JMB: While completing our review of urban design on 1st Street SW, we are finding vantage points that provide both unique views of our city and convenient spots to draw them.
Sitting inches apart for about 20mn on either front seats in Ihor's car, we bring you stereoscopic design at a grand scale, as we keep our focus onto 1st Street SW: two sets of eyes, two pens - a Pentel Sign pen and a Pilot fineliner - two 81/2x11 MultiUse Printer sheets of paper, two clipboards, and the same amount of time sketching. The difference: you can see the slight angle apart from the position of the CPR dome at the center point of the one-point perspective, and a reduced field of vision.
Hence a question: how can we design urban spaces for the pedestrian and the vehicular alike, when such subtle differences produce as much of a change in focus? Hence the answers: Cullen, Lynch, McHarg, Jacobs - which we strive to bring alive for you with this blog in our here city, Calgary. Our contribution? Vantage points: where to draw and what to draw. From systematic to symbolic we trust they will assist you pick these spots to explore and express your connection to the place, or to pick other spots to contrast and distinguish what we see from what we miss.
This view of 1st Street is sketched from the southwest corner of the 25th Avenue SW bridge over the Elbow River. It frames 1st Street SW perfectly: 1st street appears at an angle from the Chocolate condo to the left to the Pallisser hotel to the right. It is also a great city skyline which combines with the vantage point in Bridge land to offer two of the most enjoyable vantage points to sketch downtown Calgary.
This view of 1st Street by Hans, pushes all the envelopes: the perspectives are breathtaking and it manages to capture with the same lines the Here and There, which is the spatial relationship that defines the sense of place, in this case between the heritage exchange district and the modern office towers, and the This and That which is the textural differences from architectural elements that define urban spaces, and examines urban design in Calgary from an impossible the edge between realism and surrealism that offers the ultimate vantage point. And when we look around that very space between the Grain Exchange, and the Palliser Hotel, there are just as many vantage points with the same challenge in perspectives and convenience in sketching spots. So follow Hans, and try your hands at these.
The urban in "Urban Design" is very much what Alison showed us in her exhibit at the Monteclark Gallery from September 15 to October 12 in Vancouver. People in space are ultimately the spirit of that place. They are the eyes, ears, skins and bodies Gordon Cullen built his methods upon, for once "serial vision", "this and that" and "here and there" are fully functional at the end of the pen, it is "functional tradition" we track in the mundane.
