We took this photo on our 2004 visit to the amazing land of China.
It was taken from the balcony of the Tiananmen Gate, just in front of the Forbidden City. In the distance you can see the Mausoleum of Mao Tse Tung, and in front of it, the Monument to the People's Heroes.
A trip to China is hard to imagine without a visit to Tiananmen Square. It's 100 acres (40.5 ha) of serious open space - making it the largest open-urban square in the world.
And there's not a tree or a park bench on any of it.
With nowhere to settle, and nothing to break up the scenery (except thousands of people, some of them trying to extract a couple of yuan from you for a map or a guidebook), you really do feel like an ant with a universe laid bare before him.
It's amazing what feelings a space like this arouses in people. On one's own; you feel tiny. As a foreigner, perhaps over-awed and lost.
But what if you were standing in the square in 1949, as Mao stood before a crowd of 1 million Chinese and announced, "The central government of the People's republic of China is established. The Chinese people have stood up."?
Or what if you were one of the demonstrators here in April 1989?
The images of some of the more noteworthy happenings in this square do not merely record human interactions; they record the engagement of people with diverse interests with the largest bare urban square in the world.
I wonder what the square's original architects set out to achieve with a space like this, unparalleled by any other on earth?
2 comments:
The difference between original design intentions and what we end up perceiving and using can be quite different. On the basic level, do we look around and see a world made by a creator, or just a random wild place?
Cathedrals - designed to put us in awe of God? Or do they just show us that the church has a lot of money and power?
It's not just architecturally as well. The late 19th century composer, Anton Bruckner, being a devout Roman Catholic, composed his symphonies in a vast style. Nobody had ever heard anything like it - and many people said it was simplistic and not very clever. But to him, it was not the complexity that mattered, but the majesty of the music, that represented God to him.
However, just to show the difference between design intention and later use - half a century or so after Bruckner composed these pieces, they were Nazi favourites. The majestic sound of God had turned into the triumphalist sound of the German Reich.
Great observation.
Physical contexts are certainly wide open to reinterpretation, as each person's perspective, beliefs, and experience differs.
It's amazing how much of ourselves we bring to a space, and how that affects our reading of it.
Your observation of how we experience our 'macro' context (i.e. the entire created world) is a good one.
Design, it seems, is in the mind of each 'space-maker', but how we read a space as 'end-users' makes all the difference.
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