What Makes A Good Place?

What makes a good place?

That’s what architect Avi Friedman wanted to know.

He wanted to know why some places are inviting, memorable and make us feel alive – while other places are completely forgettable.

Friedman traveled around the world visiting different kinds of “good” places as research for his new book, “The Nature of Place”.

He talked with Lisa Mullins about what he found.

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Lisa Mullins: What makes people return to a special spot, besides of course the opportunity to get away with admitting to stealing the towels a few years back? Author and architecture professor Avi Freedman has travelled around the globe to try to find out what makes a location memorable or inviting. His new book is The Nature of Place. One of the places Freedman told us about is a restaurant he spotted in Tuscany, Italy.

Avi Freedman: When I walked into the place, I walked there with my wife, and the person who runs the place told me that they have two conditions. The first one was that you need to sit with other people, so you don’t get your own table.

Mullins: Oh, it’s like cafeteria style seating?

Freedman: That’s right, but this was a surprise. The second one is that we don’t serve water. In other words, you have to enjoy our wine. And as I was sitting there I recognized that there is something unique that you get from that type of scene. The combination of how the place was built, exposed walls, and then at the back the kitchen and the smell from the kitchen, and the people that you sit next to.

Mullins : So is this an aesthetic experience or a structural exploration? I mean, what made it work there?

Freedman: Good places provide a wonderful backdrop to a process that is happening there. So it is a combination of how the place presents itself and how the people who use that place engage in it.

Mullins: Give us another example.

Freedman: I woke up very early in the morning and I started to walk the streets of Taiyuan, China, and I saw a wonderful market that was a direct exchange with farmers who grew their own produce and sold it to locals who live there. And this was, for me, wonderful because it was the rural scene. It was not made-up market, not even public market. Another place that really attracted my attention, I worked for several years in the far North, Canadian North, in a town called Iqaluit.

Mullins: Nunavut, up way North.

Freedman: That’s right. And the sun rarely set there. And I was walking, I came, I stumbled across a group of soapstone sculptures that was put together by the people who live there. And there is so much beauty in this sculpture garden, and the nicest thing about them was that they were embedded in the scene, the mountain range in the back, no trees, and the small homes that were awkwardly laid around the area. So it’s something where you have a very instant connection with art, and the scenery and the place create a wonderful backstage.

Mullins: But that’s interesting because it means that you’re looking at that and that’s in the foreground for you, but what is literally and figuratively in the background are homes that are, in some cases, ramshackle and people who are quite impoverished. Does that not appear in your lens?

Freedman: It is, but I believe that this is one of the elements that define authenticity. When you come to a place you never know what will define its uniqueness. Perhaps the sculpture on a background of ramshackle homes, or my walk in Tijuana in the middle of a made-up street with ramshackle homes built next to it are, for me, a definition of a unique place. Now, as I was walking in Tijuana, I recognized that it raises issue about why neighborhoods in North America, new neighborhoods, lack soul. Despite the fact that the squatter settlement was really a very impoverished place, I also recognized that the people who moved to that place tried to define their locale in so many interesting symbols. The geranium plant. They put bunch of tires to get to the home and they painted them. So it was an intention to make even impoverished places defined, personalized and unique.

Mullins: So where does the element of planning come in? How does that work against or for this sense of place that you’re looking for?

Freedman: It is one of the biggest questions that I ask myself; whether nice places can be choreographed. And I recognize as an architect that this cannot happen because the defining element of nice places can be summed up in one word; accretion. How time works on a place. If you say, travel to Europe to our favorite places, to visit and walk through cathedrals, cities and so on, you will see that the time component is essential in them being unique or authentic. They aged gracefully. The people who built them selected material that they knew will weather the time well. They created beautiful spaces that were challenging at the time to put together, but this is what made them unique. So if say, one designed and introduced this beautiful element, say a square. You rarely see a beautiful square in a suburban community. If one will include this feature, over time they can become beautiful place over the coming years.

Mullins: Avi Freedman is a professor of architecture at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His latest book is called The Nature of Place: A Search for Authenticity. Very nice to talk to you.

Freedman: Thank you for inviting me.

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