Walking
Photo: The Right Angle Journal
My interest in walking started many decades ago. I was about one year old at the time, and walking wasn’t an issue of mild curiosity; it was an intense fixation and a biological compulsion. Everybody around me was doing it and, if I wanted to experience the world as they did, I was going to have to do it on two feet, and I had better get started.
Walking has a long and distinguished history. Humankind’s ancient ancestors, beginning with Sahelanthropus (family hominidae, subfamily homininae), spent about five million years developing the art of bipedal locomotion, before Homo erectus finally arrived on the scene. And if you go back to the Acanthostega, the very first animals to stumble out of the water and walk on dry land at all, you’re looking at something closer to 400 million years.
And yet, each of us, individually, manages to progress from wiggling in amniotic fluid to squirming, to crawling, to walking within about one year. This should be recognized as nothing short of a miracle. Shouldn’t we all be paying much more attention to this incredible feat?
This is especially true of those of us who are designers of the built environment. We seem to take it for granted that our creations will be appreciated at a walking scale, without really celebrating it.
When we talk about walking, we also include those people who are walking challenged. For our discussion, walking represents a scale of activity – a measured speed and in close contact with a supporting surface. Design provisions are made for wheelchair users and people who require walking assistance. This is in order to make the environment more easily accessible, but also to maintain the walking scale.
In this issue of The Right Angle Journal, we explore the phenomenon of walking and how that ability relates to our appreciation of the built environment.
THE RIGHT ANGLE wants to engage design professionals and the public in a dialogue about the things that truly matter in our environment. If you have a thoughtful opinion you would like to express, don’t hesitate to contact the editor at: editor@therightanglejournal.com
An Environmental Experience | Walking and Feeling
We experience architecture at walking pace through all five senses: a blindfolded tour of Toronto and the case for designing the full sensory walk.
Two Excerpts from the Road to Ronchamp
Architects walk to Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp: dragging suitcases over Lyon’s cobblestones and tracing the original High Line in Paris.
An Urban Sensory Walk
A guided sensory walk through Toronto’s west end, from a traffic-drowned amphitheatre to a hidden Victorian square, shows how much of the city we miss by only looking.
A Walk in the Park
Four researchers walk through Los Angeles theme parks to test an idea: that walking itself is a method of creative research.
UX and Architecture - Integrated Building Design… and More!
What Canada’s C-2000 program proved: an integrated design process can halve a building’s energy use at little or no extra cost.
Guelph Market Square
A winter walk through Guelph’s Market Square: how curving ovals, a skating rink and a glass pavilion turned a parking lot into the city’s rallying place.
Locations | Blindfolded Tour: An Eye Opening Experience
Led blindfolded through downtown Toronto on the end of an orange shoelace, the author discovers how texture, sound, and smell shape space when sight is taken away.