Читать книгу Living in Information - Jorge Arango - Страница 9

One Montgomery Street in San Francisco is home to a branch of the Wells Fargo bank. It’s also a time portal. When you step through its semi-circular portico, you’re transported back to 1908, the year the building opened. Designed by renowned San Francisco architect Willis Polk to be a bank, One Montgomery looks the part. Its exterior is staid sandstone punctured by a series of tall arched windows, tied together by an ornate frieze. The interior is all business—from a time when business was a less hurried, more elegant affair. While it still serves as a functional bank branch, One Montgomery is not what 21st century bank patrons expect. It’s a cathedral for business, with high, ornate ceilings, soaring marble columns, low lighting, and a hushed tone. Mary Poppins’s George Banks would feel right at home.

One Montgomery Street in San Francisco.

PHOTO BY BEYOND MY KEN VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, HTTPS://COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG/WIKI/FILE:2017_1_MONTGOMERY_STREET.JPG

I toured One Montgomery in the spring of 2017 with an architectural historian who pointed out the details that made a bank in the first few decades of the 20th century. A raised central station, to allow branch managers to oversee staff. Marble cladding. Carved stone tables for customers to fill out their deposit slips, featuring built-in inkwells.

The inkwells have long been dry, since most people don’t write with fountain pens anymore. And more often than not, they don’t “bank” in buildings such as One Montgomery. Today, most of our financial dealings—and many other activities—happen in a different type of environment, one in which we enter and leave on a whim through screens we carry around in our pockets or unfold on tables in coffee shops.

Whether they be websites on your notebook computer, apps on your phone, or “conversations” with the “smart” cylinder on your mantelpiece, these environments are where you catch up with your friends, work, study, find a romantic partner, bank, shop, and undertake a whole host of other activities that our forebears did in physical space. Because they are composed primarily of information—words and images on screens—we refer to them as information environments.

We know how to design and use physical banks such as One Montgomery. We’ve been using places for this and other purposes for thousands of years. The forms of buildings have evolved over that time to suit our needs. However, information environments are still new. Patterns for their effective use are only now starting to evolve. As with every new medium, we bring to information environments biases and expectations that are not inherent to them, but echoes of the past. Let’s start by looking at how we use places: parts of our physical environment that we’ve set apart for particular uses.