An Environmental Experience | Walking and Feeling
Architecture is all about walking. With few exceptions, we experience architectural space at a walking pace and a walking scale, even if we are not fully mobile and require assistance in getting around.
Image: A man speed-walking. Photogravure after Edweard Muybridge, 1887, Wellcome Images, Wikimedia Commons
Walking is the human default method for moving about. It remains one of the most convenient and efficient means of human locomotion, even if we only use it to get from the elevator to the car. As designers of the built environment, we are generally aware that our end-users are nearly always walking, standing or sitting. All three states present design challenges, but the mobile, “ambulatory” state – when people are free to go where they please, when they please, how they please – provides the greatest challenges and the greatest opportunities for design creativity.
Our task as designers is to modulate the walking experience and to make it as significant as possible, allowing and encouraging people to get from A to B (or A to A) directly, indirectly or undirected. The experience should be safe, pleasant, and comfortable. In many instances, where direct, efficient travel is not a priority, a successful walking experience might offer variety, surprise, sensory stimulation (“sensual amenities”), spatial character, decision-making opportunities and “hints of experiences to come.”1
There is a huge amount of research and writing on the subject of two-legged walking (see partial bibliography below), from its prehistoric origins to today’s state-of-the-art bipedal bots. Subjects covered include philosophy, history, athletics, mechanics, health, meditative psychological and creative benefits, etc.2 Our main interest is in how we as designers can use what we know about walking to design better environmental experiences.
VISUAL PREDOMINANCE
Image: Yonge Street, Toronto, looking north towards Dundas St.
Photo: The Author
Environmental design is strongly focused on creating a visual experience.
This has been true at least since the documentation of linear perspective in the early 15th century, and is most often accomplished at the expense of other sensory stimuli. There are several reasons for this. First, a large percentage of our brain is dedicated to vision. Second, and largely as a result of this, our designs and presentations are invariably visual. Third, painting, film, photography, and more recently, digital visual media are highly visual and represent a huge part of our culture.
Last summer, I became stunningly aware of how important vision is, not only to the appreciation of the finer points of design, but also to the nature of walking and the total environmental experience. I had signed up for a blindfolded tour of downtown Toronto. So, on a busy Saturday morning, wearing an official paralympic blindfold and grasping one end of an orange shoelace, I was urged slowly forward by my friend and tour leader (literally) Jonathan Silver. More about this unusual tour is described in the Locations column in this magazine. While the tour awakened me to the important role of non-visual stimuli, it also made me aware that spatial experience and the act of walking through the environment is made a lot simpler when you can use all five senses.
WALKING AND MULTI-SENSORY EXPERIENCE
Because vision processing occupies so much of our brain, it tends to spread out, overlapping here and there with other, smaller sensory areas. As a result, our sensory inputs can get mixed up, creating stronger perceptions, even though the multi-sensory aspect may go unnoticed. In fact, it’s largely true that, unless our attention is specifically drawn to a smell, a texture or a sound, we stay focused on what we can see. Often these other sensory stimuli are stealthily recorded in our sense memory, only to be brought back later when the stimulus is repeated.
Image: A temple walkway in Kyoto.
Photo: The Author
The nature of walking is strongly affected by sensory stimuli – touch (irregularities and textures underfoot and at hand level, breeze, temperature, slope), sound (speech, music, water, nature, excitement), smell (coffee & cinnamon buns, nature, popcorn, spices), taste (indirectly suggested by smells) and vision (attracters, distractors, intrusions, informers).3
A lot of our walking takes us only from A to B, on routes that are unchanged from day to day. We typically endure these trips rather than enjoying them, since they stopped providing any noticeable sensory stimulation long ago. We may find these walks stimulating in other ways, since they allow us to disengage from our environment and let our minds wander in creative directions. But at other times, we may choose to walk for reasons of health or pursuit of adventure. In these cases, sensory stimulation is appreciated and, conceivably, sought out.
Walking places us in immediate contact with our surroundings. What is the nature of the surfaces we are in contact with? After all, on foot, there is a surface beneath our feet that tells us something about how we should behave. Rough pavers or cobblestones will slow us down in order to make us more observant, more cautious, or more alert. A soft carpet will slow us down as well, but will make us feel more relaxed and comfortable. When we are walking, we can reach out and touch things. A smooth wooden handrail steadies us and gives us confidence when we are ascending or descending a ramp or staircase.
Walking allows us to slow down – even stop in our tracks – to appreciate the character of the spaces we move through. A lofty, generous space may make us want to walk reverently, hesitantly, to enjoy the experience and absorb the feeling of spaciousness, whether it’s an architectural space or a natural one. Moving through a low-ceilinged, noisy underground parking garage, on the other hand, might make us feel uneasy, and will encourage us move quickly and spend as little time in the space as possible. The presence of other people can be calming, as the murmur of overheard conversations passing by on a gravel path, or stressful, as the hurried click of stiletto heels on a marble floor.
In addition to the five traditional senses, there are also the effects of navigation, balance (proprioception), speed (vestibular system), anticipation and decision making. This would present us with an impossible amount of environmental information, if it weren’t for the fact that walking is as natural to us as breathing.
URBAN WALKING
Image: Takeshita-dori, Tokyo.
Photo: The Author
Before the mid-19th century, the idea of walking about in a city for the sheer pleasure of it wouldn’t have occurred to most people, if it had been possible at all. In the 1860s, the poet Charles Baudelaire introduced the French public to the flâneur, a “gentleman stroller of city streets,” and “artist-poet of the modern metropolis.” This romantic persona, as fact or fiction, introduced the recreational possibilities of city streets – something which, today, we take completely for granted.
In fact, one of the hallmarks of a “livable city” today is “walkability.” How easy, safe and enjoyable is it for people to negotiate the city on foot? In the words of ArchDaily Assistant Editor Niall Patrick Walsh, “I always find that my experience of a city is entwined with the people I meet, see, or even hear. So the fundamental characteristic is perhaps a city that is walkable, or negotiable without using a car, to maximize daily interactions.”4
According to the findings of the National Walking Summit held in St. Paul last September, there is a social component to walkable cities, as well:
"Safe, convenient and comfortable places to walk are fundamental to the forgotten one-third of Americans who don’t drive – the young, the old, the disabled and those too poor to buy a car. These people live under a form of house arrest in many U.S. communities, unable to do much of anything.…5"
At the urban scale, walking represents simultaneous acts of independence and cooperation. Within certain limits, we are free to go wherever we want to, but the urban environment is shared among all of us. In cities such as Venice, this duality becomes especially apparent. If you are one of the millions of foreign tourists who visit the city annually, you are constantly aware that you are enjoying a delicate environment that generations of Venetians have built and maintained. Yet you are completely free to wander the maze of streets and alleys, to lose your way and to find it again. Architectural historian Bernard Rudofsky6, commenting on this phenomenon, cites the town of Martina Franca, in Apulia: “Labyrinthine towns hold a singular fascination for people whose flow of imagination has not dried up by living on streets that run for miles in a straight line.”
As Rudofsky points out, straight lines are rarely the raw materials of fascination and imagination. Tara Quinn, writing in the literary journal Brick refers to “walking, being, and noticing.”7 Metaphorically, walking and living are closely bound together: “walks of life,” “walking in another person’s shoes.” “Noticing” is the third ingredient that makes the experience complete. It’s not that designers can, or should, create spaces that are filled with excitement at every turn – only that they remember walking is an essential part of our being and that an engaged existence requires that we all experience our surroundings to the greatest degree we can.
REFERENCES
Motloch, John L. Introduction to Landscape Design, Second Edition. NYC: John Wiley, 2001
In researching “walking” for this essay, I found 80,000 results on Amazon.com; in a Google search, I found 1.3 billion sites, the first of many pages, being dedicated to the TV show “Walking Dead”
Motloch, 158
Badalge, Keshia. “What Makes a City Livable to You?” ArchDaily, 09:30, 28 April, 2018 https://www.archdaily.com/893435/what-makes-a-city-livable-to-you?utm_medium=email&utm_ source=ArchDaily%20List&kth=1,589,472
Walljasper, Jay “The Positive Power of Walking,” Utne Reader https://www.utne.com/mind-and-body/the-positive-power-of-walking-zbtz1706zsau
Rudofsky, Bernard. Streets are for Walking. NYC: VNR, 1969
Quinn, Tara. In a review of The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, Brick 98, Winter 2017, 60
BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gros, Frédéric. A Philosophy of Walking
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Nicholson, Geoff. The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism
Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking”
Fermor, Patrick Leigh. Trilogy: A Time of Gifts; Between the Woods and the Water; The Broken Road