make constant noises that destroy her concentration. The quality of her work in such an environment will be different from what she would produce in a place that allowed her greater control over her attention.
While their primary purposes may be to give us safe locations to work, eat, learn, worship, and more, many places also meet another important need as well: they allow us to come together as a community. In his book The Great Good Place, sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place” to refer to places such as cafés, bookstores, hair salons, and bars that are not our home (the “first” place) or work (“second” place), and which allow us to socialize with our neighbors and fellow citizens. For example, in many small towns in the U.S., the local post office is the place where people catch up with their neighbors and get a sense of what they think and feel about the state of the world. They may come for the mail, but they also get an understanding of where their community stands on various issues of the day.2
Some places also tell stories about who we are—and who we were—as a people. Consider the Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral, or Centro GAM, in Santiago, Chile. This is a modern building complex that has had various uses during its existence, all of which speak to Chileans in particular ways. It was built in 1972 to serve as a convention center shortly after the election of then-new president Salvador Allende. Beyond this utilitarian purpose, it was also meant to function as propaganda for the new government—it was built in under a year by volunteers after an extraordinary effort. When Allende was overthrown, the Centro GAM became the seat of the military government led by Augusto Pinochet. Parts of it were used later to house the headquarters of Chile’s defense forces. In 2006, a considerable part of the complex was destroyed in a fire; however, when I last visited Santiago in 2016, a major restoration of the complex was almost finished. As a physical structure, the Centro GAM is a container for particular activities, but for Chileans, it’s also a container of the country’s modern history.
The Centro GAM was still being refurbished when I visited Santiago in the fall of 2016.
So places serve on two levels: they perform physical functions and symbolic ones. Both are essential to healthy societies. Physically, they shelter us and provide us with contexts in which we can effectively perform our activities, including the secondary, but no less important, activity of socializing. Symbolically, they embody and catalyze our cultural identities at the local, national, or global level; in other words, they ground us.
On both levels, places convey information. At the physical level, a building’s form conveys to your senses the possibilities for action that it makes available to you. A wall keeps meetings private. An opening on the wall allows you to cross through to the other side. A sidewalk encourages you to walk in a particular direction. A bolted door makes it impossible for you to enter (and lets you know that’s the case). A glass storefront gives you a preview of the goods sold inside. Your senses take in these physical features of the place automatically; they let you know what you can and can’t do there.
At the symbolic level, places convey information by using location, scale, symmetry, rhythm, material selection, and more, to establish their relationship to other elements in the environment. If you’ve ever visited the National Mall in Washington, D.C., you’ve experienced the power of an architecture designed to convey symbolic information about the place.
In the National Mall, the location of buildings with relation to open spaces, their relative sizes, the materials used in their construction, their architectural language, and so on have been carefully chosen to have a specific effect on you. These buildings’ forms provide much more than mere spaces for people to debate and enact the laws of the United States. The particular effect they have on you will depend on many factors, starting with whether or not you are a U.S. citizen.3
The National Mall in Washington, D.C.
PHOTO BY JOHNNY BIVERA, PUBLIC DOMAIN, HTTPS://COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG/W/INDEX.PHP?CURID=32519919
To summarize, physical environments both convey information and create the contexts necessary for people to exchange information with each other. In a very real sense, buildings and cities are the original social networks. They’re also cultural manifestos in stone and terra cotta; they keep relating stories long after the people who created them left the scene. Given how central placemaking has been to our species, and the degree to which places work for us regardless of our level of education, it is no exaggeration to claim that architecture was our earliest, most enduring, and perhaps most important information technology.
Chartres Cathedral conveys information about man’s relationship to the divine through the configuration of space in and around the building, and through more literal carvings on its surfaces.
PHOTO © GUILLAUME PIOLLE, CC BY 3.0, HTTPS://COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG/W/INDEX.PHP?CURID=10219594
Information
We need to take a step back here. I’ve said that physical environments convey information and serve as contexts where people convey information to each other, and that places are an information technology. I’ve also talked about “information environments,” and suggested they are different from physical environments. Before we go any further, we need to look more closely at this word “information” to make sure we’re on the same page.
You normally think of information as something you find in books, newspapers, and websites; the stuff in the world that adds to your knowledge. You talk about living in the “Information Age” and being “information workers”; your phones and computers are “information technologies.” But information is not only something you learn through books and websites, but it’s also part of your surroundings. In fact, you couldn’t make sense of the world without it. There’s information all around you at this very moment. So what is it?
You can think of information as anything that helps reduce uncertainty so that you can make better predictions about outcomes. That’s somewhat abstract, so let’s look at a pedestrian example. Every morning I walk my dog, Bumpkin, around our neighborhood. Most of the houses where we live have front yards. The owners of some of those houses have placed signs on their yards that look something like this:
Information happens.
IMAGE BY DAVID SWAYZE, VIA FLICKR, HTTPS://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/SWAYZE/3195122793
Whenever I encounter a yard with one of these signs on it, I know I shouldn’t allow Bumpkin to poop there. It’s not that he can’t poop there; physically nothing bars him from going on the yard. Rather, the sign helps me predict a likely outcome of my decision to let him do it; namely, having to deal with an irate homeowner.4 The sign provides information about that particular yard; it sets a value for an attribute of the yard that sets it apart from the others around it. (You could express it in pseudocode: PoopHere = FALSE.)
Note that this doesn’t mean
