150 A Place to Wait*

. . . in any office, or workshop, or public service, or station, or clinic, where people have to wait - Interchange (34), Health Center (47), Small Services Without Red Tape (81), Office Connections (82), it is essential to provide a special place for waiting, and doubly essential that this place not have the sordid, enclosed, time-slowed character of ordinary waiting rooms.

The process of waiting has inherent conflicts in it.

On the one hand, whatever people are waiting for - the doctor, an airplane, a business appointment - has built in uncertainties, which make it inevitable that they must spend a long time hanging around, waiting, doing nothing.

On the other hand, they cannot usually afford to enjoy this time. Because it is unpredictable, they must hang at the very door. Since they never know exactly when their turn will come, they cannot even take a stroll or sit outside. They must stay in the narrow confine of the waiting room, waiting their turn. But this, of course, is an extremely demoralizing situation: nobody wants to wait at somebody else's beck and call. Kafka's greatest works, The Castle and The Trial,both deal almost entirely with the way this kind of atmosphere destroys a man.

The classic "waiting room" does nothing to resolve this problem. A tight dreary little room, with people staring at each other, fidgeting, a magazine or two to flip - this is the very situation which creates the conflict. Evidence for the deadening effect of this situation comes from Scott Briar ("Welfare From Below: Recipients' Views of the Public Welfare System," in Jacobus Tenbroek, ed., The Law and the Poor,San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1966, p. 52). We all know that time seems to pass more slowly when we are bored or anxious or restless. Briar found that people waiting in welfare agencies consistently thought they had been waiting for longer than they really had. Some thought they had been waiting four times as long.

The fundamental problem then, is this. How can the people who are waiting, spend their time wholeheartedly - live the hours or minutes while they wait, as fully as the other hours of their day - and yet still be on hand, whenever the event or the person they are waiting for is ready?

It can be done best when the waiting is fused with some other activity: an activity that draws in other people who are not there essentially to wait - a cafe, pool tables, tables, a reading room, where the activities and the seats around them are within earshot of the signal that the interviewer (or the plane, or whatever) is ready. For example, the Pediatrics Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital built a small playground beside the entrance, to serve as a waiting area for children and a play area for the neighborhood..

Waiting room at the pediatrics clinic.

In another example we know, a horseshoe pit was built alongside a terrace where people came to wait for appointments. The people waiting inevitably started pitching horseshoes, others joined in, people left as their appointments came up - there was an easy flow between the horseshoe pit, the terrace, and the offices.

Waiting can also be a situation where the person waiting finds himself with free time, and, with the support of the surroundings, is able to draw into himself, become still, meditative-quite the opposite of the activity described above.

The right atmosphere will come naturally if the waiting area provides some places that are quiet, protected, and do not draw out the anxiety of the wait. Some examples: a seat near a bus stop, under a tree, protected from the street; a window seat that looks down upon a street scene below; a protected seat in a garden, a swing or a hammock; a dark place and a glass of beer, far enough away from passages so that a person is not always looking up when someone comes or goes; a private seat by a fish tank.

In summary, then, people who are waiting must be free to do what they want. If they want to sit outside the interviewer's door, they can. If they want to get up and take a stroll, or play a game of pool, or have a cup of coffee, or watch other people, they can. If they want to sit privately and fall into a daydream, they can. And all this without having to fear that they are losing their place in line.

Quiet waiting.

Therefore:

In places where people end up waiting (for a bus, for an appointment, for a plane), create a situation which makes the waiting positive. Fuse the waiting with some other activity - newspaper, coffee, pool tables, horseshoes; something which draws people in who are not simply waiting. And also the opposite: make a place which can draw a person waiting into a reverie; quiet; a positive silence.

The active part might have a window on the street - Street Windows (164), Window Place (180), a cafe - Street Cafe (88), games, positive engagements with the people passing by - Opening to the Street (165). The quiet part might have a quiet garden seat - Garden Seat (176), a place for people to doze Sleeping in Public (94), perhaps a pond with fish in it - Still Water (71). To the extent that this waiting space is a room, or a group of rooms, it gets its detailed shape from Light on Two Sides of Every Room (159) and The Shape of Indoor Space (191).

A Pattern Language is published by Oxford University Press, Copyright Christopher Alexander, 1977.