Chinese Whispers:

as tented pavilions have strong distinguishable characteristics to behave as landmarks in a fabric. Prime characteristics needed for a public place and public inhabit-ability is for the people to feel at home, like the Piazza do San Marco in Venice (207).

Paths are of different kinds, the only point to make a decision in a path is at the intersection (208). The act of climbing, walking up and down can subsume the specialty of place. The moving body and richness of the path is further seen when the body moves on the path but the eye traverses faster seeing all routes (209). Examples of important paths are the pilgrimage routes (210), where the path itself is the ritual, like Braga, Portugal offering a highly structured vision (211).

Patterns are made of paths and places and again depict some kind of identity or orientation towards man’s image of civilization depending on the type of pattern. Haptic patterns are piece by piece responses rather than any visual or grand conceptual design. Like the old city of Cordoba Spain consisting of large and complex residential blocks which create narrow lanes and defensible housing (212). Haptic with geometric plan are observed in the middle eastern town plans with haptic streets and unrecognisable patterns (213). Radial patterns have major roads leading to the centre and minor roads connecting neighbourhoods like the Karlsruhe created as an image for the physical manifestation of power (214). Radial centrifugal plans like the Doric and Ionic site plans (215) have buildings, walls and objects which close in the view and create an inner space. The rectangular Cartesian grid has an image of a powerfully ambitious system, authoritarian and democratic. Like the Puebla grid made according to the laws of the Indies (216). Finally the twentieth century saw a three dimension grid system like the one by Yona Friedman consisting of a mega-structure with streets in air for people, goods and services (217).

Edges have characteristics to ‘wall it in’ or ‘face it out’ consisting of elements like the facade, the parapet, the wall, the bay and the folds in the system which add character. The facade can be described as an edge for the world outside. Like the mission church in Sonora, Mexico with a white stucco face resembling a lady with a painted face to affect someone outside. (218).

Parapets face out across the landscape like the parapet edge of the Italian town of Assisi facing out across the air (219). While walls have surfaces for excluding the hostile outside. However, walls can be articulated like the walls of Marrakech where a duality creeps in, as the outside walls create a backdrop of marketplace. The qualities of the edges are heightened with bays, coves or harbours ringed with facade like in the Crescent at Baths England which form bays off the wide space of the river valley (220). Finally, folds in the system are places where the pattern stutters to produce an edge.

Like the San Francisco grid which collides and creates an edge of the most urbane business district in American West (221).

According to Moore these examples show an immaculate collision when building or landscape pieces come sharply against one another, without loss of their individual identities or spirit which is important to make memorable places. It gives an account of the experience of place strengthened with identifying characters.

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