What Time Is This Place?

289 Pages·1972·15.633 MB·English

by  Kevin Lynch

What Time
Is This Place?
Kevin Lynch
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England
Copyright © 1972 by
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This book was designed by Kevin Lynch and
produced by the MIT Press Media Department.
It was set in Linofilm Palatino
by Southern New England Typographic Service,
printed on Finch Filmtext
by The Colonial Press, Inc.
and bound in Interlaken AVI 428
by The Colonial Press, Inc.
in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lynch, Kevin.
What time is this place?
Bibliography: p.
1. Progress—Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Cycles—Ad­
dresses, essays, lectures. 3. Time perception—Addresses, es­
says, lectures. I. Title.
CB155.L95 301.24 72-7059
ISBN 0—262—12061—5
I have seen land made from the sea; and far away
from the ocean the sea-shells lay, and old anchors
were found there on the tops of mountains. That
which was a plain, a current of water has made into
a valley, and by a flood the mountain has been
levelled into a plain. The ground that was swampy
is parched with dry sand, and places which have
endured drought are wet with standing pools. The
heavens, and whatever there is beneath them, and
the earth, and whatever is upon it, change their
form.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XV
To:
Howard Webber
Michael Southworth
Mary Potter
Catherine Lynch
Anne Lynch
Karalyn Krasin
Gyorgy Kepes,
whose ideas helped me write this book
Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Introduction: Time and Place 1
1
Cities Transforming 3
2
The Presence of the Past 29
3
Alive Now 65
4
The Future Preserved 90
5
The Time Inside 117
6
Boston Time 135
7
Change Made Visible 163
8
Managing Transitions 190
9
Environmental Change and Social Change 215
10
Some Policies for Changing Things 224
Appendix: Asking Questions 243
Bibliography 248
Illustration Credits 258
Index 260
v
List of Illustrations
1
Ralph Allen's house in Bath 10
2
Rooftops of the Corridor, Bath 10
3
Stoke-on-Trent from the air 14
4
Broken crockery, Stoke-on-Trent 14
5
Waste heap, Stoke-on-Trent 15
6
Marl pit, Stoke 15
7
The site of Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela 21
8
Maps of Ciudad Guayana by its residents 22, 23
9
Metamorphosis of the Hotchkiss House,
New Haven, Connecticut 33
10
A garage occupies a church 34
11
The two sites of the temple at Ise, Japan 34
12
London Bridge in the Mohave Desert 45
13
Lake Havasu City, Arizona, from the air 45
14
The theater of Pompey on the old map of
Rome 46
15
Its mark on the Rome of today 46
vi
16
Traces of a henge as cropmarks 47
17
Obliterating old cropmarks 47
18
Kwakiutl totem in decay 47
19
Amateur archaeologists in California 48
20
Inca stonework in Cuzco, Peru 58
21
The first bogman 59
22
Shaker chairs 59
23
Time ball, Royal Observatory, Greenwich,
England 68
24
Memorial exhibition for Martin Luther King 85
25
Playing in a dynamite box 85
26
Kite festival 86
27
An unfinished second floor in Athens 96
28
Early phase of squatter settlement, Peru 96
29
An office building "to be continued" and
the breaching of a cornerstone 97
30
An old tree anchors a settlement 111
31
The race of time 129
vii
32-88
A walk down Washington Street in central
Boston 135-162
89
Balia's La Giornata dell' Operaio 164
90
Balia's sketches for Volo di Rondoni 165
91
Marey's four-dimensional model of a flying
gull 165
92
Avebury village and Silbury Hill 169
93
Fossil remains in a rural wall 172
94
The sunken temple of Vespasian, Rome 172
95
Contrasting views of the Piazza del Campo,
Siena 175
96
Farewell to the Florentine ghetto 179
97
Oldenburg designs monuments to the tidal
Thames 183
98
The vibrating figures of Hans Jenney 188
99
Waste heaps in a brickmaking pit 193
100
A marquee announces the final showing 197
101
Inhabitants revise a design by Le Corbusier 208
102
The demonstration town in the Summer
Palace at Peking 230
viii
What Time
Is This Place?