Irregular potential

Irregular rooms flummox regular rules.

Acute corners, wobbly walls and twisting topography impede progress for floors, doors and more. Much contemplation, swearing and sweating often signal defeat.?

And, sometimes, addressing irregularity generates improbable fixes to the wrong problems. And, sometimes also, much patronising explaining about others what can’t understand. And what can’t be done.

Regular problems can sometimes standardise problem solving. Creativity can reduce to the quickest path to the most efficient solution. And move on. Irregular problems challenge thinking. They provoke a searching of what isn’t in front of us to find what is also not beyond us. These problems need a healthy commitment to the art of the possible.

Irregular spaces, in irregular shaped places are a scrapbook of ideas.

They are an archaeology of futures. In the field, the process of archaeology is about managed expectation, pattern matching, and disciplined enthusiasm. Slowly, layers of earth are scraped away, to reveal new insights about old ideas. Making sense of the new discoveries means pacing around, across, over and through the space of the find. Multiple, patient vantage points open the possibility of patterns, and the potential of meaning. Stories, and images, and rich tapestries of lives lived emerge. New knowledge opens.

Urban spaces can creak, crawl, and crumble. Sometimes, the most that is visible is what is absent. It’s hard to see potential. Seeing beyond the immediate, connecting with and across the layers of place opens new potential. And, it invites deliberate thinking on the next move, to respond and progress the layers of potential in place.

Great urban spaces are moments of suspended thought, artfully arranged to show what’s possible, and yet invite more yearning, more discovery, more creation to support, and challenge human potential.

Coda:

Rafael Moneo's Murcia Town Hall is a modern intervention in an old town creating new possibilities for urban space and civic life.