Designing for the urban sublime: the uncanny as a programmatic motivation in new city parks
“Terms like sublime or awe-inspiring, wild or terrifying, sacred or magical have left our lexicon—they seem needlessly florid to describe the everyday. Yet the spaces that are most meaningful, the spaces that draw us back time after time, are precisely those that exercise upon us an effect that is irreducible either to the trade jargon of design or to bland entertainment programming. They intend, rather, to have us tremble in desire, delight, disorientation. They titillate us with expectation. They paralyse us with awe. They release us into wonder.”
Staging Urban Landscapes, edited by B. Cannon Ivers.
Collected as a chapter in the book Staging Urban Landscapes: the Activation and Curation of Flexible Public Spaces, the essay I wrote with favorite coconspirator Gina Ford, FASLA, is a defense of the sublime — the sense of awe and terror that is often missing in contemporary life. Ford and I look at three cases studies of introducing an element of the sublime into public spaces.
Great public spaces bring us powerfully into contact with the other: the otherness of unfamiliar territory, of the elements, of people who are not like ourselves.