This article from the New Yorker is quite interesting in its parallels between Greenwich Village and an office environment. It reads…

“The west village was blessed with a mixture of houses… and shops and industry which meant there were always people ‘outdoors on different schedules’… It had lots of old buildings… [that] have the low rents that permit individualized and creative users. And, most of all, it had people, cheek by jowl, from every conceivable walk of life… without [this] active sidewalk life, without frequent, serendipitous interactions of many different people, “there is no public acquaintanceship, no foundation of public trust, no cross-connections with the necessary people…

Forty years ago, people lived in neighborhoods like the West Vilage and went to work in the equivalent of suburbs. Now, in one of the odd reversals that marks the current economy, they live in suburbs and, increasingly, go to work in the equivalent of the West Village.”

kessels kramer

We can see this social design present in the likes of Googleplex and kessels & kramer’s converted church. It’s this approach of turning the inside out, from working to live-work environments, that has always struck me as visually interesting, but, in a way, fake. Like in a Michel Ghondry movie, do people really want to mix the realities of home and work? Is this simulation of an environment solving a problem, or creating an air bubble around it? The Googlers are famed for having no life outside of the Googleplex as everything they need to live, is provided for them.

“When employees sit chained to their desks, quietly and industriously going about their business an office is not functioning as it should. That’s because innovation - the heart of the knowledge economy - is fundamentally social. Ideas arise as much out of casual conversations as they do out of formal meetings.”

So Google provides a social ecology, where their employees actually live in their work environment. And it seems to be successful. Google has produced alot of innovative projects. Yet this all seems a bit eiry to me; cutting people off from the real world. And we return to the air bubble idea.

But why is it so difficult for people to interact with each other? The model of Greenwich Village seems, to me, to have been successful because it was a melting pot of people getting by, living ‘cheek by jowl’. The village’s short blocks provided a community in a looming city and a shelter from hierarchical structures in the working world. Because people didn’t have everything they needed, they looked to each other. There was no advantage in being solitary. Unfortunately this model is becoming more and more an anomally in today’s society.

At the end of the Newyorker article, we are left on this note:

“The reason Americans are content to bowl alone.. is that, increasingly, they receive all the social support they need - all the serendipitous interactions that serve to make them happy and productive - from nine to five.”

And so too, in the uk, are we becoming too content to interact; to reach outside our comfort zone? If so, this is detrimental to the society developing it’s innovative core.

Now, I could now bring up social networking.. but that’s a whole other post…