So far my project has proven far more challenging than expected. When I planned my project I thought I had a concrete and logical goal in mind: making a book breaking down public spaces. Yet, one of the first things I learned through my project was that my original idea would never work. 

My original hypothesis was founded upon the idea that public spaces could be simplified and systematized — that I could describe parks and streets through their elements and arrangement alone. I imagined that there was a perfect state for all types of public spaces, and expected to see every space I studied as an inferior version of these wonderful places. But this view of public space was quickly shattered. 

One of my first walks went through the Gowanus neighborhood, a space largely devoid of human activity and vibrance. In large part I saw what I expected to see: development stagnated by backward zoning, shops and streets dulled by low density, activity blighted by the unpleasant and movement-stifling Gowanus canal. But I also saw moments of unique humanity and vibrancy. There were thriving metal-working studios, unique homes, and communities, parks coursing with teenage life and revelry. These uses all relied on a quiet corner of the city to thrive, an area where businesses and homes don’t control and stifle all that goes on around them. These couldn’t be explained by perfect designs, but they could still be appreciated as unique and important — elements just as human as the designs I had hoped to study. 

  

This leads me to my first important conclusion: my project’s goal should be to study how spaces accommodate humanity, whether that means looking at the design of a park or the context of a block in Gowanus.

The second conclusion that I came to while making my project was that I wanted to focus my process far more on art. In the first days of my project, I was bored out of my mind, trying to break down streets through numbers and plans, but when I began to sketch the spaces I was exploring everything felt so much more joyous and clear. 

With my art giving me the direction I leaned in, taking pictures of interesting public spaces and drawing them at home. But this began to backfire as time went on. As I focused more and more on drawing I began to stop analyzing the spaces I was supposed to be studying, instead simply spending my time rendering my drawings. But, with the guidance of those at Koko architects and James French, I pivoted to focusing on more pensive and growth-inducing drawing methods. I began to focus more on illustrating the effects that I was seeing, modifying what I was looking at to display what exactly I wanted my audience to see and understand. I also committed to doing as many drawings from life as I could. I decided to do this because it allowed me to incorporate more of a sense of the space into my drawings, making them interpretations of what I was seeing and thinking rather than representations of an image. 

   

With these two conclusions I know that I won’t be aiming to make the book I was originally aiming to create, so I decided to take a new direction. 

When I first decided to nix my original plan I was moving towards a project entirely contained in my sketchbook, where I would explore public spaces through a mix of sketches and illustrations. I thought this would allow me to have a more free-form method to explore my thoughts and ideas, leading to more learning and growth. But as I began to do this for a longer period I felt listless and lost. I didn’t feel like I was moving forward or accomplishing anything, just spinning in place.

But, while I was in the midst of this lost period, James said that I would likely need larger work for those looking to learn from my project to see. This stayed with me as I continued to struggle, and it slowly dawned on me that these large pieces could be my goal, the anchor for my project. I hope for them to each be a mix of description and art. This would mean a few of them are panels that break down a specific area I was studying, that some are panels with similar illustrations grouped together to describe a conclusion, and that most are singular pieces of art that display something interesting I found. While these will all be trying to describe specific spaces and effects, the central goal of each of them will be to explore the humanity and vibrancy of the city.