Architecture is predicting the future

When an architect is asked to design something, part of the challenge is to anticipate the effect that this usually large built and immovable object will have on the many people that will see, use and possibly inhabit it.

Conceptual art approaches can help, for example making a building evoke an idea, or using an idea to start a design, but they are never enough. That my building is 1776 feet high may help get sponsorship, but in it will hardly be perceived.

Fame or notoriety help. Celebrity architects draw buzz and crowds. One can invest genius in a built object and the aura of the famous designer creates a culture around the space.

The inescapable challenge of architecture however is to be present in time and space in a significant way.

Here is an example of how things can go wrong:

In my little town, the well-meaning heritage preservation committee got involved in the review of a design for a pump house that would sit along the waterfront. The building would need to have the volume of a large two storey house.

The committee looked around "for context" and found a nearby older shed that had two stone gable ends and a very symmetrical sloped roof, a kind of 19th century shed. So they strongly suggested that the utility's architect (or most likely engineer), take the cue.

The intention was to reflect the heritage of the industrial waterfront area.

The result was a large, white stucco covered imitation of an old shed, like an over sized paper model of it, sitting there contrasting against the dark water and sky.

I don't think that was the intention. I also think that any architect would have easily anticipated this and informed the client of the danger. Unfortunately, the heritage preservation committee is wedded to form and mimesis (a pompous architect term meaning copycatting). Unfortunately, it is an easy notion to sell, a concept that seems to make sense, reflect shapes, and if you are lucky materials.

An aside:
I agree with many of my colleagues who say that if you are going to do some restoration work or add to an older building, choose one: re-use material or re-use form and proportion, but don't do both, at the risk of getting some half-assed mimesis.

Ok, so back to the story. This thing now sits on the waterfront, annoying, out of place, and a reminder of industrial sheds we lost, but bigger and worse.

So instead of learning a lesson, this heritage committee moves on, job well done, and is now addressing the problem of our train station. Again, mimesis is being suggested, but this time there is no proximate context, so they looked in the pattern books for old train stations with huge eaves, and came up with some hybrid Frank Lloyd Wrightish stone bunker, because they wanted the stone of course.

What is galling is that the railway people had proposed a very nice, airy design, with proper functional overhangs to protect people on the platform, but with nice glass, and curves and a good light feel to it, considering the barren context of the area, a jewel that may have lightened the oppression of the district.

I don't think it will be realized, because no-one thinks that architects can predict the future, especially when the heritage preservation committee is locked in the past.

Intel and MS

The Concorde parked on Manhattan's Intrepid Air, Space and Sea Museum.

I remember attending another launch, back in the early 1980's - it may have been 1983 - when Windows was just becoming real. It was in Seattle, and Bill Gates was talking to a relatively small audience. Many of the cooler attendees were typing on Tandy Model 100's and making annoying key clicks.

Bill said something that was surprising to me at the time, that he predicted that Intel and Microsoft would become the dominant presences on the desktop. You have to remember that back then there were lots of contenders, including the new Mac, the really advanced Amiga and many other smaller players, and Bill's statement seemed preposterous to me, since his DOS was so primitive and Intel's 8088 was nasty to program, slower than the 6502 (except in clock rate) and not at all like the PDP-11 (which was something the Motorola 6800 and later 68000's were aspiring to). Some of us were even aware of Unix and its possibilities on the desktop.

He was right of course, but I think that he made the prediction come true, rather than actually saying something that made sense. His tactics and acumen forced the issue, and the contenders mostly disappeared, except for Apple. Despite being technologically inferior both the CPU and the UI he promoted became dominant. He saw that business decisions were not made by techies, even in the emerging micro world, but by risk-averse non-techies who prefer a brand name to any technological advantage.

I guess that is why he then started to draw huge audiences.

Vico and iterative design - History as a spiral

Giambattista Vico was an Italian 17th century academic who wrote about history scientifically. His thesis is that history is a helix, and that the we can know history better than we can know nature because we make history. It is the New Science.

History is iterative design, in short. We are creating our cultures through spiral cycles of successive approximations. There is no overarching strategy, only tentative approaches, herding of instinct by the powerful, and some imperfect knowledge of the past that gets better as we approach the present.

Iterative design is the norm. Anything else is just so much hubris.

Waterfalls mostly create entropy.

Reality TV and movies at home

What can we learn from the fact that reality TV as we know it took-off after movies became widely available on video? I mean, who wants to bother watching a movie when it will be interrupted by commercials all the time? But people do watch plotless reality shows that way. The commercials offer relief.

Is there an analogy with books and the Web? Books online with commercials and page transitions, no way. So the future of books as a separate medium seems bright. The Web, like TV, is a spotty medium (take that McLuhan). Spotty media are not amenable to plots.