Caress the Detail, the Divine Detail

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

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.

1. 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?
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
4. 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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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?

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

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?

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

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

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

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.