To digress just a little from the line discussion: That Parc Citroen photo puts me in mind of the Cornell Arts Quad, around which are ranged some of Cornell’s most historically and academically significant buildings. The Arts Quad is huge (obviously not what it has in common with the Parc Citroen lawns shown), and there is a several-foot (eleven feet?) grade change from east to west, along its short axis.
Cornell Arts Quad looking north to south. The tipped plane displays the lawn more prominently to those walking along the west side and looking east, as an open box of candy looks more appetizing when held at a slant to display its contents better.
When I was a student there in the late 80s, and in the throes of learning how to analyze sites, I realized that the Arts Quad’s tilted plane created a perceptual wall for anyone walking along the west side, looking east and uphill. Standing at the bottom of the lawn and facing east, your eye perceives more lawn even than is actually there, because the plane is slanted rather than flat. In Parc Citroen, the tipped planes of lawn feel similarly more available to the eye from the walks along their low edge.
Using this kind of quiet grade manipulation can let you create a sense of greater green space than may really be available. Horizontal planes give you two axes — horizontal and vertical — to read, while tilted planes give you a more complex experience. I think that controlling the ground plane’s edge makes the experience more readable, as in this Halvorson-designed tilted plane at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank,
Tilted plane of lawn at Boston's Federal Reserve, with South Station behind. This cylinder of stone and grass is actually part of the Fed's security system -- no one can drive a truck through it to hit the bank's glass walls, just to the left. But you don't read it as a giant bollard; you read it as a big pad of lawn, elevated and held out to your eyes on a stone tray.
Now that's a controlled edge.
Manipulating the ground plane with a wash is a fine way to tweak how a space is perceived, and to give it more quiet complexity.
Cornell Arts Quad photo taken by Anjum and supplied courtesy of Flickr.
Deborah Howe
Toby Wolf
Never thought of it that way. Thank you!
And when stippled with red sacs…..
http://www.archdaily.com/32276/field-pezo-von-ellrichshausen/1250478314-field-low-pezo-04/
[...] 26, 2009 by Deb Craig Verzone’s comment on the Tilted Planes post didn’t make sense to me until he sent me an email asking if I’d seen this project on [...]
That wall looks so gunky, heavy and intrusive……..
Thanks for the comment — we hope you’ll keep an eye on the blog and comment when you’re moved to.
It is certainly a heavy wall. But gunky? Intrusive? Overscaled, perhaps, like a supergraphic in three dimensions, but when you’re in the immense space of Dewey Square these walls make sense. The tilted planes are so large that they become places in and of themselves, and mediate nicely between the bulk of South Station — for the definition of heavy, look at that big granite pile swelling into Dewey Square just across the street from the Federal Reserve — and the large and quite loose space in front of it and the FR.