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To tinker with a house is to commune with the people who have lived in it before and to leave messages for those who will live in it later.
“finishing is never finished.” There are several reasons for that. You’re down to detail, and details are endless.
Also you’re down to where the building most interfaces with the people who will be living in it, and they discover that some important things were left out, and some ideas that seemed so sensible on the plans aren’t going to work.
Finally the work crew goes away and the occupants move in.
This is at least not the case for devops wrt. building software.
ecopoiesis”: the process of a system making a home for itself.
The countermanding sign is an example of the way most problems are handled in buildings once they’re occupied. The solutions are inelegant, incomplete, impermanent, inexpensive, just barely good enough to work. The technical term for it, which arose from decision theory a few decades back, is “satisficing.”22 It is precisely how evolution and adaptation operate in nature.
SATISFICING doesn’t try to solve problems. It reduces them just enough.
Zero expense, zero waste of time, scant investment in an evanescent piece of technology, but a highly customized and convenient workspace.
The advantage of ad hoc, make-do solutions is that they are such a modest investment, they make it easy to improve further or to tweak back a bit.
Style cramps life, and life erodes style. All too soon the unified look is polluted by use, and it’s time to hire someone to supply another alien unity.
Paradoxically, habit is both the product of learning and the escape from learning. We learn in order not to learn. Habit is efficient; learning is messy and wasteful. Learning that doesn’t produce habit is a waste of time. Habit that does not resist learning is failing in its function of continuity and efficiency.
A third level of learning is “learning to learn.”
Particularly worth examining is the history of the “open office,” an innovation that swept the world in a decade.
What used to be semipermanent Space plan material had turned into mobile Stuff.
no great improvement in costs or flexibility was detected.
was designed by professionals for professionals and assumed no incremental change and no handling by building dwellers.
Integrating all the complexity in one bundle meant that only a specialist could understand or handle the system,
Ironies of Automation
“We found that any user sophisticated enough to seek out a ‘smart’ building was also sophisticated enough to home-brew a more flexible system.”
These were classic cases of overspecificity, overcentralized control, and “tight fit.”
Change is often followed by reversal of the change,
most change is really undertaken as a trial, no matter what people say at the time. And most trials are errors.
Smart organizations, therefore, push control of space as far “down” the organization as they can.
At each level of scale, it is those actually using the space who understand best how it can made/altered to have the character of being conducive to the work,
The lesson: adaptivity too can be overspecified.
“The thing which has characterized MIT’s success is a physical environment which does not impair communication and set up arbitrary barriers to it.
The common attribute of vernacular remodeling (and construction) is that it is done without plans. You proceed by improving on what already exists, following wherever usage demands. “Wanderer,” wrote a Spanish poet, “there is no path. You lay down a path in walking.”
“Evidently organisms adapt well enough to ‘satisfice’; they do not, in general, ‘optimize.”’ In 1958 he wrote, “To optimize requires processes several orders of magnitude more complex than those required to satisfice.”
ALL BUILDINGS are predictions. All predictions are wrong.
Buildings can be designed and used so it doesn’t matter when they’re wrong.
The product of skilled scenario work is not a plan but a strategy. Where a plan is based on prediction, a strategy is designed to encompass unforeseeably changing conditions. A good strategy ensures that, no matter what happens, you always have maneuvering room.
SCENARIO PLANNING leads to a more versatile building. It takes advantage of the information developed by programming (detailed querying of building users) and offsets the major limitation of programming (overspecificity to immediate desires). The building is treated as a strategy rather than just a plan.
many a building is a brilliant (or pedestrian) design solution to the wrong design problem,
“When architects design buildings for themselves, you invariably have an interesting time.”
his highest priority in planning the building was “to force interaction between research groups and individuals….”
The great virtue of programming is that it deeply involves the users of a building and makes it really their building. The great vice of programming is that it over-responds to the immediate needs of the immediate users, leaving future users out of the picture,
He gets the client to discuss the vision of the building at the very beginning in some depth, and then he can harken back to that vision when obsessive details threaten to overwhelm the building with fussiness. Vision is generic, and generic is adaptive.
The iron rule of planning is: whatever a client or an architect says will happen with a building, won’t.
It never works. The future is no more controllable than it is predictable. The only reliable attitude to take toward the future is that it is profoundly, structurally, unavoidably perverse.
instead of converging on a single path, its whole essence is divergence.
The group ranks these driving forces in terms of importance and uncertainly, placing the most important and most uncertain highest, because it is the important uncertainties that will drive the scenarios apart.
2x2
The goal is to develop scenarios that are both plausible and surprising—shocking, in fact.
A building is a huge investment, a black tarry pit of sunk costs, a trap and a prison.
“Never expect a building to solve organizational problems.”
Anyone could reach in and move things around.
Some design is better if it’s postponed.
Taking a strategic approach to a building may mean postponing many design decisions and leaving them to the eventual users of the building.
Postponing some of the design yields more building for less money,
A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
A building “learns” only through people learning, and individuals typically learn much faster than whole organizations.
architects maturing from being just artists of space to artists of time.
