The plaza

I. Past and Future Category: public open space. Subcategory: plazas and squares. Within a traditional urban fabric, public space has an identity; it exists as more than mere residue after the construction of buildings and roads. Public spaces associated with some communal activity are particularly important. The combination of internal use and external space affect the public life and activities through which a community defines itself. The plaza is an open area with a clearly recognizable public space. It is carved out of the built urban fabric as a distinct form. Plazas are not unlike urban squares, but while squares tend to be green, plazas are predominantly hard-surfaced. The paving allows for crowds and activities to spill over from civic or market buildings. Both historically and in current practice, town planners have controlled the texture of the surrounding urban fabric by designing the plaza prior to any buildup. A plaza should be designed in correlation with the form and use of the buildings to which it relates. An extreme example, shown here, is a building that defines three kinds of plazas. The main facade fronts a major civic plaza, which gains status from the building. A side facade defines a medium-sized plaza, while a third facade controls a minor plaza. The scheme sustains the kind of complexity that urbanism requires, and the design achieves this with a relatively small amount of building. This variety of spaces is useful for accommodating several market segments at once. Built examples of this kind of relationship between building and plaza include the courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware, and the inn at Princeton's Palmer Square. With the emergence of shopping “plazas” and the vague, setback “plazas” associated with modern high-rises, the term has nearly lost its meaning. We may begin to recover the term by conceptualizing parking lots — today's preponderant hard-surfaced, public spaces — as plazas that happen to have cars on them, rather than as areas exclusively for automobile storage. Among other things, it is important not to stripe spaces, since this automatically defines the surface as dedicated to cars. The size, details, and location of plazas related specifically to civic and market purposes will be discussed in two subsequent sections: II. The civic plaza and III. The market plaza.