Quotes On Architecture, construction, planning

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)