Negative Space

this article is written on the un-ceded lands of the Massachusett People

One of the key tools of architectural representation is the figure ground diagram. The idea is that there is some figure (usually the architecture) that surrounds, encloses, sits next to, or otherwise acts upon this thing represented by the ground. The most famous figure ground, at least in my experience of architectural education, is the Nolli Map. In the early 18th century, Nolli, an architect and surveyor, engraved the most accurate map of Rome to date but, instead of rendering buildings black and open spaces in white as had been custom, he left vacant the interior public spaces of buildings, places where people might enter. So, it’s explained, we see private spaces as figural compliments to the ground of open civic spaces. The map makes the argument that all of these spaces are, if not continuous, richly intertwined. It has been, at least in my education, the canonical example of a diagram showing public and private relationships between spaces as they exist in a city. It’s a representational narrative that disciplines dealing in drawing the built environment re-purpose across many scales.

Detail from the 1748 Nolli map, La Nuova Topografia di Roma, showing: (837) Pantheon, (842) Piazza della Minerva

But here’s the thing - I think this interpretation of the Nolli map is absolute nonsense. What Nolli drew for us is an artifact of sociopolitical life in Rome in the 1730s. He’s drawn for us how he experienced Rome, which is one definition of public spaces in the city. To Nolli, the inside of the Pantheon (837), the Piazza della Minerva (842), and the street that connects them constitutes the same type of space - open civic space. They differ in composition and ambiance but they all carry the same cultural values of access, of openness. That definition is unlikely to be accurate for all residents of Rome, especially those that didn’t benefit as much from the freedoms of bouginess during the Enlightenment. It makes for a clever and beautiful map, but by no means an objective one. If that’s the case, what else are we accepting when we take this map for granted? And how do those assumptions morph and distort as we copy and apply them to new projects? How are we all so sure we’re talking about the same things?

What the traditional figure-ground map does, and what Nolli's map riffs on, is to show patterns of enclosure. Learning and living in a western, capitalist society, it is hard to divorce this representation and the relationships it shows from ideas of property. In the early days of the United States, citizenship was defined through the process of property owners coming together to create a public. The ability for citizens to move between private property and public space determined the nature of public interactions. Publicness is a voluntary state, something you participate in that is secondary to your private life, not a constant state. And if you didn’t own property, if you were enslaved, a woman, indigenous, or otherwise an outsider to that system, you were excluded from public space and spaces of the public, or you could be at any moment. This starting point, the production of the public sphere of the nation through exclusions, provides an incredibly problematic basis for the construction of something so apparently simple as negative space.

This column is a project borne of an interest in what makes public public, and what that word means, exactly. As we’ve explored with Nolli, in architectural practice, public and private are often thought about as a dichotomy. Public spaces are communal areas, places where people are invited to gather; while private spaces are more individual, more obscure. In conversations on building typologies, public projects are parks and schools and libraries; while private projects are houses and offices. I find these typologies deeply unsatisfying. They oversimplify and make too many operating assumptions about their audience. They neglect complex cultural contexts of power - things like race and class, that often color the ground of that diagram, filling in the negative space, producing a different map or a different version of events. The physical construction of “open” space overlaps with, but is different from the less-visible socio-economic political construction of “open”, where who is welcome, who is “other”, and who is surveilled may be completely unaligned with space itself. These misalignments are worth interrogating. They’re uncomfortable. They ask us to interrogate power as it is at play in our projects, the politics they embody, the cultural norms we implicitly accept, where the boundaries are.

So then, what are we really talking about when we talk about "public"? What is public anyway? What guidelines do we follow when we design "public" spaces? And who are they for? The column will explore the design-politics of public spaces - how they’re literally made, how they look versus how they perform, the whos hows wheres and whys of their geography. It will likely center on US geographies, as that is the context I’ve always lived in; though I hope they’re if not applicable, at least interesting thought experiments in whatever context you call home. I have a lot of questions that I’m not certain I have the answers to and a few typologies I can think of off the top of my head, let’s chat.