Hospitality Design - December 2012 - 66

perspectives

trends

making cities well
JK: Tokyo, for instance, is o

PB: Yes, how do you create an environment, which does not oblige you to do this at seven in the morning, but not solicit you either? How can the master plan, the architecture, the type of retail, how can it take you there? PR: You probably need to accept the fact if you are going to start this, you
are going to get an experimental kind of person, and then there needs to be an a itude of experimentation within the community so that you will try things. You will try tai chi. If nobody wants to do tai chi, cancel tai chi. It seems to me that there is probably a group of people who would be interested in something like that and the challenge would be how do you nd them, and then engage them, and actually make them part of creating what this place will ultimately be.

JK: I think that is a very important point, Peter,

that there is a mission here, and that there is a certain group of potential residents who will buy into the mission and the notion that this should be a prototype. It should be a lab, it should be a place that engages a lot of di erent domain experts and representatives of di erent interest groups, but the residents themselves are going to be proud to be part of that experimentation process, to be part of the vanguard.

spa

en referred to as the amoeba city, because it has been constantly evolving for centuries, and this notion of temporariness in architecture is baked into the Japanese aesthetic. There is a shrine, I don’t know how many of you have heard of it, it is an amazing phenomenon where every ten years they take the entire shrine down. It has no nails, so it is all wood puzzle construction, and they move it somewhere else and then rebuild it, and it is a reminder that nothing lasts forever, but it is almost a celebration of impermanence. I also agree with Peter that cities thrive because of a sense of place, and simply giving people a set of tinker toys and saying that it can be whatever you want when you decide to change your mind isn’t the answer either. All great art operates with constraints, and so the fact that cities like New York, Paris, London, and Tokyo have streets and established architecture and buildings that have been there for one-hundred years and may or may not be falling down, but provide a sense of orientation, I think is crucially important.

PB: Maybe we will ask the audience if there is any question you would like to ask. Audience Member: The spa industry struggled with identity from
di erent types of spas to lack of true integration with medical, wellness, and tness industries. While I certainly feel that a healthy town can be done under that model with that integration, spas—traditionally Western spas—with this healthy concept of town, are mostly made up of baby boomers or wealthy generation X-ers. How do you see children incorporated into this model, versus the reality of the nancials of who you are marketing to? rst thing I would do would be get rid of the word ‘spa.’ I had this conversation with some people who were more worldly and smarter than I, and they reminded me that my reaction was an American reaction. That may well be true, but the word spa, at least here in the U.S., has a connotation to it which is just deadly, compared to the openness and the broader thinking that I have heard in these rooms for the last two days. So I think there is some fundamental rede nition that needs to happen, and it is as simple as branding. nition, in

PR: And how you create that atmosphere and make it welcoming and

not threatening. And the other thing is, by the way, people are investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in this. If it is a town you are moving in and buying a house or renting an apartment, so it is not something you do on a whim.

rm called Water Studio, and his theory is that cities in the past were built to last, and that today cities should be like a smart phone, where you can change everything rapidly, and that there is no reason for a city to be the same twenty, twenty- ve years from now. Obviously, it is very di cult to build big buildings and tear them down every twenty years, right? So he found an idea. It is called a water city. He has built a city next to Amsterdam on a set of arti cial islands; long buildings with at roofs are spread over the lake. It conveys a sure sense of harmony that may well be a mark of forward thinking, and those homes, he can change them as he wants. Can it be the beginning of a healthy city?

PB: There is an architect in Holland, and he has created an architectural

PR: If I were the king of your world, the

PR: No. One way to guarantee mundane, boring, and trivial, is to try and

Another audience member: What is the deadly de
your opinion?

build something with the idea that it can then be anything you possibly want it to be. So you are going to have a series of long, stretched out buildings that will have no sense of place and no sense of being. I think you can do architecture and you can make it user friendly and still keep in mind the fact that that storefront may [have] a di erent use twenty years from now because the tai chi is gone and there is now a bakery in there.

PR: That it is for rich, white women. You asked me.
To read t he compl ete t ranscript , l og on to gl obal spaandwe l l nesssu mmit . org.

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December 2012 hospitalitydesign.com

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