URBAN DESIGN AND INTUITION

Looking into the rear view mirror this year I must admit to continuing to be an intuitive designer. That was so in my past, and that remains so now in my present. My hope is that there is no end to continuing these adventures in design.

I never had a plan to begin an urban design. I followed no system other than the thinnest of programs. I like working intuitively. My aim every time was doing a good design. To create something that would be easy and interesting to share is important.

At every stage I could only work within my knowledge and sensibility and talent and world-view. Those things have developed design by design. And I had to do the design because there were no formulas about the subjects of the program to give me what I wanted. I had to clear up my world, elucidate it, for myself and create new environments each time.

My years at the university, and my years with different A.E.P. firms still seem to indicate that my experience was very thin, was not truly of the stuff of designs

There were other things that meant much more to the filing of images and experiences in ones mind. With all my travels it is the other senses of sight, sound and aroma of observed spaces formed within and between buildings that also matter. It is also the means by which one travels whether on foot, by car, by rail, by bus, and by aircraft that matters through these spaces in time. The excitement of arrival and sadness of departure are the emotions brought about by these movements. The feelings derived from spatially defined enclosures are important. It is only between brief silences that awareness of sharing spaces with anonymous humans, that one begins to measure with sensitivity the differences between these vastly different experiences from that of sharing intimate family moments.

I have always designed by intuition alone. I have no distinctive special layered, planar, and sectional, volumer or three dimensional design systems. In fact I have even tried Leonardo’s design in reverse by looking into a mirror and drawing. I have no guiding aesthetic philosophy other than to attempt to feebly emulate the extraordinary designs found in Nature. I think that probably lies with my ancestry as I feel we are more inclined to see the humor and pity in the designs of man.

There were a few instances of true debates about things of quality in urban design during this past year. But the greatest miracle for me was getting started each time. I feel – and the anxiety is still vivid to me - that I might easily have failed before I begin the process of design.

Proust in Against Sainte-Beuve. Wrote "The beautiful things we shall write (design) if we have talent," Proust says, "are inside us, indistinct, like the memory of a melody which delights us though we are unable to recapture its outline. Those who are obsessed by this blurred memory of truths they have never known are the men who are gifted. Talent is like a sort of memory which will enable them finally to bring this indistinct music closer to them, to hear it clearly, to note it down..."

Talent, I would say is good luck, and much about spending a lot of time in the labor of love that is -- simply drawing. I shall hope to have a greater urgency in me to draw more this next year for the sake of my urban design evolution.

Maybe this coming year will show some of the “stuff” of good urban design.

BY Graham Kaye-Eddie – Master Urban Designer.

Makabusi Inc. – Bakersfield – California

Email – makabusi@pacbell.net

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One hopes that Bakersfield's Urban Renewal Architectural Committee has some written aesthetic standards that keeps some of it's worthwhile architectural heritage as well as measures for what constitutes an excellent future piece of architecture. The Downtown Architectural Committee must have some set of standards which are practical to apply so as to have the capability of assessing good architecture as a level above ordinary utilitarian buildings.

It is important that future architecture presented for downtown Bakersfield becomes critical not only to our aesthetic sensibilities but also to our public and communal lives.