Globalization and digitization are making physical location less and less significant to human experience. Are we building a world where there is no “there” there? How will we know what we have lost?

Insight Labs is partnering with Phoenix architect Mike Davis to assess the components that make a place distinctive. We will also consider together how these elements of place can be treated responsibly by architects, planners, designers, and others who shape the spaces where we spend our lives.

Click here to see an index of all of the pieces in the “Elements of Place” series. The discussions will also inform a Lab on the future of community development in May 2012.

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: Last time you concluded by saying that what really makes a skyline beautiful is the relationship between the horizontal and the vertical. I think it makes sense to break those out and explore them as elements of place. So what are your emotional, gut-level associations with the idea of the vertical?

Mike Davis: The first thing that comes to mind is the concept of scale. We humans being the size we are, we have certain perceptions of how things tower over us or how we tower over them. There is something inherent in height that can be inspiring, no matter what the structure is. There is a spirit of ascension with the vertical. There is a spirit of power – even if you have no power, you can imagine looking down at the minions or the ants below. There is a sense of wonder.

Though it’s worth remembering that if you went high enough into outer space, you would have no concept of the vertical. It’s all in relation to our little domicile called the Earth. So it also has a relationship to our groundedness.

Something about the vertical also seems to correlate to our aspirations, whether it’s flying or going to outer space or building half mile-tall buildings. You want to live in the penthouse rather than the outhouse. You think of undesirable things as beneath you. An unlucky person is “down and out.” He’s certainly not “up and out.” Crowns reside on the head. We value trees that grow up rather than weeds that grow out and spread. We have a general wonderment with things that are tall.

ABN: I don’t think you can deny that almost any person you would meet would identify highness with superiority and lowness with inferiority. You know, there’s a common assumption that when Copernicus and Galileo moved the earth away from the center of the Universe, religious authority was magically undone. I don’t think that was actually the case, but it’s true that once you’re aware that in the vast majority of the Universe there is no up or down in any meaningful sense, it does start to make all the human symbols and hierarchies that are organized that way seem kind of silly.

MD: Right – are the famous photographs of the Earth from space looking up at it or down at it? I’m no astronaut, but it seems silly to ask. David Bowie said they were “floating in a tin can, far above the world,” but you’re not really above the world – you’re just not on it anymore.

Architecture is pretty unique to Earth. It’s true that the space station has architecture, but the ups and downs of it are pretty bizarre. I actually get sick thinking about it – I’m not sure if it’s agoraphobia, claustrophobia. Maybe some sort of non-locality phobia.

ABN: There is a cousin to deja vu called jamais vu, which is the feeling that you’ve never been to a familiar place or never done a familiar thing. I think there is an equivalent feeling for place, a kind of horror of being in no place. When you close your eyes, your two fingers can find each other even without the sense of sight. I don’t understand the physiology, but I imagine that comes from a basic sense your body and brain have of existing in a space with certain physical constants.There is something horrible about the idea of those being taken away.

MD: I get that sense sometimes, especially after traveling a lot. It’s the same feeling as falling asleep at about 10:30 p.m. with the TV on and the lights on in the bedroom. You wake up and think, “Where the hell am I?” But that may just be early Alzheimer’s.

ABN: So there’s something else I’d like to ask about. Even though the philosophers probably didn’t understand it this way, I think there was a basic sense through most of human history that “up” was heaven and “down” was hell. I don’t mean to suggest that there was a previous era of superstition and we’ve moved past it – I don’t believe that at all. But there does seem to be a sense that place and direction had moral and spiritual meaning in the past and does not today, don’t you think?

MD: Yes. There was the notion of the king as “your highness,” or the vision of Isaiah in the Bible of God sitting high on his throne. Architecture was clearly a part of that – you think of the story of Rapunzel in the tower. The tower was the symbol of safety.

But there are still many ways in which we express value in the vertical. We talk about the highbrow and the lowbrow. If you think about a chart or graph, you tend to measure positives and negatives going up and down rather than side to side.

ABN: That’s true. So what are your gut-level associations with the horizontal?

MD: I think of freedom versus confinement, an open space versus a cramped space. It’s different from being crushed from above – it’s wide versus narrow. I think we also measure time in the horizontal plane, either forward and backward or left to right. I don’t know if that’s a Western concept – they say that in other cultures time is more circular. But certainly in Western culture we think of time as moving from the left to the right.

Our cities and settlements are largely defined on the horizontal plane. On a map, you move from point A to point B. Only recently have we had any real access to the vertical plane. We generally think of our movements as occurring in the horizontal, whether it’s walking, running, driving, riding a horse. That also has something to do with gravity. Even if you think of the movement of an aircraft, it tends to reach a certain level, fly a long way on the same horizontal plane, and then land.

ABN: And you’re primarily using the airplane to move more quickly through horizontal space. There’s no destination at 30,000 feet. If you’re a frequent traveler or you’re absorbed in your book the whole flight, you may not even think about the vertical.

MD: When you think about it, we hardly ever move up and down vertically. The enormous majority of human activity takes place in the horizontal. So the vertical is a place of resolve or respite, of inspiration or depression. Moving up and down is hard. You wouldn’t want to spend all of your day riding up and down in an elevator. You wouldn’t want to spend it jumping up and down. You’d get tired. Horizontal movement requires considerably less effort.

As a result, the horizontal also signifies commonness or commonality. There is a sense that down here, we’re all just people, regardless of your lofty bank account or the penthouse where you may entertain your friends and colleagues. All of the expressions of “the street” – “the man on the street,” “being from the street,” “the Arab street” – imply the horizontal. It’s where we interact.

Also, even though we agreed that buildings are basically vertical, there is a sense in which all enclosure or expansion of space occurs in the horizontal. The amount of land you own is a horizontal measure. In a prison the main divisions are horizontal.

I think the idea of “surroundings” is also a horizontal one. You may have a sense of certain valleys or vistas, but the basic way you ascertain what is around you is to turn around in a horizontal plane.

But the main idea, I think, is what we have in common. I’m trying to think of any ontologically higher or lower thing that we express in the horizontal. See, I just betrayed myself by saying “higher” and “lower.” Better or worse, then.

ABN: There’s at least two I can think of. In philosophy you can talk about a thing being prior to something else. If you think of time as occurring from left to right, that’s horizontal. But the main one is the sense of moving forward or going back. I’d say that sense of progress primary occurs in the horizontal, though there are also vertical representations of it.

MD: Yes.

ABN: There also used to be a strong moral association with left and right. It was good to be right-handed and bad to be left-handed. Christ sits at the righthand of God, that sort of thing. But I don’t think it’s nearly as strong as the moral legacy of up and down. You can still see that legacy in dozens of places. But that feeling about left and right is almost impossible to recover. I mean, in Spanish you used to be able to say “siniestro” for left or left-handed. That’s the same root as sinister.

MD: I was just reading in Ecclesiastes the other day – “The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.” That was written 3,000 years ago.

One would also certainly associate equality with horizontality, though. We talk about “leveling the playing field.” But I always hope that equality is something more like spokes on a wheel than a single, flat mass. You hope there can be horizontal equality without there being a singularity.

ABN: The singularity – a concept that is also depicted with a vast horizontal disc.

MD: But back to the right and the left, I remember someone telling me when I was getting started as an architect that the men’s restroom needs to always be on the right side. Now as far as I’m concerned the only important difference between the men’s and women’s restrooms is that one has a urinal. I don’t think one is somehow more noble for being on the right side or the left. If I’m violating some secret order of the guild, no one has told me yet.

ABN: Don’t you think it’s interesting that through a series of arbitrary associations in Western history, we have a political sense of “left” and “right”? I think even a mediocre high school student could tell you the political difference between left and right. We all seem to agree on the convention, and yet it has no basis in physical reality. It’s not like color, where you could argue that there are rational reasons for certain political movements to be known as red, blue, green, etc., based on their associations with real things in the world that are those colors.

MD: There’s something inherently arbitrary about the concept of left and right in general. I can never remember, for example, how being left-brained is different from being right-brained, if that means anything at all.

ABN: Neither can I. I know the concepts but I always flip them.

MD: Or when I read that a sign of a heart attack is pain in the left arm, I sometimes fear that I might be wired differently and feel it in the right arm.

ABN: So since we occupy three-dimensional space, all spaces exist in the vertical and horizontal. But what do you think are some of the factors that make certain places feel vertical or horizontal in the way we’ve been talking about here?

MD: It is something of a challenge. Think of an elevator. Sure, it’s moving you vertically, but it doesn’t feel like a particularly vertical space. It’s kind of like the airplane. You move into and out of it horizontally. You use it to get to a series of horizontal spaces.

ABN: Right – if you’re talking about a space that you actually experience vertically, you would need to be moving using a spiral staircase or a fire escape or a ladder or a rock wall.

MD: And there’s physical effort required to do that. You couldn’t roll your way up the stairwell. But you could roll your way into an elevator.

I thought about this when we were climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. From the base camp to the summit, we went up about two and a half miles vertically. But we had to move about 50 miles horizontally over various terrain to get there. You think of it as a highly vertical place, but the actual experience of it is still often horizontal.

When it comes to the vertical or horizontal experience of buildings, I think of classical religious architecture, which in theory was intended to draw your eyes as well as your thoughts toward the heavens. Those churches designed to be the high-status buildings of their day, and it may be that our vertical commercial skyscrapers are going for a similar effect.

But I still think our main experience of buildings is horizontal. We build houses where we sleep – a horizontal activity – for a third of our lives.

ABN: I’d still like to think of some places with a strong, inherent horizontality though.

MD: I think of the Southwestern desert, or the calm ocean. If the ocean goes vertical, you really don’t want to be out there. Then there’s where you’re from, the flat states like Kansas.

ABN: It’s not all flat. The funny thing, though, is that when I come home to Kansas after a long time in a city, I’m actually much more aware of the vertical because I can see the sky or the stars at night.

MD: I know what you mean. I was thinking of being in the middle of a dense redwood forest. You know it’s a vertical place, but you can’t actually see that much. If you had a telescope, you couldn’t see the vertical of the sky. I think there is a kind of freedom with an open, horizontal space that you can’t experience in other kinds of space.

ABN: Though a deep cave or tunnel is also a highly horizontal space.

MD: Especially in the sense that it has a horizontal beginning or an end. You certainly can’t see the sky there. You’d have “tunnel vision,” since your natural plane of sight is about 60 degrees right or left.

ABN: Huh, I guess when you think about it, human vision is inherently horizontal too, since the eyes are to the left and the right of each other. I suppose that’s why you see square TVs and panoramic TVs, but no portrait-style, vertical TVs.

So when you are planning a building, in what ways do you consider the vertical and horizontal attributes of the site?

MD: When you think of a city skyline, you can be inspired by the beauty of an architect’s decisions. But fundamentally those buildings happened because enough people wanted to be at the same place at the same time on the horizontal plane. If we’re both in the Empire State Building, and you’re on the second floor and I’m on the 102nd floor, there’s a certain sense in which we’re still in the same place. We’ve basically taken a hundred horizontal spaces and stacked them on top of each other. We don’t create a lot of truly vertical spaces outside of the climbing wall at the gym. They’re almost always just series of horizontal spaces.

ABN: It’s interesting – earlier, you mentioned massive one-story buildings like St. Peter’s as horizontal structures. But they seem to be more devoted to a vertical experience. There’s nothing inside the highly vertical skyscraper that says, “Hey! Look up!”

MD: A lot of it has to do with the use of the building. The Empire State Building is primarily built to be used from the inside. But you do have vertical structures like the Eiffel Tower that are mainly designed to be experienced vertically and let you look at the outside. Those three structures show us three very different versions of “tall.”

ABN: My intuitive sense would have been that any time you add a building to a place, it make the place more vertical. But now I’m not so sure. What do you think?

MD: It all depends on the level of your eye or your point of entrance. Intellectually, I know that if you and I are roughing it out on the Kansas plains and we erect a four foot-tall tent to sleep in for the night, we’ve added a vertical structure to the universe. But if we’re of average height, it won’t have a vertical impact on us. Meanwhile, to the ant on the ground below, it would be as impressive at St. Peter’s. Similarly, we can accept that a rudimentary cottage with a seven-foot ceiling is a vertical structure. But we wouldn’t experience it in a vertical way.

Architecture has to be in some sense vertical – otherwise we would just have a plan drawn in the sand.

Previous Elements of Place discussion: “Sculpt the skyline” • Next Elements of Place discussion: “Build in each dimension”

Images: Detail from “Newton” by William Blake (teaser from home page); selection from “Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower” by Henri Revière (top); photo of “The Big Room” in Carlsbad Caverns by Ansel Adams (bottom).