Edward Hall, in The Hidden Dimension, suggests that a comfortable distance between strangers is the distance at which you cannot distinguish the details of their facial features. He gives this distance as being between 12 and 16 feet. Thus, the ceiling height in an indoor street should be at least in that range.
Where people sit and stand talking to each other, the appropriate social distance is more intimate. Hall gives it a dimension of four to seven feet. Thus, the ceiling in activity and “edge” places should be seven feet.
This suggests, for a large indoor street, a ceiling that is high in the middle and low at the edges. In the middle, where people are passing through and are more anonymous, the ceiling may be 12 to 20 feet high, or even higher, according to the scale of the passage. Along the edges of the thoroughfare, where people are invited to stop and become slightly more engaged in the life of the building, the ceilings may be lower. Here are three sections through an indoor street which have this property.
JX A.
Cross sections of an indoor street.
IOI BUILDING THOROUGHFARE
4. Wide entrance
As far as possible, the indoor street should be a continuation of the circulation outside the building. To this end, the path into the building should be as continuous as possible, and the entrance quite wide—more a gateway than a door. An entrance that is 15 feet wide begins to have this character.
5. Involvements along the edge
To invite the free loitering described above under Shortcut, the street needs a continuum of various “involvements” along its edge.
Rooms next to the street should have windows opening onto the street. We know it is unpleasant to walk down a corridor lined with blank walls. Not only do you lose the sense of where you are but you get the feeling that all the life in the building is on the other side of the walls, and you feel cut off from it. We guess that this contact with the public is not objectionable for the workers, so long as it is not too extreme, that is, as long as the workplace is protected either by distance or by a partial wall.
The corridor should be lined with seats and places to stop, such as newspaper, magazine, and candy stands, bulletin boards, exhibits, and displays.
Where there are entrances and counters of offices and services off the corridor, they should project into the corridor. Like activities, entrances and counters create places in the corridor, and should be combined with seats and other places to stop. In most public service buildings these counters and entrances are usually set back from corridors which makes them hard to see, and emphasizes the difference between the corridor as a place for passing through, and the office as a place where things happen. The problems can be solved if the entrances and counters project into the corridor and become part of it.
Therefore:
Wherever density or climate force the main lines of circulation indoors, build them as building thoroughfares. Place each thoroughfare in a position where it functions as a shortcut, as continuous as possible with the public street
outside, with wide open entrances. And line its edges with windows, places to sit, counters, and entrances which project out into the hall and expose the buildings’ main functions to the public. Make it wider than a normal corridor—at least n feet wide and more usually, 15 to 20 feet wide; give it a high ceiling, at least 15 feet, with a glazed roof if possible and low places along the edge. If the street is several stories high, then the walkways along the edges, on the different stories, can be used to form the low places.
♦J* -b
Treat the thoroughfare as much like a pedestrian street (100) as possible, with open stairs (158) coming into it from upper storys. Place entrances, reception points, and seats to form the pockets of activity under the lower ceilings at the edges—
FAMILY OF ENTANCES (l02), ACTIVITY POCKETS (124), RECEPTION WELCOMES YOU ( I 49), WINDOW PLACE (l8o), CEILING
height variety (190), and give these places strong natural light—tapestry of light and dark (I 35). Make a connection to adjacent rooms with interior windows (194) and solid doors with glass (237). To give the building thoroughfare the proper sense of liveliness, calculate its overall size according to pedestrian DENSITY (123). . . .
| 102 FAMILY OF ENTRANCES* |
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499
. . . this pattern is an embellishment of circulation realms (98). circulation realms portrayed a series of realms, in a large building or a building complex, with a major entrance or gateway into each realm and a collection of minor doorways, gates, and openings off each realm. This pattern applies to the relationship between these “minor” entrances.
When a person arrives in a complex of offices or services or workshops, or in a group of related houses, there is a good chance he will experience confusion unless the whole collection is laid out before him, so that he can see the entrance of the place where he is going.
In our work at the Center we have encountered and defined several versions of this pattern. To make the general problem clear, we shall go through these cases and then draw out the general rule.
I. In our multi-service center project we called this pattern Overview of Services. We found that people could find their way around and see exactly what the building had to offer, if the various services were laid out in a horseshoe, directly visible from the threshold of the building. See A Pattern Language Which Generates Multi-Service Centers, pp. 123—26.
Overview of services.
2. Another version of the pattern, called Reception Nodes, was used for mental health clinics. In these cases we specified one
102 FAMILY OF ENTRANCES
dearly defined main entrance, with main reception clearly visible inside this main entrance and each “next” point of reception then visible from the previous one, so that a patient who might be frightened or confused could find his way about by asking receptionists—and could always be directed to the next, visible receptionist down the line.
Reception nodes.
3. In our project for re-building the Berkeley City Hall complex, we used another version of the pattern. Within the indoor streets, the entrance to each service was made in a similar way—each one bulged out slightly into the street, so that people could easily find their way around among the resulting family of entrances.
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| Family of entrances. |
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4. We have also applied the pattern to houses which are laid out to form a cluster. In one example the pattern drew different house entrances together to make a mutually visible collection of them, and again gave each of them a similar shape.
In all these cases, the same central problem exists. A person who is looking for one of several entrances, and doesn’t know his way around, needs to have some simple way of identifying the one entrance he wants. It can be identified as “the blue one,” “the one with the mimosa bush outside,” “the one with a big 18 on it,” or “the last one on the right, after you get round the
corner/’ but in every case the identification of “the one . . can only make sense if the entire collection of possible entrances can first be r en and understood as a collection. Then it is possible to pick one particular entrance out, without conscious effort.