GREG LYNN

The terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ as extreme opposites are becoming obsolete due to an ever-increasing dissolution of boundaries in urban occupation under the influence, on the one hand, of alternative modes of interaction in digital platforms, and on the other, of an increasing number of private ventures operating in open spaces in our cities. Where would you propose shifting the focus to when discussing urban spaces to achieve a better grasp on those contemporary issues that redefine the boundaries in navigating and inhabiting cities?

I risk sounding conservative, which I don’t normally think I am, but a critical ingredient for cities are civic spaces. By definition, civic spaces are dedicated to citizens — not users, customers, or inhabitants but citizens. Only recently have I thought about what makes a citizen in a building or space. I consider that a citizen is characterized by a decorum and agreement about etiquette when interacting with others in civic spaces. There are behaviors that characterize people as citizens that are related to spaces in cities and towns and villages. Social interactions are different in those spaces than they are on, say, Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, where civic conduct or decorum is either totally different or nonessential. This might be because people are having private relationships with their phones or it may be because people are not physically with one another while they’re interacting. For whatever the reason, in the world today, there’s a change in what it is to be a citizen and what behavior is expected from citizens in what you have referred to as ‘public spaces.’ Behaviors and etiquette have changed very, very quickly. Our field of architecture has yet to think about what this means in terms of space making and buildings. I agree that the distinction between public and private interaction and behavior has broken down, but the spatial distinction might have become more extreme. More people are spending more time on screens, not being aware of their surroundings. The attention to architecture and the built environment

“I consider that a citizen is characterized by a decorum and agreement about etiquette when interacting with others in civic spaces. [...] Social interactions are different in those spaces than they are on, say, Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, where civic conduct or decorum is either totally different or nonessential.” is different while you move around space with, or sit in a space focused on, a screen. Additionally, we are sharing a lot of things on devices that do not require spatial interaction. This all suggests a different awareness of the built environment. The one thing diminishing is interaction with other people in space without a screen occupying their attention.

So would you say the screens are almost an enemy to civicness at present?

Not an enemy, but they are definitely a distraction. Even the developers of these apps are worried about people falling off of cliffs or walking into traffic. Screens distract from interacting in space with other people, especially strangers. The amount of time people spend on screens is incredible. The majority of our waking lives are spent on, or in proximity of, screens of one type or another.

For example, Netflix’s CEO said that “their only competitor is sleep, and they are winning.” From large screens to phones, people are just spending tons of time distracted from all subtle signals and cues from people and the architecture they are occupying.

And do you think there is a potentially positive relationship between screens and architecture — a way to integrate digital interfaces into the design of physical spaces such that they would not simply take away from our attention to our surroundings and reduce the added value of spatial experience, but rather enhance those spaces?

It could be progress that I’m not seeing. I was recently at a championship American football game in a new stadium in Los Angeles, where there happened to be a one-billion-dollar screen that’s a ring floating over the field. The resolution and motion was the most incredible digital thing I’d ever seen. During the game, nobody was looking at their phones. The screen was so much better than a telephone’s. And everyone was connected to events happening in the moment and focused on the same live event and digital content hovering above it. That’s the only place I’ve been in a crowd where it wasn’t everybody with their phones. A few weeks later, I was at a Billy Strings concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl with a view to the ocean next to the stage and I was distracted by everybody’s recording and streaming through the medium of their phones. I don’t know, it might be that more digital content needs to be lifted off the phone and integrated into architecture.

So if the attention is directed in the same way, forming a collective viewing experience, then you would say social interaction is not diminished, or the civicness of those spaces is not reduced?

I felt connected. And present in that event in a way that I haven’t felt connected and present in an event for a while, because so much was being mediated, that it kind of focused a lot of people’s attention on what was happening in the moment.

Would you say this is one of the biggest upcoming challenges for architects in the production of public spaces? Or are there other such challenges you could identify when taking digitalization into account?

The first challenge is societal. What used to be a shopping place in the center of New York City is now half vacant storefronts; all over Los Angeles shops are empty. It’s because people are consuming and shopping in a totally different way and sharing remotely rather than sharing the spatial experience of shopping in stores.

Restaurants are not as busy as they were, because people are getting food delivered more and more. Markets and stores are less busy because people are getting all of that stuff delivered. There’s much less interaction in civic spaces that relies on in-person commerce and exchange. Is that a problem for architecture? I don’t know. Architecture has become more and more downstream from cultural innovation and change. Architecture is rarely part of the contemporary conversation. That’s why the studios at the Angewandte that I teach — the food studio, the market studio and the mobility studio — all start by looking at ride hailing and micro-mobility to figure out

Is that a problem for architecture?

I don’t know. Architecture has become more and more downstream from cultural innovation and change. Architecture is rarely part of the contemporary conversation.” where architecture can have an impact on this change. I wouldn’t judge these changes as good or bad. It’s definitely different and something is being lost in favor of more time on screens.

By initiating the company Piaggio Fast Forward with the aim to develop cargo-carrying robots, you are taking part in a larger effort to increase walkability in the urban environment. How do you see the impact of autonomous vehicles on public spaces developing in the future?

We started Piaggio Fast Forward with a very specific insight and attitude, which is that in the United States, in particular, people choose where they live based on walkability. There’s a score that’s given to every address in the United States called the walkability index. It’s based on things like, Is there a sidewalk? How far away are you from a grocery store, from entertainment, from a school, from a park? A lot of people are finding that to have an urban experience, you don’t have to live in a metropolis, that you can have all the components of urbanism you need in Nashville, Tennessee, or Charlotte, North Carolina. Somebody living in a suburb can walk to a school or a farmers’ market, all of it, a mile or less away, but they choose to drive. In the United States, the average number of trips a person takes in a car right now, which includes ride hailing, is five and a half trips a day. Two of those trips involve work, the other three and a half are running errands and most of these trips are in the range of walking but not carrying. People will say they will carry 20 to 40 pounds for a one-mile walk, but their behavior is they drive or hail a ride for really short trips over a half-full shopping bag.

So what we tried to do when we formed Piaggio Fast Forward is to think, How do we replace some of those trips, and what’s the quality of the trip? If you walk that one mile, what happens on that journey? You see people that you live with, who are strangers, but who are familiar. You start to see what’s in your environment as an amenity, and you start to understand a little bit more about your local lifestyle. That desire for local amenities and local living is what most people think about when they choose to live somewhere. But then once they get there, they’re taking a lot of Uber trips and they’re doing a lot of driving. We use robots that move the way people move in pedestrian environments to help replace that. Most of our customers share that desire to have a higher-quality walking experience rather than driving for these short errands.

You have mentioned the private sector a lot restaurants and retail as the activators of public space. They are often relied on for programming, maintaining, and bringing to life a huge portion of cities. As a result, spending time in those spaces becomes to a large extent bound to a monetary transaction, so in a way, they are rendered somewhat exclusive to the customers of these private ventures. What do you think would be the role of the architect in negotiating the boundaries between private occupation and open use of public space?

I think it is true, a lot of times when people are out being pedestrians in civic spaces they are in spaces that belong to a municipality, rather than a private company or individual, such as sidewalks, parks, streets — they’re on public property. Ride hailing companies are doing business on public property, that is, streets. The reason there’s a reaction against push scooters is they get left on sidewalks and sidewalks are seen as a civic space. That’s not a place for a business to just drop their products and let people pick them up and leave them. So, organizing pick up points — like bus stops, but instead for ride hailing and parking places for scooters and electric bikes — this is a priority in major cities, all over the world, so that they have a clear place in the civic realm. I think one job is to just think through, with all of these new services for transportation, where do they belong? How regulated should they be, and spatially, where should they live when they’re not being used to ride in and ride on?

The other thing is that you don’t really need an architect for a park or a sidewalk, but the way buildings address parks and sidewalks is very important. And so, thinking about the relationship to land use and zoning is, I would say, more important for architecture than it’s been in a while, just because if you don’t do it, then people aren’t going to get out and enjoy a city. They’re going to just take whatever route their telephone tells them to take. And they’re going to be sitting there texting while they’re driving the car or driving in the car. They just won’t pay attention to it.

So you have to make an extra effort to make that civic experience even better to compete with the fact that they could otherwise just be checking social media feeds and watching videos on a phone.

...also when it comes to retail or restaurants, and what their relationship is to those open areas?

I’m working on a very ambitious project for a motorcycle company called Moto Guzzi and what we’re doing there is inviting the general public into a big plaza in the middle of the factory and giving them an opportunity to go on a tour and be able to look into all the different stages throughout which a motorcycle is built. We have a museum where they can go see historic versions of the motorcycle, experience the brand and what it’s about. And then we’ve got restaurants and cafes and even builder labs where people are invited in to customize things. The factory has been there for a hundred years on Lake Como. So it’s a place where tourists will go and that place will for sure augment, if not replace, a dealership, because somebody that goes there and sees this big plaza with motorcycles, motorcyclists, all parked there, goes on a tour of the factory, looks around in the museum… It’s a very compelling experience that makes you want to go for a ride on one of the motorcycles. It’s an even better experience than watching Ewan McGregor on TikTok, who is their brand ambassador. It’s more comparable to watching a documentary film with Ewan McGregor riding a motorcycle from China to Europe — it’s understanding that storytelling and experience is what the architecture’s job is there. And it takes the place of the retail shop. Frankly, as an architect, it’s much more fun to think about how to connect the language and the buildings and their massing to the brand, to think about the materials, to think about the design of all the spaces and the experience of people moving through the spaces. There’s less of architecture, but the quality of it is much higher and the thoughtfulness is much more sophisticated than just doing retail shops.

You mentioned these two contexts of Italy and of the USA, the different movement patterns of people. To what extent is context specificity important in the creation of successful public spaces compared to more generic or prototypical approaches to urban activation?

I think cultural and spatial context is getting more and more rare. If context is considered as the expanded field for your experience and memory of the building, it is now job number one. It used to be that you think

What is your favorite public space?

I have a lot of favorite public spaces. The places that I like the most are places where you could combine a lot of different modes of attention. In Tokyo, there are some places I love, especially at night, because you drive through them, you walk across the street at them, you see them from an adjacent building. You come into them on a subway and the space holds up with all those different scales and speeds of experience. I also enjoy spaces that have big changes throughout the day, that really feel like a big public empty room in the morning and really feel like a kind of a civic agora during the day. Places like Campo de’ Fiori in Rome that turn into something vulgar and amazing at night after being beautiful and vibrant markets during the day.

Since you were mentioning all those characteristics that you appreciate, as well as how online you don’t get to experience civicness — what about virtual public spaces, such as VR meeting rooms? Do you see potential in those, and do you think architects will be progressively more involved in designing such virtual environments?

about context in the sense of playing off some strong fabric or structure. Now so much of the world is feeling exactly the same, that context is something you need to create rather than find with any kind of authenticity.

You go to Bratislava, you go to Milan, you go to Boston, you go to Santa Monica, and it’s all generic. There’s a new global generic that is our context, but it’s not the kind of context you play off of, or that you would necessarily reproduce.

How to do something that is memorable within that is easy if you get the chance. But those projects are less frequent.

I don’t even know who my neighbor is in Boston. I’m in a loft and there’s somebody that lives next door who’s screaming all the time. Yelling from three in the afternoon until 10 at night, sometimes laughing hysterically, and often screaming in agony. There were several months where I just thought this person was insane. Obviously, nobody could possibly cohabitate with this person, so they’ve got to be alone in this loft. Yet they seemed to be yelling and screaming at someone or something. I couldn’t put it together. Then I watched my son playing a video game with some of his friends online together and I realized — this person next to me is just playing video games with an excessive intensity and for most of the day! Games are obviously a very powerful medium when my neighbor can spend more than six hours a

“A phone app that provokes people to have adventures and experience the world, mixing the virtual with the real, this is spectacular. An app that motivates people to get on airplanes and travel to get Pokemons is such an achievement. [...] I get much more excited about that than about trading spatial experience with other people for screen time, and I am not even that social a person.” day, every single day, animated like a person who would be considered certifiably insane in public space. So games must work. Personally, I’ve never really gotten that excited about interacting with people in a virtual space. I was very excited about the work I did with Hololens, where I started to see augmented things in a space where there were two people looking at the same virtual model or two people walking through the same virtual model, but in real space.

Pokemon Go I haven’t played much, but I love the idea of it more than anything. The statistics about how many times to the moon and back people have walked, searching for Pokemons, and how a community gets formed out of people that are all looking for Pokemons — that I love. A phone app that provokes people to have adventures and experience the world, mixing the virtual with the real, this is spectacular. An app that motivates people to get on airplanes and travel to get Pokemons is such an achievement. When they dropped a Snorlax in Rotterdam, there were something like 300,000 people that were there to get it all at the same time in the same places — it’s incredible.

So the digital for you should serve rather as an activator of physical space and not as an alternative?

I get much more excited about that than about trading spatial experience with other people for screen time, and I am not even that social a person.

“More people are spending more time on screens, not being aware of their surroundings. [...] Additionally, we are sharing a lot of things on devices that do not require spatial interaction. This all suggests a different awareness of the built environment. The one thing diminishing is interaction with other people in space without a screen occupying their attention.”

Greg Lynn

The Digital Colosseum

The Digital Colosseum statistics show that the rising number of gamers has surpassed the total US population, indicating that the rise of e-sports is not temporary and therefore a notable development in the way sport is spectated. Unlike the arenas of today, the project proposes an e-arena that will house a number of functions to give back public space to the heart of any community. Doing so demands a new arena typology, one that incorporates a diverse and progressive method of interaction between people, space, technology, data and the surrounding context. In turn, e-sports will become an integral aspect of the daily lives of people as a potential future of sport, entertainment and technology. In the arena, spectators no longer have dedicated seats but instead move around, experiencing a juxtaposition of moments, from augmented reality popups of gameplay, to virtual reality experiences, to being an active member in the game itself within gaming booths or from mobile devices. The arena is proposed as an architectural spectacle to wander through a mixed reality world, similar to a music festival typology, bringing spectators and gamers closer together than ever before.

Night | Shift

A Performance of Relocation

Events in public spaces define to a large extent the quality of life in any cultural metropolis. In the course of our research, we observed that the boulevard of Vienna Ringstrasse needs a vast infrastructure to sustain its functions. So why not use these elements to build up events? For each time of the year, a specific event setting is programmed and autonomously set up.

Bus stops and benches, bicycle stands, billboards and streetlights, the entire urban inventory swarm together and reconfigure into a modular pattern to become a concert stage, a festival, or even a part of a fashion show.

Pedestrians would experience this spectacle during their evening stroll. The architecture would ‘crawl’ at night to let the city dwellers find a slightly different city the next morning. This system would change the way we think about logistics and storage.

Siqi Zhu is a NYC-based urbanist-technologist working across technology incubation, human-centered design, and the built environment. As a Director of Planning & Delivery for Sidewalk Labs, he provides urban innovation consulting to the real estate development industry and works on reimagining how technology could transform the design and implementation of urban streets. He is currently teaching a graduate studio at Harvard’s Master in Design Engineering program.