Jonathan L.

Fallin
09.30.09
Midterm Essay
Urban Design
Prof. Hashas
Dead Zones in the Urban Environment

The city of Atlanta is sprawled out so much that some of the ideal public spaces have
been lost because they lack comfort or excitement. Visibility plays a huge role in the way that
our minds comprehend the urban fabric. Because of our drive to understand, the coherence of
the space is what ultimately leads to the sensation of comfort. There is the opportunity for this to
coherence to occur with intelligent infill of the open public spaces in the area. In order for this to
happen, the most important issue, in my opinion, that urban design and planning experts
should deal with in Atlanta, is visual connectivity in order to avoid "dead zones." This
essay will target the space that is behind the Woodruff Arts Center in Midtown Atlanta to
support this opinion.

Dead zones occur when public space becomes uncomfortable for the human psyche.
These areas discourage public interaction. Without public interaction there are less "eyes on the
street" so there is more crime and people do not want to use spaces. Physical access alone is not
sufficient, there has to be a visual connection so that the public space of the street seems to spill
over into the buildings and alleys themselves.

The target zone is the cultural center of the city of Atlanta and has much to offer in
terms of positive and negative forms of visibility. It offers panoramic views of the expansive
Interstate 75/86 interchange and the new Atlantic Station complex. The Marta station that it sits
on is among the most used in the city, but people mostly use it to transfer from the bus to the
train. It would seem that such a space would get much use, but it does not. As you can see in
figure ground #2 the Peachtree Corridor and the Woodruff Plazas get much use, but the space
behind gets very little. The space behind the Woodruff Arts Center lacks visibility in many
ways. The ones that I will concentrate on are, lack of visibility from private space, too much
openness, and improper use of boundary.
 In urban architecture there are two opposite realms of existence that create memory.
There is the private realm which consists of all structures and activities that are individually held
to express identity. Then there is the public realm which consists of the parts that belong to
everyone, these treatments cannot be molded by individuals, so instead of expressing identity
like the private space does, it bestows identity to the people that inhabit it.

In the architecture of the city both the public and private realms must be present and clear
but overlap at the same time. "In sustaining this contrast, the street embodies the concept of the
public defined in relation to the private.... It also embodies the principle of architectural order
through which the public sphere of civic life is both represented and constituted." (Holsten P.
245) The target zone lacks this phenomenon when it comes to the residential. The base of the
residential towers are raised up away from the street so that the low windows of the dwellings do
not afford a view of the street. The only good view of these from the street is from a distance as
shown on view #2 in site section #2. This type of view is in contrast to view # 3 into the Art
Center from Peachtree Street. Which establishes a relationship to the viewer.

The rear wall of the arts center does a good job of putting the private on display as you
can see in site section #1. However, because all of the public entries and visible spaces are up
above the street, it can become confusing as to where you are allowed to enter. On the first
approach most pedestrians will travel all the way over to the front of the Art Center on Peachtree
Street because the rear wall seems almost completely privatized. If pedestrian traffic were
slightly elevated at this point only it would increase connectivity through the well carved space
that the Arts Center creates.

Private spaces should have an interchange of almost voyeuristic viewing of the public/ by
the public. With the street front as the facilitator of the interaction. "As a selectively porous
divider, therefore, the street facade constitutes a liminal zone of exchange between the domains it
holds apart." (Holsten P.246) Liminality is defined as "a psychological, neurological, or
metaphysical subjective, conscious state of being on the "threshold" of or between two different
existential planes." With visible penetrations in private buildings, that are in proximity to the
pedestrian, he/ she does not feel alone even when they are. There is a sense of a safe connection
to the people on the other side of the boundary.

There are many open spaces in the zone that is behind the Woodruff Arts center that are
just not used because they are not well defined. The unused public spaces in figure ground #1
exist in areas that are very open indeed. The views of the surrounding towers are exquisite. The
towers become the walls of the public space that is intended for human scale. This condition
lacks intimate isolation that makes people feel comfortable in the space. The meaning of the
open is twisted as Stevens points out. "Open space is '''open'' not because it is free of buildings
and covered with plants, but in the sense that it is uncommitted to prescribed users." (Stevens
P.201)

A prime example of this is unused public zone #4 in figure ground #1. It is an extremely
well designed plaza with all of the amenities that a public space should have (grass, plants, seats,
fountains, etc..). Yet the plaza is rarely ever used because it feels like it is heavily owned and
imposed on by the tower whose site it sits on. This grand tower which was designed by Phillip
Johnson is better observed from a distance The wall extends up into the sky - the space is lost.
"Lost space is the leftover unstructured landscape at the base of high-rise towers or the unused
sunken plaza away from the flow of pedestrian activity in the city." (Trancik P. 64) This plaza
has the potential to be greatly used if it were somehow connected to the Marta Station, but the
owners of the building might not like it that way. They keep it on tight watch with their cameras
and security guards.

This openness is a product of the design process that has occurred during the
modern movement. The buildings were mostly conceived of as autonomous creations meant to
be viewed in the round. "This current process often yields a wide range of built structures and
spaces of differing scales. materials, and uses. thrown together in ad hoc fashion to create a
disconnected environment." (Lukez P. 90) Most of the buildings in the area did not take into
account the surroundings. The open spaces were meant to promote the corporation not the urban
fabric. This can be avoided by using such design tactics that concentrate at least partly on
carving out spaces for different uses by the public, and by intelligent development that inserts
attractions and businesses that are needed in visible locations that lead the inhabitant through the
city.

The boundary is the most important feature of the urban environment because it can
simultaneously connect or disconnect. Like a wall between two rooms, the boundary belongs to
neither the public or private realm, still it creates both. Because of this, the boundary is
ironically the primary connecting feature of the urban environment. The boundary only serves
positively when is has this duality.

The elegantly designed art center sits right up close to the curb and at street level there
are only service/ private entrances, which are cleverly hidden. Currently this wall is only serving
both purposes from the Peachtree Street side. Instead creating a container of urban space the
wall currently creates pure boundary. This wall that would not be so bad by itself it negatively
intensified by the Marta Station bus station that dangerously divides the super block in the long
direction. Then the parking deck on the south side creates yet another hard boundary with no
sense of human scale. The red lines on sections #1 & #2. express these visual boundaries that
create incoherence.
 The potential is there but in order for a container to come into existence there must be
more than one boundary that dynamically works in harmony. The healthy urban space usually
acts as room that uses the facades of the buildings as containing walls. Renzo Piano paid close
attention to this idea in the Arts Center to the point where the voids could easily be viewed as the
figure instead of the ground.

As Trancik points out, "Identification of the gaps and overall patterns of development
opportunities should be done before any site-specific architecture or landscape architecture is
designed and as a key element in urban land-use planning." (Trancik P. 63) This must be the
task of the future architects, and urban designers in order to bring life to the streets of Atlanta.
Visibility from public space to public space through boundaries into private spaces should be
concentrated on. These views should be carefully orchestrated in a manner that is prescribed
only by what already exists.

There are many ways to go about this task, as an example: To remedy this "dead zone"
that surrounds the Arts Center Marta Station, the dynamic city grids could collide over the Marta
station so that the space will seem to be an extension of the Woodruff Arts center. Groups of
carefully planned business/ attractions could set up the boundary of a central open space where
the grids collide. The Marta Station could then comfortably become a place for people to travel
to for a reason, not just to pass through. There would be a green space that would flood over
into the existing green public space #4. Part of this strategy of urban development should be to
think to the future for what could be the next step. This space could then, expand through a
series of similar cohesive spaces across W. Peachtree to reclaim the deteriorating area along the
interstate.

Works Cited:

Holsten, James. Theorizing the City The New Urban Anthropology Reader. Ed. Setha, M. Low.
New York: Rutgers UP, 1999. Print.
Lukez, Paul. Suburban Transformations. New York: Princeton Architectural, 2007. Print.

Stevens, Quentin. The Ludic City Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces. New York:
Routledge, 2007. Print.

Trancik, Roger. Urban design reader. Amsterdam: Architectural, 2007. Print.