on columns and divided space

The temps are now in the 90s  in Tuscaloosa. Daily walks are best taken on the indoor track at the Rec Center. But two weeks ago, before it got too hot, my husband and I took a stroll around campus. It was then I got this photograph of Frat Row. The columns are always striking to me.

I never noticed columns on buildings the way I do now before I moved to Alabama. They are everywhere. During trips to the beach, I see them on everything from community college campuses to Publix. Last week, while at the beach, I even saw them in Big Fish, a  restaurant in a strip shopping center (I had outstanding Scottish salmon prepared "Big-Fish" style;my husband had yummy crabcakes).

Big Fish, an Orange Beach, Alabama, restaurant. 

I am reminded of what Gunther Barth has to say about how architecture fits into the efforts of human beings to create visual harmony. And whether on Gothic, Neo-Gothic or Greek Revival-styled buildings on college campus buildings or elsewhere,  pillars seem to represent something huge literally and figuratively. Regarding the latter, they represent how people look to the past as inspiration for their aspirations. This was definitely true during emerging urban life in antebellum America.

But I really like this idea of visual harmony, which is what planners of modern cities tried to create by dividing space via, among other things, the gridiron street system. In such a system, streets form a grid by running at right angles. Harmony was also created in how people organized, as Barth has written, "distinct areas of work, residence, and leisure." Early businesses found many proprietors living upstairs, but that increasingly changed (although with gentrification, some of those old ways are coming back. I have a friend whose family owned a restaurant in a happening part of a big city and his sister lived upstairs above it).

The idea of space in emerging urban life is one of the topics I will address this fall with students enrolled in this course. In the meantime, I will keep thinking it all over as I keep getting to know the campus and, indeed, Tuscaloosa. I have been here for more than two years, but am still learning my way around. The numbered grid streets are helpful.