The Hierarchy of Ground Floors
It has taken me a little while to get this post going. Being completely honest, I had the idea for a graph on this subject long before I had really laid out my thoughts on what I would write about it. Oddly enough, the graph didn’t work out how I wanted it to but the story did. I did do up a little infographic instead though, which you will see at the end and you can even download it if you want to. It took me a while to figure out I couldn’t do the graph how I wanted though, at least not as I could see it in my head. Once I figured out my limitations, I could start actually writing. So, to the article, what I am talking about is something that I have drawn on before, the ground floors of buildings. You may have read this article or this one previously.
Despite what many would think from the howling about building heights, it is the ground floor that is most important to whether a building is good or bad. By that I don’t mean whether it is good architecture or not, nor do I mean whether it is well built or not. You could have a cheap, off the rack building with a great ground floor because it really comes down to what it is being used for. I might even argue that many of the buildings that have been designed by Starchitects almost always have terrible ground floors and that might be on purpose because a good ground floor will make you forget the rest of the building, which when you are a starchitect might not be the point. When you are walking along LoJo or the Atrium building or even some of the buildings in the 700 block of Yates, if I asked you how many storeys the building above was without looking, I would bet that you wouldn’t know. I am fairly certain that I wouldn’t know without double checking either. We as humans want to interact and engage with each other (just one more thing that has made the last few months so difficult for all of us) and the more a building encourages that engagement the better. The way that planners talk about engagement in this way is Permeability. The more permeable or easily entered and engaged with, the better. Unfortunately, not all building ground floors were created equal so I have decided that I would lay out the hierarchy of quality ground floors and what makes them good or bad as I see it (or more or less permeable). We are going to start with the bad and move up from there and finish with the visual graphic that I think will cover this off in a shorter format.
The Bad
There are so many bad uses for the bases of buildings it is shocking. I could easily do multiple posts on terrible ground floors just here in Victoria without trying very hard at all, but I want to keep it simple. So I would say that the worst is the blank wall. The thing about the blank wall is that it is actually one of the easiest to move up the list into a higher category and that is just by putting some art on it, without that though, it is the bottom I think, if you can think of something worse let me know. (actually maybe parking garage…)
Not too much further up the list is the ground floor office, by this I don’t mean a bank or a real estate office. I mean a large firm or government office that is not for the public to enter into but is instead full of people sitting in cubes like they would in an office tower but at ground floor. Of course you won’t know what they are doing because the glass will be mirrored. I think that this might be so terrible just because the opportunity is there and it is being purposely squandered. An excellent example in Victoria is 800 Johnson Street. Here is a building that even looks as though the space at the corner was designed with the plan to make it engaging but the tenant makeup changed their mind at the last minute. What makes it even more sad is that this intersection has such opportunity with engaging businesses on the other three corners.
The Okay
The middle of the group is also where you will find the majority of ground floor uses at least in commercial or downtown areas. There are three main types you will find and the move from barely okay to good. At the “only okay” edge of this you will find financial institutions. They are certainly better than ground floor office because all of us can go into them if we want to. The thing is that when we do go in it is for a very specific reason, getting insurance, making a deposit, or maybe talking to an investment advisor. Not something that you would generally do on a whim. Also for whatever reason, banks and similar places seem to always have advertising over the windows and that really kills permeability.
A second and somewhat controversial type of ground floor that I will put in this section, is the bottom level townhouse. Certainly this is not a permeable ground floor for anyone but those that live there but it is permeable from a community perspective as it puts eyes on the street. Something that we have a number of examples of in Victoria is the ground floor live/work townhouse. These have been only moderately successful over the last couple of decades in the city, but they can be quite engaging depending on the business located there.
Moving up from there is your standard store or restaurant. Good examples of these can be seen all over the city. Usually there is a big picture window with a door next to it. Both of these ground floor uses are very permeable as we can choose to go into any of them to buy something or get something to eat. An easy way to enhance your basic store is to create an engaging window display, something that will make the passerby stop and look in. So I know what your thinking, what can be more engaging than a ground floor store or cafe with a great window display? Well something that reaches out and tries to grab you!
The Great
I am going to talk about two examples here though there are likely more and I would love to hear your favourite types of ground floors in the comments. The first one is a store with some of its wares out on the sidewalk. In Victoria one of my favourite places to go for a walk is Chinatown and one of the main reasons I love it is how vibrant it feels. I think a large part of this vibrancy is due to the fact that the stores literally spill out onto the sidewalk, forcing you to engage with them. You can see other good examples around the city though, The Patch on Yates Street often has a few racks of its clothes out on the sidewalk to pick through and almost every time I go by there are a few people doing precisely that. From a permeability perspective this is great because you don’t even have to take the drastic step of going through the door to see what a store offers. This gives the pedestrian that extra bit of comfort to look further in store as they know what to expect.
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There is one better than this though and I think most know what it is, the restaurant or cafe with a sidewalk patio. We are living in a grand experiment on this right now with the traffic closures on Government and Broad and the numerous parking spots that have been given over to sidewalk seating. Even if you are not planning to eat or drink, people want to go to areas that have this type of business because it feels vibrant, engaging and safe. For the businesses, those sitting on their patio are all living advertisements for their food. I know that when I have been travelling to parts of the world where these patios are the norm, you can often pick the right place just be looking at the crowd on a patio or lack thereof. Not all parts of a city are conducive to having streetside patios but they were more places than we have had them in Victoria. If done right, there can be no better ground floor to a building.
So as I said at the beginning, I have created a little infographic below that lays this out in a simple format. At the very end is a button if you would like to download your own free copy of it!
