COMMUNITY TABLE
The dinner table is the center for the teaching and practicing ...of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of society...
Judith Martin (Miss Manners)
activities. When getting together around the TABLE, participants engage physically, socially and emotionally as ideas, inspiration and a sense of community occur. A TABLE can make a family of strangers connect through sharing, talking, watching and listening. The unpredictable nature of what happens around a TABLE sets the stage for an event to occur – not prescribing the event, but allowing the community to establish it. The WORDS donated by the community, imprinted on the TABLE, make the people recognize themselves around the TABLE by being affirmatively pictured and validated. The TABLE and collection of WORDS become not the main subject but the canvas that creates the space of happening.
Traditional monuments in public space have, for most of the time, glorified a moment or an individual. This glorification has lent the convention obelisk-like objects and statues: frontally presented, privileged siting, usually taller than the people, placed straight up, installed on a base. These overpowering features have unconsciously distanced the people and altered their interaction with public space. We take an opposite position by inverting these features in order to bring the people to the project, and to develop a situation where interaction is valued – the return of the public. We considered the project to be horizontal, close to the ground, harmonious with the existing landscape, accessible and appealing to the most diverse
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