COVID-19 and Our Private Spaces
In these quarantine days, I’m trying to look past the obvious changes to our daily routines, trying to recognize new patterns of interaction with our surroundings. The foxes and songbirds of Yosemite Valley are probably wondering where all the annoying humans went. The raccoons of Balboa Park are probably lonely and hungry, as the trash cans are not offering their usual buffet. Of course, we’re not all gone, we’re just home. Home for work, home for dinner, home for drinks, home for working out and home for digital socializing.
When being home becomes too much, we trickle out onto the sidewalks, sauntering about with our dogs and our loved ones. People in the same household, or “viral unit,” take to the streets on foot and on bike, enjoying the sunshine that office life typically forbade.
There’s a new sidewalk etiquette. I encounter a viral unit walking towards me on the sidewalk. Two parents and their adolescent children, walking at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday. A family walking. Together. On a Wednesday afternoon…madness. As I’m outnumbered, I step off the sidewalk and into the street, ceding the way for them. As we cross paths, ten feet of air between us, I hold my breath. Perhaps this is a bit much, but this is how we walk now.
A block later, I’m passing Fernside, a corner bar that is not giving up without a fight. They have a patio door open and have set a display case across the opening as an impromptu bar. They’re serving walk-up drinks and food to go. Clients stand in a loose line, six feet apart. Even during a pandemic, many of us still would rather have someone else make our drinks for us.
However, most of us are using this isolation time as for culinary experimentation. Now friends report vast lines at butcher shops, and a famously long line at the fish market on the Embarcadero. Instagram “research” shows unprecedented amounts of first-time bread baking and pasta making.
Many of us are working less, cooking more, and spending time with family, sharing one simple fact: we are stuck inside our homes, most of the day, every day. The outdoors tempts us with space and sunshine, but the threat of infection looms. Parks are closed and sidewalks are the last menacing sliver of public left to us.
A Look at Our Private Outdoor Space
This forces us to re-appraise private outdoor space. A common refrain in urban design circles is the observation that people who live in “real” cities trade in private space for dynamic, high-quality public space. The usual example is the Parisian or the New Yorker whose home is the city itself. The cafes and plazas and parks act as a shared dining room, living room, and backyard for the urbanite. This relationship with public space has been held up for years as healthier, more social, and more environmentally friendly than suburban living. With COVID-19 among us, however, we see how fragile dense urbanity can be during a pandemic. My friends and family in New York are truly quarantined, holed up in little apartments. Fresh air and green space are rare luxuries. Going to the park is a calculated risk. By contrast, my friends in San Diego are building backyard glamping tents, WIFI equipped, pillows strategically placed, whiskey poured, emailing with sunshine streaming in.
However, this is not an endorsement of suburban living. This is a recognition of the fact that as the world becomes increasingly urban and internationally interconnected, pandemics have more and more fertile ground on which to spread. Whether it’s COVID-19 today, or something else tomorrow, we need to reconcile our need to be in quarantine with our deep need to be outside.
Contemporary architecture tries to address this need, as Eran Chen describes in ArchDaily:
“Green walls and inner courtyards aren’t window dressing, they are a direct connection from your brain to the diurnal, indigenous instincts we have as humans on earth.”
Trendy green walls aside, design has been responding to our need for private and semi-private outdoor space for ages now, and this crisis is highlighting the value of what we took for granted when we spent our days away from home.
In Curbed New York, Doug Gordon celebrates the recent rediscovery of the stoop:
“Not quite public but not quite private either, stoops have afforded at least some New Yorkers a bit of breathing room between them and spouses or roommates working from home, or children engaged in remote learning. In many ways, they may be better than a home office, extra bedroom, or even a backyard. They’re an airlock of sorts, something that seamlessly connects a home with the city while offering at least a tiny buffer from it.”
The stoop and the front porch are both very useful quasi-public spaces. They provide front row seats to the most compelling tv channel there is—people walking by. The people walking by entertain themselves by looking at, or waving at, or even chatting with the watchers on the stoops. All this happens at a safe distance. In other words, the building typologies of yesteryear already provide social distancing infrastructure, a street-level stage for us to inhabit. Now we just need to take ownership of what has been handed down to us.
Remember Jane Jacobs: She Got a Lot Right
Not all of us live in Jane Jacobs-style neighborhoods. In ubiquitous high-rise buildings, our outdoor spaces are balconies, terraces and rooftops. As Jan Gehl famously pointed out in Cities for People, a balcony above the fifth or sixth floor becomes socially disconnected from the street. We can no longer distinguish sidewalk faces easily above this height, and an attempted conversation with someone on the street degenerates into a few shouts. However, instead of looking down to the street, we can look to our left and to our right. Our adjacent balconies can offer neighborly socializing at a safe distance. They also offer something a shared building stoop doesn’t—personalization. Using plants, lights and furniture, a balcony can blossom into an expression of one’s taste. In quarantine times, the balcony is no longer relegated to evening beer and morning coffee. It is the sky-bound front porch, a place for working, lunching, and even growing food.
In inner-ring neighborhoods, off-street parking becomes less relevant when people don’t commute to work. Let’s sell our cars and turn driveways into gardens. Even in the outer burbs, our yards take on new importance. Those of us working from home need a place to escape to, and the often-lowly patch of grass that we call our yard is all the more important than it ever has been. In South Park, neighbors are simultaneously taking to their front yards in order to share a distanced, but communal happy hour in the evenings. If we have the privilege of access to a private outdoor space, this is a time for us to take ownership of it, whatever that space is and make it our attainable dream.
Now that we’re home all day, let’s put some twinkly lights and a bistro table on our balcony; or, let’s park our car on the street so we can hang out in the driveway; or heck, let’s even set up a glampground in our backyards. We’ve got to spend 40 more hours at home than ever before, so we might as well shape our little spaces under the open sky into places that we enjoy and take pride in.
BENJAMIN ARCIA, M.U.D.
Senior Associate
He’s Back
Benjamin has returned to McCullough after a year and a half spent traveling and working on farms in South America. His gregarious nature and bilingual/bi-cultural upbringing enabled him to connect deeply with people and places he encountered along the way. However, his love for his adopted home of San Diego pulled him back here to California.
Benjamin is a generalist, with a tendency towards abstraction and daydreaming. His wide-ranging interests from downhill skateboarding, to farming and backpacking, express his love for exploration. These interests have given him a diverse palette of experiences that he combines with his knowledge of history to create designs that are emotionally inspired, but pragmatically informed.
Benjamin blew in with the breeze in 2013 and has been designing at McCullough ever since. A University of Miami graduate of the Master of Urban Design program, he was at first unfamiliar with the scale and materials of landscape architecture. However, he soon found that the multi-faceted nature of the discipline, continually rewarded his curiosity. Landscape architecture has since become a deeply gratifying profession for him.
A little-known fact about Benjamin, is that he holds a second-degree black belt in Taekwondo.
Our Featured Client This Month:Liberty National Corporation
Park and Broadway rendering
McCullough Landscape Architecture is proud to announce Liberty National Corporation as our first client of the month. They are an industry leader in developing multi-family residential projects throughout Florida and Southwestern United States. Their mission is to:
“Create architecturally exceptional residential communities that are self-sustaining, environmentally sensitive and offer residents the finest in apartment living.”
Liberty National takes a long-term approach with every project to ensure they are compatible with a community’s ongoing success and sustainability goals. Above all, they value reducing the carbon footprint by conserving water and making more efficient energy choices.
Aside from being one of the industry leaders in sustainable multi-family housing, Liberty National is also committed to helping each of its served communities through different philanthropies, including but not limited to, The Salvation Army, United Cerebral Palsy and Save Our Heritage Organization.
Liberty National currently has a surplus of 4,000 units in several stages of entitlement and construction and has developed thousands of apartment units. A few upcoming projects include Park and Broadway, 10th and B, Columbia and Hawthorne, State Street, First and Beech, La Jolla Highlands, and projects in Celebration, Florida.
Grit, Soul and Style
We are particularly excited about the Liberty National project at Park and Broadway. What is now a vacant lot bounded on the east by 13th Street and the north by C Street, will soon be turned into a 40-story apartment tower with two mid-rise buildings of six and seven stories. Park and Broadway will provide 640 residential units and 16,485 feet of commercial space in one of the most regularly traveled areas in East Village downtown. McCullough was selected to design the landscape of this state-of-the-art project and we are confident that our work will be an exceptional and sustainable illustration of the downtown community.
We are thrilled to work with Liberty National. Our companies are aligned beautifully because we share the vision of combining the grit, soul and style of each unique community.
Learn more about Liberty National, and some of their other projects on the horizon.
Nicole Hensch
Marketing and Administrative Assistant
COVID-19: Important Industry Updates from BIA San Diego
Get the latest information from the Government Affairs department of BIA San Diego. Currently, they are tracking the county’s jurisdiction’s operations and precautionary measures during the stay-at-home order on a daily basis. As an organization active in policy and issues around the built environment, they are committed to keeping its members and the public informed during this difficult and unusual time in our city and around the world.
McCullough is proud to be a long-time member and sponsor of the Building Industry Association (BIA) of San Diego County
Our staff uses this incredibly helpful information while continuing to work on client projects. Check out the resources below:
Resources
The Earth Thanks Us
In celebration of Earth Day on April 22, all of us are benefitting from the stay-at-home order. The air quality is improving and wildlife is taking a breather from us. Coyotes have been spotted in San Francisco’s financial district and deer are taking a bath in swimming pools. With climate change a threat to our way of life, having 80% of autos off the road has helped individuals who suffer from respiratory illness, heart attacks and strokes; keeping our hospitals available to treat Covid-19 patients. Indeed it’s a good day for our planet called Earth.
Get the latest facts on air quality from the San Diego Union-Tribune.