The Role of Public Visual Art in Urban Space Recognition

Abstract

IntroductionPeople in a modern city are like rats in a maze 1 .They need a tool of space recognition to get acquainted with the environment they have been forced to live in.Historically towns owed their uniqueness to deep roots in local tradition.The central market square constituted the heart of the town.A magic circle of the ramparts and the moat determined a safe and familiar existence space, which the inhabitants could easily recognize and flawlessly identify with.It was the legible street network, connected by the nodes of squares, marking out formally important places, that facilitated the 'wayfinding' (Lynch, 1960) in urban maze.Compact, hierarchical sky-line of the town, dominated by domes of churches and a town-hall tower, constituted a characteristic visual code of urban space 2 .Since the time of Industrial Revolution, cities used to give their inhabitants a sense of security and an opportunity of spatial orientation thanks to their small size and ordered grid layout within a limited area.Along with spatial expansion of 19 th -and 20 th -century cities, consequent development of their suburbs and mixture of forms, functions and architectural styles, a chaos crept into cities, defined by S. Chermayeff and Ch.Alexander as "modern space salad".Modernism, introducing globally unified architectural patterns and inhuman scale urban structures, rejecting traditional harmony and hierarchy, contributed to the sense of disaffection and alienation in a big city.Simultaneously though, the same modern trends started off the revolution in visual arts.Artists' abandoning lounges for the sake of the streets, freedom of artistic voice and expression of form, inspired a number of research on the processes of artwork perception as well as its social and even political role in the public space (Kwon, 2002).The paper deals with the theories on urban space recognition and the role of public art in raising the 'imageability' of urban enclosures as well as their cultural quality and social attractiveness.The author presents the methodology of visual art location in urban public places on example of Poznan city. 1 The E.C. Tolman's experiments on the behavior of rats in mazes, performed in the 1940s, proved that both man and animals create a tentative, mental map to recognize and learn environmental relationships. 2 The best known historical spatial form records are the waterside panoramas of numerous cities found in the landscape paintings of the 18 th century (e.g. the landscape of Venice, Verona, London and Warsaw painted by Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto).

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