Globalization and digitization are making physical location less and less significant to human existence. 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: So I’d like to explore another kind of element, one that is more abstract than the climatic factors we discussed. It’s the elements of design: line, shape, color, texture, value, space, and form. So what is your basic reaction to the idea of a line and how it impacts place?

Mike Davis: Line, as in the geometric term, which is neither a point or a ray or a plane – my initial reaction is one of direction. I also think of separation and enclosure. It implies an either/or – you’re on this side of the line or that side of the line. Then you also think of infinite, of a line going on forever.

I think of being inside of a bullet train, which is linear in nature, yet when you are on it you are very aware of being a point in space that is moving somewhere. So in a funny way, lines are not static to me, though they can be barriers and dividers. But they can also be connectors. That’s being “in the line” or “on the line” – it implies opportunities, places to get to, a unifier of place rather than a fence.

Moving toward the architectural, I think of the concept of “edge.” Edge is that which gives definition to something. It is a line that plays with the surrounds or intrudes upon a space.

ABN: I have a very Hollywood image of what it means to be an architect. But I imagine that when you sit down at your drawing board or even at a drafting application on the computer, the first thing you have to do is draw a line.

MD: Yes. It’s the point of origin or beginning of any visual concept. You don’t usually start with a dot – you start with a line. It’s how you begin to describe something, even with street and property ”lines.” Generally speaking, it’s the beginning of any kind of geometry, the creation of space or volume.

ABN: You hear people talk about “good lines.” What places come to mind when you think of powerful, evocative lines?

MD: In the built world today, you think of a lot of vertical lines. In a structure like the John Hancock Center in Chicago, what’s distinctive is the angle of the lines – they decided that instead of being perpendicular to the street, they could come in at an angle. That creates a different and interesting shape on the skyline.

But I also think about a fence in Colorado. You’ve got these gorgeous mountains and pine trees and meadows, then there is this linear rail fence that runs past your field of vision – a property demarcation of some sort.

I think of directional traffic, the lines of the streets, the signs of the urban environment. In fact, straight lines don’t occur very often in the natural world. You think of the more amorphous forms of rocks, mountains, trees, oceans – there’s very little of lines in the strict sense. Even rays of light are affected by the folding of space.

Lines are very much the domain of Man. Think of a tree, the kind that is already very straight that we tend to make lumber out of. Even that we end up planing down so that it is very regimented, very linear. Is that the difference between God and Man? Is it easier for us to comprehend those boards than to make a building that looks and acts like a tree? We make things that look like boxes. Even the most complex of them in the 21st century tend to originate with two points and connecting them directly – the line.

ABN: It’s interesting to me, this question of lines in Nature. It’s true that you could not find many objects in Nature that a child could trace around and produce long, straight lines. But the principles of linearity, the lines’ mathematical rules, are there and accessible for everyone. I think the embodiment of that is the horizon. It’s this gigantic, seemingly straight natural object. It’s not “really” straight and it doesn’t “really” exist – you can’t go see it. Yet you can use the assumption of its straightness in navigation, for instance.

MD: I forgot you’re from Kansas. The horizon is a pretty ubiquitous line out there. That’s how my brother described Iraq – there’s a straight line in all directions.

We use that example of the horizon a lot to talk about the idea of progress, which also has something to do with “line.” We’re always chasing it, but you can never get there. There’s no real place there.

ABN: Not unless you’re Atlas.

MD: What other natural straight lines are there out there? You can see microscopic examples in crystals, snowflakes. But how did we arrive as this ideal as humans? We design all this stuff that is contrary to Nature, but also has beauty to it.

ABN: There’s another aspect of line and place I’d like to explore. It seems as if the way we know where we are most of the time is based on lines created by human beings, usually ones we can see on a map. What do you make of these places created by lines? I’ll show my cards by saying this seems to me like a very “Arizona” question, given that on your southern end there you’ve got a line that is so fraught with political meaning.

MD: I think of the beginnings of a city like Phoenix, with a series of line segments, a gridded street system. Every mile there is an arterial stream. There are north-south lines and east-west lines. You contrast that with the feeling of an older city like Boston, which has series of radians and angles going off every which way. You have this feeling of people saying, “This street will go to Faneuil Hall, then it will go over to Sam Adams’s place, then it will go to the State House.” But Phoenix was laid down as a grid.

Then there is the national border, as you say. It’s just a couple of lines out there, one of which angles slightly toward California. In Texas you have the Rio Grande river that defines the border between Texas and Mexico. But here you have this feeling that they just had to figure out how to get between Texas and San Diego.

Then you’ve got these bastardized messes in countries like Iraq, Jordan, Israel, that were carved out of the British Empire after World War II without any respect to tribe or sect. Instead all they have are these lines in the desert. There’s a great irony when you think that we have one too. And Los Angeles is one of the largest Hispanic cities on the planet. We know we have this military, this ability to police the line, but what does culture do with the line? Phoenix is 35 percent Hispanic. I was born in Tucson and my friends were Mexican. It was a part of where we lived. We never thought twice about it. But in a way we’re in Alsace-Lorraine. I mean, 150 years ago, this was Mexico. Then you fight a war, move the borders, draw some new lines out in the desert. Between here and the Middle East, it makes you wonder if the nation-state concept is completely absurd.

ABN: I was just reading about a book called Line in the Sand by Rachel St. John. She points out that when the surveyors were originally working out the border, they didn’t use the same degree of precision out in the desert, because they assumed that the territory would be of no significance to anyone. It’s funny to think about that now, with border politics being so contentious.

MD: It’s interesting about humans, the way our eyes work. I’ve done work that is similar to surveying myself, shooting transit lines. The nature of what you’re seeing is linear, as you’re trying to plumb the angles of where things go. You have to ask if it really makes things easier, given that many of the great human settlements of the past were considerably less linear. But in the Southwest we see a big tract of dirt and divide it up.

Then there’s something that you only seem to see in Arizona, which is the six-foot block wall that separates your property from the ”bad guys” on the other side. You don’t see that in the Midwest or the East Coast. You see some in California, but it’s usually more aesthetically pleasing or discreet. Sometimes you can see through it. But our sense of territoriality of lines in Phoenix seems to be overly pronounced. It looks like a giant government project.

ABN: Whether they’re fenced or not, I think of the lines of roads and farms that you see when you fly over the Midwest. I think of Chicago – we have a grid not because of some orderly central plan, but because the land was parceled out and sold to speculators.

MD: Yes, most of the things that make our buildings regular, box-like, linear, are ultimately functions of a mass-produced, industrial economy. I don’t know that that’s necessarily indigenous man’s solution to architecture – everything from the thatched hut to the hogan to the igloo – they are more cylindrical or circular in nature. Now we produce things in rectangles because that’s the best way to get the most out of the tree, then transport them in straight lines via locomotive and jet plane.

But one of the things our mathematical and computing abilities have also given us in the past 20 years or so is the opportunity for more organic architecture. Frank Gehry is one of the pioneers of that with places like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. As I understand it, he purchased French aircraft engineering software to start doing these sorts of things. But there is an irony, which is the the columns and supports that hold up a building like that are essentially still sticks. They’re still lines. They may be tilted, but if you look inside that curvaceous form, there are still those segments. It’s not truly organic. Does that matter? Are we just doing this because we can? All of it comes at a pretty significant cost. These are performing arts centers, museums, the upper echelon of our built environment. They’re not as price sensitive as a two-story home.

ABN: I had a friend who, when we went to the opening of Millennium Park, proposed that Frank Gehry be limited henceforth to building band shells. She said, “This is great, but this is all he ever needs to do.”

MD: His work is so unique, but in some ways it feels as if he’s cheating to repeat it.

ABN: So there’s another way that line contributes to place that I’d like to explore. I think this is a particularly Southwestern one. It’s the idea of the new place created by a line, like a railroad or a power line. What do you make of that?

MD: Right. “Welcome to Shady Acres, coming soon.” Well, where is everything? All I see is the line of the road. Welcome to sprawling Phoenix or Los Angeles. We extend the water line, the sewer line. There is a line of opportunity that says, “you can come and expand here.” Everyone gets their own little slice of heaven out in the middle of nowhere… hell. But you’ve got your six-foot block wall and your water and sewer line and your empty neighborhood. Some of these neighborhoods feel like military bases that are built to justify the existence of the water line, but aren’t really meant for anyone to live in.

I went to Moscow in 1990 through an exchange program. The Berlin Wall had fallen six months before. So it was pretty interesting to go over there having grown up with the idea of the Soviet menace. I noticed that they did a few things extraordinarily well. They had subways that ran on time and were beautiful works of architecture. They could heat the buildings. And they designed toilets the right way. I thought, “Bully for these guys! They take care of the essentials.”

But here’s the point about line. You’d go into their grocery stores and they would have shortages combined with these bizarre oversupplies of things. You’d literally have six aisles full of the Russian equivalent of Dran-O. But you couldn’t get a carton of milk. That’s what gave rise to an old saying from the Soviet Union days – “If you see a line in Russia, get in it, because you’re going to want what’s at the end.”

ABN: It’s not so different from those developments on the “lines of opportunity,” really. It’s probably driven by the same psychology.

MD: There was a forecast done in, I think, 2005 – back when the Kool-Aid was flowing – that said that Buckeye, Arizona would by 2050 become the largest city in Arizona, larger than Phoenix. Today the cows have come home to roost and it’s filled with gigantic housing tracts with few to no houses. Some of which, by the way, do not even have those water and sewer lines extended to them. Thank God for that.

Yet there is a very idealized American version of that when you think of the intercontinental rail line connecting East and West, creating the nation.

ABN: Sure – in Kansas you hear about towns that took a vote and then moved all the buildings to get closer to the railroad. 

So I want to push further on this idea of the lines of opportunity. I think an underlying motivation for our project has been this yearning for an authenticity of place, which is all well and good. But it’s the extension of those lines of opportunity and those big new developments that gives architects the opportunity to create new structures. That middle of nowhere is also a big blank canvas. In many cases, there may not yet be a housing association or a city planner to fight with. You have a better opportunity to put up whatever you want. Do you feel a kind of ambivalence about that?

MD: I have a growing concern or fear about that, which I didn’t have before. In the first five years of my career I was figuring out what was going on when you make a building. I would say that years 10 to about  25 went as you describe – another opportunity to make a better building, be more innovative, build a “better mouse-trap;” and be recognized by our peer group for it. These days I would confess to feeling a bit like a man coming out of a coma. I’m asking, “Wait a minute, why are we doing some of this stuff?”

Phoenix underwent a pretty cathartic expansion when, comparatively late in the game, it built its freeway system between 1985 and 2005. In that period the population of Maricopa County also literally doubled. There are very few natural boundaries to growth. In fact, one of the most relevant “lines” are the borders of the Gila River Indian Community and the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community, the Native American communities to the east, south, southeast and southwest of the metro area. When you look at an aerial view of Phoenix you see this large, relatively empty area and you say, “What’s that? Why does it curve around that way?” Well, that’s where they put the lines.

I believe it was the Arizona architect, Paolo Soleri, that coined the term “arcology.” That’s a combination of the words “architecture” and “ecology” and it refers to the idea of an urban environment that has little to no negative impact on the earth. There is a settlement near here, Arcosanti, that is based on his ideas. You can see him somewhat in opposition to another one of our Southwestern adopted heroes, Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright conceived of the “broad-acre city,” with these self-sufficient plots of land that are consistent with the ideas of agrarian America and are, of course, more spread out.

I’ve been thinking about whether I am more with Soleri or Wright, and I think that in the past few years it has been Soleri. Some of his ideas are a little ”out there,” but urban, higher density environments are where we’ve been evolving as human beings. But is there an urban Phoenix, or is it all so spread out that it’s all suburban? It feels as if it, along with most of suburbia in general, it was a backlash to problems that were being experienced in cities in the past. In point of fact, post-World War II urban environments were dirty, polluted, often dangerous places to live. It’s no wonder the idyllic, “leave it to Beaver” ethos of the ’50s took hold.

So that’s where I am at now. It seems if some of these things are contradictory or absurd, some of these developments that are 30, 40, 50 miles away from the center. But it’s hard to say where you draw that line in the sand, particularly when the “center” is arguably rather “suburban” in terms of density.

ABN: What I find interesting is that, to me, it sounds like your fears about putting up developments in the middle of nowhere are really aesthetic fears, rather than, say, political or environmental fears.

MD: You could think of it as part of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I often think of places like rural India or Africa and think, what value would my stock in trade be there? Would I be building beautiful, monumental temples, or would I be showing people how to put better roofs over their heads? Am I really an architect, or do I just play one on TV?

So part of it is aesthetic, yes. But another big concern for me is whether buildings are flexible. Buildings are some of the most expensive things humans endeavor to produce, aside from weapons of war and space exploration. Building constitutes the second largest part of our nation’s GDP just after health care. Trillions of dollars of capital on this planet reside in built structures. They should be adaptable. Once we’ve created a water-tight, weather-tight space, we would do well to respect it and honor the effort and expense that went into it. So I would say it’s a combination of aesthetics, economics, respect and environmental concern.

Previous Elements of Place discussion: “Shelter, then celebrate” • Next Elements of Place discussion: “Sculpt the skyline”

Images: 1953 postage stamp commemorating Gadsden purchase (teaser from home page); Great Dingo Fence, Australia, courtesy Wikimedia Commons (top); Hadrian’s Wall, courtesy Wikimedia Commons (bottom).