I found the idea that wide-open spaces are estranging or anti-human especially fascinating because in the second year studios, we've been repeatedly encouraged to maximize the amount of open space in our schemes, both to deal with pragmatic issues like sea level rise and storm surges and to meet some monumental demand caused by the Olympic backdrop of the project. Vidler, writing on Simmel, notes that the interaction of human beings can be thought of as "space-filling", where the space between individuals, termed "empty space", is immediately filled and animated by the reciprocal relations between individuals. Given the notion that people will fill empty space, I wonder how much of an obligation we have as architects to "pre-fill" the spaces we design.