On Storefronts

I've been looking for a place for this press to occupy for what seems like forever. In actuality, its been about two and a half months of city-wide scouting missions on my bike and Craigslist scouring. Why it's taking so long is the fact that I'm looking for a bit of a needle-in-the-haystack type place. Specifically, a storefront, less than 500 square feet, in a primarily residential neighborhood.

This, I'm finding out, isn't normal. Most design studios and publishers, small or large, occupy office space, of which there is seemingly endless square feet to be had in this and many cities. Most printers, meanwhile, build their shops in the more industrial edges of cities. Both offices and industrial zones are, by their definition, out of the realm of general public life. You have to know where to go, maybe make a special trip, to get there. Christopher Alexander of the Center for Environmental Structure has a lot of good things to say about a lot of things, so I'll quote him,

"In modern times almost all cities create zones for "work" and other zones for "living" and in most cases enforce the separation by law. Two reasons are given for the separation. First, the work places need to be near each other, for commercial reasons. Second, workplaces destroy the quiet and safety of residential neighborhoods. But this separation creates enormous rifts in people's emotional lives… [It] reinforces the idea that work is a toil, while only family life is "living"—a schizophrenic view which creates tremendous problems for all the members of a family. In order to overcome this schism and re-establish the connection between love and work, central to a sane society, there needs to be a redistribution of all workplaces throughout the areas where people live…"

I want my shop to be a part of the everyday life of wherever it ends up being. This weird little studio, producing goodness-knows-what, next to the drug store, the grocery, and the record shop. Again, Alexander:

"…We imagine a society in which work and family are far more intermingled than today; a society in which people—businessmen, artists, craftsmen, shopkeepers, professionals—work for themselves, alone and in small groups, with much more relation to their immediate surroundings than they have today. …In the case of the workshop, the public nature of the work is especially valuable. It brings the workshop out of the realm of backyard hobbies and into the public domain. The people working there have a view of the street; they are exposed to the people passing by. And the people passing learn something about the nature of the community. The children especially are enlivened by this contact. And according to the nature of the work, the public connection takes the form of a shopfront, a driveway for loading and unloading materials, a work bench in the open, a small meeting room…We therefore advocate provision for a substantial workshop with all the character of a real workplace and some degree of connection to the public street: at least a glancing connection so that people can see in and out; and perhaps a full connection, like an open shop front."

In this way, my shop and others like it add to their neighboorhood's sense what is possible. And that is something that seems to me to be sorely lacking in communities these days.