"...the notion of everyday life carries its own risks of commodification...everyday life usually becomes a justification for the status quo or for a nostalgic return to humanist assumptions..." (28)which I found particularly relevant to the topics I'm concerned with for my thesis: is it necessary to disassociate a visual aesthetic from an idea, that is to say, necessary so that the vernacular (the idea) is not nostalgic emulation (aesthetic)? How is it possible to disassociate the two when our field (architecture/design) is a visual one, when the user "reads" the building through visual imagery?
First, why is this question relevant to my thesis? By addressing GBJ as a potential Third Place, I am already in the realm of history: Oldenburg wrote his book in the 1980s, more than 20 years ago. Do Third Places still exist? Do we still need them as a contemporary community? Lisa Waxman's research is more recent, and suggests that the coffee shops Oldenburg references are still alive today, but perhaps not in the same way. Recent trends show that coffee shops are becoming the new workplace, as more companies allow workers to telecommute; in return for ordering a cuppa joe, you can sit with your laptop and work (ie: browse the internet without worrying about your boss looking over your shoulder). However, there are still the locals that come in after work, the students that swing by after school: this afternoon, I sat at Mill Mountain Coffee and Tea, across from a gentleman loosening his tie and reading the newspaper, watched a group of women grab a table and gossip, saw college students working on their laptops - the signs of the Third Place as Oldenburg envisions it. So there is that.
But I go back to the fact that Oldenburg wrote his book 20 years ago. Is the idea of the Third Place a nostalgic one? Is it the commodification of the everyday? By commodity, I'm assuming McLeod is using the word's negative characterstics: a "product" (not an art), something sellable/buyable (not priceless), a convenience (valued for quantity not quality). By this definition, the everyday becomes cheap (in both senses of the word). Is nostalgia for the Third Place such a bad thing? One can argue that the nostalgic is precisely what spurs on the Third Place, it is the comfort-zone, the we-know-each-other, the regulars, the peeling wallpaper and the warped wood floor, and here we are at the question: is it the visual or the idea that must prevail?
Oldenburg never requires a particular aesthetic for the Third Place (though he discusses several visual qualities that Third Places have had). His requirements are that a Third Place simply:
- be free/inexpensive
- have access to food/drink
- be proximate (walking distance)
- have regulars.
Take Starbucks, a "modern" chain, if you will. Its original shop is very much the bric-a-brac aesthetic prescribed to coffee shops. Post-branding, the stores are a "modernized" version of this aesthetic, juxtapositions of contemporary finishes and archaic leftovers (note the chair rail). Why can't a coffee shop be bright orange, or neon green? What part of Oldenburg's Third Place idea states that a coffee shop as Third Place must be dark, moody, homey?
Of course, there might be no need to separate the idea of the vernacular from the aesthetic prescribed to it. Perhaps it is intrinisic to the vernacular Third Place that there be well-worn materials? A vernacular architecture is a response to the environmental demands; if the user requires a comfortable place to lounge (the environmental demands of the coffee shop), the response is a couch: but must it always be a couch? The slouchy couch? I disagree. Just like architecture evolves over time, all the while responding to the same site's demands (see MoMA's evolution), the aesthetic of a coffee shop as Third Place must also evolve over time.
There is an everyday of today that is different from the everyday of the past; there must be a coffee shop of today that is unlike the coffee shop of the past, that reflects the everyday of today without resorting to a nostalgic aesthetic to resolve contemporary environmental demands.
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