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.

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.

Philosophy (and physics) of time

It seems that time is a ficticious variable that we use to simplify the complex interelationships between changing things. A sort of abstract currency. Not my idea. Here is a quote from this recent article in Discovery:

“What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”

I like the idea that things are interrelated in such a complex way that we invented this thing that ticks, to give us a reference. In architecture this is called a datum, the 0 elevation point, totally arbitrary, like the Earth being at the centre of the universe.

With computers we may be able to better manage the complex interelationships and understand them without the artificial variable "t". Strangely enough, most CPU's are slaves to their clocks, but some of the fancier ones have multiple, asynchronous clocks that run locally, both to save power and to be more efficient.

I have to go lie down now...