A Place to Wait
. . . in any office, or workshop, or public service, or station, or clinic, where people have to wait—Interchange, Health Center, Small Services without Red Tape, Office Connections, it is essential to provide a special place for waiting, and doubly essential that this place not have the sordid, enclosed, time-slowed character of ordinary waiting rooms.
Problem:
The process of waiting has inherent conflicts in it.
Background & Research: Not Included on the site—Go read the book!
Solution:
In places where people end up waiting (for a bus, for an appointment, for a plane), create a situation which makes the waiting positive. Fuse the waiting with some other activity—newspaper, coffee, pool tables, horseshoes; something which draws people in who are not simply waiting. And also the opposite: make a place which can draw a person waiting into a reverie; quiet; a positive silence.
Usage:
The active part might have a window on the street—Street Windows, Window Place, a cafe Street Cafe, games, positive engagements with the people passing by—Opening to the Street. The quiet part might have a quiet garden seat—Garden Seat, a place for people to doze—Sleeping in Public, perhaps a pond with fish in it—Still Water. To the extent that this waiting space is a room, or a group of rooms, it gets its detailed shape from Light on Two Sides of Every Room and The Shape of Indoor Space . . .
pg. 707