[ Music ] >> This Is the Plaza of the Seagrem Building in New York, Late

[ Music ] >> This is the plaza of the Seagrem Building in New York, late morning. With a time-lapse camera we were testing a hypothesis. The sun, we were pretty sure, would be the chief factor in determining where people would sit or not sit. Now, just after 12 they begin to sit right where the sun is. I was enormously pleased. What a perfectly splendid correlation. It was quite misleading as we would see later but it was a very encouraging way to start. We were studying the Seagram's Plaza because it was one of the most popular. Many people didn't think that it would be but it was and we wanted to find out why. Our research group, The Street Life Project, had been observing other kinds of city spaces. One was a block of 101st Street in East Harlem. We didn't know it at the time but almost every factor that later we were to find was important for a city space we could have found out right here. The clues were right under our noses. [ Children Playing ] We had studied play areas such as this adventure playground and it was a very good one too, wonderfully messy, lots of dirt and mud and the water that kids love so much. Sometimes it was crowded and this was a problem that we were very interested in because we had started out with great concern over the problem of urban overcrowding but the more we studied this play area and other play areas the more we began to realize that the great problem of these spaces is not overuse but underuse. Even this playground, a very good one, on a day like now which is a beautiful day in July sometimes is almost completely empty except for the play director. When we looked at the centre of the city we found underuse was even more apparent. Most office building plazas were empty most of the time even at lunch on a beautiful day and it wasn't meant to be that way. The city had been giving bonuses, floor space bonuses to builders for providing plazas. If the builders did they could add more floors to their building, and so they did. They built the extra floors and got all that extra money and in return they gave these empty spaces. In other cities whether through the bonus provision or not builders seem to come up with the same kind of dreary, empty spaces. But some plazas had lots of people like the Seagram. Suppose we could find out what it was that made the good ones work and the others not. We put the matter to the planning commission. They said if we could nail down the answers and back them up with facts they would draw up a new zoning resolution for open spaces. So we went to work. We set up cameras for time-lapse coverage of a cross section of spaces, about 14 plazas and three small parks, but our main technique was simple, direct observation. We made up maps for each of the spaces and then we would go around periodically and map where the people sat and what they were doing, what the time of day was, the temperature and so on and it doesn't take much longer to do this than to make a simple headcount but as you build up the record a number of patterns begin to appear. The first thing that strikes you is the extraordinary diversity of activity, people reading, eating, talking, playing games. The sociability is really rather important and we found that the proportion of people in groups can tell you a number of things. The most used plazas tend to have a higher proportion of people in twos and threes than the less successful ones but the most sociable plazas also have in absolute numbers the greatest number of individuals. A busy place for some reason seems to be the most congenial kind of place if you want to be alone or talk as this man is to oneself. The number one activity is people looking at other people but it is a point that is overlooked in many, many designs. Here are the girl watchers. Now they are a bit disdainful sort of looking down their nose as though the girls weren't quite worthy of their talents but it's all machismo. We have never, ever seen a girl watcher make a pass at a girl. We've seen very few others do that for that matter. For some reason there isn't much mixing. Those two blondes might as well be several miles away for all the attention, ostensible attention, that's going to be paid to them. Note the two men circling in the background. This is a rather characteristic pattern. We call it the travelling conversation and you will see them move in sort of an orbit ever circling right out in front of the plaza. Lovers. If you want to see the lovers people told us look in the back. We did, they weren't in there. They're out front. Most of the lovers that we spotted at Seagram's were usually to be found in the middle of the pool ledge, one side or the other, the most conspicuous of spots. This fellow is going to look at his watch to see if he can spare a bit more time. Another fine place is the corner. There is usually an audience there and one gets the feeling that the actors don't mind this in the slightest. Let's look now at some of the physical features and how they affect use. Notice the narrow strip between the pool and the ledge. The architects purposely made it narrow. They didn't want people to be tempted to use the ledge and perhaps fall off. They didn't make it quite narrow enough. One can negotiate it, a little bit of trouble for older people which it tends to filter out, but younger people find it a definite challenge. The ledge has become one of the most popular of spots and attracts a rather rakish element. At peak times the front ledge is the most heavily used especially by younger people who tend to the front. These elegantly simple steps are a very important feature. They are low and they're easy. They're easy to go up and down. They're also easy to sit on and then the corner has a right angle that's fine for groups but there's a problem. The corners of the steps are precisely where the main flow of people to and from the buildings can be found yet this is where people like to stand and to sit and to block the traffic. There is usually a few feet here and there for passage and though sometimes it does get a little difficult and you have to pick your way very carefully but it's a friendly kind of congestion and later things do clear up a bit. Now we come to another junction, the street corner. It has a social life of its own and as we saw a little bit earlier with those two orbiting executives it connects with the life of the plaza. The corner is a great place for impromptu conferences especially so around about two o'clock when the lunch groups break up. When people stopped to talk they don't move off to one side, they move smack into the middle of a traffic stream. This corner in front of the Citicorp building has a very high frequency of such meetings and the number one spot for them is the geographic centre. Another favourite spot is the front of the steps leading to the subway and even at rush hour. A third is at the corner directly athwart the north/south pedestrian flow. Now these heavy flows of course are a reason why chance encounters are such a high probability here and why there's so many hellos and goodbyes and particularly protracted goodbyes. There's another kind of activity we call people just standing there alone. Life swirls about and they let it all pass by. They just stand there. Back to Seagram's. When we plotted the off-peak use we found that over the long haul this rear space is the most favoured. It's the best of both worlds. You can see the show up front, you're not cut off from it at all, but under those trees you feel protected. It's a little like being under the awning of a café. As we move from the rear we see another aspect of the place that's quite fascinating, the movement of people across it. Choreography is wonderful and choreography really is the right word, the way people move, circle, stop, speed up, the colours they wear. There's the beauty that they must often sense themselves. You see none of this in architectural photographs, they're usually quite empty of people, but visually this movement is the ultimate test of a design and there's a lot of skill here. We've tracked people on scores of crossing patterns with a digital timer and never do they collide, a tiny hand signal, a brief retard, a tenth of a second, the timing is absolutely superlative. Think of the computers, the radar, it would take to make their equivalent. Now what's not taking place? People don't often stop to talk in the middle of a large space.

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