Reading Places

Because our lives are spent going from location to location, the message sent to people upon entering various places is more significant than we think. I notice now that messages each place sends are mostly very clear; I’m sure we learn at a young age to easily read places at once to know how to behave within the area. Or maybe we don’t even learn, but the knowledge of what a certain place is all about is ingrained in the mind, based only on recognizing the objects in the location, how many people are there, and what it looks like.
In fact, this idea seems probable to me when I think about when I was much younger and knew exactly how to behave in a certain place (although not always doing that). A few observations and I notice similarities in places of similar purpose that I hadn’t realized before. Most private places are small in size, meant usually for just one person and occasionally more than one (places such as bedrooms, bathrooms, spa-like luxuries such as saunas and hot tubs, and vehicle interiors). The more public the place in general, the larger it is. Parks, office buildings, shopping malls, and hotels are all public and spacious, especially if they are found within a city- also a location containing many more public places than somewhere suburban or rural. Backyards, beaches, clubs and parks are all places of leisure and are the most open, with little to no objects obstructing free range to let loose by running, swimming, dancing, or playing sports. Workplaces on the other hand, contain many manmade objects for workers to use. Factories, offices, kitchens and hospitals do not have large space and instead have machinery, desks, computers, and utensils.
It’s quite easy to see that if a place looks isolating it’s probably meant to be private; if it’s filled with manmade things the location is meant to be occupied by people using those things correctly while doing their jobs. What might not be as obvious, for example, is to know how to behave in a library. If someone were raised without ever seeing a library or knowing what it was, what would prevent him from being boisterous and distracting upon entering? Such a person would have to make a keen observation about the new place; a library is filled with books, meant to be read. And no one can read very easily if there is a lot of noise around. So, the person would need to infer that all the books, research tools and search engines found in a library would mean people go there to concentrate instead of socialize, being at their very basic quiet instead of loud in the environment.