Design, condescension and movable furniture.

Last week, as it pertains to the design of New Albany's Bicentennial Park by stealth, NAC's Jeff Gillenwater asked Pete Andriot of Rundell Ernstberger Associates a simple, reasonable question:

"When did the public input process into this park's location, imagined functions, design, and construction occur?"

We continue to impatiently tap our feet awaiting Andriot's reply, if any, and Jeff will be posting again on this topic on Tuesday, but in the meantime, I'd like to return to a comment of Andriot's that grates more jarringly with each passing day.

"New Albany isn’t ready for movable tables and chairs yet."

My response:

In the absence of substantive input from New Albany's citizenry, exactly how do you know this?

Did Bob Caesar and Shelle England assure you that the simple, guileless folks in New Albany cannot ever grasp such concepts, or absent any apparent desire to query the general populace, did you even go so far as to ask the tiny non-representative membership of the bicentennial committee itself?

Or, rather, did you glance at the history of the park site and conclude that any city so ineptly willing to decimate a historic post office building and permit the devastated footprint to go perpetually to seed over a period of almost 50 years afterward does not deserve to be considered capable of grasping movable furniture?

At this point, I thought it wise to search "movable furniture," and the very first hit reveals a factoid with which Andriot and his firm might readily (and unfortunately) agree: New York City is the sort of place where they're actually ready for movable furniture (see below).

There, but not here ... okay, so why?

Are we that much dumber, and New Yorkers that much smarter, that we can't even be asked by the designer?

Ahh, but maybe it isn't because ordinary New Albanians don't get it.

Maybe it's because the cadre of top-downers, those same suspects, self-appointed to spoon feed us their conventional white bread wisdom without sharing what passes for reasoning, don't understand movable furniture themselves, and the designer has wisely chosen not to offend his somewhat paymasters (a frightened, hands-off city council ensures they operate sans accountability) by instead casually offending those of us in the general populace: after all, if the powers that be were not going to solicit public input for a $750K project, why the hell would the landscape architect care to do so, either?

I suppose that in this sense, the Bicentennial already has become wonderfully and delightfully New Albany, which is to say, the same tired, congenital, wearisome song and dance.

The Battery Conservancy Americas Design Competition 2012 Invites You to Draw Up Chair

The Battery Conservancy invites students and professionals from the Americas (Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean), to design an iconic moveable outdoor seating element. The winning design will be fabricated for use at The Battery, the 25-acre park at the tip of Manhattan which annually welcomes six million visitors.

Why a Moveable Chair?
As the great urban theorist William Holly Whyte discovered: “Chairs enlarge choice: to move into the sun, out of it, to make room for groups, move away from them. If you know you can move if you want to, you feel more comfortable staying put.” The Battery’s movable chairs will delight while they invite, animating the park and making it Downtown’s central meeting place.