Millions of attributes of existence shape human experience. But for most of history, only three can be said to have influenced every person in an absolute sense.

The first is identity – we can only be one person or have one body at a time. The second is time – we have no control whatsoever over when we exist. The third is place – we can only occupy one physical location at any moment.

Yet here in the 21st century, that third attribute – place – is facing significant erosion.

While we are not technically able to exist in multiple spaces at once, the forces of globalization and digitalization are making physical location less and less important to our daily existence. While these changes are no doubt bringing great benefits to humankind, we also face the potential loss of a fundamental component of human experience.

If we’re not careful, we really may build a world where there is no “there” there.

Before we know what to do about this shift in human experience, we have to figure out what we stand to lose. Toward that end, Insight Labs is partnering with Phoenix architect Mike Davis to assess the components that make a place distinctive. They will also consider 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: So as we’ve discussed, it seems that there is this problem where the discipline of architecture, or perhaps the act of building things whether it involves architecture or not, has become disjointed from any sense of place. Does that sound about right?

Mike Davis: Yes. I was talking with [Lab co-founders] Jeff Leitner and Howell Malham a few months back, and I can’t remember who came up with the term, but it seems as if about 95 percent of architects have become “compliance monkeys.” In other words, we are being asked to “just draw it” – “it” being a typical generic, one-size-fits-all design that you often see in retail, office buildings, or tract housing. It could be anywhere in the world.

You are getting this aesthetic that is like gruel or oatmeal, a morass where everything looks the same. On top of that, there is no loveliness in the work, no beauty given to the community, no respect for the context in which this stuff fits.
Very little attention is paid to either native, vernacular styles of building or the climate or the human surroundings.

The Walgreen’s store in Kansas looks the same as the one in Phoenix and the same as the one in Okeechobee, Florida. They think of these things as brands – a crappy little compromised building with a cornered entryway – as a vision of what we all recognize as Walgreen’s, whereas several years ago it might have just been the Walgreen’s sign or logo. But it goes beyond retail. A lot of it goes into office buildings, industrial buildings – very formulaic, bottom-line-driven work with no beauty and no frills. You end up with a bland, dysfunctional, dystopia of generic architecture everywhere. In Phoenix we try to compensate by painting it all brown.

This goes back to the origins of architecture. Man created shelter and places for community largely out of the materials he had available. That was architecture. We live today in a global economy where we ship plastic back and forth to China. We make fake stone arches out of plastic. I love America, but we Americans have brought mass production to everything, whether it is automobiles or computers or what have you. Our architecture takes that on as well.

I’m not advocating that we go back to some sort of primitive state of affairs. I’m asking that we do some things like incorporate more local materials. Now you could call BS on me because we don’t have a lot of steel mills in Phoenix, and we are still going to do construction out of steel beams. I’m not against the things that help us build better, safer buildings. But there is so little respect paid to place in commercial buildings, and those buildings are the things you see when you look at a city.

Every city has its little stalagmites in the center of town – that’s what the typical American city looks like, doesn’t it? You’ve got some wasteland, some trees if they grow there, and then, voila, the tall buildings. But that’s only 100 or even 60 years old if you think about it. Chicago built these buildings as its mountains, to say it was robust and America’s Second City. Manhattan grew that way because of the density of the population. But as much as I like a nice tall building and the iconic nature of it, what does that have to do with Phoenix? This is Sprawl City, USA, but we feel like we have to have our little lump of buildings. A bit of this is calling BS on myself. That’s why I have been asking “What should go here?” about my site – and why?

ABN: So let’s imagine the world’s most mediocre yet essentially competent architect. Do you feel that simply in doing his or her job, that architect would have to make some sort of minimal assessment of how his or her work fits with the place where it will be built?

MD: Yes. There are the baseline building code issues. The United States and most of the Western world operate with building codes to deal with things like relevant seismic issues and wind flow. The stringent seismic codes in California are different from those you would find in Omaha, Nebraska. So in order to get a building permit, you’ll have to respect certain things.

The second part is climate. In areas where you’ve got high water penetration and filtration, there has to be extra attention paid to things like leaks. Snow will determine roof loads. It’s interesting – when you think of the generic house, you think of a gabled roof. But gabled roofs were designed for a reason: to get the rain and snow off of the top of the building. In Arizona you have a lot of flat-roofed buildings because they are simple to construct – we don’t need a lot of highly sloped roofs because there is nothing to collect on them.

You will also find some localized construction methodologies. Certain cities, generically speaking, build more steel buildings or more concrete buildings. Places  with clay soil will do certain things in the foundations. Those are some things that start to describe the sort of place you’re in, though they are practical, regulatory issues. Some of these things you may see, and some you may not. But more often than not there is a generic wrapper on all of it.

ABN: So we could talk about that as a sort of minimum level of respect for place. I just wanted to establish that it’s not as if absolutely alien structures are just landing haphazardly at places across America – most buildings have some relationship to place. But the premise of this conversation is that we could also do a lot better. What examples could we look at for a maximum level of respect for place? What buildings do you feel are really well integrated with the places where they exist on every level?

MD: I think that in most architectural polls, you’ll see the Kaufmann Residence or Fallingwater home that Frank Lloyd Wright did in Pennsylvania near the top. That took a very unique site – steep terrain, waterfalls – and built a home right into it that is aesthetically beautiful. The house itself addresses  the features of the land organically, though you can tell that Man made it. It feels as it grows out of the land. I feel like those are universal principles that can apply in the stark desert or in the woods or in the snow or in Florida.

I also think of Phoenix’s main public library, which is one of our best buildings in town. It has a sort of metaphorical canyon wall done in concrete clad in copper, which is one of the main things we provide the world in Arizona. So it has native materials in it. It’s handled very tastefully. You can tell where the front is. There is a sort of compression of space that intrigues you as you walk in. It’s handled really well in regards to the sun -  each side has really good light while also having different shades and structures.  It’s really well-handled.

ABN: So we’ve defined something like a minimum and a maximum. I’d like to consider if there is a sort of a happy medium, something like the medical “standard of care.” Do you think there is a reasonable “standard of place”? We can’t all be Frank Lloyd Wright, perfectly integrating our buildings with waterfalls, but what might be a standard to which all architects could aspire?

MD: Well, there is one kind of higher standard that has become pretty normal  in a lot of cities, which is the design review board. I can’t tell you how many master planned communities there are out there that dictate almost everything down to the type of tile you can use. Though I appreciate that they frame their existence under the constitutional protection of health, safety, and welfare, they have come to a bit of an extreme. If we all have brown houses with tile roofs, our houses will have a more or less even value. This can have some good effects, but there are also ways in which it can dumb down the community at large. It blocks anything that is emotionally stirring in a good way or even in a bad way.

Design boards and zoning ordinances usually seek some sort of compromise. The architect’s battle, in some respects, is not just to push the envelope in terms of novelty, but to challenge these people with buildings that are more sound and sustainable. In a country like America, a lot of these buildings will outlive the people who were the progenitors of them: the builders, the owners, and so forth. Cities evolve, and many of them are left with empty buildings that don’t have any sort of longevity. So one of the guiding principles of our practice has always been to do things that were flexible.

The part that seems imperative for the design profession is to look beyond what is right in front of one’s face. The building is going to be there for a while. It may outlive the architect and it may outlive me. There is a certain timelessness that needs to go into the design of things. Best Buy has to have their little sign here, but what happens when this isn’t a Best Buy anymore? That is a place where, despite the need to make a living, a lot of architects compromise. And they really shouldn’t.

We should be the leaders of sane design ordinances and zoning codes. We should be the leaders of reforming housing. Frankly, we should be the people on the design review boards. These boards tend to get very myopic about things like “What kind of brown paint are you going to use?” But the question ought to be “Why brown?” Or “Why paint?” “What’s the bigger issue?” But when you get together a group of people without strong qualifications, they tend toward consensus, which is not always a driver of quality.

ABN: I’m wondering, though, what specific actions or best practices you think could be added to the architectural process to achieve the ends you’re talking about.

MD: Pay attention to what’s around you – I mean literally on that block, that street, that neighborhood. That doesn’t mean you have to repeat it. It just means that you ought to be designing with more of an urban planning mindset. So much of architecture is done within the lines of a given site plan and legal description that you ignore whether the building will affect the flow of the city or create shade or add a gathering place or something like that. Planners, on the other hand, tend to work in these noble, larger contexts but fail to take in the reality of cars and pedestrian conflict and economics that determine the ultimate use of a building site. There ought to be a space in between the two. Some people would categorize these as plannerly concepts, but I think they ought to be considered part of rudimentary architectural design as well.

So near context is important, but also the general context: the climate, the region. Respecting the idea that buildings, unlike fashion, don’t change very easily. They are expensive to renovate, so if they are reasonably well thought out, so much the better in terms of the capital and impact required of the community. Once you have built something on a given site, it doesn’t come down easily. But like fashion, architecture seems to cater to where the money is now, so some of these communities aren’t built to last.

ABN: So for the kind of inquiry we are going to perform, how do you define “place”?

MD: The first thing that comes to mind is uniqueness – when where you’re standing or sitting or sleeping or whatever is special. I know that if I were standing out in a wheat field in the Midwest I might be in a place, but I don’t know what would differentiate it from the field two miles away from it. It might be one big place. Whereas if I’m sitting eating my food in the corner of a restaurant, that might be a tight place.

There is an element of safety to “place.” When you’re talking about a building, it’s something that modifies the element of place in Nature in a benign way: protection from the heat or the tornado or the climate.

There is a rich, tactile sense to “place.” What does it feel like? Or look like, smell like, sound like, even taste like?

There should be a sense of passage: a way to get in and a way to get out. And there should be some definition, though I guess you could call the Earth a place.  “You’re on the Earth, I’m on the Earth, how’s your experience right now?” My experience of it right now is walking around the lobby of a building.

ABN: Huh, it seems to me that that scenario leads us into a fundamental problem of discussing “place.” When you’re talking about putting up a building with a respect for place, the environment in which you are going to put it is a place. That subset of place has already received a lot of attention from sustainable architecture and the like. Then the existing structures and social fabric around the site where you are building are also a place – the skyline you are going to modify, if you will. But then, in this inevitable way, the building the architect is going to put down will be a place, whether it had any respect for these other elements of place or not. So in a way it seems almost impossible to talk about integrating buildings with place – once they exist, they are place.

MD: And they also impact all those other elements of place. Once a building is there, the place of the field or the lot is not the same place. They participate in place as a greater whole, and they are also unique as the place that they are. They have a logic of the things that they do internally as well as the external impact on the places that they sit in. Being in the house is different from looking at the house. You can be in a place called the neighborhood or the place called the dining room. Or the foyer or the bathroom. Each of those places in and of themselves are going to have a proportion and sensory qualities that make them peaceful, invigorating, scary, what have you.

ABN: It seems as if there is something like a continuum of place in which all buildings and architects inevitably participate.

MD: Yes, there is. You start with the raw natural stuff. Then you have settlements that become a city. The densities change. The town changes, and the levels of stimulation, excitement, safety. There is a continuum that goes from Nature to the very rooms of the buildings.

ABN: That’s kind of humbling. And I suppose it’s the subject that we’re going to tackle. So to get us started, I’m wondering if you could just throw out some of the elements of place you imagine us considering.

MD: Texture. Lighting. Thermal control — hot, cold. Size. Volume. Detail. Color. Smell. Sound. Shade, shadow. Darkness and lightness. Compression or expansion – am I being pulled or pushed? Intrigue, mystery – am I excited about this? Is it daunting, boring? Commerce, foot traffic. Can I sit down here? Is it forbidden or can I engage in it? Am I at rest or active, working in it? Does it function well for me? Are there elements of emotion? Then there is cost, economics. Is it ubiquitous or unique? Does it blend in well or stand out? Is it ugly or pretty, and what does that mean? Time. Is it here for the long term or is it disposable, transient? Is it flexible or permanent? It would be hard to go and move one of those pyramids in Egypt. Delight, civility. Danger, wonder. You can cantilever buildings over people’s heads and even though you’ve walked under it many times, it doesn’t look like it’s supported. Geometry. Mystery, discovery, navigability – if it’s late at night, I want to be able to find my hotel. Then there is the building in relation in time in the day, the position of the sun in the sky.

ABN: Huh, The Sun. That seems like a good place to start.

Next in The Elements of Place: “See the Sun and the shadow”