Notes about Space

The public space I am choosing is the Vaquero Country Club.
While there I noticed all sorts of things that can be arguments. I’ll start with the space as a whole. The club house is where I observed. The outside of the building looks quite southwestern and Texan. The building is made of sandstone colored stone and has a greenish, black slate roof. Most all the fixtures on the outside are made of copper. It is a large building, in the neighborhood of 10, 000 square feet. The inside carries on the architecture of the outside. When you walk in through the front double doors you are immersed by a relaxing, log cabinesque interior. The front doors look an awful lot like doors from an old Texan prison. Aged dark wood and rebar. As you walk in straight ahead of you is a wide hallway leading into the bar. As you walk into the bar/great room to your right is a free standing fire place and on the other side of that is the more formal dining room. If you look to the left there is the actual bar and bar stools. If you walk in the front door again and instead of going straight you go to the right you go down a hallway again that leads to a stairwell and double doors. The stairwell goes up to the ladies locker room and the double doors go into the men’s locker room. There is more but I will leave that out for now.

The objects in the club house are mostly golf or antique type things. The pictures are aged golf pictures or aged impressionistic paintings. All very dull black, white and gray pictures. Nothing flashy at all. There is a lot of statues either of copper or bronze. The statues are mostly of golfers or famous Texans. The furniture looks like something you would see in a log cabin if it was in Texas. It is aged and there is a lot of leather and wood. The tile on the floor is a slate looking tile. Once again it is all aged to look like it has been there for a while.

The people in the country club are very different and yet very similar. All of them are very well off, in fact it was just named highest per capita income for a single city in the United States. The people though range from CEO’s of large cooperation’s to Famous Football players and everyone in-between. Most of the people that are at the club are there for a purpose. They are either there to play golf, to eat lunch or dinner or to relax in the spa. I noticed a lot of people simply come there to socialize too, especially around dinner time. Most everyone knows each other so there is a lot of interaction between the people. I also noticed people treat the club house like their home. Most everyone feels very comfortable there and it causes them to relax more than if they were just in a typical space like Wal-Mart or something.

I observed the club once at night and once in the early morning and I was surprised at the different things people did at different times of the day. In the morning people are generally there to work out or to play golf. There is not a lot of wandering around. In the morning I noticed quite a few more women there than men. I’m not sure why though. In the evening most of the people were there for dinner. It seems as though most of the people that came also socialized quite profusely. The dinner customers too were also more polite and personable then the morning people. I accredited this to the people in the morning were still tired and probably were still trying to wake up. While the people at night were ready to go out and have a good time. I know from personal experience I am generally much more fun to be around at night then at 6am in the morning.