Quotes On Architecture, construction, planning
Our senses convey to us the raw material on which our thinking is based.
From The Oregon Experiment (1975):
…as a source of organic order, a master plan is both too precise, and not precise enough. The totality is too precise: the details are not precise enough. It fails because each part hinges on a conception of a “totality”, which cannot respond to the inevitable accidents of time and still maintain its order. And it fails because as a result of its rigidity, it cannot afford to guide the details around buildings which really matter; if drawn in detail, the details would be absurdly rigid. (p. 23)
From Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964):
If a form is made the same way several times over, or even simply left unchanged, we can be fairly sure that its inhabitant finds little wrong with it.
We can measure with a tape whether or not a man can reach something, but we must apply an entirely different set of standards to judge the validity of an individual’s feeling of being cramped. (p. 52)
From The Hidden Dimension (1982, orig. 1966):
Space perception is not only a matter of what can be perceived but what can be screened out. People brought up in different cultures learn as children, without ever knowing that they have done so, to screen out one type of information while paying close attention to another. Once set, these perceptual patterns apparently remain quite stable throughout life. (pp. 44-5)
Texture…is appraised and appreciated almost entirely by touch, even when it is visually presented. With few exceptions…it is the memory of tactile experiences that enables us to appreciate texture. So far, only a few designers have paid much attention to the importance of texture, and its use in architecture is largely haphazard and informal. In other words, texture on and in buildings are seldom used consciously and with psychological or social awareness. (p. 62)
A keystone in the arch of human understanding is the recognition that man at certain critical points synthesizes experience. (p. 66)
The structure of the eye has many implications for the design of space… For example, movement is exaggerated at the periphery of the eye. Straight edges and alternate black and white bands are particularly noticeable. This means that the closer the walls of any tunnel or hallway, the more apparent the movement. This feature of the eye causes drivers in countries like France to slow down when they enter a tree-lined road from an open highway. To increase the speed of motorists in tunnels, it is necessary to reduce the number of visual impacts that flash by at eye level. In restaurants, libraries, and public places, cutting down on movement in the peripheral field should reduce the sense of crowding somewhat, whereas maximizing peripheral stimulation should build up a sense of crowding. (p. 72)
…our own culture tends to stress that which can be controlled and to deny that which cannot. (p. 58)
…man senses distance as other animals do. His perception of space is dynamic because it is related to action–-what can be done in a given space-–rather than what is seen by passive viewing. (p. 115)
When the full power of a human imagination is backed by the weight of a living tradition, the resulting work is far greater than any that an artist can achieve when he has no tradition to work in or when he willfully abandons its tradition. (p. 25)
from Architecture for the Poor:
Development without self-help is an impossibility. But people whose surroundings are ugly and barren are apt to be unproductive and dispirited. This is not the idle speculation of a do-gooder. Any factory manager knows its truth. Workers in bright, attractive surroundings produce more than workers in ugly, drab surroundings. The human spirit is our most precious resource. Its ecology is our greatest challenge.
From the foreword by William R. Polk:
…in the architectural school they make no study of the history of domestic buildings, and learn architectural periods by the accidents of style, the obvious features like the pylon and the stalactite. Thus the graduate architect believes this to be all there is in ‘style,’ and imagines a building can change its style as a man changes clothes. (p.20)
A conscious decision may be reached either by consulting tradition or by logical reasoning and scientific analysis. Both processes should yield the same result, for traditions embodies the conclusions of many generations’ practical experiment with the same problem, while scientific analysis is simply the organized observation of the phenomena of the problem. (p.23)
Certainly one may make something according to habit – it will then be living and beautiful only by the residual virtue of the decisions one took when first trying to make that kind of object, and by virtue too of the minor decisions taken in the act of making the habitual movements of fabrication. Yet the best way to create beauty is not necessarily to make an odd or original design. How true this is even in the work of God, who does not have to change the design concept in order to produce individuality in men, but can span the whole scale of beauty between Cleopatra and Caliban simply by adjusting the position or the size of the elements in a face. (p. 23)
The responsibility for this degeneration of the patron to the status of client lies squarely upon the architect, who has himself degenerated from an artist to a professional. (p. 29, footnote)
…in medicine no one expects the doctor when dealing with the poor to try to mass-produce operations. Why then, when a passing infirmity like a sore appendix is honored by careful personal treatment, should a permanent necessity like a family house be accorded any less? If you chop off appendixes by thousands with a machine, your patients will die, and if you push families into rows of identical houses, then something in those families will die, especially if they are poor. The people will grow dull and dispirited like their houses, and their imagination will shrivel up. (p. 31)
If you regard people as ‘millions’ to be shoveled into various boxes like loads of gravel, if you regard them as inanimate, unprotesting, uniform objects, always passive, always needing things done to them, you will miss the biggest opportunity to save money ever presented to you… For, of course, a man has a mind of his own, and a pair of hands that do what his mind tells them. A man is an active creature, a source of action and initiative, and you no more have to build him a house than you have to build nests for the birds of the air. Give him half a chance and a man will solve his part of the housing problem – without the help of architects, contractors, or planners – far better than any government authority ever can. (p. 32)
A peasant never talks about art, he makes it. (p. 40)
Because his experience of nature is so bitter, because the surface of the earth, the landscape, is for the Arab a cruel enemy, burning, glaring, and barren, he does not find any comfort in opening his house to nature at a ground level. The kindly aspect of nature for the Arab is the sky – pure, clean, promising collness and lifegiving water in its white clouds, dwarfing even the expense of the desert sand with the starry infinite of the whole universe. (pp. 55-6)
Where a single may be a melody, a whole town is like a symphony, as in Wells, where the town squares ascend, movement by movement, to the climax of the cathedral. (p. 72)
With a few fateful lines on his drawing board, the architect decrees the boundaries of imagination, the peace of mind, the human stature of generations to come. (p. 73)
from The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (1993):
80 percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last 50 years… (p. 15)
…I will make the argument that this process of destruction, and the realm that it spawned, largely became our economy. (p. 15)
Other Old World values toppled before this novel system [commercial transfer of property] - for example, the idea of land as the physical container for community values. Nearly eradicated in the rush to profit was the concept of stewardship, of land as a public trust: that we who are alive now are responsible for taking proper care of the landscape so that future generations can dwell in it in safety and happiness. (p. 26)
The great cities of Europe, long abuilding, were at once centers of political, commercial, ecclesiastical, and miltary power, and they showed it not just in their finely grained urban fabrics - their plazas, forecourts, esplanades, and galleries - but in the overarching civic consciousness with which buildings and spaces were tied together as an organic whole, reflecting the idea of civilization as a spiritual enterprise. (p. 33)
American cities flourished almost solely as centers for business, and they showed it. Americans omitted to build the ceremonial spaces and public structures that these other functions might have called for. What business required was offices, factories, housing for workers, and little else. Beyond advertising itself, business had a limited interest in decorating the public realm. Profits were for partners and stockholders. Where architectural adornment occurred, it was largely concerned with the treatment of surfaces, not with the creation of public amenity. The use of the space itself, of the real estate, was a foregone conclusion: maximize the building lot, period. (p.33)
From The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)
Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories. Instead the practitioners and teachers of this discipline (if such it can be called) have ignored the study of success and failure in real life, have been incurious about the reasons for unexpected success, and are guided instead by principles derived from the behavior and appearance of towns, suburbs, tuberulosis sanatoria, fairs, and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves. (p.7)
…people, even when they are thoroughly enmeshed in descriptions of reality which are at variance with reality, are still seldom devoid of the powers of observation and independent thought… (p. 12)
There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served. (p. 15)
Scale must be considered in every building, a scale that is of the epoch, a measure of the spirit, a measure of the technical means and forces at our disposal.
Him I call an architect who, by sure and wonderful Art and Method, is able both with Thought and Invention to devise and with Execution to compleat all those Works which, by means of the Movement of great Weights, and the Conjunction and Ammassment of Bodies, can with the greatest beauty be adapted to the Uses of Mankind. And to be able to do this, he must have a thorough Insight into the Noblest and most curious Sciences…
… it is easy to distinguish between the parts which are essential to the composition of an architectural Order and those which have been introduced by necessity or have been added by caprice. The parts that are essential are the cause of beauty, the parts introduced by necessity cause every license, the parts added by caprice cause every fault.
Any device - even if approved by great men - which is either contrary to nature or cannot be convincingly explained is a bad device and must be proscribed.
I have always believed that what is originally an abuse does not cease to be one by having become customary.
Our house was not unsentient matter - it had a heart and a soul, and eyes to see with; and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benedictions. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out in eloquent welcome - and we could not enter it unmoved.
From How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (1994)
We need to honor buildings that are loved rather than merely admired. Admiration is from a distance and brief, while love is close up and cumulative. New buildings ahould be judged not just for what they are, but for what they are capable of becoming. Old buildings should get credit for how they played their options. (p. 71)
Buildings can’t learn if they don’t last. Most building code systems are a manifestation of the whole community learning. What they embody is god sense, acquired the hard way from generations of recurrent problems. Form follows failure. (p. 74)
American planners always take inspiration from Europe’s great cities and such urban wonders as Piazza San Marco in Venice, but they study the look, never the process. (p. 78)
Specialised knowledge distances buildings from users. Specialized space hinders future flexibility. (p. 150)
The difference between style and form is the difference between a statement and a language. An architectural statement is limited to a few stylistic words and depends on originality for its impact, whereas vernacular form unleashes the power of a whole, tested grammar. (p. 155)
The Darwinian mechanism of vary-and-select, vary-and-select has one enormous difference from the process of design. It operates by hindsight rather than foresight. Evolution is always away from known problems rather than toward imagined goals. It doesn’t seek to maximize theoretical fitness; it minimizes experienced unfitness. Hindsight is better than foresight. (p. 188)
A building ‘learns’ only through people learning, and individuals typically learn much faster than organizations. This suggests a “bottom-up” rather than a “top-down” approach in the building’s human hierarchy. Robotics researchers call it “subsumption architecture” - pushing the power to respond to the bottom of the organization. Their motto is “Fast, cheap, and out of control!” Perception and responsive action take place locally rather than being mediated through some remote command center. (pp. 188-189)
[Anne Vernez] Moudon draws a radical conclusion: “A return to the room as a module for residential design is a necessary step toward creating resilient space. We must abandon the use of dwellings as modules of spatial organization.” The problem with dwellings-as-module (as the fundamental design unit) is that it encourages overspecialized rooms that will be difficult or impossible for later tenants to respecialize for their own needs whereas simple, autonomous rooms can be constantly readapted without stress to the building. (p.193)
Some of the solidest buildings in America were constructed during the 1930s by the New Deal programs of the Public Works Administration and the Works Projects Agency - libraries, schools, park buildings, bridges, dams, viaducts. That investment by government in “infrastructure” is seen by historians as having been the basis for the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. America is said to be overdue for a new round of infrastructure investment. (p. 194)
Can a building learn while it is being built? Here we come into the realm of theorist/architect/builder/contractor Chris Alexander. He insists that architects can’t really visualize how a building will look and feel, nor can anyone else - no matter how computer-enhanced they are - and so construction should be a prolonged process of cut-and-try. “Everybody wants to zoom,” he says, “and you mustn’t. You are constantly finding out about the building while constructing it, and what you will find out is inherently and necessarily unpredictable. You are watching a developing wholeness.” (p. 200)
It would be nice if architects would design tiny starter homes for people, but they won’t. The profit margin is too small. And developers won’t do it for fear of encouraging too much grassroots autonomy and change. Nearly all homes that grow from modest beginnings are, like Thomas Jefferson’s, owner-built and owner-designed. Usually an architect is rented briefly just to sign the plans. I think there’s an opportunity waiting for professionals who can figure out how to design and construct houses that grow incrementally over time. (p. 201)
Wrong door. Think of every restaurant, shop, and public building you’ve visited. The entrance has double doors, by law. But one door opens and one door doesn’t, and you can’t tell which is which until you’ve crunched into the wrong one. That one detail of staff failing to unlock both doors shrieks of laziness, disinterest, and unwelcome. Every customer enters in a state of having been humiliated by a building, by a nuisance untended to. (p. 207)
Fine-tuning is what turns a building from a nuisance to a joy. (p. 209)
…make adjustments to a building in a way that is always future responsible - open to the emerging whole, hastening a richly mature intricacy. The process embraces error; it is eager to find things that don’t work and to try things that might not work. By failing small, early, and often, it can succeed long and large. And it turns occupants into active learners and shapers rather than passive victims. (p. 209)
In architectural education the teaching of a method of approach is more important than the teaching of skills… the integration of the whole range of knowledge and experience is of the greatest importance right from the start; only then will the totality of aspect make sense in the student’s mind… such an educational approach would draw the student into a creative effort to integrate simultaneously design, construction, and economy of any given task with its social ends.