Years ago, there was a study done on kittens who were raised in a room with no right angles. After their birth, everything they came in contact with was oblong, curved, and lacked definitive edging. The walls were rounded, as were the toys and all other objects in the room. There were no harsh edges or vertical lines to be seen. The kittens had perfect vision –their eyesight was excellent.
After the kittens had surpassed what was considered to be their formative developmental period, they were brought into a normal room that you find in the real world. A room with floors that met walls at right angles, where chairs had straight legs, and where the walls were perfectly vertical. To everyone’s surprise, when the kittens began walking around to explore their new surroundings -- they walked into the walls, bumped their heads on the furniture, and tripped over the food bowls. It appeared that they could not “see” these new straight lines that composed the objects that they were encountering for the very first time. (Rounded obstacles and objects however, continued to be appropriately recognized and responded to.) Having never experienced such a thing as a right angle in their lifetime, they could neither recognize nor interpret this particular visual phenomenon. They did not know what to do with straight lines or right angles.
I grew up in a small New England town, once occupied by early settlers. These settlers cleared forestland to make fields for growing crops and rode in horse-drawn carriages. The rocks unearthed in the process of clearing a field were used to build stonewalls. In such a setting, the evolution of roads happened over time. They were not nicely laid out with urban planning in mind, but instead were dictated by a much slower process -- the etching of a path inch-by-inch into the existing mountainside wherever a horse-drawn carriage might need to go. They served a purpose, and laid the framework for society to build houses, commerce and whatnot. Those narrow, twisty, windy roads exist today (both in my hometown and in Boston where I spent the last decade) although they have long since been paved over. They have however, maintained their original form -- and those narrow, twisty, windy roads are still the norm for me.
If you look at a
map of Chicago, you’ll find that it is masterfully and purposefully designed as a grid. Roads are straight and flat. They run from East-West or North-South. Roads meet to form intersections of right angles of a precision unprecedented in the Northeastern part of the USA.
This last week has been full of newness for me. A new city. A new state. New People. New Buildings. New everything -- especially the roads. Today, in reference to the grid that makes up these roadways, I remarked to Brian that I felt a tiny little bit like those kittens that didn’t know what to make of right angles!
-Kelly
