The attached square

Category: public open space. Subcategory: plazas and squares. Most urban open space, whether it is a plaza, square, or green, is detached from the surrounding blocks by a surrounding street. An attached open space is one that shares its urban block with one or more major buildings. According to William H. Whyte, from his empirical studies on urban behavior, the attached square (the type found at the midpoint of the urban-rural transect) is more likely to be used than one surrounded by traffic. Urban spaces are activated to a great extent by the life in the buildings at their edges, particularly if these buildings supply shopping, food, and drink. Whyte discovered that the most used attached squares were at the corner of a block, tapping into the diagonal pedestrian shortcut. Attached squares of regular layout are common settings for civic buildings. Pulling the civic building back from the street creates an honorific setting for it. Such squares add grace and significance to the civic building by creating an integrally designed surrounding, called an entourage. Irregular attached squares are most commonly residual to regular buildings placed on irregular blocks. Others result from the rationalizing of angled intersections or emerge when the traffic movement trajectory does not coincide with the spatial enclosure provided by the surrounding buildings. Two types of residual squares are formed by streets intersecting at non-orthogonal angles: those that slice through at acute angles and those that are resolved at right angles. The latter follow the recommendations of Raymond Unwin’s Town Planning in Practice from 1909. It is important that no public space remains undesigned. Even at the smallest scale, an attached public space is a good location for all sorts of things of community significance, be it a chess table or a memorial. References: Whyte, William H. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, 1980. Unwin, Raymond. Town Planning in Practice, 1909.