Problem: Buildings, and especially houses, with a graceful transition between the street and the inside, are more tranquil than those which open directly off the street.
Solution: Make a transition space between the street and the front door. Bring the path which connects street and entrance through this transition space, and mark it with a change of light, a change of sound, a change of direction, a change of surface, a change of level, perhaps by gateways which make a change of enclosure, and above all with a change of view.
In the centre of the forest is the sandō, leading up to the shrine. It follows an L-shaped curve, and is very different to the straight processional pathways found in religious buildings in the West or in China. Curves ensure that the view changes constantly, helping visitors make the transition to a deeper, more spiritual place.
In the design of Japanese tea houses, the building is seen as less important than the path (roji) leading up to it, and tea masters of the past believed that the journey along the roji allowed participants to better immerse themselves in the slow time of the tea ceremony.
At the Ace Hotel in New York, a required exit sign over a door was an eyesore, and a stark contrast from the considered, detailed wall where it was mounted. Rather than accept the wart as it was, the sign was embraced as a chance to create an experience for the hotel’s guests by integrating the exit sign into the space. Now, surrounding the sign are other letters painted on the wall in a similar condensed style.
Every requirement is an opportunity for delight, even the ugly ones. Sometimes the creative treatment of these warts are the most enjoyable parts of a design.
The trick to get around this is to move smoothly up and down the gradient of social interaction intensity, never dropping below a basic floor of presence: the sense that there are other people in the same place as you.
Instead of having two modes, “in a call” and “on my own,” we need to think about multiple ways of being together which, minimally, could be:
In a video call
In an anteroom to a video call, hearing the sound of others
In a doc together
On my desktop but with the sense that colleagues are around
And the job of the designer is to ensure that their software ensures the existence of these different contexts, instead of having the binary on-a-call/not-on-a-call, and to design the transitions between them.
Problem: Any part of town—large or small—which is to be identified by its inhabitants as a precinct of some kind, will be reinforced, helped in its distinctness, marked, and made more vivid, if the paths which enter it are marked by gateways where they cross the boundary.
Solution: Mark every boundary in the city which has important human meaning—the boundary of a building cluster, a neighborhood, a precinct—by great gateways where the major entering paths cross the boundary.