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A recent trip to Chicago on the first weekend of summer reinforced the importance of great public art. After a particularly harsh winter, the welcoming parks, squares, and plazas of the city were burgeoning with people soaking in the sunshine.
Coming home to talk with my husband, who happens to be an art museum director, we had some interesting conversations about the differences between civic art and public art. For my husband, there really is no difference, however in my industry, there is.
I’m a freak magnet.
For reasons unknown, the more, err, colorful characters of the public realm seem to find my personal space especially attractive.
If I go to a midday matinée and another patron — let’s say an agitated mumbler in a trench coat with shoes crudely fashioned out of car wash sponges — joins me in an otherwise empty theater, that person will sit in the seat directly behind mine. Which he’ll then begin kicking.
I live in an old house that overlooks a single-track CSX rail line. Between my front gate and the train is a two-lane, neighborhood-edge thoroughfare with a speed limit of 35 mph and an average speed closer to 40.
Though it functions as an in-town, city street, it’s classified as a state highway by the Georgia DOT, which means that, while modest in scale, it’s not exactly context-sensitive in its behavior. It’s been repaved many times without being milled, so the historic curbs once in evidence are now long covered up with asphalt, and the 4 and a half-foot sidewalk that runs along it is separated by a planting strip of 24 inches or less (depending on the block) which, ironically, can’t legally be planted with anything other than grass.
Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns might classify it as a baby–stroad.
