The original note, as written at the time
Take a unified space that extends outward along its length and create sections of varying visual and spatial continuity toward the outside.
Ongoing development
Take a unified space that extends outward along its length, and then create sections of varying visual and spatial continuity toward the outside.
That is the whole idea and it is almost embarrassingly plain, but it is the thing we get wrong constantly. We design a shop as a box. We design a hall as a box. We design a room as a box with a window punched in it, and then we wonder why the inside and the outside feel like two different worlds with a thin wall of denial between them.
The enfilade — the long connected run of spaces, one opening into the next — is an old device and a good one, but it is usually used for ceremony, for the long walk towards the throne or the altar. I am after something quieter. Not a progression of grand thresholds but a gradient, where the degree of continuity changes as you move out, so that the boundary between inside and outside becomes an interval rather than a line.
Practically it means that the outer sections get more porous, more open, more visually connected to the street, and the inner ones get more enclosed and more private, and the change between them happens over several metres rather than at one door. You feel the building becoming more of a building as you go into it. You feel yourself being released as you leave.
The reason this matters in our climate, and in our streets, is that a hard threshold is hostile in both directions. The inside cannot use the street because the street is a wall of noise and glare. The street cannot use the inside because the inside is a sealed box. A gradient lets the two negotiate. It lets a shop extend a metre or two of itself outwards without becoming a stall, and it lets a passer-by be partly inside for a moment without committing to anything.
And this is one of the few ideas here that costs almost nothing. It is a matter of how the sections are arranged, not of how much structure you buy. You can do it badly with a large budget, and you can do it beautifully with a small one, which is exactly the kind of idea a city like ours should be collecting.