A Sense of Place

Cortona is starting to feel a lot like Athens as far as my comfort level goes. I know my way around our little mountaintop pretty well, and the novelty of being in a foreign country wore off a good while ago. I can finally do what I sought out to: immerse myself in a place, familiarize myself enough to feel it, and hopefully glean some design techniques and philosophies from it. Life lessons wouldn't hurt either, but that's an entry for a later time.

It no longer feels strange to see road signs and advertisements in a foreign language. I don't feel totally lost when I walk down a street and don't hear a word of English spoken. Uneven stone streets, while not fun to navigate while jogging on, don't seem so awkward anymore. Ordering at a restaurant isn't as much of a challenge as it used to be, and I'm even getting used to the tiny cars that line the streets.

By no means am I flaunting myself as a blue-blooded Italian or anything like that; rather, I make those points to show that I've just grown accustomed to this way of life, and I think that's kinda neat. Now, in my last few weeks here, I feel like I can now really take it in and immerse myself in the spirit of this place. Why is this so important to me? Because it's linked on so many levels with what I want to do with the rest of my life.

Each place has its own personality and leaves its own distinct impressions on its occupants. It's important for a designer to recognize those feelings and see what elements of a given area contribute to those impressions. These same elements will be manipulated by the designer in order to create a new sense of place in other locations, so understanding what makes an area its own is quite the important task. Most people think that Landscape Architects just throw in some shrubs to make a place prettier, but my actual aim is to create a space with its own individual presence, and it takes a lot more than a few rhodos and boxwoods to accomplish that. An understanding of scale, light, hardscape materials, entries, circulation, elevations, views, and spatial presences are all critical in mastering the craft of creating spaces.

The natural and built environments of Italy are quite different than those back home, and that's why I'm so interested in how people react to their surroundings here. And in this place where language has almost no influence on my perceptions of space, I can now focus on other things. For example, the geometry of the buildings. The lighting at different times of day. The scale of plants, their color, their bloom time. Where people walk. How fast they walk through the space. How the age of things affects their character. Where the eye is led to upon entering a space. How art or sculpture affects the space. Where windows are. Where doors are. Where are we guided to? What is there along the way? What colors, what textures draw you towards them? Which ones push you away? And, most importantly, how to the people in these places act? Do they move through quickly, or do they stop and let their eyes wander? Do they interact with the environment around them, or do they just accept it and move on? What do they focus on? Obviously, the landscape doesn't define all of the behaviors within it and thus a sociological understanding is also key, but that might be another rant sometime too. This is already long enough.

Big picture? It's neat to surround yourself in a wholly different environment. For a person that is going to be designing them for the rest of his life, I think I'm pretty blessed to have this opportunity. Hopefully I can get some tips through the fellas that built this city all of those centuries ago, letting them speak through their creation. Because while the language barrier might throw a wrench in figuring out what kind of pizza that is on the counter at the bar (turned out to be anchovies...), the relationship between a person and their environment is the same in any language, much like a kiss or a smile.