Having traveled almost non-stop during the last two months, Ive spent a lot of time in waiting rooms of various kinds, but mostly airport and train station. So it was during unhappily long waits in waiting rooms at the train station in Rennes and the airport in Nice that I found myself thinking about how sad, uncomfortable and deeply alienating these spaces have become. To wit, no one gives them any thought whatsoever. To be sure, you can retreat from these unpleasant places with a frequent flyer or traveler card, but in NIce I wasnt flying with the airline with which I have such a card and in Rennes, the SNCF salon Grand Voyageur was closed on Saturday (gee, that makes a lot of sense in a country with 10% unemployment during the height of the vacation travel season). So I was stuck out on the pavement like everyone else, and had time to notice the obvious, which is that any accommodation of waiting passengers is made sort of grudgingly by supplying an inadequate number of seats here and there and rather little else. Rarely is there a clean working water fountain to be found in such spaces, all the more to make you use vending machines or cafes, and the lighting is uniformly horrible. Waiting spaces are, I think, knowingly designed to force you to shop or spend in restaurants or cafes, and they intrisincally assume solitude, or that you wont be speaking to strangers, since the seating is arranged in such a way as to avoid all eye contact. This is in such stark contrast to the handsome old waiting room that once existed off of the 42nd Street entrance to Grand Central Station in New York City where beautiful oak benches faced each other in rows, there was a newsstand that was opened until the last train left and several water fountains, including a low one for children. So Id like to invite all and any architects who might be working on a public transit hub in the near future to have a good think on the waiting room as a democratic expression of public convenience and civility.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 15:46:31 +0000
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