Act 10 - Scene 4 - Town Centre design

TOWN SQUARES - PATTERNS

"A town needs public squares; they are the largest most public rooms, that the town has.  But when they are too large they look and feel deserted. "
 

"The life of a public square forms naturally around its edge. If the edge fails, then the space never becomes lively"
 

"A public space without a middle is quite likely to stay empty...a place where people can protect their backs, as easilty as they can around the edge...perhaps there is an even more primitive instinct at work" (A Pattern Language, Alexander, C, 1977)

"Between the natural paths which cross a public square or courtyard...choose something to stand roughly in the middle: a fountain, a tree, a statue, a clock tower with seats, a windmill, a bandstand. Make it something which gives a strong and steady pulse to the square, drawing people in toward the centre.  Leave it exactly where it falls between the paths; resist the impulse to put it exactly in the middle." 

"Perhaps related to the mandala instince, which finds in any certally symmetric figure a powerful receptacle for dreams and images and for conjugations of the self.

MANDALA IN RELIGION

"Maṇḍala (मण्डल) is a Sanskrit word meaning "circle." In the Buddhist and Hindu religious traditions sacred art often takes a mandala form. The basic form of most Hindu and Buddhist mandalas is a square with four gates containing a circle with a center point. Each gate is in the shape of a T.  Mandalas often exhibit radial balance

These mandalas, concentric diagrams, have spiritual and ritual significance in both Buddhism and Hinduism. The term is of Hindu origin and appears in the Rig Veda as the name of the sections of the work, but is also used in other Indian religions, particularly Buddhism. In the Tibetan branch of Vajrayana Buddhism, mandalas have been developed into sandpainting. They are also a key part of anuttarayoga tantra meditation practices.

In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts, as a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing a sacred space, and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. According to the psychologist David Fontana, its symbolic nature can help one "to access progressively deeper levels of the unconscious, ultimately assisting the meditator to experience a mystical sense of oneness with the ultimate unity from which the cosmos in all its manifold forms arises." The psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw the mandala as "a representation of the unconscious self," and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional disorders and work towards wholeness in personality.

In common use, mandala has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the universe from the human perspective" Wikipedia - Mandala
(text and images from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala#Bora_ring)