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| | Patricia Tusa |
It seems to me that the pleasantest and most profitable side of city life is social and human intercourse, and that the city with arcades is truly a city where these are most found.
– Libanius, 360 AD
Perfect for quick chats, long slow-moving reflections, and endless viewing of fellow citizens, the arcade knits a city together. Arcades are covered walkways, abutting the street, and attached to a building with or without shops. Most have columns, many have domed, arched ceilings, but the essence of this horizontal architecture is open, directional and continuous space. An arcade is a connector, creating a sense of passage. The beauty of this linear form that modulates shade and sun, inside and out, cannot be matched by the modern shopping mall. The mall creates an interior illusory space whose only function is merchandising. The portico is a part of the public realm: publicly owned, maintained, and open to the street. Under the portico a walker meets, greets, and sees people who are not only shopping, but journeying to school, appointments, a meeting at a café, or just getting some fresh air.
Arcades have been built for over 2000 years. Offering protection from the rain and a respite from the sun, the arcade was bound to be attractive. The ancient portico nurtured a public dialogue that, it could be said, led to the beginning of democratic institutions and to advances in our civilization. The ongoing conversation led to new ideas, to an awareness of a civic life. There was the daily salute, exchanges with neighbors, comment on the weather and discussion on politics both local and national. Unselfconsciously, boundaries of education, wealth, race and religion are crossed, and a commonality of concerns and ideas understood. In Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, porticoes are an urban tradition.
Bologna, home to Europe’s oldest university, has twenty miles of portici in its historic center. Professors and students, engaged in thought and discussion, stroll the arcades. Statutes on size and extent of porticos have been on the books since 1250. The result is a streetscape that is a work of art, and a city that continues to use and build portici in the 21st century. Thousands of miles away, Chinese immigrants in Malaysia followed a similar pattern. Wanting to provide shelter from sun and rain and encourage trade, they began building verandahways. Based on their hometown arcades and the local Malay porch, these covered walkways became an integral part of the 19th century Malaysian city. In a typical city block twenty to thirty shophouses are joined by an uninterrupted verandahway. In the 1970s, Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza designed the 66 acre Malagueira housing compound. Siza created a contemporary covered walkway along shopping streets by expanding the raised aqueducts carrying water and electricity.
Considering the big block/big building development of downtown Seattle, the task of creating human-scaled colonnades seems daunting. But the canopies at the Bon Marché give a clue to the possibilities of uniting a block. The new Seattle City Hall tempts with its 5th Avenue façade. A well-proportioned porch stretches across the building, but at the South end, a wall appears. The walker loses connection to the next streets or the rest of the city. There are no extensions around the south and north sides of the building. Citizens could have approached their city hall without rain or wind whipping at their heads. The designers forgot that the portico was born to connect. On a porticoed street, the portico is the sidewalk. The full width of the sidewalk becomes a public gathering place.
The neighborhood centers of Seattle offer more fertile ground for the arcade. Here, housing and business mix, along with a scale conducive to daily walking. Through walking, we achieve a bodily experience of urban space. In America, walking has become an exercise activity, not a workout for the senses and the intellect, nor an indispensable urban activity. Thinking is making connections. Thinking out loud involves dialogue with your fellow city-zens. The merchants of Broadway, Wallingford, University Avenue, Ballard and West Seattle could follow the centuries-old experience of merchants who have found that arcades are good for people and good for business. To assist them, City planners should revisit their arcane restrictions on overhead projections. Asian and European cities allow property owners to build over the city sidewalks, creating living quarters above the public arcades.
Walking around Seattle on a typical drizzly day the pedestrian finds few covered spaces. All, (like the new City Hall) are set back from the main sidewalk, and lack connections between buildings. The only examples of long, continuous colonnades are those under the freeways and bridges. In our city we now build the grand spaces for the measure of the car, not the human body. Rediscovering and building arcades would give citizens a human-scaled place for walking and interacting, and maybe even for a public conversation. |
Patricia Tusa is an architect who likes to walk in cities. |
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