Tyler Jankauskas

Tyler Jankauskas

Newbury Street and the Prudential Center take different forms as commercial spaces due to the agency afforded in their constructions. The layout of the Prudential Center, being a designed center on a plot of land, could have taken really any form. As such it was designed with commercial interests in mind. There is a single level experience here, with escalators and elevators connected discrete floors. Stores fronts take up most every available visible space, and kiosks litter the walkways. There is an ambivalent sense of disorientation--the many turns of path the walker takes rarely have the experience of being a decided turn. The fungibility of the given franchises lends towards the experience of most any one location (and associated constellation of storefronts) being fungible with another. The consumer is always lost among the seemingly familiar, the layout ceding the best aspects of lostness (more time near stores, more likely to spend) without the worst (sense of alienation, not liking the space, wanting to leave and not wanting to come back).

Newbury Street only definitely became a shopping district in the last 50 years, though it of course had storefronts previously. Walking in the contemporary permutation of one of Boston’s oldest streets reveals the ad hoc nature of its storefronts. Irregular, jumbled on top and underneath of street level shops are stairs and doors utilizing every inch of real estate possible. One of Boston’s few areas without curves, the streets are gridded—not in the perfect Cartesian grid but arrange in straight parallels and perpendiculars. One maintains a sense of location to the landmark Public Garden and Charles (which are likewise perpendicular and parallel to Newbury). The irregularity of shops does not lull consumers like those in the Prudential Center. A sense of spatial awareness remains, but the ad hoc arrangement is more pleasing than the sterile one of the Pru. The consumer needs no architecturally designed anesthetic because he is not undergoing an architecturally designed lobotomy.