The Vita Activa

Caress the Detail, the Divine Detail

2010-06-26T10:44:00.001-04:00

Writers obsess about something we call our “voice.” On a simplistic level, the question can be phrased as “Does this writing sound like me?”, a question we usually ask ourselves when we know that it doesn’t. I write periodically for academic publications, and I always struggle not to fall into the conventions of that form, presenting the blood-drained corpses of ideas. I can usually tell (upon re-reading, anyway) that some alien scholarly being has entered my head and typed for a while, and mostly I can fix it.

But really, the fact that my writing has a “voice” is less egoistic than “sounds like me.” A writer’s voice is, I think, two things. The first is the sum of the choices we make about words and punctuation, and the second is what we choose to observe and report on. And my writing has unique characteristics in both of those realms. I LOVE punctuation that allows me to digress within the stretch of a single sentence — the em-dash, the semi-colon, the parenthesis, even the simple bracketing commas surrounding a non-restrictive clause. And, as you can see, I love the sound and rhythm of repeating words, all of those “the’s” in that last sentence chiming like a liturgy.

When I observe situations in the world, I’m attentive to the exact words people use, and to their postures and the ways they express emotions. But I’m also attentive to what I’m thinking about it while I’m watching it, so my writing tends to be like a narrated film on the Discovery Channel — you get to see the animals playing, but you also get to hear me commenting on it at the same time.

The title of this blog post comes from Vladimir Nabokov. I’d never heard it until I read an essay by Patricia Hampl called "The Dark Art of Description." It’s not a terrific essay (mainly because I don’t so much care for her voice), but the ideas are important. Here’s a couple of sentences:

Next to grand conceptions like plot, which is the legitimate government of most stories, or character, which is the crowned sovereign, the detail looks like the ragged peasant with a half-baked idea of revolution and a crazy, sure glint in its eye. But here, according to Nabokov, resides divinity.

So this is not my preferred voice — it’s a bit overblown, with the metaphor drawn out pretty thin. But what a perfect idea. We buy Robert Ludlum and John Grisham thrillers because the plots are fun, but the characters are little more than plot mannequins, and the details are careless and distracted. We may burn through them on the airplane, but nobody ever reads one again for the love of the language.

So now the context shift that brings us back to design. I think we can imagine that our focus on form and space is akin to a focus on plot — it grabs our attention on first read, but has little staying power. Perhaps character is something more akin to architectural material – cold or warm, generous or meager. But if we come back to good buildings, as we come back to good writing, it is because the details unfailingly please us. There are pieces of music I’ve heard a hundred times, and I get choked up at exactly the same place every time because that particular musician has made a particular choice about pacing or emphasis at a particular point in the score, and it’s just revelatory every time I hear it.

Architecture about form is the equivalent of books centered on plot — exciting once, but not savored. Architecture about “ideas” is the equivalent of the dessicated and emotionless academic paper — possibly interesting, but not what you want around you when you’re tired or lonely. It’s the details that reward repeated encounter, that show us something noble or joyous on each occasion.

Creativity is Overrated

2010-06-24T14:32:00.002-04:00

Two stories. First, a couple of weeks back, a group of colleagues and I were reviewing the "creative exercises" that our aspiring undergraduates construct as part of their applications. We'd quickly narrowed the field of seven down to four, and one seemed to be rising to the top that I was less than excited about. One of its features was a short description of a photograph (a required element) that was a fanciful take on its subject matter. But it didn't make much sense even within its own internal frame, and the language was overblown and stilted. I raised those concerns, and a colleague said, "Yes, but it IS creative, and this is supposed to be a creative exercise."

The second story: I was on my way back from a conference in Utah (where, yes, one of my colleagues really did get propositioned to become someone's third wife...) two days ago. A friend, a provost at a southern university, had given me a ride to the airport and said, as we were walking shoelessly through security, "We need to sit down sometime so I can pick your brain about innovation." I gave her my increasingly standard line about innovation not being a verb (see this blog 6/19 and 6/28, 2008). "Well, then, what IS the verb?" she asked. I thought for a few seconds and said, "re-imagining constraints."

A couple of years ago, I heard the architect Stephen Kieran differentiate between innovation and invention. "Invention is cheap. Novelty is a dime a dozen, but real innovations are hard-won. They have to perform, and they have to change the baseline for what comes after." Too much of what we think of as "creativity" is merely churn, something that's different in order to be different. That's a fine marketing technique in an overcrowded product field, but has nothing to do with the merit of the ideas or the craft of their execution.

So here's a series of questions I'd put forward in any condition to imagine how much "creativity" is a good thing.

Can you describe, in exacting detail, the human aspirations and relationships that should be enhanced by your work? And are your answers broadly held or idiosyncratic?
Is there a "status quo" or a contextually accepted condition that reaches those ends? It's pretty rare that the answer to this is no. If you're building the first offices on the moon, there aren't any other moon offices to copy, but there's a long history of what information-based work life entails. If you're building the first vacation house on a particular lake, there's still a vast array of "vacation house" that acts as precedent. And that status quo goes beyond building types — if you want your school to be a place of deep collegial thought, look at monasteries and good taverns instead of schools.
Is that status quo pretty good? If so, leave it alone and do the best possible iteration of it that you can, respectful of both history and local circumstances.
If the status quo needs significant improvement, then which exact parts need to be improved, and what evidence do you bring to make that case? Let's take the suburban house as a simple example. It uses far too many materials, expends far too much energy, and causes far too much driving. Those are all pretty empirical questions, and the basis of those concerns is a contemporary awareness that energy is not infinite and that consuming energy changes our atmosphere, neither of which were common knowledge or belief in 1953. But to propose a new form or a new arrangement of rooms presumes that the current form or arrangement "doesn't work," which is a far more subtle and positioned argument requiring difficult evidence. And that evidence is rarely forthcoming.

The notion that what I'm creating has to fundamentally be different than what came before is a reflex of contemporary design. If there's a broad historical consensus around something, let's start out by presuming that it has some merit, and examine its successes and shortcomings in close detail before we abandon the past for our sketch-pad phantasms.

The Outcome is the Outcome

2010-06-11T15:31:00.003-04:00

Deductive logic is a powerful thing. We have a body of knowledge, and a body of theory about how that knowledge makes sense together. From that, we create hypotheses to move that theory into some marginally new area, to see if the theory explains what we're about to see during the experiment.

Le Corbusier wrote “A house is a machine that you live in. To build such a machine, you need the sun, the sky, the trees, steel and cement — strictly in that hierarchical order. If only with these materials you build, ingenuity is at work and suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say this is beautiful.” But Corbu was famous for not caring what people thought of living with his designs, for wanting to educate people into appreciating what he appreciated. He worked out his hypotheses by attending to the first half of his maxim -- the tightly limited palette, the intellectual hierarchy -- but neglected the part about touching our hearts.

Every profession has the tendency to focus on the work that it understands and the outcomes it can directly impact. Your doctor probably focuses more on your blood pressure than s/he does on your enjoyment of life, because s/he understands the physiology of blood pressure and the pharmacological possibilities of its treatment. And yet you, the inhabitor of the body the doctor examines, probably have no idea what your blood pressure is at any particular moment; you know that you feel good, or tired, or lightheaded. For you, blood pressure is not the end goal -- feeling good is the end goal.

So too for buildings. Designers are interested in buildings, but most of us aren't. We're interested in having our work be productive, our family be happy, our neighborhoods be safe and sociable. If our buildings can help those things be true, then they're fine; if not, they just don't work. The building is not the outcome. The outcome is the outcome.

So I'm interested in looking for examples of happy, productive, lively, intelligent people, and then trying to figure out if there are any commonalities to the places in which they have those experiences. I want to build theory inductively, trying to assemble a body of good experiences and understanding what ties those experiences together. If we HAD a workable theory of design's impact on those satisfactions, then we could be deductive, but we still live in a world that's prior to that point (and may always be short of that goal). We have to quit thinking so much about form and space and material, and far more about joy.

Why are suburban houses so huge?

2010-06-07T16:54:00.003-04:00

If our homes were smaller, we could do one of two things: we could build them for far less money, or we could build them for the same money and far more elegantly and substantially. The first would allow millions of lower-income Americans to own homes that are truly within their reach (the old rule of thumb used to be that your house should cost 2.5 times your annual salary -- but a young working couple making $80K between them would be limited to a $200,000 home, and that just ain't happening in or near Boston). The second would increase our emotional delight and also put less crap into the waste stream when the suburban slums start to come apart in thirty years and shed their vinyl and fiberglass and aluminum all across the landscape.

But then I think about what I'm looking for in a house, and one of the criteria is that it has to be big enough to hold a full sized Brunswick Gold Crown tournament pool table. That means a room that's at minimum 20'x15', and there's a tenth of my McMansion right there. So I'm also guilty, guilty, guilty.

So why do I need a pool table? Because if I live in a suburb or a rural edge, there's no community anywhere around me to go play pool. I played for three years at Sacco's Bowl Haven in Somerville, which was as close to a second family as I've had in years. It was in the midst of Davis Square, easy to get to and easy to walk out for half an hour and get Chinese food between matches. But they closed (that's how I bought my Gold Crown, lying in pieces in my basement), and now I have to drive 45 minutes out to Peabody and past eight car dealerships and two strip clubs and the twin Dunkin Donuts exactly across from one another on opposite sides of the 50 mph divided highway, and go down the driveway behind the car wash and the porn store and under the Japanese restaurant, and park next to the dumpster. So I play once every couple of weeks instead of three times a week, and I suck again.

The suburb, with its physical distances and its single-use zoning, has kept us from having a lot of public social amenities that we could share -- taverns, cafes, pool rooms, bookstores, music venues, little theaters, on and on. The kinds of things we take for granted in good cities. Instead, I need my own movie screen, and my own pool table, and my own wet bar, and it doesn't take long to get up to just plain huge. And if I'm going to build a 3,000 square-foot house and not have it cost millions, I have to build it about as well as the WalMart junk I'm going to put into it. (Because of course the argument also applies for furniture, clothing, fast food, and all other consumer goods; if I want a lot of it, and I want to be able to afford a lot of it, then it's mostly going to be made really, really badly.)

It's not about wanting less. I know that's unAmerican. But it's about wanting something better -- better for us socially, better for us economically, better for us environmentally.

Ulrich's Trees

2009-08-11T23:14:00.002-04:00

Back in the mid-1980s, a psychologist in Texas named Roger Ulrich performed an experiment. He studied how long people stayed in the hospital, and compared those lengths of stay against whether their hospital-room window had a view to a natural scene or not. He found that those who had a nature view tended to recover more quickly, and that the differences between the two groups was statistically significant. It does indeed seem to matter.

But this area of research seems not to have become significantly more sophisticated over the intervening 25 years. There's a lot of talk about "restorative environments" and "healing gardens" and whatnot, but not much careful definition of what it means to be "restored" or "healthy." I know a fair number of people for whom intense urban life and distant rural life are the intertwined and necessary counterpoints for a rich life; without each one, the other would become unbalanced and unsatisfying. I have a colleague at work who has 57 plants in his office; I frankly don't care much about potted plants, and prefer to have a wall full of quotes and inspiring language. Reading exceptional text (and playing a game of Freecell) is how I recover my equilibrium during a difficult workday. We don't know enough about what it means to be fully engaged with places, or soothed by places, or energized by places. And in the absence of knowledge, we keep coming back to Ulrich's Trees. Stick a tree outside every window, and we're good to go. (Not to mention that "nature views" mean something very different to different people. If the view out my hospital window was a vista of a wheat field, I would go fully insane in about an hour and a half – you couldn't BUY enough morphine to make up for that. But people from the Plains often say that they feel claustrophobic in forested areas, because they can't see the horizon and feel hemmed in.)

We're often guilty of looking for answers rather than getting better at thinking about why we're asking a particular question. What IS it about the nature view that seemed to matter in Ulrich's studies? Is it just the fact of greenness? Or is it motion, or changing qualities of light? Is it the movement and flash of color of the perching birds, or the squirrels chasing each other up and down the branches? Is it the SOUND of breeze moving the leaves, like the meditation fountains you can buy at Target for forty bucks?

If you wanted to calm ME down, all you'd have to do is put on some ambient music and set the Apple Visualizer to play psychedelic shapes. I'm hooked for hours.

The Three Orders of Architecture

2009-07-29T21:13:00.003-04:00

I was working with a colleague today over lunch, designing the framing ideas that we'll put into play in our first semesters of design experience for new students. And the thought occurred to me, as we were talking about materials and about making, that there have really been three significant structural modes or orders in architectural history. There is the stacked order, in which heavy things are piled on top of other heavy things to make structures. We pretty much quit doing that at the turn of the 20th century when we stopped making buildings our of real bricks, but there's still some of it around, and lots still occurring around the world. There is the assembly order, in which major components are notched and jointed and the joints fit precisely together for structural strength. Post-and-beam barns were made this way, and much of Japanese architecture is based on the elegance of its wooden connections.

Our contemporary design culture is, I think, representative of a third order, which I'll call the super-glue order. Things are stuck together with the lightest of touches; thin nails, adhesives, staples, brackets. And this is true not only for finishing panels, but even structurally; the suburban house is made affordable at least in part by the mass-produced truss, which itself is made possible only through the use of metal nail plates, not much more permanent or elegant than duct tape.

I was at a conference 15 years ago in which a major contractor in the Midwest said that he was preparing to lose (to retirement) about 40% of his journeyman electricians, and 50% of his masons, and a third of his plumbers. He didn't see a generation of new skilled tradespeople coming up behind to fill in those voids. In part, that's because we've made ever-more-ingenious materials that can be assembled by ever-cheaper labor. It doesn't take nearly the care or experience to build a balloon-frame house that it does to build a post-and-beam. And the quality of our environment reflects the quality of not only the materials, but the care of their construction.

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts is about to host a major Greene and Greene exhibition. You want to see some craft, have a look at their work. But in far more humble ways, most of the housing of 1920 was intensely more interesting and better constructed than what we have now. They didn't call it the Craftsman era for nothing. What will they call ours?

I Don't Know What This Means, But I Don't Like It

2009-06-15T11:42:00.003-04:00

I was listening to NPR in the car on the way home a couple of days ago, and in the local newsbreak between national segments, the news reader told us that someone in Boston's Back Bay had just bought the city's most expensive parking space. It's down by the Boston Common, outdoors and uncovered in the alley behind Commonwealth Avenue. The sale price was $300,000.

A whole bunch of things ran through my mind when I heard this. Although it was called Boston's most expensive parking space, I would hope that it might be the most expensive parking space in America, perhaps in the world -- it would be disturbing to think of one that cost even more. And I was trying to imagine the kind of car one would have to own to justify that cost; the Back Bay is lousy with assorted masculine-compensation cars, Ferrari and Bentley and Maserati, but if you were really worried about your car, you wouldn't leave it exposed in a public alley. On the other hand, I can't imagine parking my Civic in a $300,000 parking space.

I thought about my emotional reaction to paying that much money for a convenience, investing the equivalent of five or six experienced high school teachers' salaries for a parking spot. I also thought about the price of condos down in that neighborhood: if someone owns a five million dollar apartment (not unusual there), then this parking space accounts for six percent of their overall housing costs. A suburban garage is far worse in terms of proportion, and its associated house and driving patterns might be worse overall in terms of environmental impact. Maybe this is what the green solution looks like...

And I thought that this is a person or family for whom the price of gasoline is no barrier to behavior. If they were driving a Hummer H2 and gas were $8.39 a gallon, it would still represent a trivial expense in their lives.

So I don't know what a $300,000 parking space means. I feel like it's this week's Sign of the Apocalypse, but for reasons that are more complex than I first thought.

Against Process

2009-05-30T07:38:00.013-04:00

In his 1994 book The Death of Common Sense, the legal theorist Philip Howard described a particular case of an oil refinery made to come under the jurisdiction of environmental protections standards. A particular smokestack scrubber had been prescribed as a required solution to emissions from such places; as Howard describes it, the refinery itself had discovered that moving the refined product onto ships caused significantly more atmospheric degradation, and could be remedied for significantly less cost.The EPA in fact agreed with that assessment, but the “common sense” solution was rejected in favor of the mandate for the less effective, but approved, smokestack device.

In many ways, our entire culture has embarked on the pursuit of process, of “value-neutral” tools that can be used equally toward good ends and bad. The fact of automobiles was less important than the process of industrial assembly, and whether the outcome was a Corvette or a Vega (or a corn dog, or a Beanie Baby) didn’t matter nearly as much as the process of materials being moved from raw to completed through the assembly line. We see the same thing in every industrial process, from health care to public education to urban zoning policy; the outcomes matter less than the process, and the outcomes are often terrible exactly because of the process (see Eran Ben-Joseph’s The Code of the City for a particularly fascinating discussion of planning codes that made sense, but which created senselessness).

The governing principles of process are primarily those of internal consistency. Rules are created and followed, and the outcomes are valued in terms of being “interesting” rather than desirable or beautiful. John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen weren’t especially interested in musical beauty, a term they would probably have distrusted as nostalgic; instead, they were interested in developing a set of rules and relationships that would generate intriguing outcomes, interested in freeing us from the dead images of the past and revealing to us a new and compelling present.

Process has been the watchword of architectural education for that same time; the ruling notion is that a design process must be developed, and that the rigorous intellectual pursuit of conceptual clarity would result in intriguing spaces.And what we’ve discovered is that “intriguing” is rarely satisfying, that rarely do these compelling ideas emerge into truly delightful places of habitation.

Philosophers have described the evils that we do when we pursue ends above means, when we decide that some particular condition is so desirable that we’re willing to commit atrocities in order to achieve it. But there’s been considerably less exploration of what happens when all we have are means, put toward no particular ends. Or, perhaps, when the means themselves become ends. Design has become, like art, an intellectual practice of exploration, one not aimed at any particular outcomes other than rigor. If that rigor results in places that are rigorously untenable, such as much of what emerged from the International Style and its Brutalist offspring, that doesn’t much impede the interests of scholars, because the rigor can be investigated and critiqued and expanded upon in interesting ways. Scholarship itself is too often procedural rather than aimed toward better lives.

The process century has delivered to us a tradition of building and of design education that are all head and no heart. And what’s a shame about that (well, many things, but here’s one of them) is that the developers and marketers were also process-focused; not only in intellectual process, but also in psychological process. They singlemindely pursued the industrial model in order to falsify the satisfaction of our emotional sustenance, building microscopic “ranches” and winding country lanes across the nation, every man the lord of his petite estate. Just as McDonalds developed a food process that made pseudo-meals, the builders developed a construction process that made psuedo-homes. They looked nutritious, kind of… and they were certainly affordable, in a fashion that only federal subsidies and vinyl siding could make possible, satisfying (badly) our need for ownership and rootedness. An architecture focused on habitation and community, on the creation of place, could have worked as leavening to the development impulse, and could have made our contemporary landscape look far different than it does. But instead, our design professionals played their parlor games, creating intellectual puzzles rather than places. No surprise, of course – philosophical trends matter because they affect all areas of society at once — but sad none the same.

In a culture of process, who will look after the outcomes?

Helvetica House, Garamond House

2009-05-08T07:55:00.005-04:00

Helvetica House

Garamond House

I was looking at real estate listings last night, and recognizing that most of the houses I liked were too expensive and most of the houses I could afford were covered with vinyl siding. And that got me to wondering about the state of the art in prefabricated housing, so I got to poking around online and discovered that IKEA, the "flat-pack" furniture store giant, has partnered with Skanska, the international construction administration giant, to create flat-pack housing.

The BoKlok system, as they call it (supposedly Swedish for "live smart"), comes in two flavors: row housing of multiple-sized units, and six-unit apartment buildings. Several thousand have been built, and people who live in and near them seem to think they're quite nice, and certainly affordable.

But when I visited the website, what I was most struck by was their logo. Anyone who's ever been in an IKEA store recognizes almost everything about that logo instantly. The square text box, the blue and yellow corporate colors, and especially the all-capped, tightly-tracked Helvetica font.

The 20th century was really the Helvetica century in design. We embraced the clean, the sharp, the unadorned, the bold. We were done with the serif-font past, done with the fillips and gewgaws of our embarrassing Victorian history.

One of the things that's so appealing about Helvetica architecture is that it implies simplicity and purity in the context of our lives, which have gotten so hectic and overcrowded. Most of us don't lead Helvetica lives -- my Bjursta dining table is covered with mail, my Roger chairs are grey with cat hair, and my Unni rug needs vacuuming. My Ikea Modern furniture mocks me, an assembly of austere monks who disapprove of my scattered and unfocused ways.

Personally, I'm more of a Garamond person. Garamond is a comfortable font, with strong distinctions in stroke weight, differently sized serifs at the tops of strokes for different letters, and nice broad feet where each letter comes down to its baseline. It's well-educated, not ostentatious, and somewhat amused at the prentensions of a perfect life. Helvetica is strict and unyeilding, Garamond is easy and welcoming.

Helvetica is also, in journalism, the font of headlines: forthright and authoritative, calling out the news in six words or less. The ideas, the intellectual life, are in the Garamond of the body text. Nobody would bother to read a newspaper set in Helvetica throughout; the lack of serifs make long engagement with the text uncomfortable. And it may be no coincidence that Helvetica architecture is equally unsuited to daily life, though it photographs wonderfully for those strict and idea-free images of the design magazines.

Font choices tell us a lot about people. Grafitti taggers spend months perfecting their dense and cryptic lettering, simultaneously calling out to us and rejecting our easy understanding; gangsters and lowrider clubs take on Old English for its motif of excess and its artificial history and class connotations; and car numbers in NASCAR are always italicized, as though the characters are being pulled into distortion by the raw speed of the cars.

So here's a test. Pick about six fonts, and find men's clothing, women's clothing, a car, a chair, and a house that suit that font. It won't be hard.

Visual Literacy and Material Noise

2009-04-26T15:11:00.006-04:00

I like words. I like them very very much, yes I do. And because I like words so much, I think that pleasure may blind me to other forms of language. So I'm going to explore some ideas here (in words) that I don't know if I believe yet, but are on my mind.

There are lots of forms of language. Some are languages that are sounds and symbols organized by rules, such as written and spoken English. There's also non-verbal communication or "body language," a knowable system of postures and facial expressions that convey emotional states of interest or boredom or attraction or defense.

Mathematics is also a language, consisting (like English) of a body of symbols and a set of rules that establish relationships between those symbols. Computer code is widely thought of in terms of "languages" such as C++ and SQL, which are again systems of symbols and relationships.

Music can be reasonably thought of as a language: a system of symbols and relationships. But now we get into some interesting areas. One of the core tenets of postmodern philosophy is that the question of "meaning" is no longer tenable; that as our cultures have become more complex and intermingled (and ironic), there is no longer a meaningful connection between what I write and what you read, between what you say and what I hear. And that gets expressed in a couple of different ways: taste and comprehension. Taste is subcultural – I belong to a group of people who does or does not like Tom Waits, Beyonce, or James Taylor. Those sounds are reassuring to me, help me feel like a certain kind of person (ironic hipster, fashionable clubster, or mellow Yuppie sophisticate, respectively).

But understanding is also subcultural. The vast majority of Americans would not recognize the music of Gavin Bryers or Napalm Death or Nas as music at all. The common parental epithet "Turn down that goddamn noise!" is only partially intended as an insult. "Noise" means, literally, acoustic signals that do not convey information; in language term, symbols with no system of relationships. So when parents listen to the music of their children, they may often be faced with a bewildering array of sounds and no meaningful way to put those sounds together into rules. The writers and performers of that music have meaning in mind – they are conveying something. But if I don't understand the rules, I don't get that meaning, just as I miss almost everything going on around me when I visit a Chinese neighborhood.

Which brings me, in a very sideways fashion, to architecture. Last week, some colleagues and I were discussing the criteria we wanted our students to be able to achieve after they'd gone through some part of our program. And one of the criteria was that they were able to find relevant ideas, analyze them, and use them to create an argument about something that mattered to them. One of my colleagues said that he wished we could create criteria that would more fully express the fact that we were a design school, that wasn't so much about language. Others immediately responded that design should be an argument, that one is making a material stance toward the world. And I completely buy that. But the question I raised, and the one that we collectively haven't resolved yet, is whether the ideas and the analysis and the argument can be conducted wholly through the medium of a visual language, or whether at some points we have to use words and sentences to convey the ideas that created the visual outcomes. In other words, if you're deeply fluent in architecture, can you read someone's thought processes through their drawn and modeled and constructed work, without any words attached? I honestly don't know the answer to that; it may be possible that there are readable ideas throughout the work of the more esoteric architects. I do know that, if there are, they are as unapproachable to me as the conversations of the Vietnamese merchants of downtown Oakland.

So I know that I approach the world of architecture as a limited speaker of visual language, a kind of VSL student. I'll claim that as a weakness. And yet, I'll also put forth that I'm likely more visually literate than most Americans, after years of architectural education and architectural scholarship. So if we're teaching our students a specific idiom of architectural language, are we doing them (or our society) a service by teaching them one that's so thoroughly incomprehensible to most civilians? I can choose to attend or not attend a Napalm Death show; I get no such choice to work in or near a Holl or Piano building, which is just as likely to be understood as "noise:" symbols with no comprehensible rules for relationships.

Programming at an Appropriate Level

2009-04-23T22:52:00.006-04:00

One of the things that design professionals have largely let out of their purview is an activity called programming. A "program" is a document that lays out the criteria for the success of a design project. Too often, it gets minimized to a space list and a budget; sometimes it gets expanded to include preferred or required adjacencies between spaces, and to something of the functional necessities of those spaces (electrical and Internet access, for instance). But it really ought to be something more; it ought to get at the emotional criteria we have for living with it.

I challenged a class of students tonight to develop the program for an architecture school. They had a lot of opinions about what makes a good architecture school, of course – they're experiencing one every day. But the trick is to make sure those comments land at an appropriate level. Here are the four common kinds of comments, from most vague to most specific.

Fog: "We want a building we can be proud of." Well, that's likely true, but it gives me no hint as a designer how to accomplish that. Pride, for you, might be expressed through something ostentatious, or through something immaculately detailed, or through something just plain huge. No way to know which will be most suitable.

Experiential Outcomes: "We want a building that identifies our school as something different than the other uses in the neighborhood – we don't want people to wonder what goes on inside." Now this is something that a designer might have some ideas about.

Strategies: "We ought to make the work we do in the building visible from the outside." That's a little too specific – a good designer might have any number of ways of making the identity of a school understandable that don't entail lots of ground floor windows, which might be counterindicated by other equally valid experiential desires.

Design Resolutions: "The ground floor should be glazed on two sides, from floor to ceiling." That's what you pay your designer to do in construction documents, not what the client should be thinking about early in the imagining stage.

The real trick of doing good programming work is to listen carefully, and to keep bringing the clients back to the level of experiential outcomes. "We should have a Plexiglass barrier at the reception window" is just another way of saying "I want to feel secure at my workplace." "We need another bathroom" is just another way of saying "We need to accommodate the fact that we all get ready for work and school at the same time in the morning." The designer's job is to develop strategies that seem to reach for those stated experiences, perhaps strategies that are more sophisticated and complex and wonderful than the clunky first idea that a client might start with. The longer we can keep our clients holding at the level of those experiential outcomes – up from the strategies and down from the fog – the more likely we'll be to be able to design thoughtful and successful places.

FYI, the list of outcomes we ultimately developed included (in no particular order):

Students should be the primary focus of the buildings
Students need a stable and claimable workplace to inhabit every time they arrive
The circulation needs to accommodate crunch times between classes with students carrying large models
The building should be a learning tool itself
The surrounding neighborhood should also be a learning tool
The building needs to accommodate the work and lifestyle needs of students who commute, and who've already been at a job all day
Student ownership of the spaces – both through control and also through seeing their own work everywhere
The building should help to foster community and repeated interactions with other students
The administration should be "transparent" – students should know where to go to get questions answered and problems resolved, and functions should be co-located so that if their problems require administrative collaboration, the student isn't responsible for trudging all over the building and making sure that one administrator calls another one to get a resolution.

These may seem vague and unresolved. They are unresolved, but they're far from vague; my test for that is that any design student could take this list and examine her or his own physical school environment, and pretty quickly conclude whether or not (and why) the space accomplished these things. That's the kind of criteria that need to be laid out at the beginning of any project, and referred back to at every significant decision. The space list will take care of itself... it's this kind of thinking that will make the place truly satisfying.

90x

2009-04-05T18:22:00.006-04:00

One of the most misunderstood words in our language is "objective." It stems from grammar: the basic form of a simple sentence such as "I saw Juan" has as its components the subject ("I"), the object ("Juan"), and the transitive verb ("saw"). So the idea that something is "objective" means that it, like Juan, stands outside of me, is something that I can regard or act upon without self-impact. When we use it as an evaluative term, "objective" implies that, since the phenomenon is separate from me and my interests, I can regard it without judgment or favor, and merely report on its factual characteristics. (Something "subjective," then, is so bound up with the subject — me — that I can't separate myself from it. I have a stake in it, a preference for it, and so my description is likely to be tainted by my self-interests.)

Quantification is an especially valued marker of objectivity. Something has a specific weight, height, density, duration, cost, chemical content, and so on. If we report those numerical descriptors, we can say that we have been objective, since its weight is its weight regardless of who describes it.

But numbers can sometimes be remarkably subjective. A few days ago, I was sitting in a corporate conference room on the 12th floor of a Boston office tower. The firm in whose conference room I was sitting was one of those distinctly bow-tie Boston financial outfits that specialize in making old money even older. (Its Beacon Hill predecessors had played a special role in colonizing my home state, funding -- and claiming most of the profits from -- the copper mining that gave Michigan's Upper Peninsula its primary reason for European habitation.) Trading rooms lined the hallways, each with its television in the upper corner streaming CNBC or Bloomberg stock-exchange feeds.

Those of us assembled for the buffet lunch were not of the high-finance persuasion. We were instead academics and college administrators, advertising people, high school teachers and students. So our host had to make explicit something that went unsaid in that building every minute of every day. He said, "I worship at the altar of the free market."

No surprise there, though one might equally substitute "trough" for "altar," but never mind. The surprise was a move to the "objective," through the following statement:

The average American family's quality of life is over ninety times that of the average American family of 1776. We'll soon have a quality of life that is more than a hundred times greater.

First to note the distinctly Bostonian, first-families reference to "1776." Yeah, your ancestors signed the Declaration, get over it. But I noticed that only half a minute after I noticed the first thing, which was that our quality of life is ninety times larger than it once was. I had a sort of small synaptic seizure when I heard this, a vapor-lock of the brain. Are we 90x as happy as the Colonials? Do we live 90x as long? Are we having 90x as much sex, or 90x as much religious ecstasy, or 90x as much yogic meditative peace? Does our corn taste 90x better? Is our work 90x more satisfying? Do we hang out 90x as long at the village tavern, playing 90x more music and 90x more games of darts over our 90x more pints of ale? I had a hard time listening to the next fifteen minutes of introductions and platitudes, because I was trying to get my head around this 90x thing.

A standard of living 90x that of two centuries ago. Not 75x, and not 136x, but 90x, and on its way to 100x. That's pretty precise. Seemingly objective. The problem, obviously, lies in the precision of some numerical observation and the remarkably subjective definition of "standard of living" to stand for (inflation-indexed, averaged across the population, based on a six-week rolling mean, blah blah blah) how much money we have. Or, rather, how many things we have and how much they cost. Now, that's not a surprising yardstick to be applied on the 12th floor of a capital-services tower, but it's anything but objective. It's the winners' judgment, since it's how they define their success, and since they take home so much more of that money than you and I do. (That's one of the common errors of averaging when you have a broad range; the old joke is that Bill Gates walked into a bar and the average income was suddenly over $100 million a year...)

But you and I might hold different definitions of "quality of life," having to do with love and bad jokes and good ideas. Reducing quality of life to someone's averaged share of the Gross Domestic Product makes it simultaneously measurable and meaningless.

But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. — Robert F. Kennedy, Address to the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968.

In honor of April Fools' Day

2009-04-01T22:23:00.006-04:00

The worst thing we can do to our children is to convince them that ugliness is normal. -- Rene Dubos.

College of Environmental Design

University of California at Berkeley

Yale School of Architecture

Schools of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning
University of Cincinnati

So Easy...

2009-04-01T22:12:00.002-04:00

I met Dennis Littky about ten years ago, when he and I were both part of the same national organization. Even then, I knew that he and his school partner Elliot Washor were doing something new. And I ran into Dennis again a couple of days ago, and recognized again that he has a gift for being unconstrained. Have a look at the video here ; the whole thing is great, but the story that starts at about a minute twenty is at the heart of Dennis' thinking.

It's really easy to do good work with students. You pay attention to them as individuals, you respect their ideas, and you give them something engaging to do. That's about as much of a recipe as you need. The problem is that we've devised education to do none of those three things. Instead, we pay more attention to the curriculum than the students; we treat students as uninformed and in need of our expertise; and we give them homework that we've created on a schedule that we build for ends that we've decided on. You couldn't intentionally build a more counterproductive system.

Again?!? Really?

2009-03-31T23:22:00.004-04:00

I was reading a college assessment report last week, and one of the lines they quoted was a bit of folk wisdom: If all you ever do is all you ever done, then all you'll ever get is what you already got.

I've already written about Jack Nasar's book Competition by Design, in which he showed how invited competitions almost always result in disastrous buildings. I think that book was published in 1999, so we've had ten years to learn from it. But no... Michigan State's new Zaha Hadid art museum, budgeted for $40 million, came in at first estimates of about four times that (and the firms that created estimates said that they really didn't want to do the building, because they were pretty sure they couldn't make it work). They'd have to heat the roof, because they couldn't figure out any way to control the snow load. (East Lansing, Michigan, latitude 44 degrees north, annual mean snowfall ~50 inches. I mean, they could have just called me for help; at $125 per hour, that information would have cost the design team about $6.40 .)

I can't put much of the blame for this one on Hadid and her office. After all, when children learn that tantrums work, they employ that strategy. When starchitects learn that they don't get called out for being ridiculous, why should they have any incentive to change? This is the client's fault start to finish.

The Madhouse of Now

2009-03-30T19:33:00.002-04:00

Steven Covey, the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, has a knack for stating fairly obvious things in a clear enough way that we actually pay attention to them. You don’t read his work for insights; you read it to recognize the everyday truths you’ve seen a thousand times but didn’t stop to consider.

One of those obvious truths is the difference between actions that are urgent and those that are important. On the surface, we might consider those as synonyms – if it’s urgent, it must be important, right? Well, no, not so much. E-mail is urgent, but often not important. Most of what we see on CNN is urgent, but not important. And in both cases, the sense of urgency is promoted by the medium itself. With e-mail, we write and post a message which arrives at its desktop destination – down the hall in Boston, or at a friend’s computer in Bozeman – within seconds of “send.” And the expectation is that the response will be just as fast, within the day for sure but preferably within the next few minutes. With CNN (and all of the 24-hour news hoses), each story is 60-90 seconds long, followed by a completely unrelated story of about the same length, all of which is underscored by a running “crawl” of headline words, a digital clock, inset screens, and a rotating computer-graphic background. It’s the madhouse of now, bewildering in its uniform urgency.

The big problem is that if we dwell in that land of the urgent all the time, we lose track of the things that really matter, the things that are important. Our relationships, our ideas, our joys and our values are all pushed to the side by the seemingly endless stream of things to be done right now.

I wonder sometimes if our contemporary design culture doesn’t also emphasize the urgent at the expense of the important. I can think of several ways in which design and design education reinforces urgency over importance:

The Attention-Deficit Curriculum. Everybody knows about the architectural tradition of the charette, the brief and intensive work period. Lots of design schools have occasional charette projects – the sketch problem, the weekender, the quick-turnaround competition. But even in standard coursework, the semesters are broken into small units; most studio courses have two to four significant projects over the 15-week stretch. I’m not at all sure why that’s the case, but I think that one of the outcomes is an experience of always starting over. New site, new program, new conceptual issue, go. Work like mad for four or five weeks, get your critique, archive your drawings and photograph your models, and start over with a new one. One of the most fundamental aspects of studio education is its enforced incompleteness; a design can never be taken to a substantial level of sophistication and integration. The concept and the elaboration of that concept are as far as a project can go in five weeks. No strong research is possible, no integration of multiple building systems, no rigorous examination of the program or projection of scenarios for the future uses of the building. Nothing but a new idea and a new shape. This is so universal in design education that I have to imagine it’s intentional. And the intent (the hidden curriculum) can only be to underscore that everything that matters about architecture can be approached in a few dozen hours per project.

The Connection of Architecture with Fashion. The fundamental logic of fashion is turnover, the madhouse of now in perhaps its purest form. And in a hypermodern bubble economy, building “to express the moment” was briefly possible – the notion of a multi-century building wasn’t on anybody’s mind during the past sixty years. The architectural fashion industry keeps pushing for novelty, something new and “fresh” to look at. Real innovation is rare, but novelty is cheap and easily attained.

The Ponzi Landscape. Speaking of the bubble economy, the architectural fashionistas and their developer partners have really been guilty of a Madoff-quality pyramid scheme. Build a new building, make your money back plus a little bit, and build a new and bigger building. The problem is that the suckers…uhh, the clients will have bought a building with no expectation of duration, which will now a) drive a “me too” building boomlet in the neighborhood, resulting in oversupply; b) be seen as outdated and less desirable to commercial tenants or homeowners, themselves in search of fashion by association; and c) require a lot of maintenance of so-so building systems serving gargantuan spaces. There was a terrific piece in The Atlantic last fall about the suburban slums, whole neighborhoods with no homeowners that are being taken over by the homeless or criminal. Our buildings are no different than any other class of assets when they bear the expectation of liquidity and easy turnover. The suburban house is the credit default swap of the material world.

Never Checking Anyone’s Work. Wasn’t it fun earlier this month when Jon Stewart had Jim Cramer on his show, and played clip after clip of predictions that came out to be blindingly incorrect? And it was wonderful because it was so rare to see a pundit asked to account for mistaken assumptions, missed observations, and general brainless cheerleading. Well, friends, what Stewart did there was the media equivalent of a post-occupancy evaluation. Every building, every urban plan, is a prediction of the future; and if we never examine our predictions against later reality, then the architectural punditry will never be accountable for their forecasts. And as much fun as it would be to have Jon Stewart sitting across from some architect bathed is flop-sweat, the real reason to examine predictions is to get smarter at predicting – to be able to more reliably infer how our work will endure, how it will enable, how it will adapt.

So those are four ways that we embrace the immediate and urgent and dismiss the important. But fundamental to all four is that we rarely ask our students or ourselves to name what’s important. If we haven’t named our ideals and aspirations, then urgency is actually pretty comforting, because it distracts us from the larger emptiness of the work we’re asked to do.

On What Evidence?

2008-11-10T22:28:00.001-05:00

Thinking outside the box. Win-Win. Let’s blue-sky this for a while.

The business community has a great habit of inventing catchy titles for everyday ways of being. There was already language in place for each of those three opening examples (creativity, mutual benefit, and suspending constraints), but you can’t sell self-help books that way,

In recent years, a new term has entered the architectural lexicon: evidence-based design. This, for me, is one of those ultimate WTF moments. What other kind of architecture could we possibly practice in any responsible way? But my students tell me regularly that evidence is in short supply in the profession and in their coursework. Design decisions are made on the flimsiest of suppositions — as the architect Herb McLaughlin said thirty years ago, we work structurally and mechanically down to three decimal points, but design for social outcomes by hunch.

The fact that we had to invent the term means that evidence-based design must stand outside the norm (just as creativity isn’t a regular feature of commerce, and hasn’t become any more so now that we call it thinking outside the box). Evidence exists — there is a body of research we could draw upon. But we don’t seek it.

And even more evidence is latent in all of the post-occupancy evaluation that has never been done. I was at an architectural conference at which one of the keynote speakers was the leader of a nanotechnology company, making objects measured in microns. One of the things he told us was that this technology was making sensors (for temperature, particulates, water flow, and all kinds of stuff) dirt-cheap. His challenge to us was “If you could install ten million sensors in your building, what would you measure?” To which one of the audience members, bless her heart, replied, “We already do. They’re called people. And we never collect their data.”

Evidence-based design. I mean, that’s just embarrassing. One would hope, for instance, that there’s no news flashes about evidence-based medicine. Or evidence-based plumbing. The antonyms of “evidence-based” in almost every other field would be “unemployed” or “disbarred” or “imprisoned.”

In the Wee Hours

2008-11-10T22:12:00.004-05:00

One of the best things about teaching is that you learn things. I was at a thesis review meeting a couple of weeks back, and wrangling a bit with one of the other reviewers. He, a professional architect, kept asking the student to focus on “architectural questions,” which for him had largely to do with the quality of direct and reflected light. I, on the other hand, hoped that the student could pursue the programmatic goals of his project, which has to do with experiential learning.

The learning moment for me came when we were discussing the precedent experience that had gotten this student interested in his thesis topic. He’d spent a summer working aboard a marine research ship, both sailing and working in the labs. And he had a photograph of one of the experiments, an elaborate (and utterly homemade) set of tanks and hoses that enabled the study of mollusk behavior. And it struck me that the lead scientist, deeply trained in marine invertebrate behavior, had also had to learn to be a lab technician, building enclosures and gates and regulating salt and fresh water flows and such.

So I grabbed a whiteboard marker and wrote a diagram on the board. I don't have decent drawing software to include it, so draw this for yourselves. I'll wait.

Draw a circle with arrows going around it clockwise.
Write the words "Condition/Circumstance" at 12 o'clock.
Write the words "Interpretation/Evaluation" at 3 o'clock.
Write the words "Supposition/Question" at 6 o'clock.
Write the words "Intervention/Action" at 9 o'clock.

We can suppose this to be a cycle of inquiry through which we rotate clockwise from the top. We encounter some circumstance; we decide what it means and whether we approve; we have a new question about it; we then do something in order to test that question; and that action results in a new circumstance, which we can then investigate again.

Nothing new here. But my insight, spurred by the work of the snail behaviorist, is that the work that drives you are the ones on the right side of the cycle, and the things you do to support that work comes on the left side of the cycle. To go back to our snail study, the condition, interpretation, and question are all about snails; the work of manipulating the tank and the water and the adjacency of predatory crabs are the techniques used to ask questions and change conditions.

And in this clock diagram, I discovered much of why I disagreed with my other panelist, and why I think that the profession has so little to offer to the real issues of the world. For me (and for the student), the work on the midnight-to-6:00 side of the cycle — the things that kept us awake at night — had to do with experiential learning. How could we best support the kind of life-changing experience that my student had on that research vessel that summer? In order to investigate the architectural solutions to that question, we had to make spatial and material tests on the 6:00 to noon side of the cycle. But for my professional-designer counterpart, the whole cycle was about spatial and material conditions.

Let me return to the overall title of this blog. Hannah Arendt posited that some ways of approaching the work we do have only to do with making things — what she called homo faber, or man the maker. But her belief is that we had a further and greater calling to our work: to be social actors, to be citizens, to participate in the life of action, the vita activa.

So there’s my question for today. What keeps you up in the wee hours of the morning? What drives you to take up your work? A person who uses the right-hand side to examine people’s welfare and the left side to make spatial contributions deserves the fullness of the title “architect.” A person who stays in the world of material resolutions around the clock is a technician.

The Dark Ages of Architecture

2008-10-11T09:13:00.006-04:00

One of the worst things about being an administrator is that I don't have nearly enough time to read. I still have 93 unanswered e-mails in my inbox from Wednesday alone. But last night, I took the luxury of not turning on my computer, and instead read a book I'd bought almost two months ago.

Most of us know Jane Jacobs from her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a book that helped all of us understand what made good street life and why modern planning was wiping that out. But since then, she's broadened her scope from the smallest scale of civic life — the neighborhood — to larger structures of governance and culture. One of her final books before she died was 2004's Dark Age Ahead, a cautionary tale of what we might face.

A Dark Age is a culture's dead end. We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of a culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were deciseively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost.

...even the memory of what was lost was also lost. This opening paragraph stands as a premonition for our own culture. Jacobs argues that North American culture — not merely those "primitive" native cultures, but our own high-tech, high speed success — has changed so radically over the past couple of hundred years that we no longer recognize what was, and don't realize the depth of the changes we've accepted.

In the five chapters that follow, I single out five pillars of our culture that we depend upon to stand firm, and discuss what seem to me ominous signs of their decay. They are in process of becoming irrelevant, and so are dangerously close to the brink of lost memory and cultural uselessness. These five jeopardized pillars are:
community and family (the two are so tightly connected they cannot be considered separately)
higher education
the effective practice of science and science-based technology (again, so tightly connected they cannot be considered separately)
taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities
self-policing by the learned professions. (p.24)

And as I was reading this, in the dual contexts of our current economic crises and of my school's attempts to re-frame its curricula, I started to realize why architecture is so thoroughly declining, why the profession is racing headlong into its own Dark Age. Let's take each of Jacobs' five pillars in their order.

Community and Family. I've been working with a lot of young architects over the past couple of years, people in their "internship" or pre-licensure period of their careers. Almost without exception, they talk about the ways in which they feel unsupported in their workplaces, the ways in which their supervisors are unconcerned with their intellectual growth (which, by professional standards, senior architects are obligated to foster), the way in which they are treated as labor rather than partner. This is not how a decent family or community raises its young. And it explains to some extent why the profession has declined so radically in numbers, how in America the 3,000 architects who retire or die each year are replaced by only 1,500 new architects. (It also explains more specifically how the 40% of architecture school graduates who are female becomes the 15% of new architects who are female, according to the Royal Institute of British Architects.)

Higher Education. Jacobs talks about the ways in which the cultural elements of higher education, the opportunity for deep consideration of personal, ethical and historical meaning, has been lost to a culture of credentialism. Almost every college, even the most elite, is now seen as an elaborate provider of job training. Architectural curricula have been headed that way now for a long time. Even coursework in writing and mathematics are seen as useful only inasmuch as they contribute to professional success ("you're going to have to write proposals some day"). Architectural education has lost touch with the larger culture and history that makes any profession meaningful to its society, and aims to produce either sculptors or technocrats depending on the particulars of a school's mission.

The Effective Practice of Science. Kim Tanzer, immediate past president of the American Collegiate Schools of Architecture, says that architecture is the only remaining non-cumulative
academic discipline. I find myself enormously frustrated when I hear design students say that people will do certain things or respond in certain ways in the places they have drawn and modeled. I find myself even more frustrated when nobody in the room says "How do you know that's what people will do? What evidence base are you drawing upon to make those claims?" There's a great deal of research on the specific ways in which people use and encounter places — not nearly enough, of course, but that's true in every field. But architecture is the only academic field I've ever encountered in which we make crucial interventions in people's lives with only the most vague handwaving about why it will have certain effects. That would be seen as criminally irresponsible if a pharmacist did it with a dozen patients; how much worse that we do it with interventions that will affect thousands.

Taxes and Governmental Powers Directly in Touch with Needs and Possibilities. The AIA, which is the governing body in charge of the profession, seems from my non-member perspective to have systematically helped to diminish the profession's possibilities. Needs assessment, programming, and post-occupancy evaluation — the actions from which the field can actually learn how to serve its public — are not part of the standard contract sequence. The profession doesn't advocate for a specific research agenda, or frankly for the value of research at all. The AIA missed the boat on sustainability, with LEED standards growing from the early-90's work of Rob Watson and the Natural Resources Defense Council into a stand-alone organization called the U.S. Green Building Council. The AIA missed the boat on the 1970s launching of environment-behavior studies, a body of knowledge toward which architectural education remains mostly hostile. It seems to be an organization in a defensive crouch, prepared to defend against turf encroachment rather than to stand up and move where it believes society needs to go.

Self-Policing by the Learned Professions. I've already written about the ways in which architecture is not founded on a core of ethical principles. So how can a profession monitor the behaviors of its members if it isn't trying to adhere to a set of principles? Doctors get disciplined when they harm patients, because one of the core principles is the remedy of suffering. Lawyers get disbarred when they act corruptly, because the principle of justice is at the heart of their work. So what is it, exactly, that might get an architect disciplined by the profession as a whole? The AIA's Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct is a meager document, focused on standard business and contractual ethics rather than anything specific having to do with the unique contributions of architecture to families, businesses, and communities.

I foresee a Dark Age of architecture... perhaps already upon us, but certainly soon to come unless we take immediate corrective action. Jacobs lays out five core areas of action; they may not be the only ones, but they seem to me to be at least places to start.

The Emotional Cost of Drywall

2008-10-10T13:36:00.002-04:00

I was just in a newly finished space a few days ago. A lecture hall designed to seat about 100 or so folks. It was just completed (smelled like paint and carpet glue...), and perfectly clean. I looked around -- fresh, bright, new carpet, 100 new comfortable chairs all around, high-tech presentation gear installed -- and I thought, "This feels like a place to wait for jury duty."

It's hard to make the economic case for good spaces. (After the past couple of weeks, it's hard to make the economic case for much of anything beyond bare survival...) But if we believe that architecture has emotional importance, that we can inspire people to learn and achieve through the richness of the place they inhabit, then we need to study carefully what makes a place emotionally resonant. It has something to do with form, but only just a little, I think. Rather, it has to do with the way in which we can lose ourselves in a place, where we're repeatedly rewarded by interesting details and information-rich materials.

I've made this case before, but I really think that we start architectural education from the wrong end. Do small, simple, real things. Detail a window opening. Work to make the floor material encounter the base of a wall in a deep and compelling way. Eventually, once you're good at that, we'll let you maybe put a room together. After a while of that, we'll let you put a suite of rooms and connecting spaces together. It would be several years before I'd let my students muck around with building massing and form. Because that's not what makes places beloved.

Why Ethnography Matters

2008-10-02T23:00:00.005-04:00

I just finished watching the Palin-Biden debate, and I understand more than ever what social class means in America. Prior to the debate, I was reading the most current issue of The New Yorker, a magazine clearly aimed at the well educated urbanite. In a piece early on about Obama campaigning in Appalachian Virginia, the writer used the word "Nascar."

Sorry, wrong answer.

It's NASCAR, all caps, an acronym standing for the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing. You don't get to live in America any more and not know how to spell NASCAR.

And then the debate came on, and Palin spoke the following pronunciations:

"eye-RACK" for Iraq
"eye-RAN" for Iran
"Noo-kya-lar" for nuclear

You think those are errors? You think, after eight years of reporters calling Bush out for mispronouncing "nuclear," that Palin would make the same mistake?

I feel like a conspiracy theorist pointing this out, so let me start out with some bona fides: my dad dropped out of high school in 10th grade, worked as a factory machinist for his entire life, and I have a Ph.D. I'm what Alfred Lubrano calls a "straddler," a person with a foot in both worlds and at home in neither.

So here's my thinking. Palin very clearly pronounces those words as a signal to a certain population (small town, rural, working-class, not very well educated) that she understands them, that she's not one of those fancy-pants New Yorkers or Washington Insiders that have caused so much trouble over the past decades. Biden, in control of the facts, doesn't address the emotional connection being made. He throws out numbers, he throws out truths about the misdeeds of the administration, he helps us realize the scale of the problems we face. But none of those facts will go as far as being seen as "one of us," being seen as a hockey mom who "gets" the day-to-day problems faced by good old American families.

This election is about identity. Who do you feel more comfortable with? Do you want to have a beer with Sarah, or a dinner with Biden? And ethnographers, people who can live with others extensively and understand their values, are uniquely situated to understand identity issues and how they're expressed through things like spellings and pronunciations.

George Lakoff is right. Elections are not won on facts, but on frames. It doesn't matter that much of what Palin said tonight will be revealed tomorrow to be incorrect. What matters is that she comforts people who feel left behind, who feel powerless.

Dammit.

Resisting Emotion

2008-08-22T22:20:00.002-04:00

I assigned my students a project today — to develop a set of ethical principles that could drive their professional lives, and then to respond to the principles derived by their colleagues. As I transcribed that session this evening, I was more and more discouraged. A large component of their responses, probably about than a third, could only be described as "smart-ass." And one of my former students who I invited to participated said afterward (in paraphrase), "They're a lot more abusive of one another than we were."

I think there are a couple of mechanisms we use to distance ourselves from circumstances that make us uncomfortable. One is irony, the saying of things we don't mean; the other is a form of absurdism that's not so much about the object of ridicule as it is about the unimportance of pretty much anything. An example of the first is a response to the principle "We don't just go through the motions" that read "We skip a few." An example of the second is a response to the principle "Value everything" that read "even sea monkeys."

I'll admit that I'm tired (and old), but I can't help feeling some despair in the face of the ideas of professional ethics being dismissed so easily. We go for the quick joke, the sitcom one-liner. I think I can build on this, because I think these responses reflect a discomfort with their daily professional lives that I can continue to push — their comments are a veneer atop some real disillusionment over their chosen careers. But I wonder what our environments would be like if we privileged earnestness over glibness, if we rewarded silence and reverence in the face of things we don't understand rather than quick first responses.

Come on, take a walk with me darlin', tell me who do you love?

2008-08-15T07:28:00.004-04:00

I thought some more this morning about the idea of narrative design. And it occurred to me that you have to have a peculiar, somewhat non-professional way of thinking in order to do it well. You have to think like a writer, to get inside people's way of living, to really work hard to understand what it is that they do and value and believe. And that not only is way difficult and takes a lot of time, but it actually de-emphasizes the outcomes of our work in some complicated ways. If you're going to be a good _____ (your choice -- teacher, architect, parent, anything dealing with providing for the welfare of others), then you have to love those people more than you love the thing you're making.

The building is nothing. The lives of the people who will encounter it are what matters, and the building, if it has any value at all, works in ways that benefit them. And they get to define "benefit," not you. You can help them think more deeply about the benefits they may be overlooking, you can help them prioritize from among all of the wonderful things a place might provide, but in the end, the building does not belong to you.

There's an easy proxy for this hard work, of course, and that's building for your client. But aside from the rare case of single family homes, your client merely provides the checkbook. She or he also is making something that will touch the lives of countless others. So architects may have to hold an extra serving of love to make up for the developer's balance sheet, may have to find ways to serve the larger community that don't cost extra money and thus get value-engineered out of the project.

Working this way is not lucrative. It requires a lot of non-billable hours. And it doesn't get you much attention. But on those rare occasions when you do get to sleep, you sleep well.

Designing Nothing

2008-08-05T18:18:00.002-04:00

I'm reworking Chapter 2 of Sennett's book, a chapter called The Neutral City. Before I get into this, though, I just want to say that no one should be allowed to have as many ideas in a lifetime as Sennett works through in just these 30 pages or so. My work is much more humble than his. I want to talk about the ways in which space has been privileged in design and design education.

Designers seem to have three different conceptual areas of attention, which they manage or ignore in differing proportions. These conceptual foci are surface, object, and space. You can pretty easily read which concept was most central to a designer when you encounter her or his work. For instance, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown have made a career out of work in surface (a focus on what they call "the decorated shed," a building whose form is less important than the signs that the form carries). Graves' Portland Building and Holl's Simmons Hall are both fundamentally surface buildings. Lots of designers do object buildings, so it's hard to pick on anyone in particular. Let's say Gehry's Bilbao, Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum, Foster's Gherkin. And there are some designers who are fundamentally interested in issues of space: Peter Eisenman comes to mind, as does Tadao Ando and (earlier) Alvar Aalto.

This is not to say that any one of this bunch, or anyone else, is wholly focused on one of the three elements to the utter exclusion of the other two. It's just an area of particular interest.

So the attention to surface and form are clearly art impulses. The only things you can do with them is consider them, regard them. We might imagine space to be the most humane of the three, but I'll tentatively argue that it might be the most hostile. Why? Because there's an understood connection between space and habitation (at least at the scale of a building); space allows me to be in, to dwell, to move. So when space becomes the overt object of intervention and manipulation, the designer isn't just messing with my intellect; s/he's messing with my lived experience, actively disorienting me, intentionally belligerent toward my history of occupancy.

For architects who design space, the belligerence may be unintentional. They may not want me to be disaffected or confused. They may not be thinking of me at all. They may be working at a far higher conceptual plane, actively engaged in the design of volume (which is to say, the design of nothing, the design of absence). That's interesting for sculptors and glass artists, but irresponsible for environmental designers.

Here's a fourth arena of design intentions, far less well considered among architects and interior designers but thoroughly addressed in the theater: design for narrative. How can we design for experience, for sequence, for social action, for political progress, for family harmony? What kinds of spaces contain and foster curiosity, aspiration, self-esteem, resiliency? What kinds of spaces contain and foster rebellion, equity, collaboration, belonging? What does love look like, smell like, feel like, sound like in space?

There's a meager version of this that we do when we engage in basic programming. What's the stuff, what's the tasks, what's the materials, what's the sequences? That's narrative reduced to a plot sequence, the richness of literature reduced to "this guy was writing, and a crow came by and kept saying 'Nevermore,' and the guy freaked out." But it addresses none of the complexities of our inner lives, of our social lives, of our fears and aspirations. It's a reduction of humans to another material flowing through the assembly line.

Now, one might say that design for narrative is impossible, that there's no way of knowing what kinds of places will be beloved or inspiring or fearful. I don't believe that's true — but if it were true, then architecture would be of no value whatsoever.

Retreat Pt. 2 — The Clock and the Watch

2008-08-02T14:42:00.003-04:00

On the weekends and when I'm on vacation, I make it a point to leave my watch on the dresser. I appreciate the liberation from structure, discovering at 2:15 that I haven't had lunch yet, sleeping until I wake up.

Sennett makes the differentiation, though, between two different kinds of timepieces: the clock in the public square and the private wristwatch.

The monastery was a closed world in which the hours and their parts were reckoned by listening to the bells, and this same marking of time through bells of course continued in the churches of the Renaissance cities. These ringing bells marked the ritual moments during the day, the mount of time lapsing between one sacred duty and the next. The machinery that produced little mechanical dramas when the hours struck, in Venice or other cities — such as a bell ringer popping out of a concealed compartment to pound on a drum while the church rang out its hours — reinforced the ritual of the moment. Practical time required instead reckoning how much time was passing between these little dramas. The quantification of the time in between, of time elapsing in units, was the time shown on clock faces; in this sense, secular time meant visible time without ritual. (p.178)

I've spent a fair bit of time in two small towns whose volunteer fire departments mark the noon hour by sounding the fire horn. And when I hear them, I only partly think "Oh, it's noon." More thoroughly, I think "Here I am in this place, among these people." There is a sensory specificity to the workings of community — smelling the yeast from the brewery or the brine from the marsh, feeling the damp chill of morning fog or the dry cool of desert sundown — that cannot be replaced by mechanical engineers. The 72-degree, still-air, constant humidity interior environment that HVAC technicians shoot for is an individual conceit, the making of animal comfort for each of the animals in the building. So perhaps one of the aspects of places that really mark us is not so much that we feel at home there, but rather that we feel part of a community that feels at home there.

So many of our "communal" experiences now are really individual experiences simultaneously undergone by many at once. Television is the perfect example: it may well be that 30 million people watched each episode of Seinfeld, but almost all in ones and twos. We experience traffic jams as individuals and subway crowds as individuals. No one has caused them, no one comments on them, they just are. Maybe this is why sports (especially college sports) draws such a vocal and unified response — for at least the duration of the game or the season, individuals can take on a meaningful group identity larger than their families. My Duke students used to talk about how "We" beat NC State or UConn in a basketball game, and I was always amused by the degree they took ownership over the work of a dozen mercenaries who shared almost none of their daily student-life experience. Looking back, I think they were smarter than I was — they accepted that they were part of a community that had multiple ways of expressing itself, but they were able to take joy in each of the expressions even if they individually had nothing to do with it. Just as I take pleasure in a place with a volunteer fire department that sounds the horn at noon.

Perfecting Retreat

2008-07-28T20:49:00.003-04:00

I've been reading Richard Sennett's 1990 book The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (I'm about to assign it to a class). I'm early on, but on page 23, Sennett reminds us of the 19th Century work of one of the pioneers of sociology, Ferdinand Tonnies. Even in early-industrial Germany 125 years ago, Tonnies saw a marked difference in social life between two kinds of communities:

The vision of an interior in whose warmth people open up was enshrined in the jargon of the social sciences by Ferdinand Tonnies when he coined the opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft represented to him a "face-to-face" social relationship in a place that was small and socially enclosed, while Gesellschaft was a more exposed, mute exchange. Buying a stewpot in a corner shop where you chat and bargain was an experience suffused with Gemeinschaft, whereas buying the same stewpot in a department store in silence was an operation in the domain of Gesellschaft. (p.23)

And as I was reading this, I was pondering the ability to spend so much of our lives in isolation. Certainly, shopping is increasingly isolated; not only do we not have meaningful social exchange in the aisles of our supermarket, or even at the checkstand, but we purchase more and more of our goods online (the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that "e-commerce" represented about 3% of all goods and services purchased in the first quarter of 2006, up from about half a percent in 1999; the growth is pretty much linear and constant).

But aside from shopping, we've invented fascinating ways to be private in public. First the Walkman and now the iPod allow us to have our own soundtrack, and to make it clear to others that we don't care to be interrupted. We regularly see people walking together on a sidewalk but each immersed in her or his own cell phone call. The car is a sensory isolation booth, encasing us in steel and glass and again with the stereo as an auditory buffer.

At work, the interoffice phone replaced the walk down the hall, and the e-mail replaced the interoffice phone. I'm speaking to you (whoever you might be) from my keyboard in an otherwise empty house. I go to the gym in the morning, surrounded by thirty other people engaged in the same activity, all of us wordlessly staring in bovine fixation at the televisions mounted from the ceiling. (I was in a hotel a couple of years ago that had a 5" television installed under the button panel in each elevator. God forbid that I should have to ride up to the 12th floor without passive entertainment.)

Until about 1920 or so, if you wanted to hear music, you had to go to a physical location and listen to people present in the same room with you. Now, we not only listen to music electronically transported across space on physical media or radio waves, we regularly listen to dead people (two of the Beatles, for instance, or all of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, or Mark Sandman of Morphine — an extensive list of the dead-and-still-popular, as you might imagine). The sociologist Ray Oldenberg says that in the 1930s post-Prohibition era, 90% of all alcohol consumed in America was drunk in bars and restaurants; by 1990, it was only 30%.

We have television to bring us to a bar "where everybody knows your name," or into families where mute silence is not the norm.

I spend my days with all my friends
They're the ones on who my life depends
I'm gonna miss them when the series ends

(Steven Wilson, "Prodigal," from the 2001 Porcupine Tree album In Absentia)

And even within our homes, we increasingly have custom rooms into which we seal ourselves from one another. The historian Albert Eide Parr writes of the difference in family life when the home was both heated and lit by a single fire. Bedrooms were not places of private activity; they were cold and dark, and you did nothing but sleep there. The entire family spent the evenings together in one room, and social life was by necessity quite different. Now each child's bedroom (not to mention our own) is a fully equipped recreation and entertainment venue; as one parent said, "Now that he's got cable TV in there, he'll never come out except to use the bathroom and maybe to get something to eat."

We seem to be perfecting the notion of retreat, of escape from a world we find difficult and tense and dangerous. There was a French movement of the financial aristocracy away from urban life after a particularly corrupt monarchy in 1830s, which was called the emigration interieure — they fled the cities for their own private domains. We have our own emigration interieure, facilitated by the landscapes and toys that divide us from one another.

Our Ruthless Utopias

2008-07-22T21:50:00.005-04:00

On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure time for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

I guess I never thought of Donald Fagen (half of Steely Dan) and Le Corbusier in the same context before, but Fagen's 1982 song "I.G.Y." is the ironic commentary to the Plan Voisin. Wipe out the past, build the perfect new society and its forms, and we'll all have chocolate and kittens forever.

There have been no end of utopias, in literature and in architecture. And if you really stand back and think about what life would be like there, you discover just how ruthless their creators are. Everyone gets along... because everyone has the same political or religious beliefs. Everything is aligned... because there's no one in the photograph to mess it up. All signs of discord have been squashed (pleasantly, of course), all pain and suffering is banished (because we all have come from eugenically strong stock), and all decisions are wise (because we all agree on the nature of wisdom). As the Talking Heads told us twenty-five years ago, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens."

Stewart Brand, in his book How Buildings Learn, makes the claim that "total design" results in buildings that are almost entirely unable to accommodate fluid uses. A place perfectly designed for X is perfectly useless for all not-X. Back in my undergrad days at Berkeley, Paul Groth used to talk about the 19th Century landscape as the "isonomic order," in which things were made to be interchangeable. The land was gridded so that one parcel was the same size as the next; building structural systems were created in uniform rectangular bays so that a piano factory might become a newspaper printing plant might become yuppie condos. Groth claims, by contrast, that the 20th Century landscape constitutes the "monomic order," or a series of objects good only for their one specific use. The Interstate Highway System, airports, Kmarts, parking lots, drive-through restaurants... all of these resist creative re-use. There aren't many kinds of clients that need 70,000 square feet of space with four truck docks and 800 parking slots; that Kroger supermarket isn't going to become a bookstore or a grade school any time soon. The "perfect fit" seals us in amber, unable to change. We learn to behave in ways that accommodate the things that we have designed.

We can't design for mannequins, all the same size/age/gender/culture/politics. People are funny and flawed and wonderful, and I don't want to live in a utopia that flattens all of that delight.

Our Diminished Vocabulary

2008-07-11T08:34:00.002-04:00

I know you're all sick of this topic, but I'm going to do the "art" thing one more time. I just heard someone say yesterday that teaching was both an art and a science, and the light bulb went on over my head (the fact that I was interviewing someone for a job at the time went off to the side while I thought about art and science for a couple of minutes...)

Everybody, it seems, wants to describe their work as "both an art and a science." Medicine is the science of biology combined with the art of diagnosis and bedside manner; teaching is the science of pedagogy and the art of classroom interaction; politics is the science of polling and the art of connection and persuasion; blah blah blah. I think that all of these usages are just failures of vocabulary, imagining that all human endeavors have to fall in one of those two categories because there aren't any others.

Let's have a richer array of possibilities, please. Let's imagine that there are a great number of ways of interacting with the world -- science, yes of course, and art too, but also craft, design, interpretation, advocacy, and translation (at least -- probably lots of others). Just because some action relies on firm knowledge or responds to the physical world doesn't make it a science, and just because it requires discretion and judgment doesn't make it an art.

Well, I WAS on Vacation...

2008-07-08T15:14:00.003-04:00

It's funny how life happens. I'd intended to do a ton of work last week on the manuscript, and was in fact really productive for the first half of the week. Then I just sort of quit. Part of it was cooking all day for the 4th of July community potluck (this is a town of about 500 permanent residents, and I'm going to say that there were at least 150-200 people at this thing). Part of it was emotional reactions to some work and life circumstances. Part of it was just vacation downtime.

I still feel good about being 18 pages ahead of where I was two weeks ago, but it could have been more like 50 if I'd kept it together.

I did, however, watch another movie (my second in a week, which means probably my third this year). Charlie Wilson's War was on pay-per-view, and it was fabulous! So fabulous, in fact, that we watched it twice back-to-back. I don't think I've ever done that.

So back to work. I'm leading a hiring committee this week, which is fun and nerve-racking at the same time. I just want everybody to do well... but if they all do, then I'm going to have a terrible time making a decision. I guess that's a good problem to have.

Writing Day 3

2008-07-02T13:11:00.002-04:00

Didn't get much writing done yesterday. Cat food, cat litter, tomato cages, haircut, groceries, friend visiting in the afternoon, dinner and a movie. Sounds kind of like a vacation, doesn't it?

(The movie, by the way, was Sex and the City. My partner and I went to see it at Aimie's Dinner and a Movie in Glens Falls NY; it's a halfway decent restaurant that shows a first-run movie during dinner. So the room was completely packed, with only one empty table — and there were 39 women in the room and only 4 men. Lots of "girls' night out" tables. The movie was cute, in its way, but also frustrating. Money was always available and never discussed. Whenever anyone wanted anything, they bought it with no regard for where the money was coming from. Manhattan would indeed be a fun place if your pockets were constantly replenished...)

But today (I'm writing this at 1:00 in the afternoon) has been really productive. I've pushed forward another five pages or so, and I'm working on reasons why architecture — while it makes use of science — is not a science itself. That's a surprisingly difficult and nuanced argument to make, while the argument about art came fairly easily. So the challenge is terrifically fun.

One of the things I know about myself is that I'm pretty useless when I try to concentrate in the afternoon. I'm good from 6:00 to noon or so, and then again from 7:00 to 11:00 or so at night. But between noon and 7, all I can do is answer e-mails, browse the web, or go to meetings; I just don't focus well enough to be able to read or write seriously. So I have to manage my schedule well enough to not waste particular times of day on the things that don't fall naturally during those hours.

Writing Day 2

2008-07-01T11:23:00.002-04:00

So yesterday I turned my attention to likely the most contentious element of my entire argument, and the one that I started this blog with three months ago — that architecture is not an art. I still feel confident about that assertion, and worked yesterday with a little bit of aesthetic theory and philosophy in order to make my terms clearer.

But one of the things that became immediately apparent, and that I remember from prior research projects, is the need for extensive library resources. When I was at Duke, I had access to over five million physical books and bound journals, and nearly 400 academic databases. The library's budget was larger than the budget for my entire college now (and also employed nearly as many staff, and occupied significantly more square footage). Now I have access to one and a half databases — the Avery Index of Art and Architecture, and a subset of ProQuest.

First off, there's something already incorrect about Avery's linkage of art and architecture, but I won't go there. The more important thought is that most disciplines rely on a restricted body of knowledge that their practitioners feel to be "at its core." And that conception of core knowledge is terrifically constraining. As we increasingly imagine scholarship to be interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, we need to make connections across a broader range of disciplines, in ways that each scholar will map out for herself or himself. My first major research project resulted in a degree from a school of architecture, although my committee members were an architectural historian, an environmental psychologist, a cultural geographer, an art historian and critic, and a novelist. When the book appeared, the publisher catalogued it under Cultural Studies/Sociology, and it was nominated for a book award through the American Sociological Association. It's now been used in college classes in (at least) architecture, youth studies, anthropology and education.

This range was only possible because I was able to use the work of anthropologists, architects and architectural theorists, compositionists, consumer researchers, cultural geographers, economists, educational theorists, historians, material culture researchers, media theorists, nonfiction authors, philosophers, psychologists, public policy researchers, sociologists, women's studies researchers, and urban planners. When you study a topic, you find that lots of people have had lots of great things to say about it, and those people come from a lot of different backgrounds.

Architecture is like that. We're all surrounded all the time by the built world, so it's no surprise that good thinking about buildings comes from almost any discipline you can imagine. If we were to do a good job of educating architects, we'd ensure that their instruction reflected this breadth of knowledge.

Writing Day 1

2008-06-30T12:35:00.003-04:00

Back when I was working on my first book, I took copious notes all day, and then came home, fired up the mighty 386 (an archaic computer, children, which ran at about 5% of the processor speed of my inexpensive MacBook), and wrote for an hour or two about what was on my mind. In the end, when it came time to write the book, I found myself lifting a lot of the analytical material directly from those immediate musings. The language was more raw and honest, it expressed the sense of surprise I still felt at the end of that day's observations, and with a little tweaking, the wordcraft was good.

I'm on vacation for a week, sitting in a little house in Middletown Springs VT and working on Nonfiction Architecture. And I've found myself back in that happy place of having usable material already created from the blogs. I finished much of the introductory chapter yesterday, and maybe 10% of it or so was recast directly from blog material. But it's not just numerical proportion that matters. Clearly, what I've been writing about in the blog are ideas that I care about, the things that will be at the center of the larger argument. So even though the words that I'm moving over are a small percentage of the total, they act as the diamonds around which I now get to build the settings. (Okay, so maybe "diamonds" sounds a little self-assured, but you get my drift...) And those settings will be primarily made up of the sequencing of ideas, and the research that supports them.

I sometimes forget how fun this is to do. As they used to say in Peace Corps recruitment ads, it's the toughest job you'll ever love.

Well, THAT Didn't Work...

2008-06-28T20:24:00.002-04:00

As Robert Burns reminds us, the best laid plans o' mice and men gang aft agley, and lea' us naught but pain and grief for promis'd joy.

My thought was that I'd knock out 15 or 20 minutes of blogging at the end of each day of my Cranbrook (Thurs-Fri-Sat) and CUR (Sun-Mon-Tue) adventures. But instead, I ended up connecting with old friends and making new ones until midnight or later every night, and getting up at 5:30 or so the next morning to prep for the day, and I didn't have 15 or 20 minutes left in me.

I think this is a good thing.

I can say that the Cranbrook conference was easily the highlight of my academic year. I was part of a remarkable team of young scholars, and facilitated a conversation in which we did the inductive work of examining our own experiences for common themes. I'll post more about some of those after a bit (sure you will, Herb...), but I wanted to say here that we worked ourselves into a position where we believed that rather than teaching a skill set, design faculty need to be fostering a mindset.

Here's another thing that arose. We had started to agree that innovation was a change that had been adopted by a community and had become the base for future work. But that retrospective attribution, the idea that we can only recognize innovation after the fact and through its acceptance, implies that innovation is not a verb. Maybe we can't meaningfully say that we “innovate,” but only that some action is later seen to have been “innovative.” And if we can’t innovate, then we can’t teach anyone else how to innovate, either.

Anyway, I'm on a writing vacation this coming week, so I think I'll be somewhat more blog-active than I was last week. See you soon.

American Bauhaus

2008-06-19T23:25:00.005-04:00

We started our Cranbrook afternoon with a tour of the grounds, focusing especially on the Saarinen House. It was extraordinarily detailed — leaded glass, fluted layers of plaster with pinstriped edges, handwoven rugs and upholstery, custom furniture and its marquetry, custom radio shells and steam-radiator grilles, handcast lamps. It was all lovingly restored, based on old photographs — we all had to remove our shoes and wear special little booties because the wooden floor had recently been stained and hand-waxed.

It's become a kind of religious icon, in a way that goes beyond excess to a kind of creepiness. They had the original dishes and glassware (designed by Eliel's daughter Pipsen). The curator told a story of a couple of preservationists visiting Eero's house and gasping in recognition that they'd found Eliel's original handmade bath mat. It struck me in many ways like the friendless and reclusive middle-aged man who collects and catalogs original 1950's 45 rpm records. It's nice to have a hobby, but it's not like this house was occupied by Moses...

The degree of handwork, though, was remarkable. We often think of the numerous servants employed by the well-to-do: the maids, gardeners, drivers, nannies, secretaries. But we don't nearly as often realize the larger number of craftsmen who make all of that customized stuff. And our image of design, the things we see in photographs, is deeply affected by the near-perfection afforded by dumping acres of money onto every object. I found myself deeply torn between my love of hand craft and the socialist headaches I often get when faced by so much consumed by so few.

Oh, yeah, the conference...

So last year there were 110-120 people at the conference, which was about Integrated Practice and BIM. I very much enjoyed it, because we were divided for much of the weekend into working groups of ten or so who responded to the problem posed for us. I was worried that it might be too large this year, and that working focus might be lost.

I needn't have invested any concern over that. We've got about 50 people registered. I think the reason for the small number is twofold: one is shrinking institutional budgets and the cost of jet fuel, and the other is that BIM is sexy and research is just reallyreallyhard.

The opening session had all three conference organizers — Max Underwood, James Timberlake, and Stephen Kieran — talk for ten minutes or so. The highlight for me was Kieran's differentiation between innovation and invention. "Invention is cheap. Novelty is a dime a dozen, but real innovations are hard-won. They have to perform, and they have to change the baseline for what comes after." His advice was to quit teaching studios with new problems posed, and instead have students return to the same problems and the same emerging resolutions for several semesters so that they can have some deeper understanding of the work and of their own practice. I'm all for that — I really do think that one of the traits most rewarded by current studio practice is a kind of glibness, the quick and impressive surface with little beneath it.

Kieran also said that he begins with the assumption that our actions reflect our values, so why does American studio education focus on inventive form-making? He believes that we've separated the art and the science into "looping dead ends" with no opportunity for dialogue. I still think that both art and science are unhelpful terms for design, which is its own thing.

Finally, the keynote speaker was Brent Siegel, a chemist who is now COO of Nantero, a nanotechnology firm making unimaginably small objects for use in electronics and health care. He believes that nanotechnology is going to be important for materials science, and that architecture needs to be out in front of lightweight materials, dirt-shedding surfaces, glass that changes its transparency in response to sunlight, film-thin solar collectors, and other nano-enhanced materials that have the opportunity to revolutionize the profession (and our environments).

After his talk, my question/comment from the audience was that this kind of research is seductive, both because it has the appeal of being scientific and certain but also because it talks about what designers are so easily brought back to — the object. We lose track of the outcomes, of our goals. If our goal is social justice, how can a material help us? If our goal is organizational effectiveness, how can a material help us? Lighter, cheaper, faster, that's all fine... but in the service of what? There's no glazing system anyone can build that will help us recover Detroit. I think this is a theme I'm likely to return to quite a lot this weekend. We're changing the world, and using buildings to help us do that. That's the kind of research I want to focus on.

Stay Tuned...

2008-06-18T23:22:00.003-04:00

I hate flying. Not so much the being up in the air in an aluminum test tube, but rather the endless hanging around in unpleasant environments over which I have no control. But I'm selflessly off to several flights over the next week, first to the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills MI (I tell people I'm going to Detroit, which is true as far as airports go... but Bloomfield Hills is to Detroit what Beverly Hills is to Compton) for the annual AIA/ACSA Teacher's Conference. The topic this year is on the nature of research in design education and in the profession, and I'll look forward to being part of these discussions. It's usually quite a small conference, and we break up into working groups of ten or so to respond to the problems that are framed.

Anyway, your tireless correspondent will post a conference update after each day's work so that you reap the benefits of attendance without the air travel or the $450 registration fee. You can thank me later...

On Sunday, Cranbrook will be over, and I'll be off to my second conference, the biennial meeting of the Council on Undergraduate Research. I've been part of CUR for about five years, and chair of the Social Science Division for the past three. I might blog from there as well if something seems especially pertinent.

You can sleep well, knowing that your intrepid reporter is on the case.

EP4 -- All Brains and No Heart

2008-06-11T10:37:00.002-04:00

So here's the paradox of the day. I've written a lot about the ways in which buildings have deep responsibilities to their clients, inhabitants and neighbors. And I've also written about the ways in which we have loads of social, economic, and material research that can help us be more fully successful in our work. So it would be easy to conclude that I'm a strict rationalist, that I'm fully invested in quantification and objectivity and emotionless evaluation.

But that's not the case. I've spent my research career trying to understand why people love some places and feel oppressed by others and are neutral toward still others. That's one of my deepest goals -- that everyday folks (not particularly architects, but the other 99.7% of the population) love the places they find themselves in, that they feel fondness and affection for their homes and streetscapes and workplaces, and feel themselves to be greater because of the everyday places in their lives.

But that goal is not an art impulse, especially not for the art of the 20th Century. Art (visual art, musical art, literary art, performance art, you name it) is now seen as an intellectual challenge, an opportunity to encounter something unsettling with which we must come to terms. And being unsettled, being challenged, is quite counter to the nature of place, which is all about the narrative emotional relationships we build with our settings. We imagine that design needs to have a "concept," a term I still remain fuzzy about but the outcomes of which I see regularly. Why do buildings need to have a concept? My clothes don't have a concept. My pool cue doesn't have a concept. My cat doesn't have a concept. And they all make me happy.

One of my greatest problems with the past century of architecture is that it's all brain and no heart, all "challenge" and no love. I mean, I've got a busy job and a 14-year-old car and gas is $4.20 a gallon. I've got enough challenges in my life without my buildings pitching in with another one. So knock it off, 'kay? Can you build me a home that will offer me comfort? Can you create a workplace that makes us more collegial? Can you create a subway station that makes my commute more pleasant? Can you build a streetscape that people want to hang out on? Those are the questions I want us to solve together, not some concept that distracts us from the real work. And oddly enough, I think there is a body of research that can help us build beloved places (rather than interesting buildings), because there are beloved places (rather than interesting buildings) in the world that we can study.

Today's quote is from the musician Brian Eno, on discovering the music of Harold Budd: "I was handed this tape by Gavin Bryars in the mid-Seventies; it struck something very personal in me. It was music that could seduce. If there's only a conceptual underpinning and no seduction, that doesn't make it for me." We imagine that reaction is unique to each of us, which absolves us of the need to take responsibility for how others encounter our designs. But although there are likely no absolutes (Chris Alexander would differ and insist strongly that there are), there are both central tendencies and understandings of culture that will help us be able to predict emotional outcomes.

One of them, by the way, is allowing people to make decisions about their places. There are a jillion stories, some true and some apocryphal, about architects returning to a house they've designed and going bat-crazy because the owner brought in some piece of furniture or a throw pillow that didn't "fit the design." Architects have often taken pretty tight control over the furnishings of their spaces -- that kind of intellectual unity photographs well, but it doesn't live comfortably, because it denies the choices of the people who live with it.

EP3 — CYA

2008-06-09T20:32:00.005-04:00

I don't have a whole lot of regard for Corbusier, but I have to give him credit for one thing — he had MASSIVE amounts of self-regard. Here's a brief passage from The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton:

In September 1936, six years after the villa's official completion, Madame Savoye compressed her feelings about the performance of the flat roof into a (rain-splattered) letter: "It's raining in the hall, it's raining on the ramp, and the wall of the garage is absolutely soaked. What's more, it's still raining in my bathroom, which floods in bad weather, as the water comes in through the skylight." Le Corbusier promised that the problem would be fixed straightaway, then took the opportunity to remind his client of how enthusiastically his flat-roofed design had been received by architectural critics worldwide: "You should place a book on the table in the downstairs hall and ask all your visitors to inscribe their names and addresses in it. You'll see how many fine autographs you will collect." But this invitation to philography was of little comfort to the rheumatic Savoye family: "After innumerable demands on my part, you have finally admitted that this house which you built in 1929 is uninhabitable," admonished Madame Savoye in the autumn of 1937. "Your responsibility is at stake and I have no need to foot the bill. Please render it habitable immediately. I sincerely hope that I will not have to take recourse to legal action." Only the outbreak of the Second World War and the Savoye family's consequent flight from Paris saved Le Corbusier from having to answer in a courtroom for the design of his largely uninhabitable, if extraordinarily beautiful, machine-for-living.

There's an architect that wasn't all that worried about being sued. I wonder if he carried E&O coverage...

But, although Corbu's principles were deeply misplaced, he put them first. I find most of the architects I talk with now to be a remarkably beleaguered bunch, feeling as though they'll be hauled into a courtroom if they haven't specified exactly how many times each screw should be turned or which way the grain should run on the third stud from the left. And that's probably true. We are a litigious people, and the only way to avoid litigation is to predict and prevent every possible thing that could go awry.

Maybe. Another way to avoid litigation, though, would be to build relationships with your clients and tradespeople, and to suck up some of the cost when troubles arise (even if they're not your fault). I'm thinking about the brickworkers of my previous post... imagine what it would mean to say to your finish carpenters or masons (or their foremen) "You guys know more than I do about bricks. Make it look great" and trust that they would. Imagine getting a positive call from the job site. "Hey, Betsy, you know what would look really good here? If we used a dyed mortar, and ran two courses at the lintel that were sawtoothed horizontal at 45 degrees." And Betsy says, "That sounds great, Carl. Lay up a sample and I'll be over in a couple of hours."

Oh so naive... I'm such a child. But once in a while, I've seen those relationships work in other (equally contentious) settings. There's a high school where every kid works with his advisor, his internship supervisor, and his parent(s) to create his own curriculum for every semester. When everyone sticks to her or his own contractual limits, then everyone does exactly their part and no more, and has little regard for the ultimate outcome. But when everyone agrees on the outcome and is in constant communication, then a fluid system really can work.

It's easy to say, "Yeah, that's great, but it'll never work because _______ is such a jerk." There are two responses to that. One is to start not by assuming what their problems are, but to ask yourself "what would I have to do to start working that way?" The other is to quit working with jerks.

EP2 — Tradesmen and Skilled Labor

2008-06-08T17:10:00.003-04:00

I was at a conference a decade or more ago, and a major Midwestern building contractor said that his greatest fear is that he'd no longer have the labor force he needed to do his work. He predicted that he was going to lose a huge percentage of his electricians, plumbers, steelworkers and masons to retirement, and he just didn't see another generation coming up behind.

As a nation, we value the idea that we can work without physical labor. In fact, one of the best definitions I've ever heard of social class is that it's based on the size of the muscles you use to make your living. Laborers use their legs and backs; skilled tradesmen use their arms and hands; white-collar professionals use their eyes and fingers; the ruling class uses other people. Working with your body is somewhat looked down upon (at least until you need someone who knows how to do physical things -- I recently heard one contractor describing a young apprentice as "book-smart and field-stupid." That would be me...).

We've now reached a point where a majority of high school graduates at least starts college (and where a majority of the population graduates from high school). Neither of these were true before World War II. But working in the construction trades, being "a craftsman," was a respectable livelihood. And if you look at buildings prior to that era, you'll often see a remarkable articulation of materials — brick patterns, cut stone, wrought iron, carved details, custom-milled moldings and railings and ballusters. Apprentices often had to make scale models of their future work in order to gain entry to the guild, and those have become collectors' items. The final block of Boston's Newbury Street was mostly carriage houses for the mansions on Commonwealth Ave... but even those carriage houses were fabulously detailed in ways that we now rarely attempt.

What do we make of this, in our era of Simpson Straps and nailguns and engineered lumber and masonry veneers? Is it possible to make a great architecture from channel studs and drywall? Is it possible to have engaging details when working with panelized materials? And can we reclaim the skilled trades so that masons and carpenters and millworkers actually make architectural decisions? In an interview conducted by Dana Cuff, the architect Hugh Hardy talks about how much he likes working with skilled tradesmen, because they constantly develop innovations and details that make the finished experience of his buildings better. How much control can the architect surrender if s/he trusts her tradespeople to finish the job with care and craft?

EP1 — Fast Track, Slow Foods

2008-06-08T07:50:00.002-04:00

Much of this blog has focused on issues internal to the architectural profession and to the educational thinking that supports it. But we have to be clear that architecture doesn't stand separated from the larger culture. Architects don't commission buildings, they don't zone cities, they don't develop wheat fields and scrub forests into McVillages. So the next few posts are going to focus on some of the external problems (EP's) that have hindered intelligent responses to our physical environments. All of these problems are interrelated into a kind of ecosystem of bad places, but I'm going to try to pull them apart a little bit for analytical purposes.

The first one I want to talk about is the expectation of speed. The old joke in the construction community is that you tell your clients, "You can have it quick. You can have it cheap. And you can have it good. Pick two." (For the same problem for college students, replace the three variables with "good grades, a social life, and sleep.")

We used to talk about "fast-track projects," in which the building design was still being refined at the very moment that the foundation was being excavated and poured. The design team finished the details for every building system two days before those particular tradesmen hit the site. But I don't think that there are very many fast-track projects any more, because we just don't use the term. There aren't any slow-track projects left to compare them against. Fast-track isn't an option — it's the expectation.

As with most other practices, the faster we need to go, the more we streamline and reduce and pare down to "the essentials." Which means less time for exploration, less time for research, less time for developing new and creative building details, less time to investigate a range of materials. Instead, we fall into habit and do what we've done before. We all have about half a percent of the Sweet's Catalog that's dog-eared from use, the products and practices that we know and can fall back on. (Sorry about the dog-eared reference there -- I know that nobody uses the bound-paper Sweet's anymore. Carry on.) We develop a somewhat more limited vocabulary of foundation techniques so that we have a little more flexibility to make changes on top of the slab once it's poured. We specify the stock moldings because we don't have time for the mill to make the ones we'd prefer.

There's a community afoot (mostly in Europe) calling themselves "the Slow Movement." Born in response to McDonalds' global campaign of expansion (McDonalds = fast+cheap-good), it puts forth the idea that increased speed has social costs; not only for those workers made to perform faster, but for those of us caught up in the pace of consumption as well. Things are made and consumed without care — consumption has become its own value. A quote from one of the Slow founders, Guttorm Fløistad:

The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.

The Buddhists tell us that when we read and eat at the same time, we do neither. Now, neurologists from UCLA tell us that multitasking makes us less capable; that not only do we do none of the individual things as well (or as fast!) as if we'd done them independently, but that we build weaker neural connections, make ourselves less able to focus and concentrate. In a very real way, we're changing the nature of what it means to be human, both as individual thinkers and as members of a community. (See the July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly for an article called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?")

It's becoming clear to me that Nonfiction Architecture will take the form of a resistance movement, that it will have a dual focus on a way of life that we value and a disruption of practices that hinder that way of life.

Sitting in Church Looking Around

2008-06-07T19:46:00.004-04:00

Other little boys wanted to be firemen or astronauts or rock stars. But my first memory of a career preference was when I was about eleven or twelve and wanted to be a Lutheran pastor. I'm fortunate now to realize that I have the secular version of that job. I get to read and to write, and to speak in public. I get to counsel young people, and organize difficult discussions about doctrine and belief.

But aside from the fact that I really liked our pastor and our interns from seminary, I think that I was just drawn to the physical space of church. Our church was nothing special; it was a kind of rectangular ranch-style church, one story with offices on Waalkes Street and the sanctuary itself running down Summit and a gravel parking lot out back. But within the sanctuary, a different kind of feeling took hold. The high space, the three stairs to the altar, the pulpits on each side, the organ music, and the stained-glass windows all meant that this was a space that we collectively cared for. Most of our families were no great economic players — lots of folks who worked for the phone company or an insurance office or the school district — but they'd come together to build something more intentional, something more dedicated, than any of us had at home.

There was an Altar committee, ladies whose job it was to polish the brass candelabra and vases, to arrange flowers at each end of the altar, and to choose and lay out the altar cloths appropriate to the ecclesiastical calendar (pink for Advent, purple for Lent, white for Easter). The hymnals were in their racks on the rear of each pew. The acolytes entering from both sides of the altar to light the candles at the beginning of the service.

I'm reminiscing about all this because we had our commencement ceremonies a week ago today, in Boston's Old South Church. And while I was listening to Board members and honorary degree recipients speaking, I was also taken back to that time when I was sitting in church looking around.

In terms of space, the sanctuary of Old South is really no great shakes. A great big rectangle, with two galleries off to the sides at the front half. There's a big open cupola at the top, but it's square as well. What makes this place come alive, become something important, is all the stuff inside it. The carving, the massive hammer beams, the stenciled-paint patterns on the walls, the glass, the organ pipes. It's all materials and surfaces, and has very little to do with unique spatial characteristics.

Maybe I should have gone into interior design.

Anyway, it made me think again about my conviction that people appreciate familiar form with rich fill. That's exactly what Old South Church has to offer, and what makes it fabulous. And that's exactly what Bethlehem Lutheran Church offered me forty years ago.

New World Order

2008-06-07T11:33:00.005-04:00

Back near the end of the 19thC, there was a growing desire to rationalize and systematize all kinds of processes. That desire led us to the assembly line and Taylorist studies of efficiency, and also led us to the uniform high school curriculum we still struggle against. But the underlying assumption is that there was one right way of doing things, that it could be scientifically determined, and that it would apply across circumstances. As Henry Ford himself said, "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today."

So a group of well-meaning folks got together and thought about how we might benefit from having better communication across nations. The telegraph was still kind of a luxury and the radio was a decade away from creation, but there was a growing awareness that the social world of the 20th century would not be as spatially limited as it had been throughout prior history. And so a new language was created, called Esperanto. It was not derived from any existing language. It made use of some of the grammatical structures of European language families, but "scientifically selected' for ease of learning. The spelling system was rationalized (no more worrying about how to pronounce words ending in "ough," for instance -- think about the difference in vowel sounds between rough and cough and through and though. Esperanto would end all of that.).

But Esperanto never really caught on. It turns out that German people like to speak German, Russians Russian, Swedes Swedish, Mexicans Spanish, and so on. Not just because it's easier not to have to learn a new language, but because language carries culture and meaning and history. There's an Italian phrase "traduttore tradittore," which means that the translator is a traitor -- changing the language inherently changes the subtleties of meaning. It's estimated that a couple of thousand people in the world are now fluent in Esperanto, which they mostly use when they go to conferences with one another. (By comparison, there are nearly a hundred thousand people who speak Navajo, a language so unfamiliar worldwide that the American military was able to use it as an unbreakable code during World War II.)

About that same time, it was thought that architecture could be equally rationalized and de-localized. Adolf Loos' famous conflation of ornament and crime was not merely an aesthetic critique nor a rant against fashion-based design that would become obsolete; it was fully immersed in its era of scientific understandings, and equally in opposition to cultural history. This way of thinking led us toward the architectural Esperanto that we know as the International Style of high Modernism.

And, as it turns out, people didn't take to that either. We seem to appreciate things that have relevance to their larger region, culture, and history. They "fit the story." We can place ourselves within them, understand them at an everyday level without careful study, make comfortable use of them.

I'd imagine that the proportion of the population who really delight in new, theoretical architecture is somewhat higher than the proportion of Esperanto speakers and somewhat lower than the number of Navajo speakers.

With apologies to Don Henley and Glenn Frey...

Esperanto, why don't you come to your senses?
You been crossin' those fences for so long now.
Oh, you're a smart one;
I know that you got your reasons.
But your cultural treasons
Have kept you outside.

Don't you diss the local language, boy,
She's got you by the numbers.
You gotta meet them where they're at to get their love.
Now it seems to me a century
Is enough to merit slumber.
But you need to prove that you can rise above.

Esperanto, oh, you ain't in nobody's favor.
You think and you labor, with no one to hear.
And progress, oh progress, well, that's just some people talkin'.
Your progress is walkin' out where no one draws near.

No New Buildings

2008-06-06T20:06:00.006-04:00

I was talking with a friend at work the other day about studio education, and was reiterating all the stuff you're tired of here -- architecture as something other than art, the degree to which we already have research-based answers to many of the most important architectural questions, and so on. And she asked me what we'd do about teaching form. And I replied (somewhat abruptly, although she forgave me), why should we care?

So let me put out today's thought experiment: why should we ever build another new building? Ecologically, new buildings are a resource problem, even if they're more efficient than what they replace. (I don't have the data to support this, but Jeff Stein told me the other day that 60% of the energy a car will use through its entire service life is used in its manufacture and pre-sale shipping. I have to believe that buildings are somewhat similar... you'll never be able to LEED your way out of the energy spent in materials and construction.)

The national stock of buildings has some baseline level of vacancy. If you include general excess supply, buildings in transition between owners or tenants, and periodic regional development exuberance, there is always going to be some percentage of built square footage not currently inhabited. If you also include cities that have been discarded, the percentage goes way up (for instance, Detroit has gone from nearly two million residents to fewer than a million, but most of the buildings are still there). The English government has a study available that shows commercial and industrial vacancy rates between 5% and 30% in different cities. Boston's central-business-district vacancy rate last summer was about 12.5%.

So what would happen if we declared a national moratorium on new construction and just used what we had? Rehab permits would remain fully available, but new buildings (either teardowns or greenfields) would be prohibited. Here are a few things that I think would happen:

Our national energy use would decrease significantly. First off, the aforementioned problems with embodied energy of materials would be avoided in large part. But we'd also recognize that our buildings would have to last longer, and we'd start to retrofit what we had rather than waiting for its tax amortization to dwindle to the point where it made financial sense to knock it down. We'd also spend less money commuting to ever-more-distant suburban retreats (or bring meaningful employers to underutilized big-box sites in the burbs).
We'd have to think differently about cities. We'd recognize that we could no longer run from our perceived problems or reclaim another 150 acres of corn for a subdivision. When Oregon instituted its Urban Growth Boundaries in the 1970s, it brought about a fairly sophisticated public conversation about the nature of community, because people had to acknowledge that they lived in cities and would for the foreseeable future.
We'd have to reclaim wasted places. Our uninhabited downtowns, those as large as St. Louis and as small as Bartlesville OK, would be re-colonized. (This would also allow us to think smarter about transit; what exists is usually more centralized and compact than what we've been building.)
The profession of architecture would have to rethink its purpose without the crutch of sculpture to lean on. The question of form would for the most part become irrelevant; habitation, client effectiveness, and social issues would be made foremost.
With one stable variable (the form of the human environment), we'd be able to come to much more solid understandings of other variables (racial discrimination, school funding, transit use, globalization, and an infinite number of other issues). The shape of the landscape would become the fixed point against which the others could be measured.

Now, I know that this isn't realistic. I know that some places that had no surplus building stock would be prohibited from economic recovery or new social services (Middletown Springs, VT, for instance, has fairly few empty houses, and Norm's gas station just burned down). We'd have to get a tribe of lawyers to figure out all the exemptions for replacing buildings destroyed by fire and weather and irreversible decay, and we'd probably start a creative new arson industry to boot. But I think that we're good at seeing the problems created by big changes in habits, and much less good at seeing the problems created by continuing to do what we've already done.

Anyway, I digress. My purpose for this blog post is one particular aspect of the thought experiment. If we built no new buildings and thus couldn't teach form, what would we teach? Would architecture, as a profession and as an academic subject, be immediately obsolete?

Learning from the Ads

2008-05-22T12:49:00.004-04:00

In this month's ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) News, there are a couple of things of note. The first is that the opening column from ACSA president Kim Tanzer makes note of the professional constitution of Richard Rogers' firm (Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners) as an exemplar of professional culture. You can read excerpts from it at their website. But the preamble language is inspiring. "The practice of architecture is inseparable from the social and economic values of individuals who practice it and the society which sustains it." Yup.

But the other thing I noted was an ad in the back (p.35, if you want to look) for new books from the MIT Press. There are three books stacked vertically on the right side of the page that deliver three very different visions of what the profession ought to be about. It's a miracle that they haven't caught fire from being placed so close together. I'll go through them from bottom to top, because I feel like it.

David Orr, Design on the Edge: The Making of a High-Performance Building. "Allows us to understand why we'll need to cleverly maneuver both the technological and the human track to have any hope of avoiding the ecological abyss we find ourselves approaching" -- Bill McKibben

Alberto Perez-Gomez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics. "A vision of architecture that transcends concerns of form and function and finds the connections between the architect's wish to design a beautiful world and architecture's imperative to provide a better place for society."

Francois Blanciak, Siteless: 1001 Building Forms. "An attempt to free architecture from site and program constraints and to counter the profusion of ever bigger architecture books with ever smaller content."

So we have buildings as necessary responses to an ecological crisis. We have buildings embodying the tension between beauty and social responsibility. And we have not buildings but "building forms" which revel in their freedom from either place or purpose.

Y'know, if I were a better man, I'd go look for Blanciak's book. I would seek to immerse myself in his argument, to understand the nature of placelessness and uselessness as worthy pursuits. But I'd rather have strep throat again. Just the level of hubris in the blurb -- "to counter the profusion of ever bigger architecture books with ever smaller content" -- is warning enough.

And this matter of having 1001 of them... it seems oddly precise. Mathematically, it seems far more likely that there might be 1,297 interesting forms, or 833, or any other non-centennial number. I mean, I can understand having 101 Dalmatians, because it was written for eight-year-olds. But grown-ups can handle somewhat greater numerical complexity. Chris Alexander and his colleagues identified 253 patterns in A Pattern Language: 94 having to do with community, 110 having to do with buildings, and 49 having to do with details. They didn't see a need to have some pretty number that they could advertise; they named the things they believed in, and stopped when they were done. I think there's a lesson there for us all.

The Architect and the Engineer

2008-05-21T10:40:00.002-04:00

The old saw is that an engineer learns more and more about less and less, until eventually she knows everything about nothing. The architect learns less and less about more and more, until eventually she knows nothing about everything.

Sure enough, NCARB agrees with that. NCARB, the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, has published a document entitled Architecture as It Differs From Engineering. It's a 2004 update of a document originally created in 1982 and amended in 1995, and its purpose is "to assist its Member Boards in their continuing effort to prevent the unlawful practice of architecture by unlicensed persons." Basically, it's a legal brief to be used by state boards when they go after non-architects for providing design services. They go through differences in training; outline precedent cases in which engineers were sued or blocked from project completion because they had done design work; compare the Architectural Registration Exam (ARE) to the Fundamentals of Engineering and Principles and Practices of Engineering exams; bring in quotes from an "expert group" about professional differences; and compare B.Arch and B.S. Civil Engineering curricula from six colleges.

The argument boils down to this:

architects go to school longer than engineers;
architects have broader training than engineers;
this training is more "integrative and imaginative" than that of other fields;
this training allows architects to coordinate the work of others; and
this training ensures that architects promote individual, community, and ecological values.

Therefore, "a registered architect should be involved in the design of all buildings intended for human occupancy and habitation, and...a registered architect is the only design professional prepared to coordinate all the other disciplines required for the project."

Being someone involved in the training of architects, I think I'd have to respectfully disagree. There aren't an awful lot of courses in the curriculum that help students manage teams of diverse specialists. There's only sporadic attention to ecological concerns and data-driven outcomes testing. The consideration of "how does a building impact its surroundings" is typically true only inasmuch as the surroundings are mass models of gray chipboard. And the understanding of culture and behavior and values is also not a feature of most architectural curricula.

In the end, as we look at the comparison of the B.Arch and B.S.C.E. curricula they provide in Appendix C, the only fundamental differences are that the engineering students take a lot more math, physics and technical systems, and that the architecture students have studio and architectural history. So in order to bolster NCARB's claims, studio and arch history courses had better have a lot of attention paid to team facilitation, post-occupancy evaluation, individual cognition and social behavior, cultural norms and values, contextual sensitivity, and ecological fit.

And, as the saying goes, how's THAT workin' out for ya?

Buildings for Paparazzi, Part 2

2008-05-21T07:11:00.007-04:00

SO last year...

Those of you who know me realize that I don't care an awful lot about clothes. I have about 20 shirts and six pairs of pants that I rotate through, and I think everyone at work saw all of my ties in the first month I was here.

So working on Newbury Street in Boston has been quite the revelation. I mean, just the shoes alone! Square toe, pointy toe, open toe, pointy toe that's about a foot and a half long. Spike heel, block heel, kitten heel, wedges, flats, flip-flops. Those funny little Pumas that look like bound feet. For the past month, I've seen tons of high heels that have red soles.

The thing about fashion is that it's supposed to make you feel stupid and outdated and insecure. Wearing last year's shoes or last year's hair is the worst of all possible fates. But fortunately, we have a solution: buy new stuff. Then you'll be smart and current and admired -- for a few months, until you're stupid and outdated and insecure again.

As Carrie Bradshaw once said, "I like my money right where I can see it... hanging in my closet."

In the past few years, there have been more than a few exhibitions and monographs that attempt to draw the links between architecture and fashion. Do we really want that to be true? Do we want to reduce architecture to immediacy and tastemaking? "On the runway, inspired feats of virtuosity are all too often quickly forgotten by blasé audiences rushing to the next show." (Judith Thurman, "Frocks and Blocks: Fashion meets architecture in Los Angeles," The New Yorker, December 4, 2006). You can't exactly give away your Steven Holl building to Goodwill when your magazine-driven lust for current taste kicks in.

The historic preservation movement is in the midst of a crisis. Originally formed to save the buildings and streetscapes of the 19th Century, they couldn't just come out and say that old buildings are simply better: better in scale, better in proportion, better in materiality, better in detailing, better in most of the ways that laypeople appreciate. (They're worse, of course, in mechanical performance, which is why a lot of preservation work is really taxidermy -- removing the entrails and stuffing the preserved hide with modern materials. But I digress.) So if the preservationists didn't want to make the argument from quality, which would have made them seem old and stuffy and out of touch, they had to make the argument from heritage and historic importance. And that argument has come around to bite them in the butt, because now there's an awful lot of really bad Modernism that's old enough to be the subject of preservation. Boston's City Hall, one of the most reviled buildings in the past half-century, will soon be a half-century old. That doesn't make it any better, but it does force people's hands in some uncomfortable ways. I have a technical term that I teach my students -- the FUB, or F----ng Ugly Building. But the preservation community hasn't yet adopted it.

I think that the historic preservation of late 20th-C buildings is going to tell the tale of mass gullibility, of the pursuit of fashion and novelty without concern for endurance. Look back at your high school yearbook, and cringe at what you thought was cool. And then think twice before you decide to put the architectural equivalent of a mullet out onto the street for the next few decades.

Upper photo: http://fashionista.com/2008/05/20/#entry-46158

Lower photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Holl

Here's what Getting It Right looks like...

2008-05-20T20:17:00.005-04:00

My partner was at a one-day conference last week, convened by Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. One of the speakers was John Abrams of South Mountain Company, a small design-build company located out on Martha's Vineyard. She was impressed with his talk, so I started poking around their web site (www.somoco.com). Now I'm impressed, too. Here's at least eleven ways they get it right.

They're employee-owned. Any employee who's worked there for 7500 hours or five years is eligible to become an owner; of their 32 employees, 15 have an ownership stake, and they think four or five more will this year. And this isn't just financial partnership; the owners all have decision-making responsibility. This does a couple of things. First, there's not the situation where one person's driving and everyone else follows. Second, every time they hire a new employee, they're hiring a potential co-owner, so they take pretty good pains to bring on people who share their values.
They do their work locally. They'll never become Skidmore Owings & Merrill, because they do their work in the community that they understand and that they value. They're building for their neighbors.
They use reclaimed building materials, found objects, and very selective site-clearing practices. One of the ways that buildings fit their environments is when they're actually made out of their environments.
They do the whole job. The company does the client work, the design work, the site work, the construction work, the finish work. They have subcontractors and suppliers with whom they have long-standing relationships. They never "throw it over the fence," as we used to say in the consulting world; they're responsible for every element of the work.
They turn down work. They accept work that fits with their values (and state their guiding principles very clearly).
They have a transparent pricing process. They bid the job (materials, labor, subcontractors, etc.), and add a profit number. If they come in at or under bid, they get the whole profit amount; if they run over without owner-approved changes, the overrun comes out of their profit envelope. The client knows every number in the process.
They have a simple and thorough programming process. And they're not asking their clients to do any design work; the only "traditional" programming question in their script is an approximation of how many square feet the client is after, and answering that question is clearly labeled as optional. Instead, they're building an emotional program, a set of criteria that fulfills the deeper stories we build from.
They keep going after the building is done. They provide their homeowners with owner's manuals; they include post-occupancy work in their costing; they do a walk-through with the homeowner a year after handover.
They're politically engaged. They have a stake in the Martha's Vineyard community, and work to facilitate strong discussions about its future. They strive to develop public transportation options, help the elderly to remain able to live there, and try to keep the economy vigorous enough to keep kids from having to depart in order to make their living.
They're educators. Aside from going to conferences like the VBSR, they publish in design/build magazines, Fine Homebuilding, local newspapers and magazines, materials magazines (Timber Framing, Solar Today, etc.), and small business magazines.
They build with craft and endurance in mind. As their website says, "If our buildings are not designed to last at least 250-300 years, we're not asking the right questions. Our industry is making buildings designed to last the life of a mortgage - they should last at least as long as ten."

I'll definitely need to make a site visit and have a talk with these folks as I start to build the list of practices that will revitalize the profession.

The Losers' Club

2008-05-13T21:35:00.007-04:00

My favorite pianist is a fellow named Yakov Kasman. I had the chance to hear him play Mussorgsky at a small church in Lompoc, California; the power and utter absorption of his playing is wholly unlike anyone else I've ever heard.

I discovered him when I was watching a PBS documentary on the Tenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, in which he was a competitor. The competition gets hundreds of audition tapes, brings in dozens of players, knocks the field down to 24, and then the work starts. If I remember correctly, they play public performances with a string quartet and with the Fort Worth Symphony. They give a performance of a brand new piece specially written for the competition, a piece that none of them have ever heard before. And they give a recital of material of their own choosing.

The six finalists are all better piano players than any of us have ever met, better than anyone else in their city or state or country, better than all but a handful of people who've ever lived.

Five of them lose.

Kasman finished second, but to my tastes, was the most remarkable classical musician I had ever come across. Now, the fellow who won, Jon Nakamatsu, is a hell of a pianist. I have a CD of his work, and think it's fabulous. But Kasman is supernatural. And a loser.

I've been reading Jack Nasar's book Design by Competition (1999, Cambridge University Press), a serious study of architecture competitions and the buildings that come from them. He was spurred to study this because he's at Ohio State, and had a front-row seat at the competition and creation of the Wexner Center. There were five firms invited to participate in the competition: Eisenman/Robinson (the ultimate winner), Arthur Erickson, Michael Graves, Kallman McKinnell & Wood, and Cesar Pelli.

People at OSU pretty much despise the Wexner Center. It cost about four times as much per square foot as the average building on campus, and came in at 270% of its estimated cost. It costs about 30% more to heat and cool than other buildings on campus, about 30% more for everyday maintenance and cleaning. It leaked badly and immediately. It's reported to be a horrible place to look at paintings, it has problems with sunlight damage to artworks (a problem shared by a fair number of high-end museums, most notably Meier's High Museum in Atlanta), and the staff hates it as much as the visitors.

Nasar showed all five of the final entries to people unfamiliar with the Wexner. Eisenman's design was rated next to last. He also grabbed entries to other major design competitions, and showed the winning design and one of the other finalists to 50 architects and to 50 laypeople. Both the architects and the laypeople thought that the losing designs were, on average, superior (the laypeople especially so).

Nasar then goes on to describe the jury process, with some remarkable quotes from jurors. Here's one from the landscape architect Martha Schwartz:

At first we went through every one in about ten seconds. That's awfully fast. But by the time we started getting into it, we realized that we could see whether or not there was any merit in a project in even less time. We actually got it down to about five seconds.

It takes five seconds to be a loser, to be judged as being without merit. At least at the Van Cliburn competition, you got to play for a few hours before they threw you out.

Jon Nakamatsu, the ultimate winner of the 1997 Van Cliburn, gave a wonderful talk at an amateur competition for which he was a juror. It was a talk about losing. You can see it here.

There are some things we should compete over. Seeing who can throw a rock furthest out into a lake, for instance. But basing a multimillion dollar investment that will impact thousands of lives on the judgment of five people in a windowless conference room with stale coffee and no empirical criteria for success... maybe not such a good idea.

Identity Crisis

2008-05-12T21:28:00.004-04:00

I sleep with the radio on. I've found that having the news on quietly helps me wind down at the end of the day, and if it's quiet enough and the story isn't deeply compelling, I'll fall asleep in no time.

So this morning I woke up for some reason around 2:30, and the BBC World Service was doing a story about discrimination against African immigrants to Italy. Now that Berlusconi is back as Prime Minister, the newly-resurgent Right has fired up a big wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. It's couched in terms of threats to Italy's cultural identity — the shared language, religion, clothing, foods and other elements of daily life that let people say "We are this way, and these things help define who we are."

In psychology, identity is an individual concept, the idea and definition of oneself. And that identity can be surprisingly fragile. We all have periods in our lives where identity is ruptured, where the old story no longer holds. Adolescence, graduations, "mid-life crisis," illnesses, divorces, menopause, retirement. At those points or transitions, we are no longer who we were, but we've yet to figure out who we are now.

I think that cultural identity is equally fragile in our Modern age. We are highly mobile, pursuing work around the world and blending our habits with those of people from everywhere. Americans are increasingly non-European, and the country is soon to be majority non-white. Ideas and entertainment and material products come from everywhere, and belong nowhere.

I think we find this normal now. But imagine living in 1850. Born and raised in one town. Living your whole life in the same region. Inheriting the family farm or learning the family trade. Member of the same church as your great-grandparents, and headed one day for the same cemetery. Eating what comes out of your garden. Waiting weeks for a letter, and rarely seeing a newspaper. Now that's an identity-rich environment; you'd never have any question about who you were, or wonder what you might become. It's also extraordinarily constraining when seen through our modern eyes. But for most of human history, this was completely the norm. (For much of the world, it still is... except that the ubiquity of television brings Western life to even the most remote places.)

One quick response is that we might have had greater security in who we were (as individuals and as a community), but we also had pretty horrific gender repression, regularly died of malnutrition or tuberculosis or childbirth, and lived lives that, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." For most of us, it's a pretty easy tradeoff to choose modern conditions.

But I think that those two poles represent an artificial choice. We get to choose (if we want to) what kinds of world-awareness we embrace, what kinds we accept, and what kinds we refuse. I read quite a lot, listen to music from multiple continents (and centuries), get my news from NPR and the BBC, drive a tiny little Korean car, and appreciate having access to all of that. I also don't watch television or listen to pop music or go to many movies, because I find them a) tedious, b) embarrassing, or c) uncomfortably violent. These are my choices, based on my own identity issues. And I like living in places that look like they belong where they are, that have a meaningful local vocabulary that's endured over a long, long time.

As architects, we get to make that choice on behalf of lots of people — do we reinforce the local sense of cultural identity and place, or do we challenge it? It might be polite if we asked first. I mean, if you were going to order pizza for a group of friends, you'd ask how many were vegetarians and whether someone had allergies and if you should leave off the anchovies on part of it. Think how much more substantive, enduring, and deeply personal our relationships with places are — why should we presume that we can place the order for all of our neighbors?

Disclaimer: I have a BA and a PhD in Architecture, but I am not licensed to practice the profession, and thus cannot appropriately use the term "architect" to describe myself. So when I use the term "we" when describing what architects do, I include myself only in the community of those who are academically trained in, and have a deep interest in, the built environment (and who feel a strong responsibility for it). I offer no architectural services. Do not call me to design buildings, interiors or landscapes at any scale. If swelling or redness occurs, contact your physician.

Buildings for Paparazzi, Part 1

2008-05-09T20:44:00.010-04:00

It wasn't long ago (but before she shaved her head, I think) that Britney Spears had those "scandalous" photos taken of her night on the town with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. I had a chance to see a video of the scene: three young women walking down the sidewalk, inside a moving oval of about 50 photographers firing their 4-frames-per-second cameras with the electronic flash units blazing away, all shouting "Lindsay!! Look up!! Paris, look over here!!!"

What a way to live. Nobody cares about you as a person; you just exist as an object to be photographed and discussed over donuts in every office in North America. And you'd pretty much have to drive the Mercedes SLR McLaren and have five thousand pairs of shoes; you can't afford to be photographed getting into a 2005 Accord wearing your beat-up Chuck Taylors. Geez, I'd drink, too...

I sat down this evening with the acknowledged masterwork of architectural history, Spiro Kostof's A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (Oxford University Press, 1985). Kostof was almost certainly the most humanistic of the great architectural historians, spending more analytical time on cultural narratives than most of his peers, hence the subtitle of the book). I wanted to see what buildings he discussed in the Modern and PoMo eras (admittedly, a book from 1985 won't deal much with Gehry or Holl or Hadid or Calatrava). It turns out that there are 68 photographs of buildings created since 1900 that are not intended to be direct historical throwbacks (Edwin Lutyens and Frank Lloyd Wright were contemporaries, but you'd never guess it by their intentions).

So here's my little geek moment about those 68 buildings. In each case, imagine the buildings that would be added to those categories if we did a 2008 update covering the past 25 years.

The largest number of buildings photographed were a three-way tie between skyline towers, museums & theaters, and civic buildings. None of these are programmatically driven buildings; they're exercises in branding, the "look at me" function we get so tired of in our celebrities. The additions would be no end of newer skyline towers, some from Dubai and Kuala Lumpur; and lots of museums and civic centers.

Industrial and mass-housing buildings are next on the list, mainly shown because they're unique to the 20th century and also because they have intellectual connections with modern processes of efficiency and economies of scale; they tell a story about cultural change. We quit seeing them pretty much around 1935 or so, once their novelty goes away.

Religious and commemorative buildings come next. Again, these aren't so much programmatic buildings as they are places to change your mindset toward contemplation. Their whole purpose is to be entirely different than what's outside, because they're asking you to shed the outside world and get in touch with god.

The two full-time residences are far outshadowed by the seven vacation homes. You can get away with a lot in a vacation home.

The three academic buildings are all schools of architecture. You can get away with an AWFUL lot in a school of architecture.

There are four "installations" that have no function intended whatsoever (for instance, the Barcelona Pavillion). You can get away with ANYTHING in an installation; look at the Diller Scofidio + Renfro Blur building, made of sprayed water vapor except for the parts that actually have to accomplish something — the nozzle system and what you're standing on. Try making the floor out of water vapor.

By the way, when did "+" start to emerge in architecture firm names? I'm tired of that; it's very '90s and used up, like calling some function an "e-function" just because you used a computer.

You can easily add your own more recent list of museums, campus buildings, vacation homes, skyline towers, installations, and any number of other buildings (or "buildings") that have no responsibilities. I think of them as indolent buildings, lounging around wearing their price tags on every surface, existing only to be photographed. I wonder if they're bored. Maybe they take Xanax or long rehab weekends.

(I'm imagining the Stata Center and Bilbao holding each other around the shoulders as they stagger down the sidewalk, singing "They tried to make me go to rehab. I said no, no, no.")

I don't know why we teach from them. Like Paris and Lindsay, they're not exactly role models; more nearly cautionary tales.

The Paradigm and the Cognitive Frame

2008-05-01T10:38:00.005-04:00

One of the things we've learned about successful social change is that different behavior must be preceded by different ways of thinking. I'll take up two examples here, one from science and the other from politics.

The historian of science Thomas Kuhn has argued that scientific theory doesn't really change because of newly introduced evidence, at least not much. Really major changes come about because some small group of scientists see the existing data in different combinations and with a different interpretation, and they construct a parallel body of theory that seems also to fit with the data at hand. They then conduct new experiments that would indicate some further reach of their theory, and gradually (through publishing and teaching) gain converts until the new paradigm, to use Kuhn's term, displaces the old one.

Kuhn gives a striking example of this "paradigm shift" in his book Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (1987, University of Chicago Press). In BBT, Kuhn explores the original published papers and unpublished correspondence — in French, German, and English — of the leading physicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the moment when Newtonian physics was called into question by the new quantum physics we now associate with Einstein and others. Kuhn focuses on the work of one notable physicist, Max Planck, who was doing work on the mathematics of energy emission and absorption (a "black body" is an object that absorbs 100% of its received energy and reflects 0%). He discovered a small error in the most widely accepted calculation, and introduced a microscopically small multiplier (0.00000000000000000000000000000000006626...) that seemed to resolve most of the issues at hand. This was in 1901.

By 1905, a number of physicists working across Europe and the US had come to the belief that this dinky little number represented not a statistical tidying-up job, but rather suggested that there were indivisibly small units of matter and energy that they began to call quanta, and that these energy/matter units would predict all kinds of unexpected things about physics at scales other than the everyday. Quantum physics was the outcome, and Planck's Constant, as it is called, is seen as the origin. But Planck himself never believed that quantum physics made sense, and died twelve years later as an unrepentant Newtonian.

Now the political. A linguist at Berkeley named George Lakoff who is politically very left-leaning has done some fascinating analysis for why conservatives have so firmly held political power for the past 30 years, even in the face of some pretty objective failures. He argues (like Kuhn, but without invoking his research) that people aren't fundamentally swayed by evidence unless that evidence can be organized into a compelling cognitive frame (the equivalent of what Kuhn called the paradigm). Lakoff and others believe that the thing that conservative thinkers have done best, and what liberal thinkers have to learn to do, is to offer an overarching view of the world that encompasses the evidence at hand, and to recast the vocabulary in a way that supports that bigger frame. As conservative intellectual Eric Huebeck put it,

We must win the people over culturally—by defining how man ought to act, how he ought to perceive the world around him, and what it means to live the good life. Political arrangements can only be formed after these fundamental questions have been answered... The ideas of the masses never come from the masses. The most important thing any movement can do is capture the imagination of the people. One must give them dreams and ideas that have been put in terms they understand, and touch their hearts as opposed to their rational minds. If we cannot capture the imaginations of our members, then we cannot expect our members to make great sacrifices for us. (Huebeck, Eric. 2001. "The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement." Available at the Free Congress Foundation website, www.freecongress.org/centers/conservatism/traditionalist.htm )

All of the core ideas of conservative thought — that government is invasive, that markets are self-regulating, that the media is liberal, that the left is untrustworthy, that patriotism should be uncritical, and so on — are drawn from an overarching (and emotionally attractive) cognitive frame about the strength and autonomy of the individual. We stand and are judged on our own merits, with no strength but ourselves, our family, and our faith. Lakoff and others argue that if a political left is to be resurgent, it also needs to express an overarching and emotionally attractive cognitive frame. Facts and policies are not enough, and can never be enough, to change minds in the absence of that larger narrative.

Hey! This used to be an architectural theory blog... how did we get over to physics and politics?

Because I think that both Kuhn and Lakoff are right. If we hope to change the practice and the teaching of architecture, we have to offer an emotionally compelling story about why our vision is attractive and would result in happier communities. We have to reclaim architecture from the profession's current narrative of architect as intellectual and artistic pioneer and from the popular narrative of the architect as master technician. We need to develop (and do the work to support) a new story, that architects know more than anyone about how to enhance personal and social happiness through manipulating the physical world.

Anthropomorphic Meaning

2008-04-30T19:41:00.004-04:00

Well, I've nearly survived a week of strep throat, which, for all of its miseries, has given me a chance to read a few things and get to know my cat again.

One of the things I've been (re)reading is The Architecture of Happiness, by Alain de Botton (2006, Pantheon). de Botton was trained both in literature and in philosophy, and writes about architecture not as an "expert" but as an enthusiast. One of the things I love best about this book is his insistence that we (laypeople) engage buildings primarily with our hearts rather than our heads. I've written quite a lot about the ways in which we construct our sense of place through attempting to define ourselves ("If this is where I am, then what kind of person am I here?"), but de Botton extends that to the specificity of material objects. Here's a favorite passage:

Cardinal opportunities for elegance or its opposite lie in the way that columns are designed to hold up ceilings. Even as laypeople, we are adept at guessing the thickness that would be required safely to support a structure and esteem those columns that appear most diffident about the weight they are supporting. Whereas some varieties have broad enough shoulders but look disgruntled at having been asked to carry even a single storey, others hoist up ceilings as high as those of cathedrals without apparent strain, balancing massive weights on their narrow necks as if they were holding aloft a canopy made of linen. We welcome an appearance of lightness, or even daintiness, in the face of downward pressure — columns which seem to offer us a metaphor of how we, too, should like to stand in relation to our burdens. (p.210)

I think that building elements can indeed help us to believe better of ourselves. An educational building can allow us to aspire to scholarship and mentoring (in Milwaukee, the 1890s Sabin Hall was far more successful at that than the 1960s Curtin Hall); a view of the bay and mountains was a daily reminder of my sense of loyalty to Northern California.

We all have places that speak to us like this. But we have to be particularly careful not to mistake the universality of having the experience for a generalizable truth about the contents of that experience. de Botton speaks as if the slender and lithe column is a global choice, and that all of us aspire to bear the world's burdens with grace. There is another large community for whom that isn't the aspiration at all, for whom a sense of sturdiness and expressed strength would be the metaphor for their own imagined best selves.

One of the most important things I take from this, though, is that I think we talk too easily and quickly about the "meaning" of buildings. Some of it, to be sure, comes from historical allusions, a building that looks like a temple or a castle or a cottage. A little bit of it (I think very little) comes from the intellectual work behind the building, the concept that drove the original schematics. But more meaning than we imagine comes from the materials and connections themselves.

One of the things I've taught myself fairly carefully over the past twenty years is the ways that different writers choose words and punctuation. I read my favorite writers in part because I like the way they think, and one of the ways that thinking is most deeply expressed is in the way that they manage our experience. Joan Didion once said, for instance, that she tries never to end a sentence with a dying sound. (Like that one did.) Instead, she closes sentences with a word or syllable that's sharp. (Like that one was.)

Not everyone likes Didion. But it's through the detailing of her work that so many of us have come to trust her deeply. Pick your own favorite writer, and you'll find the same level of detail and preferred structure. It'll be different in its forms, but it'll be there.

Compartmentalization

2008-04-25T17:54:00.004-04:00

Psychologists have a term for pretty much everything. One of those terms is compartmentalization, which is the process of actively not trying to think about one thing when you're involved in another. Usually it denotes a kind of denial: we know that using lots of gas is bad for the environment, and in fact we actually care about that, but we try not to think about it when we buy a new Suburban "because we need the space." We know that eating that second cheeseburger would make our spouse, doctor, and accountant all cringe, and in fact we agree with all of them, but we try not to think about that when we order it and try to enjoy it. Compartmentalization can be seen as a very mild and very common form of cognitive disorder.

I think that Modernism has made us all a little bit disordered. Here's why.

As we've gotten more and more information, have an increasing number of products and services, have work lives that are more encompassing than ever, we've responded to that by specializing. We say, "that and that and that are somebody else's job. I'm responsible for this." (People think that the industrial work process was the moment of strong specialization, introducing the "division of labor." I think it's a natural human response to overwhelming complexity. But either way, it's now a self-sustaining spiral. Industrial efficiency has given us more stuff to cope with, so we specialize more, become more "productive," and provide even more to cope with.)

There's so much to know in academia that we have to compartmentalize intellectual work, so we have disciplines like psychology and anthropology and cultural geography and history that rarely communicate even when they're studying the same phenomenon. At Berkeley, the architecture department and the landscape architecture department were both on the second floor of Wurster Hall, but there might as well have been an armed checkpoint between them. It was pretty rare for anyone but a custodian to occupy both spaces.

There's so much to know in the professions that we have an army of subcontractors for jobs of any substance. Here's a comment by Mack Scogin, a principal with Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects in Atlanta, from a January 2008 Yale symposium on universities as architectural patrons:

“It’s absolutely incredible to me what it takes to do architecture in today’s world. If you will, I’m just going to read you a list of consultants that we are working with on a present project. This is one project. They have a consultant for health-services design, equipment planning, specifications writing, structural engineering, facade design, miscellaneous metal engineering, masonry engineering, landscape design, landscape documentation, geotechnical engineers, civil engineers, acoustical design, fire-and-life-safety design, smoke-exhaust engineering, security systems, hardware systems, information technology and communication, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, plumbing engineering, lighting design, elevator design, LEED design, sustainability, irrigation design, environmental design, food service, parking design, traffic consultant, structural peer review, commissioning agents, at least two cost consultants, construction management, code-and-agency-approval consultant, graphic consultant, and, of course, all the lawyers that it takes to negotiate all the contracts between all those people, us, and the client. That’s almost 40 separate disciplines involved in the making of one building. What that means is, these are all people that have an expertise that we as architects cannot bring to the table at the level that is required to make a state-of-the-art building in today’s world.” (Biemiller, Lawrence. “What if Robert A. M. Stern gave a party and nobody came?” Chronicle of Higher Education Buildings and Grounds section, January 28th, 2008.)

This lack of systemic thinking makes it almost impossible for us to make sensible decisions, because each player needs to maximize their variable, the only one they're accountable for.

The common, and somewhat trite, response to this complexity is to describe architects as orchestra conductors, bringing all of the players together in harmony. What I'd suggest instead is that the architect has to be the one person on the team who fully understands habitation: what it means to be part of a place, who all of the stakeholders are and what their unique goals would be. The architect is the experiential expert, like the executive chef who doesn't cook much any more but who tests and tastes every single thing before it goes out to the front of the house.

We'd have to think differently about design education if we thought that habitation was important. But there'd be at least one advantage. Taking this generalist, systemic, holistic role would also mean that the architect could be the only member of the building-provision team who isn't suffering from cognitive disorder... you'd be the only sane person on the job.

Two Cheers for Parochialism

2008-04-25T07:48:00.002-04:00

Last night, I was listening to On Point on NPR. Their guests were talking about the troubles faced by the airline industry: older fleets, increasing fuel costs, congested air routes and airports, and so on. They suggested that air travel might well become significantly more expensive in the near future, and that the Federal government might have a role to play in holding down airfares because we've come to expect that flying should be "democratic," available to almost everyone regardless of social class.

And I thought to myself, it was only fifty years ago that commercial passenger flights were rare. The idea of a working-class family piling the kids on a plane to go for a week at EPCOT would have been unheard of; you'd have gotten in the camper and driven up to Silver Lake State Park instead.

I don't know that we, as a society, were unhappier.

One of the core beliefs of Modernism (and of Postmodernism as well -- it's one of the most stable things we have) is that progress is objective. We can define it and measure it and it's incontrovertible. The GDP is growing? Progress. Your new computer is faster and smaller than your last one? Progress. Your house is bigger than your parents' house? Progress.

Let's leave aside for a second that quality of life is messier and more contentious than standard of living. One of the side beliefs of objectivity is that if a thing is true in one case, it's likely to be true in another. Truth doesn't change from one context to another. So the standards we apply to progress in Iowa are the same as those we apply in India. Back in the Cold War era, we used to talk about third-world countries, meaning those places that the first world (the democratic West) and the second world (the Soviets and their allies) fought over. Nowadays, the more common terminology is "developed nations" and "developing nations." Again, the implication is that progress is defined similarly and desired equally in every location.

We also imagine that, if we know what progress means, we have a proven set of tools to get us there... again, without regard to context. So a high school in Cleveland looks just like a high school in Calgary, because we "know what works" and have an efficient scheme for providing it.

One of the other elements of progress, closely related, is that we have skills that we can take anywhere. A software engineer or architect or pharmacist would do the same work in the same way regardless of her location. This allows for smaller local businesses to be overcome by larger national and international businesses that can have greater economies of scale.

So we have uniform definitions of progress, an increasingly diminished set of tools for getting us there, provided by people who have no inherent relationship to any particular place. If you're a fan of this, you call it globalization. If you're not, you call it placelessness.

Even though I've personally benefitted from radical mobility, I'm not a fan. It has emotional costs and social costs that we don't often consider.

I know some people in rural areas who've never been more than a few counties away from their homes. I've heard that in New England, being "a local" is a status connoted only on those with four generations in the cemetery. We can decry their parochial views on things, but there's a way in which these people know their community, their landscapes, their ecosystems, and their places within it all that us jet-setters can never achieve. By objective measures, they don't necessarily have much. But if someone gets sick, ten people will magically appear, bringing food and stacking firewood and tending the horses.

My partner and I have developed a curriculum model called Local Learning. Our premise is that the setting of the school -- its ecological, social, economic and cultural context -- ought to be the ground upon which learning is based. You can have local history, local literature, local government, local biology and climatology, local cultural geography and migration patterns, and on and on. It makes the content knowledge into a tool that we can actually see and use to modify our conditions. It helps us make informed decisions about what it means to be a member of a community. (And, I'd argue, it actually benefits those who leave as well, because knowing how to know local systems is a transportable skill valuable everywhere.)

But it doesn't work in the context of state (and increasingly national) standards for what must be learned at each grade level. We worry about what happens with a curriculum that would vary from place to place. What happens when a family moves to a new school district? How would we know that an architect licensed in Nebraska is good enough to work in New Jersey? But these questions are also rooted in our modernism. We structure things with a bias in favor of those who move over those who stay. The student who is likely to leave a school district has more influence over the curriculum than the student who remains in the same place; NCARB has more control over the definition of your architectural practice than those people who know their community and its history; the American Planning Association has more control over your street layouts than your mayor.

So let the airlines collapse, let gasoline hit $8.75 a gallon, let No Child Left Behind and its uniform definition of learning become part of our embarassing history. Let's find out what happens if we stay put.

Practical Reason

2008-04-24T09:11:00.002-04:00

I've only had this book for a week, and I've already read it twice. It's A New Agenda for Higher Education: Shaping a Life of the Mind for Practice (William M. Sullivan & Matthew S. Rosin, 2008, JosseyBass). The book is the outcome of an extensive seminar supported by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in which a dozen or so faculty in various professional programs (engineering, pre-med, law, nursing, education, etc.) talked about the ways in which they combined liberal education and professional education. Rather than seeing a tension between those two traditional opposites, the members of this seminar came to understand how neither is fully effective without completely embracing the other.

One of their more interesting claims is that our current agenda of critical thinking, while useful, is incomplete. Critical thinking is an analytical event: pulling an argument into its component parts, evaluating the character of each part, and rebuilding the parts you find solid into a new argument. They contrast this with "the new agenda," which they call practical reason. The underlying epistemological premise of practical reason is that it "...looks on knowledge, including representational knowledge, as founded on participation and engagement with the world" (p.103). A blend of objective analysis and narrative engagement, practical reason allows us to not only understand what we can do, but to explore what we ought to do.

The members of this seminar looked at one another's syllabi, and four general topics of content came to the surface regardless of their discipline.

Identity -- understanding yourself as a decision-maker, including your skills, knowledge, values, preferences, and blind spots.
Community -- understanding who has a stake in the outcome of your decisions, what their values are (and therefore what their preferred outcomes are likely to be).
Responsibility -- understanding the relationship and duties you bear to each of the members of this community.
Bodies of Knowledge -- understanding the particular theories, materials, and procedures of your chosen field.

As we look at a typical design education, we see lots of opportunities to engage in learning the body of knowledge -- through studio courses, materials and structures and systems courses, architectural history courses, and so on. In fact, that's about the only one of the four that's systematically addressed. We hope that you can develop some of the other three understandings on your own time, but we don't take it as our job. We have some component of "general education" in the curriculum, through which we hope that you'll magically become a "well-rounded person," but we never articulate the ends to which that "rounding" should be put.

One of the reasons I shape my intro design theory course the way I do is that it feels like an important opportunity to at least introduce the first three topics. Given that they won't be raised again in any of the further courses, I don't have any idea whether or not it's the right thing to do. But I'd feel irresponsible if I didn't try.

Public Privacy

2008-04-21T16:53:00.002-04:00

A friend of mine was visiting over the weekend. He's a geographer who teaches at a small liberal arts college in the Great Lakes region. He was showing my partner and I the new Street View feature in Google Earth, which allows you to literally navigate down the road as though you were driving. I mentioned that there'd been some fallout from people who had been photographed by the Google camera in ways they didn't appreciate: climbing over a fence, picking their nose, or even just being photographed someplace where they oughtn't to have been at that moment (skipping a day of work, for instance). And my friend said that in our modern surveillance environment, he thought that we had no expectation of privacy whatsoever when in a public space. I thought, on the other hand, that it was entirely reasonable to be anonymous.

About thirty years ago, the environmental psychologist Irv Altman laid out four strategies we use to moderate privacy: isolation, or being away from others; enclosure, or putting a barrier between ourselves and others; reserve, or sending body-language signals that we don't wish to be bothered; and anonymity, or locating oneself in an environment where information about you won't be noticed because there's no larger narrative frame to put it into. Anymore, it seems, enclosure is the only mode of privacy we have available.

My friend has the belief that he does at least in part because he knows how much data is available, how it can be organized and analyzed, and (in most cases) who has access to it. Most of us have no idea how thoroughly our lives can be tracked. Your cell phone allows GPS location of paths; your credit card can tell us not only what you bought, but where and when; your lawn chair might have an RFID chip in it, installed to let WalMart have better control over employee theft but now available to know where that chair is forever and ever; every written item ever written by or about you is available by Googling at a moment's notice. I read not long ago that the average American is photographed or videotaped about 15 times per day, in stores, workplaces, and even street corners.

We had this conversation on Sunday. This morning (Monday) on NPR, there was a discussion of exactly this phenomenon in the context of London. A woman was talking about trying to get her three-year-old into a highly competitive preschool; when the family went back for their interview, they were presented with a detailed database of all of their locations and activities for the previous two weeks. Apparently, English law allows for broad access to records (including GPS records from telephones, the phone logs themselves, and access to public-space video) as long as the person or organization asking for the information can demonstrate some "public good." In this case, the school wanted to verify that the family in question lived within the school district and wasn't falsifying their residential address in order to get their kid into this school. In addition, information gathering by law enforcement is not constrained by severity of accused crime; as one Minister of Parliament said, "If you've dropped a sweet paper (candy wrapper) on the street, we can take a DNA sample."

There's a tribunal you can complain to if you think your privacy has been violated, but that tribunal has ruled in favor of the complainant exactly once in the seven years it's existed. More chilling, though, is that there haven't been all that many complaints in the first place. We seem to not mind that all of our activities are potentially in the public record, that the concept of privacy (which Altman characterized as the ability to modulate information) has lost precedence to the fact of surveillance. In the USA PATRIOT Act world, a desire for privacy is itself seen as a presumption of some form of guilt; the accusation is that someone who wants privacy has something to hide.

In this light, is public space desirable any more? Does the joy of social engagement also carry within it the poison sting of the Panopticon? As a larger question, do the notions of place and time carry weight any longer? I exist (as a writer, at least) everywhere and all at once. With the right access privileges, I can see you (as you are now and as you've ever existed) regardless of where you might be.

Like much of Modernism, our surrender to surveillance is brought about because we have better answers to what we can do than to what we should do. We have nearly infinite amounts of data storage space (I just bought a 250Gb hard drive last week that fits in my shirt pocket); every cell phone has a camera and GPS tag; digital telephone systems allow one-time conversations to be called back to life any time Verizon chooses. We know how to do damn near anything; we haven't always considered why.

Iterations

2008-04-14T16:04:00.004-04:00

So I was talking with my partner last night. She'd just read the most recent Vita Activa post (A Contentious Vocabulary) and she was still trying to figure out what I meant by "design" and "craft." So we sat and talked for half an hour or so, and I'm taking another crack at it today. This is the iterative process that designers always talk about, but anybody worth their beans does it all the time, regardless of profession or hobby.

When we're creating something for use (I'm still sticking to my differentiation between art and craft for this discussion), it seems to me that we're actually doing three things. To use the academic terms, we could call them design, craft, and research. But I think those are analogous (maybe synonymous...stay tuned) to the words plan, do, and test.

Here's an example from the profession I understand best: conducting ethnographic research. I spent about a year designing/planning my biggest research project before going off to do fieldwork. That entailed the conceptual literature review, the methods literature review, the coordination with the host site, the calendaring of research tasks, the writing of the proposal, and so on. The work of "research design" (a very common term in academic circles) was intended to both frame the problem to be resolved -- our misunderstanding of teenagers' spatiality -- and to create an appropriate plan for resolving it.

Then I went off and actually did several hundred questionnaires and dozens of formal interviews and a few thousand hours of direct observation and all the writing and puzzling and sorting and transcribing that went along with it. This stuff, the everyday doing, was the actual craft: taking the plan and making something real out of it, hopefully with care and attentiveness.

The final step was the evaluation of the work, testing whether it did indeed adequately address the original problem. This was (at the largest scale) the peer-review process whereby a fair number of experts, both known and anonymous, reviewed the work to understand whether it a) was competently conceived, b) was competently conducted, c) led to a new understanding of teenagers' use and conceptions of the physical world, and d) represented a productive change in our thinking. To use my earlier definition of "research," the question my reviewers had was to learn what was true about the specific circumstances (in this case, the book and the intellectual field it lived within).

Plan. Do. Test.

When I play pool, I have a much more constrained problem -- a tame problem, Rittel & Weber would say. I have to plan how to move the cue ball to accomplish three things: make the object ball I want to make, have the cue ball end up in a location that will allow me to sink another object ball on the next shot, and have the likelihood of being able to productively move the cue ball to another good spot for the subsequent shot. I'm thinking two shots ahead, usually; someday, I'll be good at this, but for now, two is what I've got. So I have to plan the angle, speed, and spin I need to impart in order to get these problems solved.

Once the design is in place, I chalk up the cue, lean over, go through my pre-shot routine, and stroke the ball. That's the craft. Once everything stops rolling, I assess whether I solved the problem appropriately, which in this case is easy to discern: I did or did not pot the ball I wanted to pot, and the cue ball did or did not stop where I wanted it to stop.

Plan. Do. Test.

Now, it's easy to understand all of this at the biggest scale. I spent a year planning my big research project. I spent a year and a half doing it. And I've spent the last eight years evaluating it. But the fact is that I was doing all three of those things on the small scale every few minutes. I'd be hanging out at school between classes, and I'd see something happen that seemed to me to be a useful thing to explore ("useful" meaning that it applied somehow to the bigger problem, which I was redefining every day as I learned more about conditions in the field). So I'd figure out how to spend the next few minutes asking about that event I'd seen: manufacturing questions on the fly, testing their utility by thinking about the answers I was getting, and creating new questions in response to my evaluation. It was plan, do, test at the finest grain, over and over and over again.

When the iterative work is that rapid and reflexive (and that sequence lies behind every good conversation you've ever had), it seems as though it's all one thing. But I think for our purposes, it's important to remember that there are three unique acts going on, because they have different ends and therefore different terms of critique.

So what about architecture? And more to the point, what about my partner's questions from last night? Design is the process of framing the question, making the question complex and difficult (and thus worth answering), and developing a plan for resolving the question. For instance, good design doesn't answer the question "How should I make this school?" It answers the questions "How should we educate these kids? What does it mean to be educated? What does it mean to be an educator? And how can a building (or perhaps not a building) help answer these questions better than we do now?" And lots of other questions as well, having to do with budget and energy and legality and safety and so on.

Once we have the plan, we embark on the crafting of the response. We draw and model and add and subtract and turn and separate and combine and select materials and change those materials. Eventually, we have the object for which we are responsible: a construction set to give to the contractor. And then we turn to research: does my product (the CDs) appropriately resolve the questions we raised? Does the ultimate building foster education in the ways I planned for it to? What do the kids and teachers and administrators and test scores say? Are there new questions to turn to for the next design? Or do I need to rethink what I did this time in light of its lack of success?

That's design-craft-research at the big scale. What does it look like at the small, day-to-day scale?

A Contentious Vocabulary

2008-04-12T22:28:00.003-04:00

One of the most crucial aspects of interpretive scholarship is the definition of one’s terms. Words that are often taken for granted can be investigated for their hidden meanings, inflections that reveal deeper thoughts and associations. And I realize that I’ve been using lots of words in this blog so far that I probably need to examine (the word “unpack” is the trendy PoMo metaphor for this kind of work; although the term has its appeal, I’m going to avoid it just because of the community that most frequently uses it).

The following definitions are only starting points — I’m going to define them firmly, as though I’ve settled on them, but I’ll have a fair bit of research to do before I fully believe any of them. Also, because they’re definitions, they’re by necessity abbreviated. Entire libraries have been written about each of them, and deservedly so. Think of this as a working dictionary.

Architecture — The professional practice of designing places for habitation. In my lexicon, architecture is not a word to be applied to the buildings themselves, which are just buildings. Architecture is a body of practices and activities that lead to solving problems through making places.

Building — A constructed object whose primary purposes are human shelter and organizational support.

Design — The intellectual practice of imagining and planning a solution to a problem. This solution may be a physical object, but may equally be a process or a social arrangement. Architects do design, of course, but the term isn’t limited to architecture. Software design, research design, web design, curriculum design, and furniture design all deserve the term. Automotive design, fashion design and graphic design may truly be design, if they’re solving a problem like aerodynamics or information legibility; but they may not really be design at all if their intention is primarily decorative.

Environmental Design — An overarching term for the professions that collectively design places at multiple scales. At the least, environmental design includes urban and regional planning, landscape architecture, architecture, and interior design.

Art — The practice of extending the capabilities of materials and actions in order to create objects or performances that are ends in themselves. We encounter those outcomes with aesthetic or intellectual regard rather than through any presumption of utility.

Craft — The practice of making useful objects with great care and intention. Craft connotes attention to every detail through conscious decisions rather than habit and reflex. But the usefulness and performance of the ultimate object is still foremost in the craftsperson’s judgment. “Craft brewing,” for instance, stands in opposition to mass beer manufacturing by Anheuiser-Busch and the like, but the outcome in both cases is judged by the drinking of the beer. My pool cue is the result not merely of aesthetic decisions, but also of curing the wood for two years before turning it, of locating the center of gravity slightly forward of the grip, of selecting the taper and finish of the shaft, of a tip made of seven layers of laminated pig leather, all of which are done to allow for shots to be made accurately and consistently.

Habitation — The physical and emotional content of place experience. This is a more expansive term than “use,” for instance, which implies a focus on the physical and logistical functions; but it’s also more thoroughly experiential than mere viewing. Habitation implies the full employment of all of our senses, of our mobility, of our histories and preferences, and of our cognitive abilities.

Place — A physical environment that is invested with meaning by an inhabitant. The shorthand I’ve often used is Place = Space + Story. We have relationships with the places in our lives, relationships that are often as rich and complex as the relationships we have with people. One of my grad students did her dissertation on places that children found “friendly,” and learned that the full array of friendship characteristics (shared interests, mutual caring and support, equal exchange, and so on) were easily identified by kids when they talked about places in their neighborhoods.

Social Justice — The attempt to rectify inequality of opportunity, access to resources, or burdens borne. The outcome of social justice is not equality and uniformity; it is the removal of barriers and historical biases that are unfairly applied to members of a particular demographic group (defined by gender, ethnicity, sexuality, physical ability, and so on). It applies not to differences achieved and maintained through merit and effort, but rather to differences over which the individual has little control. For instance, the schools of the Oakland school district have substantially different resources depending on whether they’re in the wealthier and whiter hills or in the low-income and Black/Latino flatlands, but the children attending those schools have no ability to change their neighborhood, their families’ economic circumstances and prior education levels, or the languages that are spoken at home.

Environmental Stewardship — The attempt to make the wisest and most enduring use of the various natural resources that surround us. If we take as our starting point the idea of ecosystem — the interconnections of plant and animal life with their atmospheric, aquatic and geological surroundings — then environmental stewardship is the responsibility for monitoring and ensuring the long-term health and balanced operation of that system and all of its components.

Humane — A behavior or attitude of kindness, benevolence, and support.

Material Culture — The collective concepts and beliefs of a particular group of people as expressed through the objects that they create, use, and value.

Theory — Our best current understanding of how facts come together into systems. Theories are primarily explanatory; that is, they are the “deep structures” that explain the connections between innumerable individual phenomena. Things fall down all the time; the theory of gravity attempts to explain how and why that’s always true. Animals look different all over the place, depending on their environment and their role in the food chain; the theory of evolution attempts to explain how and why that’s always true. Once we’ve understood and refined a theory, we can test it by predicting the outcome of something that hasn’t yet happened (the philosopher Karl Popper has defined science as knowledge that is falsifiable; that is, we can prove a theory wrong or incomplete through providing evidence that the theory can’t adequately explain). By this definition, I have no idea what architectural theory is.

The Epistemology of Design

2008-04-06T11:07:00.004-04:00

Note: this is probably the most speculative and uncertain thing I've posted yet; I'm not sure I believe it myself, but it's where I am right now. These ideas are partly a response to the Journal of Architectural Education's decision to classify their manuscripts into two categories: the Scholarship of Design, and Design as Scholarship (I mentioned in my post last Sunday that I'd comment on this decision). I'd appreciate any and all thoughts you have on this one. And my thanks to my partner, Nora Rubinstein [Ph.D., Environmental Psychology], for spending some of a weekend thinking about it with me.

I’m part of an academic organization called the Council on Undergraduate Research, which works to support students and faculty members in undergraduate settings as they engage in collaborative research. CUR was founded about thirty years ago by a small group of chemists working at primarily-undergraduate colleges, who wanted to be able to compete with scholars at big research universities for publications and grant funding even though they didn't have massive labs and an army of graduate-student lab assistants. In the subsequent years, CUR branched out beyond chemistry to bring in geoscientists, physicists, experimental psychologists, and members from other fields of science.

About ten years ago, though, there was a move to launch a social sciences division, and that caused a fair bit of consternation among the CUR community. It wasn’t because social scientists were bad people, or even because our work wasn’t seen as worthwhile or productive. The problem was that the inclusion of interpretive scholarship challenged the organization’s identity as a research-oriented group, because it included intellectual activities that scientists couldn’t easily describe as “research.”

CUR’s social science division is now pretty healthy, and we’re well accepted within the larger organization. In fact, things have gone so well that we’re probably going to launch a Humanities and Fine Arts division pretty soon. But the mission of the organization has had to change somewhat in order to accommodate a broader array of academic members: the term “research” in CUR’s mission statement has now been broadened to “research, scholarship, and creative activity.”

I think that this precision of terms has some merit when we try to think about the nature of design and how it fits into the world of intellectual endeavor. Research and scholarship and creative activity and (I think) design are fundamentally different activities, in part because they have different ends but also in part because they rely on different understandings of what it means to know. (Hence the title of today’s post; epistemology is the branch of philosophy having to do with knowledge.) Here’s my first pass at thinking about what these words mean.

Research is the empirical investigation into what is true within a circumstance. Chemists do research when they describe what happens when A interacts with B, or when they learn the innate characteristics of some compound. Historians do research when they look through the personal letters of a prime minister to learn his private feelings during the war. The action is one of discovery, and the appropriate terms of criticism have to do with accuracy and methodological correctness.

Scholarship is the interpretive activity of what facts mean, what their context is, what social importance they have. Historians do scholarship when they interpret what a social movement meant in the context of its political and economic era; literature scholars do scholarship when they offer a new interpretation of a novel. The intellectual action is one of argument, and the terms of criticism have to do with internal consistency, familiarity with prior scholarship, and control over language.

Creative Activity is the bringing about of something that did not previously exist — a new play, film, string quartet, dance — through studying and experimenting with the medium of expression. That is, a dancer understands (and challenges) the capabilities of the body; a painter understands (and challenges) the characteristics of the paint, canvas, and brush. The intellectual action is one of exploration, and the terms of criticism have to do with craft, novelty and coherence.

I’ve spent much of the weekend working on this, and I increasingly think (though I’m not yet fully convinced) that classifying design as a knowledge act depends entirely on what we include as “design.” The statement of the problem is a knowledge act. It is an integrative exploration of the multiple domains to which the ultimate product must successfully respond — the economic, the legal, the social, the cultural, the aesthetic, the contextual, the physical — and the setting of the terms of success in each domain. The problem statement is the component of design work through which knowledge is created.

But what we usually think of as design, the response to that knowledge to craft a noun (an object or a process or a condition) that satisfies the problem’s components, doesn’t actually create knowledge of any sort. It relies on knowledge, and its outcome can be tested through knowledge-generating acts of research, scholarship, creative activity and problem-setting. But the act of moving from program statement to drawn plans does not create knowledge.

If we think of the academic world as having the fundamental purpose of generating knowledge, then design as we typically teach it — the response to a problem — is not correctly placed within the academic domain. What we should be teaching (and learning) instead is more thoughtful and humane ways of stating the problem, of understanding the multiple criteria for successful resolution, and of testing the outcome object against those criteria for later improvement. If design and design education were configured that completely, I'd be much happier, because I think we'd learn more and do more responsible work. We'd actually be accumulating created knowledge that could be tested and challenged and used to inform the work of new generations of design students.

Forty Years

2008-04-04T06:53:00.006-04:00

According to Exodus, it took Moses forty years in the wilderness before he was able to lead the Hebrews into the Promised Land. I've always wondered about that... it's about 250 miles from Cairo to Tel Aviv, so 40 years would mean they had an average speed of about 90 feet a day. It seems like the progress would have been faster.

It was forty years ago today that Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee. And there are a lot of days where it seems like our progress hasn't been very fast, either. We still live in a world where race matters, and matters a lot. According to Nancy Denton, a sociologist at SUNY-Albany, 62% of African American families earning more than $50,000 per year still live in neighborhoods that are strongly segregated, as opposed to 44% of Asian Americans and 40% of Latino Americans (Denton, Nancy A. 2001. "The Role of Residential Segregation in Promoting and Maintaining Inequality in Wealth and Property." Indiana Law Review 34.). She writes:

Racial segregation and suburbanization are not simply matters of class. Whereas upper middle class and affluent Hispanic and Asian families routinely achieve moderate levels of segregation, even within central cities, affluent blacks rarely make it into the moderate range, even in suburbs, and only within the South and West.

Research also shows that living in segregated neighborhoods negatively affects student performance… In addition to its effects on educational performance and the school environment, segregation also negatively affects the chances of completing a college education because it limits home value.

Sociologist Robert Bullard, one of the originators of the Environmental Justice movement, showed in his research in Houston that affluent minorities were, in 1990, more than twice as likely to be denied mortgage loans when compared to Caucasians with similar assets and economic backgrounds (Bullard, Robert D. 1990. “Housing Barriers: Trends in the Nation’s Fourth-Largest City.” Journal of Black Studies 21:1). And he's been active for more than thirty years in assisting communities of color -- including affluent communities -- in their fights against county, state, and corporate plans to locate landfills and waste incinerators in those communities.

We've been wandering in this wilderness for a lot longer than forty years, and we've got some distance yet ahead of us. We have no right as professionals to know these things and not act upon them; there aren't enough Fallingwaters and Villa Savoyes in the world to make up for a single city's discriminatory environments. If architecture has anything to do with social justice, then we need to look at the world face-on, and not blink.

A Guest Commentary

2008-03-30T10:12:00.002-04:00

I’m going to use this post to offer a direct extended quote from someone else. This is the first half of a column by Kim Tanzer, professor of Architecture at U.Florida and current President of the American Collegiate Schools of Architecture, from the October 2007 issue of the ACSA News. (The second half is how the ACSA’s publications and conferences intend to respond to the conditions she lays out in the first half; I’ll write about some of that later.) The title of the piece is “What is the Nature of Architectural Knowledge?”

Over the years, I have had many conversations with university colleagues who teach in he sciences which follow this general outline: I ask about a colleague’s research and he or she begins by saying; “We know [insert a description about agreed upon knowledge within the discipline] and I am looking at [insert a question directed toward a filling a gap in a known field of knowledge or a hypothesized extension or redirection of this agreed upon knowledge]”

The frequency of this pattern of conversation has led me to wonder, what do most architects agree that we know? And, what further research needs to be done to fill in, extend, or redirect our collective understanding of architectural knowledge?

As I have started asking this question of academic architects, I have come to believe that we apparently do not conceptualize shared ground of common knowledge but rather shared, or even conflicting, zones of actions. While I love the fluidity of design propositions, our lack of agreed-upon common knowledge concerns me for several reasons.

First, if we do not base our designs on a largely shared and verified knowledge base, we find ourselves asking the public to have faith in our assertions that designs will indeed perform as we contend. In fact if we ourselves do not believe our designs are largely based on verifiable knowledge, we can only be operating on faith. And if such projects fail, they lead to a generalized decrease in the value of professional architectural service.

Second, if we do not teach our students the outlines of our knowledge base, one must wonder what we are teaching them beyond design thinking. While architectural educators teach design thinking very well, academics in other fields argue that they do too. (Since we tend not to test assertions we can’t even prove our own point!) Architectural curricula are regarded as among the most demanding in many universities. Is such rigor necessary if a curriculum does not transmit a comprehensive knowledge base through all of its courses?

Third, having participated actively in scholarly exchanges for two decades, I regret that persuasively advanced arguments, gathered evidence, or unlocked architectural problems seem not to accumulate as a knowledge base. That is, we do not build adequately on the work of our colleagues. Rather, studies (in written, drawn, or built form) fall by the wayside, as new fascinations emerge. Too often, we find ourselves repeating, not extending, propositions made a generation earlier.

Big Ideas, Small Scales

2008-03-30T09:59:00.005-04:00

When you go out to dinner or a bar with a large group of people, have a close look at the nature of the conversations. Not to the content, which I’m sure is sparkling and witty. No, pay attention to the nature of the size and shape of the conversations. There will likely be very few moments where all eight or ten of you are engaged in the same conversation at once. Instead, you’ll see two or three or four conversations going on at the same time, small subgroups turned inward to enclose both a topic and a relationship. It’s very rare that, given our own devices (and not being brought together through a formal mechanism like a class or a meeting or a political rally), we engage with a large group. Even at a gallery opening or an Oakland A’s game, we may be in the middle of a lot of people, but we’re having a sequence of very small experiences.

This is true of the built environment as well. We almost never experience a city; instead, we experience a series of streetscapes and subway cars and restaurants and workplaces and nodes of parks; the city-ness only exists in our cumulative experience, and is mildly to strongly different across individuals. We manufacture our image of the city through habit and repetition and occasional surprise (see the work of Kevin Lynch, Ian Cullen, and Steve & Rachel Kaplan, for instance). The intellectual object of the city as shown on maps and Google Earth and zoning codes is not quite the city that we live in.

I would also argue that we very rarely experience buildings. Instead, we most often experience many, many small spaces; vestibules, lobbies, corridors, elevators, cubicles, meeting rooms. The singular buildings that designers create — sculptural, conceptual objects — are not the same as the varied sequence of places people encounter through their small and segmented experiences. This is one of the reasons that the architect’s parti is so often not merely incomprehensible but actively confusing; the “concept” that the building responds to is a scheme that has to do with the building as a whole, and which is primarily legible through the (carefully selected) drawings and models through which the building is presented. It’s often unreadable and invisible in its individual segments; in fact, the more that the “concept” drives the design, the more likely it is that some individual spaces must be sacrificed in order to serve the larger compositional theme.

Here’s a piece of research that would be fun to conduct. Choose fifty or so of the buildings that have received the most critical acclaim in the past twenty years. Read the designers’ commentary and find the concept or parti or whatever the heck you want to call it. Then stand next to each one on a nice day, and ask 100 people if they can name what the major driving idea of the building was. Check “yes” if they come anywhere close without prior knowledge through their reading. I’m betting that the success rate will be in the very low single digits in almost every case. (If you conduct this research under adequate methodology, I'll be happy to put up a $20 bet on my hypothesis.)

The Representation of Places

2008-03-30T09:51:00.002-04:00

There’s a bit of a debate going on within architectural education about BIM. Some believe that BIM (or other virtual modeling tools) should be introduced early in students’ design careers, and should be seen as an integral element of design thinking, both because of their prominence in the industry and their because they facilitate spatial and construction understanding. Others argue that beginning students should employ the traditional modes of pencil and physical models, because of their intimacy and physicality.

I’m something of an agnostic on the question, just as I was an agnostic when teaching writing whether students should use Word or Word Perfect or a legal pad when creating their first drafts. I was asking them to create a good argument, not to be a good typist.

In every design curriculum, there are a bunch of courses on design media: almost always freehand drawing, orthogonal drafting, perspective, and some broad array of computational media (I had a course called “Shades and Shadows” when I was a student way back in the stone age). And while I understand their importance, I also believe that graphic skill is grossly overemphasized in architectural education. And not merely in courses specifically about representation. I was at the annual American Collegiate Schools of Architecture conference last spring in Philadelphia, and went to a session called (something like) Research in Design. I left after the first three presenters all showed us some computer modeling of a rule-based form generation scheme; as far as I could tell, they’d developed really cool screen savers that had almost nothing to do with architecture.

I have two paired questions about how we might teach design representation:

How can we help students convey their experience of existing places that they study? This will entail drawing, of course, but how can we help them both perceive and represent the tactile, thermal, social, acoustical, cultural, historical, and temporal elements of good places? (This presumes, of course, that they actually study real places and not just pictures from afar.)
How can we help designers convey the users’ likely experiences of proposed places in all of those dimensions? How can we say convincingly that this design will be thermally delightful, for instance? (Lisa Heschong’s little book Thermal Delight in Architecture, now almost thirty years old, is still one of the very best — indeed, delightful — studies of what makes places satisfying. And not a picture in the whole thing.)

Focusing on drawing, drafting and CAD/BIM misses the point. It’s like focusing on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. But it does help us to imagine that designers are in the art business, because the tools are somewhat similar.

So Near and Yet So Far

2008-03-25T21:32:00.007-04:00

"Any intervention the West has, whether it’s the Peace Corps or tanks rolling into Baghdad, is going to fail unless we understand how the people think there." — Dan Hoyle

I read a lovely little article this evening, called “Architectural Assumptions and Environmental Discrimination: the Case for More Inclusive Design in Schools of Architecture” (a chapter in David Nicol & Simon Pilling, eds, Changing Architectural Education: Toward a New Professionalism; 2000; London and New York: Spon Press). In this chapter, Ruth Morrow — a professor of architecture at the University of Ulster — recounts the findings of research on the curriculum of a school of architecture at another UK college. The barriers to being able to practice truly “inclusive” or socially responsible design are built throughout the design curriculum as currently understood. Some of the circumstances she identifies are:

The similarity in race, gender and social class of most architecture faculty, which means they’ve rarely been excluded from or hindered by physical environments, and thus rarely build inclusivity and pluralism into their course goals;
The reduction of time spent on analysis because of the speed of class projects and the privileging of design time;
The relative lack of inclusion of the vast amount of research-supported understandings we have of user’s experiences of places, and of the variety of users unlike us who are likely to encounter those places;
The typical richness of sites chosen for studio projects, which she claims allows students to never have to work with “large, expansive sites with little character and surrounded by low-grade suburban blandness. But in reality it is sites of this kind that are, for instance, typical of those used for social housing, for day centres for people with multiple disabilities and for residential units for people with dementia” (p.45)
The building types chosen are likewise those that “more frequently reflect the needs of dominant groups in society than those of minority groups” (p.46)
The evaluative bias (in education and in professional awards) toward innovative form and the rare consideration of user assessments and POEs in our judgments of worth;
The focus on visual elements of design, which denies the full array of sensory experiences;
The demand for a “parti” or a “concept” or an “idea” behind the design (which Morrow says is “usually irrelevant to the user,” for which I would change the word “irrelevant” to “bewildering”) rather than an understanding of the experiences of a space; and
The rarity of mock-ups and other full-scale tests of the experience of design elements.

Any one of these nine would be problematic, and something to change. The fact that most curricula encompass most or all of these is pretty horrific. And the fact that we have the tools at hand to change most of them almost overnight is both encouraging because we could change, so easily, and distressing because we don’t think to do so.

Hoyle, in our opening quote, is talking about geopolitical interventions. But design interventions follow the same logic. They're doomed to fail unless we understand how the people think there.

Shirts and buildings

2008-03-21T12:24:00.004-04:00

I’m wearing a shirt. It’s a cotton shirt made by Munsingwear, constructed in Indonesia. It’s dark blue, long-sleeved, with a pattern of small white leaves and some rustic little Xs here and there. The buttons are sort of grey and black mottled plastic. If this shirt were hanging in the laundromat next to your shirts, you could almost certainly pick it out as not being one of yours. You might like it, or not like it, depending on your tastes, but it’s recognizable as being a unique shirt.

In its basic forms, though, it’s a shirt exactly like every other shirt in the laundry. It has a torso and two arms, and buttons down the center of the front. It has a button at each sleeve cuff that keeps it from flapping around, and a pocket on the left side of the chest. It has a collar that rises about an inch and a quarter, and then folds back down onto itself to come just back to touch the shoulders. The front edges of the collar come to acute-angle points. The tails are a little longer in the back and the front and shorter on the sides.

Pants. Two legs and a pelvis. Pockets. Belt loops.

Socks. A part that goes forward over your foot and curves closed over your toes, an angled gusset to make the curve at the heel, and then a top part that comes some distance up your calf and has elastic to keep it from sliding down all day.

Tie. A long linear piece of cloth wider on one end than the other, but both ends generally come to a laterally-symmetrical point. You wrap it around your neck, underneath the fold of the shirt collar, and tie it in some kind of a knot right at the top button so that most (but not all) of the knot is visible between the points of the collars. The rest of it hangs straight down the center of your belly. The wider end should hang further down than the narrower end, and should be in the front.

My purpose here is not to develop an illustrated childrens book on the nature of Western clothing. Rather, it’s an argument about the difference between form and detail. Form is cultural, expressing membership in a certain community of understanding; detail is individual, expressing specific preferences and interests. Form is what we do; detail is what I do.

There’s been a fair bit of environmental preference research about the concept of “frame and fill,” which is somewhat analogous to how I’m differentiating form and detail. I’ll need to find the exact reference for this definition from the 1988 proceedings of the ACSA Annual Meeting:

“The presumption is, then, that most pre-Modern facade compositions are largely developed and organized according to this principle of FRAME and FILL. In other words, major segments (fields) of a facade are defined, these are further subdivided, and each subdivision is “filled” through the articulation of fenestration and ornament. Thus, each subdivision of the facade is ordered, both within itself and in relation to the whole.”

It’s interesting that this is defined as a “pre-Modern” approach to building, since it’s still the contemporary approach to making almost everything else: clothes, cars, books, kitchenware, furniture. A limited number of forms, each applicable to a particular use, each available in a nearly infinite number of details in their fill. But in building design, we work backward. We build remarkable forms, and then hose them down with Dryvit and cover the inside with SheetRock, neither of which has any fill characteristics at all. (In the studio, we make the whole thing of basswood or museum board, with the same results.)

In general, we’ve found that people prefer buildings with familiar forms and interesting details. (Again, I’ll have to go into my research files to find appropriate references for this.) That is, they simultaneously want their expectations to be met and to have their senses enriched.

If I were designing an architecture school, my students’ first design exercise would be something like this:

I am your client. I am a writer. I want to build a small hut in the back yard where I can go to write and to read away from distractions. It will be square in plan, 10’ on each side, with a level floor. The walls will extend vertically up to a height of 9’, and the symmetrical gable roof will have a 45-degree pitch. There will be a door on one face, 6’8” in height and 32” in width. The walls perpendicular to the door wall will each have a window opening of 44” in height and 30” in width; the rear wall, parallel to the door wall, will have a window opening of 44” in height and 60” in width. In each case, the windows will have a sill height of 30”. No construction may extend from either the outer or inner faces of the walls by more than one inch. Using only materials and material connections, make it delightful.

We might repeat this exercise, with the programs and forms remaining predetermined but increasingly more complex, for a couple of years or more. In the meantime, they’d be exposed to ever richer and more rigorous cultural analysis, so that when they finally got around to being able to independently work with form (which is cultural in nature) after a few years, they’d be doing it with some extensive understanding of the ways in which their form decisions resist or comply with cultural norms.

The photograph, round 2

2008-03-19T12:37:00.002-04:00

“Pornography ordinarily represents the sexual organs, making them into a motionless object (a fetish), flattered like an idol that does not leave its niche; for me, there is no punctum in the pornographic image; at most it amuses me (and even then, boredom follows quickly). The erotic photograph, on the contrary (and this is its very condition), does not make the sexual organs into a central object; it may very well not show them at all; it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me...the pornographic body shows itself, it does not give itself, there is no generosity in it…” – Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (trans. Richard Howard, 1981; New York: Hill and Wang)

To understand whether architectural photographs are erotic or pornographic, Barthes would ask us to assess two things. The first is the degree to which the architectural object is fully and formally represented, and the degree to which is it obscured, hinted at, presented mainly as a scene. The second is the spectator for whom it is primarily intended.

Architectural photographs are noted for rarely including either people or signs of habitation. As Cervin Robinson noted in his 1975 essay “Architectural Photography” (Journal of Architectural Education, 29:2, 10-15),

“If asked to explain why he photographs as he does, the architectural photographer could justify most of it in the name of clarity. The wide-angle lens he uses helps distinguish planes in his picture; it tends to play down distracting surroundings; and, when his back is up against a wall, it allows him to show more. Furniture that is out of line will be more distractingly apparent in a picture than in reality; people who are asked to hold still for a photograph are likely to appear distressingly unnatural. The building which is his main subject may stand out clearly only if neighboring structures do not appear with equal prominence and clarity” (p.10).

This is the pornographic impulse: to display the fetish object fully and completely, with as few distractors as possible. The planes and the light are fundamental to both the original conception of the work and its representation; furniture, people, and surroundings play a minor role, if any at all. (In fact, the degree to which an object can even be said to have a context limits its interest among the design community, which largely canonizes second homes, museums, monuments, college buildings and other freestanding, sculptural forms.)

The architect, looking at the photograph of a building (in Architectural Record or Metropolis or some other design-focused publication), is likely to see it as merely an instance of his or her general interest in building design. That is, its importance isn’t in its specificity so much as its embodiment of certain trends, principles, styles and so on (and the degree to which it conforms to or mildly challenges those trends is exactly the grounds on which it was chosen to be photographed in the first place). The layperson, looking at the same photograph in the same context, is likely to be bewildered by both the object and by architects’ interest in it. To make this fetish argument more complete, imagine a catalog of leather bondage-wear. For those who are part of this fetish community, a particular corset might be a particularly nice example of corsets in general, but the category of corset still holds the spectator’s primary devotion. If the spectator isn’t part of the particular fetish community, then he or she has no means of applying emotional import to the fetish objects, either in general or in particular. Thus, the formal photograph of an architectural element is pornographic or arousing to the architect, and opaque to the layperson.

But what happens when the building or building element is used not in full self-exposure, but rather as a hint, a setting, a reference? These photographs are designed to enhance some sort of narrative, to evoke an emotional state. There are at least a couple of reasons for doing this, both having some persuasive end in mind. There is, of course, advertising, which (as John Berger says in his book Ways of Seeing) is intended to place us in an imagined setting made possible by the product, and to make us envious of that imagined self. Thus the photograph of the Tuscan villa or the Bahamian beach or the Manhattan apartment library or the Los Angeles nightclub, depending on our inclinations, is intended to make us say “I could be there… and if I was there, I would be the kind of person I’ve always wanted to be.”

(Architects are also the targets of architectural advertising, which often seems to imply the imagined self as more profitable and less beleaguered. Some building material or graphic software or professional development course promises to make the architect’s particularly difficult professional life become manageable, perhaps even pleasant.)

There are also photographs that argue from pathos, that attempt to persuade through the appeal to emotion. This is related to advertising through its intention to create an imagined setting within which we can place ourselves, but different in that its ultimate end is that we change our practices to attain that end state rather than merely buy something to temporarily fill the emotional need. For instance, the photographs that fill Jan Gehl’s book Urban Spaces, Urban Lives are illustrations of the appealing street life of Copenhagen: bicycling commuters, lively sidewalk cafes, casual walks along the waterfront. These are intended to let us vicariously experience what humane urban development feels like, and to instill in us a desire for that kind of experience. This complements the more intellectual argument (the logos) of the book, which offers claims that this is a smart form of urban planning and methods for how to achieve it; and the ethos or embodied authority of the book, which relies on Gehl’s status as a professional urban designer who was significantly responsible for making Copenhagen have the form that it does.

To use Barthes’ analysis, the photographs that constitute both the advertisement and the emotional argument are versions of erotica. They imply something beyond themselves; they entice us to imagine ourselves as part of another place, community, way of life. They are rhetorical devices put to use, rather than inert images inviting involuntary arousal.

I can't resist...

2008-03-18T11:30:00.003-04:00

"I hold the position that rumors are cybernetic structures in their own right, neither the parochial production of humans, no composites, not part truths or half-fictions or any other form or assembly of other cybernetic categories. Thus, they possess certain unique and irreducible qualities, such as immanent distance. Given this position, I think I figured out the first rumor, which must have occurred about 300,000 after the big bang just before the decoherence. Just before the decoherence, as photons moved farther aand [sic] farther into the plasma soup, an inkling must have escalated into a cosmic rumor that the great, indivisible unity of the plasma would soon atomize, leaving all existence fragmented, each piece isolated and alone. As the rumor spread, a fantastic anxiety would have gripped the cosmos, reaching an intolerable pitch just at the brink. For an instant, as the plasma ripped apart into atoms and transparency spread throughout the cosmos in the blink of an eye, abject terror must have gripped all existence. Then a moment later, all existence must have joined together in a cacaphony of laughter." — Jeffrey Kipnis, the Urban Rumors project, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist

The philosopher Keith DeRose from Yale describes postmodern philosophy as "a fogbank," and says "I have to worry about any writer who will carry on like that for that long."

Let's leave aside this passage's anti-scientific (nearly Intelligent Design) foolishness of sentient stellar matter. I'm more troubled by the fact that every architectural theorist who succumbs to these glib and meaningless party games takes up faculty and publication space that could actually be used for the analysis of the vast social and environmental problems that architecture could address. I'm even more troubled by the fact that every unsuspecting architecture student who comes in contact with one of these characters runs the risk of being distracted from the real work.

If you're not going to work for the aid of real people, then get out of the way.

McLuhan + 50

2008-03-18T11:08:00.004-04:00

It’s been about fifty years since communications theorist Marshall McLuhan developed his ideas about the ways in which communications media not only affect the conveyance of ideas but become the ideas themselves. The linear thinking that was promoted by typeset books, the passivity and lack of creative demands that video places on its viewers, and so on, are the larger and more important cultural frame within which any of the content must be understood.

There’s far more I’ll need to do with McLuhan’s work. For instance, Joshua Meyrowitz has used McLuhan’s theory to examine “cyberspace” and the ways in which it eliminates some of the work of cities and buildings in his 1986 book No Sense of Place. But my work in this post is much more constrained — to talk about the fundamental problem with studying architecture through looking at photographs.

Buildings are three-dimensional, inhabited objects in community context. They engage many of our senses at once. They frame social interaction. They are encountered at all times of day, in all seasons and weathers, and over the course of years. Photographs are none of these things. They are two-dimensional objects set onto a page in a re-configured context. They frame geometric relationships and light-dark contrasts. They engage only our sense of sight. They are photographed at one point in time, at one point in their aging cycle.

We can learn about architecture from looking at pictures almost exactly the same things that we can learn about women by looking at Playboy:

That they are objects of the admiring or critical gaze
That there are certain subcultural norms that determine which models are to be photographed
That the appropriate way to see them is determined by light and composition
That the models’ past or future existence is irrelevant to our interest
That the images are set within pages of framing text and images of other models, all of which sets an overall interpretive and definitional frame

If we wish to construct an architectural education that focuses on compositional issues, then our books and slide shows are the perfect media. If, however, we wish to construct an architectural education that has any bearing on our experience of habitation, then architectural photographs are perhaps the most inappropriate — indeed, hostile — mode of communication we could possibly employ.

I’ve had an interesting series of conversations with some of my colleagues in design education. One of the things they almost universally try to do with beginning design students is to keep them from thinking about buildings, and instead to help them think about form and space, about design methods and so on. One said specifically that if we were framing design education about ideas of habitation, then all of the students’ prior experience in places would be perfectly appropriate evidence to bring to bear. But if instead we want to focus on composition, then we need to eliminate habitational thinking (and political thinking, and social thinking, and experiential thinking…) . Photography helps us do that.

The Problems with Progress

2008-03-17T11:22:00.004-04:00

“The good life would then be a matter of abandoning critique’s desire for an eternal, immovable fulcrum with which to block the rolling stone of modernity. The good life might be a matter of appreciating, on an everyday level, that vectoral flux and change is ontology itself. One’s enclosures are temporary, and if built as such, one need feel much less anxiety about its passing.” — McKenzie Wark, “Telegram from Nowhere,” Mutations (edited by Stefano Boeri, Harvard Project on the City, Muliplicity, and Jean Attali, 2001)

I picked up a very silly book this morning, called Mutations. It’s about 750 pages, but doubtful if anyone would ever (has ever, could ever, was ever intended to) read it as a traditional Western book — front to back, upper left to lower right, with the expectation that the words accumulate into a story or an argument. My partner described it as a “hallucinatory fantasy,” although I believe it was intended as a compilation of thoughts in architectural theory. Its authors would likely find “hallucinatory fantasy” to be a compliment, and would write more unintelligible things about it.

The book has something in common with a newspaper, which is also not intended to be read in continuity. It has more in common with the Internet, intended to be used by hopping (though here there are no hyperlinks, no connections that an author has claimed to be sensible or useful, so one merely hops about with less intellectual intention than a rabbit, who at least has the goal of fresh clover).

But there is one common theme here, which is the same tripartite theme that has been sounded since (roughly) the middle of the 19th century:

the present is fundamentally different than the past
the future will be unknowably different than the present
this change is and has always been and will always be either unquestionably good (as with the Futurists) or morally neutral (as with most Postmodernists)

This is a remarkably superficial understanding of change, rooted in the speed of technological innovation and ignoring the many stabilities of human experience. It is undoubtedly true that building construction has fundamentally changed from a stacking technology to an assembly technology. It is undoubtedly true that the camera has changed our visual language, that recording and broadcasting has changed our relationship to sound, that the immediacy of electronic communication has eliminated many of the barriers presented by distance and topography, and that the word processor/laser printer/blog has diminished some of the power differences between “authors” and the rest of us.

And there is no reason to imagine that technological process will slow down. According to the computing axiom called Moore’s Law, the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on a computer chip will double every two years. This single change will drive everything from communications media (are CD’s already obsolete?) to manufacturing (small household objects “printed” on your home rapid-prototyping unit) to health care (nanobots flowing through your bloodstream to destroy virus cells). In fact, the inventor Ray Kurzweil insists that it will be almost impossible to distinguish ourselves from machines within the next 40 years or so because of biotechnology and artificial intelligence; as machines grow more “human” and humans grow more mechanical, the differences between us will increasingly blur until an event he calls The Singularity, arriving in 2045. Mark your calendars.

Pondering the future seems to lead to one of three flavors of response:

the utopia, in which ideal circumstances (however defined) can finally be achieved;
the dystopia, in which unintended consequences are larger than those for which we hoped; and
the public policy endeavor, in which social and technical systems are seen as largely comprehensible, subject to rational intervention, and managed carefully through tuning in response to ongoing analysis.

But the political philosopher Marshall Berman suggests that the future warrants all three of these responses simultaneously. His 1982 book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity is a remarkable exploration of the ways that “progress” is always beneficial and destructive, always manageable and untamed, and which always drags the unwilling (traditionalists of varying sorts) along into lives that they have not chosen and do not consent to. “Progress” is merely power by another name, benefiting those with the resources to manage change and drowning those without.

I’ll write more about this in another post. My intention here is to begin my own thinking about how so much of architectural theory — these shallow and inelegant utopias — has paradoxically remained inert for more than a century.

Conversations

2008-03-15T12:02:00.004-04:00

"The pursuit of learning is not a race in which the competitors jockey for the best place, it is not even an argument or symposium; it is a conversation. And the peculiar virtue of a university (as a place of many studies) is to exhibit it in this character, each study appearing as a voice whose tone is neither tyrannous nor plangent, but humble and conversable. A conversation does not need a chairman, it has no predetermined course, we do not ask what it is “for,” and we do not judge its excellence by its conclusion; it has no conclusion, but is always put by for another day. Its integration is not superimposed but springs from the quality of the voices which speak, and its value lies in the relics it leaves behind in the minds of those who participate." — Michael Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning, 1989.

One of the reasons why architecture may be (and should be) taught differently than it is practiced can be intuited by following the logic of law professor Robert Justin Lipkin in his chapter “Pragmatism, Cultural Criticism and the Idea of the Postmodern University” (from the 1994 book An Ethical Education). His argument, in brief, is that a college education is intended to be a respite from the world, during which we subject the dominant culture to the strongest questioning we can muster. If we find ourselves to be conservative, we will create counter-arguments for these important questions, and thus be better defenders of the current cultural circumstances. If we find ourselves to be progressives, we will be able to use these questions to help us form the basis for a new means of interacting with one another.

At present, design education (by which I mean studio education) is based on fundamentally different goals than those — primarily on the goals of learning to manipulate form and space so as to convey or explore a concept. But if we borrow Lipkin’s point of view, architectural education should place its emphasis on the rigorous examination of cultural notions of habitation, beauty, contextual appropriateness, pleasure, comfort, place identity, and so on.

There are, however, at least three reasons why this is not carried out. One is that architectural education is (very often) intended not as this kind of broad, critical education, but rather as a preparation to enter the community of professionals. If that is the intention, then it is a conservative intention — that is, it should prepare its new recruits to absorb and uphold the values of the culture they are about to enter. These professional values are almost wholly aligned with the values of the dominant culture more broadly: that buildings are commercial products to be sold, either on the basis of cost or of brand image. So design education is torn and often confused by its conflicting goals of professional preparation and critical study.

The second reason is that there are often individual faculty within design schools with an interest in carrying out this kind of critical discourse, but that the department itself (or even the entire college) is too often isolated from the intellectual life of the university as a whole. The ideas that design theorists create are not subjected to examination by philosophers, social scientists, humanists, or physical scientists, nor do their ideas benefit from a broad training in these fields. (In my experience, the most remarkable faculty I’ve ever met in design schools came from intellectual origins outside architecture — cultural geography, environmental psychology, human ecology, material culture studies, and so on.)

The third reason is that whatever critiques are made of the dominant definitions of beauty and comfort and so on are hidden and implicit. Here is a snippet of a design review; the project was a small single-family house.

Critic: Why are these windows smaller than those windows on the other side?

Student: Because they’re in the bathroom.

Critic: That’s the kind of conventional thinking we need you to get rid of. If I wanted that kind of house, I could just go to the store and buy a copy of 101 House Plans.

Now, this conversation could have offered the opportunity to question the student’s assumptions about privacy, to put forth counter-definitions, to explore the ways in which expectations of privacy are tied to other expectations of habitation and territory, and so on. Instead, the idea that a room might “require” different sized windows was simply rejected (and also demeaned) with no justification for the rejection. Prevailing cultural definitions are rarely named directly in design critiques, and their rejection is not the outcome of rigorous review and analysis but rather of simple declaration. (This may be, as James Elkins argues, that the critique simply offers too little time for meaningful exchange. He suggests three hours as about right for the examination and conversation about one student’s work.)

The fact is that conventions exist for a perfectly understandable set of reasons. They are defined by cultural norms that are broadly held but rarely examined. A crucial purpose of higher education should be to enter into conversations that help us understand our culture broadly, richly, and critically, so that we can be prepared to mount a strong case for its defense or its revision.

Art, Craft, Who Cares???

2008-03-13T07:04:00.003-04:00

So let’s return to my claim that architects are not artists, which is already a point of serious contention here. In order to help everybody feel a little better, let me make it clear that I am not using the word “art” in its vernacular sense. Here are some of the things I don’t mean:

That art is something done with heightened awareness and intention.
That art reflects its maker and its larger culture.
That art is work born from inspiration.
That art is something engaging to our senses.
That art is any work done well.

These are common but imprecise meanings of the term art, because they can apply to any endeavor, surely to architecture but also to furniture making, cooking, massage therapy, and hockey. If all activities and all objects can be art, then the idea of art loses its meaning and becomes nothing.

So let me be clear about my (provisional) definition here. Art is a practice of imagination and creation that is undertaken for its own sake. Its overt benefits, to its creator and to its observers, are intellectual and/or contemplative in nature; art exists, in Yi-Fu Tuan’s term, to be “regarded,” to be held at distance for observation. (Art may, of course, accrue all sorts of incidental benefits, such as status, economic worth, and even identity with time and repetition. None of these can be planned for or determined in advance, and they are not the point.) Non-art objects can become art, but only by losing their original function. The bowl no longer is a bowl, the soup can is no longer a soup can.

So why is architecture not art? For several interrelated reasons.

Architecture is a necessity for life. As individuals, shelter is one of our most fundamental human needs. As families and tribes, places hold us together and reflect our relationships. For organizations, places act as machines that facilitate specific work processes. Without our buildings, we would die.
Architecture is a commodity of consumption. It is commissioned or bought as a means to some other end, and has a predictable economic value or exchange rate.
Architecture is planned (and known) in advance. Our clients come to us with needs and functions; we respond to those functions in predictable ways.
Architecture is an enveloping rather than an externalized phenomenon. The buildings that matter most to us can never be dispassionately regarded; we inhabit them, we move through them, we encounter them over and over and over and build habitual relationships with them.
Architecture strongly frames behavior (individual and communal). Architecture can make certain acts more likely and other acts less so. Places can bring us together in comfortable social encounters, or keep us anonymous; they can make us feel fluid or clumsy.
Architecture endures beyond its era. The most basic structure and shell of a building has the capacity of at least decades, and possibly centuries, of useful life. It will be inhabited through the daily use of generations beyond those who commissioned or designed it.
Architecture is constantly modified by non-professionals, and is not subject to carefully controlled aging. Buildings begin to change the day they’re constructed. Left out in the elements, maintained diligently or haphazardly, and constantly patched and rearranged and re-surfaced and expanded by both their owners and a variety of workers, the maintenance of architecture is entirely different than the professional conservation of art that’s intended to fix a piece at its condition of origin or discovery.
Architecture does not have a self-selecting audience. We do not (most often) seek out buildings. We seek out functions and people, and encounter them within whatever buildings they happen to occupy.
Architecture does not begin with a blank canvas. It begins with a set of stated needs, with budgetary constraints and goals, with a site that provides its context. It is not a gessoed white field waiting for the first spark.
Architectural collections are not curated for intellectual or aesthetic intent. Rather, they’re what we call “neighborhoods” or “districts,” which are ever-fluid collections of places created (and modified) at different times by different people with different intentions.

So I’m not implying that you all aren’t good at, and don’t care about, your work. My notion that architecture isn’t art is really a reflection of a more precise set of meanings and conditions. Art is not a value statement meaning “really good;” it’s a category statement.

(In a related idea that I won’t follow up, I also think that the word “design” gets misused badly, usually when it means to gussy up something that already exists without making any fundamental change. Nike has a huge staff of shoe and clothing designers, a few of whom are involved in understanding biomechanics and materials engineering, and a vast number who are making predictions about next year’s colors and whether rounded or flattened shoelaces will sell better. In the 70’s, everybody wanted to be an “engineer;” in the 80’s, everybody’s job title had “analyst” in it; for the past ten years, everybody’s been a “designer.” This, too, will pass.)

Now, there’s a postmodern argument to be taken up, which is that art is not a fixed characteristic of an object, and has only peripherally to do with the designer’s intentions. In postmodern literary criticism, the meaning of a text is determined by the reader rather than the writer. The reader has every bit as much right to be thought of as an author, since it is the reader who makes meaning. By this view, art is a (probably temporary, certainly unpredictable) status conveyed on any object toward which a viewer has “art intentions;” that is, any object that an observer regards with the intention of appreciative distance. This is a reasonable position, and one that we have to contend seriously with; we have no assurance of who will see our work, nor how they will see it, nor what they will think of it when they do see it. But the fully postmodern view here would leave us to complete indeterminism or whimsy — if art is wholly in the viewer rather than the maker, then we have no bearing at all on the perceived quality of our work, and can do as we please. I can have an art experience right now, as I sit looking at the airport settee across from me while I’m typing. The centers of the leather seats are mildly wrinkled, but the leather itself is polished smooth by the scouring from tens of thousands of pants and skirts of tens of thousands of interchangeable travelers — working, reading gossip magazines, wrangling children, worrying about weather. That experience, that inarticulate little airport poem, was not provided by Herman Miller nor by the Philadelphia International Airport. It was made by me, because I wanted to do it, because I took an attitude of regard toward that bench.

In this world (and it’s true in writing every bit as much as it has been in high-style architecture), there’s a cheap and reliable way to invoke the “art intention:” you make something unusual or out of place but clearly intentional, and everybody stands back and says “WTF?!?” That notion, that a building should be an intellectual challenge, is an art notion. The idea of “place,” which I’ll address soon, refers to a much more complex set of relationships between person and setting.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

2008-03-11T07:19:00.002-04:00

In the non-linear spirit of TVA, I'm going to jump forward several chapters at the same time I go back 20 years. (Because it's what I was thinking about this morning, that's why.)

So it's summer 1989. I'm 31 years old, a senior at Berkeley (THERE's a long story...), and I got a summer internship with the Berkeley Solar Group. I'd already taken most of the building energy courses available at the school, and was good at the math and physics that it entailed.

My summer internship was one monster project that took me the entire three months. We had a research project to examine the energy savings that had been brought about by California's residential energy code. My role in the project was two-fold. The first was to develop a field-inventory system that would allow a layperson to capture the gross elements of a house (footprint, orientation, general construction and insulation, windows, heating/cooling/water heating equipment and controls, and a few other things) in a two-hour visit. I tested the protocol myself on half a dozen new houses, and built the paper form for field workers to fill out... it ran to about ten pages or so if I remember correctly. Then I helped train the temp workers, average folks with no building knowledge whatsoever, to do the inventories.

The second element was my great nemesis. I spent the better part of two months building a spreadsheet program that would accept data entry for these field forms, and then convert that data into a CSV (comma-separated values) file that would run in another program called CalRes. CalRes was the state-approved residential energy-use simulation software, and was pretty remarkable for its era. Here's how it worked. You entered all that home data that I mentioned above into the program, and the program then did two things. First, it did an energy-use simulation of your design, on an hour-by-hour basis using 50-year average climate and solar data for the appropriate one of California's 16 climate zones, to come up with an annual energy expenditure. Then it did an equivalent simulation against a house of the same size, orientation and window placement, but with the California-checklist construction features (R-11 walls, R-19 ceiling/roof, middle of the road double-pane windows, average efficiency equipment, and so on). If your proposed design performed better than the checklist version, you got your building permit; if not, not. So you had a lot of flexibility as a designer to meet the energy budget for a house of a given size; you could put way more windows than you ought to on the southwest side of the house if your overhangs were sized properly, for instance.

So I spent hours and hours working on a primitive portable computer that weighed about thirty pounds, had a green-on-black built-in screen that was about 6" across, had a 20-meg hard drive, and was powered by an IBM AT Turbo chip that ran at a mighty 25Mz. I wrote endless nested if-statements to convert one kind of data into another, trying to make Quattro (a primitive precursor to Excel) create CalRes files so that the easier spreadsheet data entry would immediately run a CalRes simulation. And by the time I went back to school in September, the damn thing actually worked, and I was wearing glasses. Fortunately, somebody else did the data entry on all 500 sampled houses after I left.

Now, I bother telling you this story for an important reason. Twenty years ago -- TWENTY YEARS AGO, when computing power was both crappy and expensive, and home video games still involved using the arrow keys to keep your cursor between the scrolling asterisks that tried to mimic a ski run -- we were able to develop simulation tools that allowed designers to know how their decisions would play out in the energy use of their ultimate buildings. Fast-forward to 2009, and through the use of BIM software that contains endless amounts of building information, we ought to be able to have a series of "speedometers" at the bottom of the screen that keep a running estimate of the design's performance against some standard conditions. Every time we place a window or spec a wall system, the meters ought to move up or down to tell us instantly what that choice means for a building's performance.

This could easily be done for energy use, separated out into heating, cooling, water heating, and demand electrical load. But we should also have meters for construction cost (using the Means cost estimation data), life-cycle operational cost, workplace safety issues (using OSHA historical data, we could easily estimate how many work hours would be lost on average for every foot of open-tread stair, for instance), lateral load performance (both wind and seismic), fire performance, payback period on investment, and any number of other quantifiable aspects of building performance. For all of these, the data we need already exists; currently, we just look it up from Means or OSHA or the National Weather Service or whatever, and figure things out once our design is nearly complete. We ought to be able to do it constantly from the very beginning of design work.

And we also have fifty years or so of information from environment-behavior research that should be able to help us simulate how buildings perform in human, experiential terms as well. Gerald Davis and Francoise Szigeti have computerized serviceability inventories; Frank Duffy has his workplace types and the kinds of work they best support; Irv Altman started thirty years of privacy research; William Whyte codified how social spaces work; the ISO has all kinds of acoustical and lighting performance data. We ought to be able to have meters that tell us about privacy, sociability, productivity, security (for people and for objects), wayfinding, visual and acoustic comfort, and a wide variety of human performance criteria. These won't be as precise as the ones related to building physics and economics, just as the temperature gauge in your car isn't a precision scientific instrument -- but they'll let you know if things are going okay or getting dangerously out of hand.

I know that one of the reactions to this may be that it shifts the decisionmaking from the designer to the software. But I think there's an opportunity there. It would be almost impossible to imagine a design that put all the meters at an optimal point; the architect would be responsible for orchestrating some desired balance of performance, and educating the client in the likely outcomes of every decision along the way. The software will help evaluate the ultimate performance of the building in the client's terms, leaving the designer more room for craft, mainly related to what Ed Allen refers to as the singular skill of the architect -- detailing, the thoughtfulness, care and precision with which the elements are brought together.

Starting Over (and Over, and Over...)

2008-03-10T18:23:00.003-04:00

I'm in the midst of re-reading a terrific book by the art historian and studio art professor James Elkins, entitled Why Art Cannot Be Taught (University of Illinois Press, 2001). The book deserves a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis, which I won't do. What I will do is to focus on one tiny part of his argument, where he talks about the kinds of things that can't be learned in art school, including art that relies on historical techniques, art that depends on deep knowledge of non-art disciplines and so on. One of them, he claims, is "art that takes time." The studio is based on many projects with rapid turnover — a student working on the same painting for a year would be seen as hopelessly stuck.

I think this is true of architecture as well. Studios keep throwing projects at students, and require that you have a strong concept and overall form but then end long before the parts of the design sequence that require craft. (They also start with a predetermined program, whereas I think that serious, research-based programming is the most crucial element of design that exists.) Design projects seem to always last somewhere between three and eight weeks. I think this means that very little gets developed beyond the most basic formal relationships and broad strokes of materials.

Back in 1989, a book came out called Architects' People (edited by Russ Ellis and Dana Cuff). Cuff has a chapter called "Through the Looking Glass: Seven New York Architects and their People," in which she interviews — you guessed it — seven New York architects and asks them about how they conceive of people in their design work. The responses are all over the map, from the deep selfishness of Eisenman ("the only person in my work is me") to the warm humanism of Hugh Hardy. But what caught my attention was the parts of the design sequence that they were most excited about, talked most about. For almost all of them, the most interesting part of a project was the early conceptual design, and to a far lesser extent the first steps of design development. None of them talked about programming and needs assessment, none of them talked about contract administration (except Hardy, who constantly took suggestions from his craftspeople in the field and thought that it made the ultimate projects much more engaging). And I think it's no accident that what we teach in the classroom is the same elements of design that interest elite designers — conceptual design and a tiny bit of design development. Over and over and over, we take on new projects, run them up to about 10% completion, and walk away to another new project. Coming up with ideas is the currency of the field — expanding upon and completing those ideas is strongly discouraged.

The Critical Craft

2008-03-08T15:15:00.003-05:00

If architecture isn't an art, as I began to argue in my previous post, then what does it mean to be a craft? Specifically, how does a craft keep from being rote? Let's use the example I trotted out last time — if we're asked to build a school, we aren't likely to wind up with a building shaped like the silhouette of a river otter and built of scavenged cell phone batteries. We're probably going to develop something that others, designers and laypeople alike, would recognize pretty quickly as a school.

And maybe we don't want that. Maybe we don't want our school to look like every other school. But we have to ask ourselves on what grounds we would argue that repetition is a bad thing. I can think of a few.

that our landscape becomes placeless, that a high school in Missouri looks exactly like a high school in New Hampshire, set in the same suburban context of culs-de-sac and asphalt five-lanes surrounded by Denny's and Chevy dealers.
that our work becomes careless, old jobs pulled out of the drawer and filled in with a new client's name.
that our work is complicit in carrying forward inequitable social relations or unsustainable environmental practices.

And, in fact, I think I'd be willing to argue that much of the output of the architectural profession over the past 60 years or so has fallen prey to exactly these three deeper flaws, at exactly the same moment that individual expressiveness and ingenuity has become the primary currency of architecture schools. The gulf between what's taught and what's done has never been greater.

So let's think about what the opposites of those three conditions might be.

that our work speaks in powerful ways about its immediate and its regional context. Boston's Commonwealth Avenue, for example, is unlike anything one would find in Phoenix or San Francisco or Minneapolis. It reflects its origins through scale and materials and proportions, and silently insists on newcomers' adherence to the pattern language. This is a distinctly Bostonian place, reflecting both the value of urban land and the New England Puritan conception of appropriate civic behavior.
that our work reflects constant decisionmaking in every single detail, from gross form to materials selection to the choice of bugle-headed or round-headed screws for the baseplates of the hallway lights. To return to Comm Ave, the "rulebook" hasn't resulted in unthinking uniformity. The differences in brick detailing, entry framing, stonecutting, roof finials and glazing make each of those rowhouses a unique event. You can stop at each one along the street and spend a few minutes seeing the care with which they were assembled.
that our work actively promotes social justice and environmental stewardship. If, as Jeff Stein insists, the basic function of architecture is to mark relationships, then we have the responsibility to make certain kinds of relationships more likely, and to intervene in those we see as inequitable. Think of The Met, the high school I told you about in Providence RI. They weren't just designing a different kind of school building because they wanted it to look cool; they were designing a different conception of what it meant to be a student, an adult, a family member. They were designing to disrupt old habits. Likewise, if we know that our buildings consume vast amounts of energy, produce vast amounts of waste, and drag in materials on boats from Indonesia, we have a responsibility to disrupt that behavior as well.

And here's where the "critical" part comes in. Each of us has to examine our own professional behavior, constantly, to look for and eliminate those three bad habits. We have to always look for this carelessness (literally, this lack of caring) in whatever we do, whether it's designing buildings or writing essays or teaching seminars. There's a consciousness, an ability to be present and attentive, that I think is entirely readable in all of our products. I don't know much about an awful lot of things, but I have a strong feel for when something has been done well, when it's been conceived and constructed attentively. And I also have a pretty strong radar for the rote and habitual and rushed and expedient.

I use the word "joy" a lot in my writing to mark that state of being immersed in something you care about. I think that joyful objects are as engaging (and as rare) as joyful people.

Nonfiction Architecture

2008-03-07T19:19:00.005-05:00

Two things will come together here. One is that I've been asked to keep The Vita Activa open for business between semesters. The second is that I've had a book project in my head for a couple of years but never had time to sit down and pursue it.

So here's my intention. Three or four times a week, I'll lay out some ideas here that are on my mind about this project. They won't be draft chapters, but they won't just be annotated bibliographies, either. Instead, what I imagine they'll be is kind of pre-writing, a free association based on what I've been reading and seeing and what I think about it all. Eventually, it may produce enough raw material that something useful can be pieced together from it.

If nothing else, at least it will spur me to read something interesting every couple of days, which will be useful in its own rights.

The basic ideas of the book (which I'm tentatively calling Nonfiction Architecture) are threefold. The first is that the professions of environmental design — and the education that prepares for those professions — jumped the rails a little more than a century ago, and have never recovered. The second is that the mistakes in the foundations of those professions matter deeply. And the third is that there are shifts we can make in our thinking that will result in better professional life and better places.

Just a humble little writing exercise...

I welcome your comments and thoughts and disagreements all along the way. They'll help me construct counterpositions that I'll have to address in order to be both thorough and honest.

My opening argument: architecture is not art, and in fact has fairly little to do with art. The confusion of art and environmental design, the importation of teaching methods from the arts, and the use of artistic terms and concepts for the critique of architecture, have resulted in deep disaster.

Part of my argument comes from the thinking of Ed Allen, FAIA, the recipient of the 2005 Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education for his work at MIT and at the University of Oregon. In his acceptance speech (a photocopy of which is lying around my office somewhere), he says that architecture is neither art nor science but rather simply "design," which he defines as the creation of a needed object. My own term, that architecture and its allied fields are crafts rather than arts, would be drawn from material culture studies, in which craft objects are useful things created with a great skill and care, and art objects are things created without regard for utility. (See, for instance, the 1990 radio lecture by University of Canterbury philosopher Dennis Dutton called "Borderlands of Art.") As Kant puts it, art is "intrinsically final," not put to a further end but existing as its own end; we regard it not in its helpfulness, nor even in being pleasing, but rather for "cultivation of the human spirit."

One of the most interesting parts of Dutton's talk was his borrowing of an idea from another philosopher, R.G. Collingwood, who says that one of the identifying characteristics of a "craft" is that the craftsperson knows (more or less) what the desired outcome is before beginning the task, whereas the artist works through discovery. A quilter, for instance, may not know exactly how she or he will organize the pattern or colors of all the cloth scraps at her disposal, but she DOES know that she's headed for a quilt of a certain size that will keep a bed warm, or a smaller quilt that will keep one's shoulders warm.

Now it seems to me that the kind of work that goes on in the architectural profession could be most reasonably called a craft. When you're called upon to design a school, you won't end up with a hospital or an airport or a tipi or a hockey rink. You'll end up with some thoughtful (we hope) variation on that which we think of as a school. On the other hand, the kind of work that goes on in architectural education (and in the high-style design that gets published) are more reasonably thought of as an art. Think of the thirteen different resolutions of the same design program on the same site that came from this semester's BAC Distance M.Arch studio: we saw everything from a Bavarian hill village to a floating intestine, all of which were considered plausible responses to the project and its intentions.

This, I think, is one of the greatest sources of disillusionment of young design professionals, trained as artists and subsequently asked to perform a career in a craft field. It's an educational bait-and-switch.

A joke you've probably heard in some variant: a Senator dies, and meets St. Peter at the gates. Peter says, "There's a new procedure. You get to spend a day in Hell, and a day in Heaven, and after that trial period you get to choose." And he puts the Senator in the down elevator.

The Senator disembarks in Hell, and discovers to his amazement that all of his old buddies are there, having a great time. Good food, good drinks, terrific golf courses, gorgeous cars. He can hardly believe what a great time he has there, after all he's heard.

The next morning, he takes the elevator back up to Heaven, where he spends the day sitting around on clouds listening to harp music. It's relaxing, but after even that first day, he's a little bored.

On the third morning, he reports back to St. Peter's desk, and says, "I can hardly believe I'm saying this, but Hell really was a better place. That's where I'd like to go, please." So St. Peter stamps his boarding pass, puts him into the elevator one last time, and the Senator decends. When the elevator door opens, he's horrified to see the great lake of fire, with all of his friends dressed in rags and screaming in pain. He's greeted by a demon, and he says, "This can't be right! This isn't what I saw two days ago when I was here."

And the demon replies, "Two days ago we were campaigning. Now you've elected us."

So design education is the demo period, and the design professions are the actuality. We have a duty to make them match more closely. Tomorrow I'll talk a little about what that match might entail.

Emotion and Reaction

2008-02-09T07:27:00.000-05:00

In this week's New Yorker magazine, there's a wonderful profile by Rebecca Mead of the new-music composer Nico Muhly. He's spent much of his training studying English liturgical music of the 16th and 17th centuries, but he's also worked as a composition assistant to Philip Glass for five or six years. Here's one of my favorite excerpts:

...he was working on a section of his violin concerto, writing parts for the marimba, the strings, and the piano. "Now, if you want to make it really godlike, here's what you do," he said, and keyed in a few throbbing bass notes. "There is a specific way the bass works that makes the English go crazy," he explained. "It's like catnip for them, so I try to take advantage of it. I love a good nineteenth-century national stereotype. It is really useful in composition."

So architects are also composers, working in a different medium. What tools do architects use to promote certain kinds of emotional experience? Most often, I see designers (at least high-style designers) reaching not for emotion at all, but rather reaction followed by intellectual analysis.

Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, argues that emotions are always future-referent. They describe not our current state, but rather our imagined state to come. For instance, anger is knowing what you want but believing that your path is blocked. Pride is knowing that what you've done will be seen as worthy by others. Discouragement is imagining that you are not talented enough to achieve your end goal.

I think we can contrast emotions against reactions, which are not cognitive at all but rather impulsive. "Wow!" is not an emotion, because it has no future referent. Awe is not an emotion, nor comfort, nor revulsion. So when we see a photograph of a building (which is how we structure most of design education), we react to it, and then try to understand it. Why? Because it's distant from us. Its success or failure does not affect us and our coming lives, so there's no need to invest emotional content into it.

I think this leads to a culture in which designers try to replicate the stuff at the present pinnacle — not necessarily to imitate its forms, although there's plenty of that, but to design in a way that reduces its potential to reaction and analysis. One of my complaints about Modernism and its successors is that they're all brain and no heart. I think it's time for a Neo-Romanticist movement in architecture.

Dude, where's my cherubs??

2008-01-27T19:42:00.000-05:00

www.travel-watch.com

A friend of mine who teaches urban design once said to me (in paraphrase):

A hundred years ago, we were a poor country, and we didn't have any of the building technology we have now — and we built glorious buildings. Now we're the richest country that ever was, we have technologies that were unimaginable even twenty years ago, and we put City Hall in a tilt-up.

By contrast, we have Adolf Loos writing in 1906 that "The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects."

And we know which way of thinking won. But if we're aiming at emotional resonance among a broad population, some degree of storytelling will be crucial. Expediency is one kind of story (and one that we can read pretty well). Crisp precision is another kind of story, if it's maintained weekly in perpetuity with that same degree of precision; so is the designer's common creed of "creativity," which can easily translate for the rest of us into "what the hell is that?"

People tie the things they see into a lifetime of things they've seen. Nothing is ever encountered fresh; instead, we read it through comparison and association with "like objects" and "context" and our own histories. We put new buildings into an ongoing story (or let those buildings amend our story, if we can figure out a way to make them fit somehow).

So what kind of stories do you want to tell?

What happens when the money goes away

2008-01-23T22:11:00.001-05:00

http://detroityes.com/downtown/38michtheat_pan.htm

Here's one of the images that haunts me.

I grew up in industrial Michigan, just about the time when the factories were closing. I remember these monstrous buildings, four blocks long and a block wide and four stories tall — surrounded by chain link fencing, with all the windows shot out, and grass growing up through the workers' parking lot.

At one time, the owners and managers and foremen at these factories had enough money to patronize businesses like the one above — the Michigan Theater in Detroit. Now there's not even enough money around to fill it as a parking lot for downtown workers.

My dad was, and my brothers are, working-class guys. It's jobs like theirs that used to support these cities. Now, retired, they complain about how all the jobs have gone to Asia (but love that they can shop at WalMart and buy the bargain barbecue grill that was made for 65 cents an hour in Indonesia). How can we build a better sense of cause-and-effect that allows us to speak of the abandonment of the Michigan Theater in the same sentence as the developer home and the six-dollar plastic resin patio chair?

A Reflection of the Idea Sketch Problem

2008-01-20T20:43:00.000-05:00

Well, you're probably back in your office today, wondering what the heck happened that a year or so worth of experience only looks like ten days on the calendar. As a way of recalling (partially) what you were up to last week, I thought I'd offer up the comments you made on my series of "What if..." statements. (Please note that all of the bullet text, even the parenthetical remarks, are drawn from the Post-It Notes.)

What if... we invited our client rep to be a regular member of our design team, instead of presenting things to them?

Teach them?
We already do and the meetings are hours long 'cause the client goes in circles.
Can I pick which client?

What if... we did some of our work in our clients' current office?

I don't like their offices.
We need to walk in their shoes.
We would learn more about them.
Agree.

What if... you started a mentorship program in your office?

For the young and young at heart.

What if... you ran for mayor?

I would probably lose, BUT if elected, I would invest a ton of $ into downtown redevelopment, implement 'green' programs (i.e. Chicago), privatize the school system, renovate the ugly buildings, cut through bureaucracy, and then... smile!
I'd be fooling myself somehow.
Improve public transportation so the public doesn't have to rely on personal vehicles.
I would like to create more housing for the homeless.
What if you worked WITH the mayor?
What if "nothing was stopping you?" (see below)
Okay, I'm going for it.

What if... your office had a drop-in clinic for everyday questions from passers-by?

I would get to make more models for our window display!
Both would spread a well-needed understanding.
Educate the public/candid view.
No one would come to it. (Why? Because your service stinks?)
It would be a long line.
I'd hate to be the one answering.
It would be one hell of a marketing tool.

What if... your future firm had a billboard on the highway? What would it say? What would it show?

"We listen to YOU."
It would have an image that created emotion. No text, except logo.
it would be a picture of a fantastic view that reminds you of vacation (beach), because home should be an escape.
"Have you had a bad building? Give us a call and we will take care of that problem for you!"
"You probably can't afford us, but give us a call anyway." --Architects.

What if... your program document was only language and music, with no lists or numbers?

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
Sounds like they are asking you to design a building that SINGS.
Make sure to select music that the client appreciates.

What if... nothing was stopping you?

There's always an excuse... thus there is nothing stopping me.
"Imagine what you could do, if you knew you could not fail."
That sense of "freedom" would be the greatest thing in the world.

Thanks for a terrific week.

The Other Side of the Tracks

2008-01-06T18:25:00.000-05:00

As a counterpoint to Duncan's description of Bedford Village, let me give you a brief history of Durham NC. It was founded in 1847 when a local dentist, Dr. Benjamin Durham, donated three acres to the railroad to build a station. The railroad allowed the town to centralize the tobacco production, and it became a farm center (and later a manufacturing center, first for cut tobacco and then for manufactured cigarettes; early in the 20th Century, 95% of the manufactured cigarettes IN THE WORLD were made in Durham).

The railroad ran more or less diagonally from upper left (NW) to lower right (SE) on your map. The area above the rail line was the City of Durham; the area below the line was unincorporated County land. As African American millworkers in cotton and tobacco started to make a little bit of money in the factories, they wanted to buy land and build houses, but couldn't afford both property and property taxes. So they bought in the unincorporated area below the tracks, and the railroad was a clear social and cultural dividing line (not unlike those in the factories, where men worked in one building and women in another, where white men and women worked on the first floors and Blacks worked on the upper floors).

As the African American community started to accumulate some capital, businesses small and large rose up to accommodate them. Parrish Street came to be known as the Black Wall Street with banks and insurance companies serving the African American middle class throughout the South , and the Black neighborhood called Hayti (pronounced HAY-tie) was a vigorous middle-class community.

Fast-forward to the 1970s. Duke University (Durham), the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and the North Carolina State University (Raleigh) had bought and developed a few thousand acres in the center of the 20-mile triangle between them and built a research-oriented business park called Research Triangle Park (RTP). RTP was booming, with over a hundred research-focused organizations ranging from Xerox to the US Department of Agriculture having labs there. (For those of you who know David or Amy Sedaris — they grew up in Raleigh because their father worked for Xerox in RTP.) And there was no significant highway from Durham to RTP as there was with Interstate 40 running between Chapel Hill and Raleigh. So the Durham Freeway was built... you guessed it... right through the heart of Hayti, cutting a 1.5-mile-wide swath through the most successful Black community in the Southeast. And that was the end of that.

What examples do you know of "the other side of the tracks?"

Chickens, Eggs, and Omelettes

2008-01-04T15:45:00.000-05:00

First off, we need to consider Bickford's distinction that she draws on p. 358 between Lifestyle, Elite, and Security Zone suburbs. We've been talking so far as though all gated communities were equal, and Bickford has been pretty careful to distinguish between them.

But the larger question right now seems to be the chicken-and-egg issue: did our suburban and urban defensive forms spawn defensive attitudes, or originate from them? Her argument, surprisingly enough, is that the spaces seemed to come first. She cites a study by McKenzie on p. 359 indicating that common-interest developments were a developer tool to place more houses on less land. As greater ethnic blending took place in the cities, a great number of white residents fled for those suburbs, so that the desire for "safety" was innately tied to the housing form. From that point, though, the causality is less important — the desire to avoid "others" breeds separation which breeds avoidance which breeds separation, and the cycle amplifies.

The deeper question we'll need to face is how to break that cycle. Many of you have criticized Bickford for not proposing solutions, but she very clearly does so on pages 366-368 in her examination of regional governance rather than the proliferation of tiny jurisdictions. She believes that the research indicates local control leads toward escape as a primary way of dealing with social problems, and that tackling issues regionally or at a metropolitan scale ensures that we can't just shift problems from one neighborhood or town to another.

But you're all professional architects rather than politicians, and I doubt you're looking to change careers. So what can the designer do to break this cycle of separation, avoidance, and fear? Do you have any tools at your disposal to make social change?

How to Read

2008-01-03T09:56:00.000-05:00

Susan Bickford conveniently tells us her task for this article, in the bottom paragraph of the first page:

"This essay attempts to reconnect political theory to the study of cities by probing the link between built environment, public life, and democratic politics. By doing so, we can discern critical and troubling dynamics shaping contemporary democratic citizenship in this inegalitarian social context."

Having laid out the work she's taking on, she also forecasts her overall findings, in the first paragraph on page 356:

"In this essay, I argue that the architecture of our urban and suburban lives provides a hostile environment for the development of democratic imagination and participation."

Can't get much more straightforward than that. So your job is to examine the ways in which she offers evidence for that claim, how she complicates and extends that claim, and whether you believe that evidence to be a) pertinent and b) compelling.

It's a long (22 pages) and dense paper. If you find yourself struggling with really comprehending the overall form, I have a suggestion.

Print a copy of the paper
Take a pen and number each paragraph
Open a fresh Word document
Using the same paragraph numbers, summarize each paragraph into a sentence. You'll lose a lot of the complexity, but you can organize the big ideas.
Study your new outline. Where does the paper change directions? Are there big thematic chunks you can identify?

One thing to keep in mind is the way she's using the words "democratic" and "democracy." She's not using the partisan Democratic, nor referring to the governmental structure of majority rule through one-person, one-vote. Rather, she's referring to equality of public access, universal freedom of speech, and other forms of civil rights that stem from the notion of equality under the law.

And off we go...

2008-01-02T10:22:00.000-05:00

Greetings, and welcome to your first semester in the Architectural Theory course. The basic question of this course is how we can use the practices and profession of architecture to make the world better. This, of course, means that we'll be struggling with several definitions — of "world," of "better," and of "architecture."

At noon on Wednesday, January 2nd, the first reading for the semester will be available on the Angel course site — Susan Bickford's paper "Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship." Bickford, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, uses this article to explore the ways in which we seem to build exclusion and social divisions into our environments.

The responses to the Declaration

2007-09-22T16:12:00.000-04:00

When I posted The Declaration of Boston back at the end of August, I was pleased to hear that most folks were planning on posting a paper copy in their office to start conversations. Gus actually posted a colleague's responses on his blog. But many of the comments I heard were interesting, having to do with how to define various terms such as "the welfare of the community" or "conscience" or "aesthetic delight" and so on. Clearly, reasonable people will differ on the nature of what supports the welfare of the community -- that's why we have Democrats and Republicans. The key, I think, is that a declaration such as this makes us take responsibility for a) thinking about these things, and b) being able to make the case for why your design solution furthers these goals. Most of the time, we design without thinking about these ethical outcomes; all that means is that our work STILL has ethical outcomes, just unintended ones. I have to believe that if you take these concerns seriously, I'll benefit from your work even if I don't agree with your definitions -- and if you don't take them seriously, I'm more likely to be hindered or diminished by your work.

The Declaration of Boston

2007-08-29T16:54:00.000-04:00

At last June's AIA/ACSA Cranbrook Teachers' Academy (and by the way, if you want to see social class on the ground, there's no better hour than the trip from the Detroit airport to Bloomfield Hills and Cranbrook...), we spent a fair bit of time looking at whether architecture had an ethical basis. Once I got home, I looked at the AIA code of professional conduct, which is mostly about not cheating your clients and horning in on other architects' turf. But I also came across the Declaration of Geneva, which is an internationally used statement of ethical principles in medicine. I've made appropriate modifications in content but not in spirit, and have called it the Declaration of Boston. Here it is:

AT THE TIME OF BEING ADMITTED AS A MEMBER OF THE DESIGN PROFESSIONS,
I SOLEMNLY PLEDGE to consecrate my life:
to the service of social justice;
to the stewardship of the environment;
to the protection of public health and safety;
to the promotion of aesthetic delight; and
to my clients’ organizational effectiveness.

I WILL PRACTICE my profession with conscience and dignity.
I WILL GIVE to my colleagues the respect and gratitude that is their due.
I WILL HOLD the welfare of the community as my first consideration.
I WILL RESPECT the secrets that are confided in me, even after my client has died.
I WILL MAINTAIN by all the means in my power, the honor and the noble traditions of the design professions.
I WILL NOT PERMIT considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to preclude me from carrying out my responsibilities.
I WILL NOT USE my knowledge to violate human rights, civil liberties, or community well-being, even under threat.

I MAKE THESE PROMISES solemnly, freely and upon my honor.

So -- who's ready to sign? And if you're not, what are your reservations about it?