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Morse Peckham, Man’s Rage for Chaos, (New York: Chilton, 1965). Morse holds that the edge of fashion is art, and “art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world so that man may endure exposing himself to the tensions and problems of the real world.” We practice meaningless change in order to tolerate necessary change. That’s fine, but in buildings the meaningless change of fashion often obstructs necessary change.
“Our basic argument is that there isn’t such a thing as a building,” says Duffy. “A building properly conceived is several layers of longevity of built components.” He distinguishes four layers, which he calls Shell, Services, Scenery, and Set. Shell is the structure, which lasts the lifetime of the building (fifty years in Britain, closer to thirty-five in North America). Services are the cabling, plumbing, air conditioning, and elevators (“lifts”), which have to be replaced every fifteen years or so. Scenery is the layout of partitions, dropped ceilings, etc., which changes every five to
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As the architect proceeds from drawing to drawing—layer after layer of tracing paper—“What stays fixed in the drawings will stay fixed in the building over time,” says architect Peter Calthorpe. “The column grid will be in the bottom layer.” Likewise the construction sequence is strictly in order: Site preparation, then foundation and framing the Structure, followed by Skin to keep out the weather, installation of Services, and finally Space plan. Then the tenants truck in their Stuff.
Ecologist Buzz Holling points out that it is at the times of major changes in a system that the quick processes can most influence the slow.
The mutability of Skin seems to be accelerating.
Developers expect their building Skins to “ugly out” every fifteen years or so, and plan accordingly.
Energy Services such as electricity and gas are driven constantly toward greater efficiency by their sheer expense—30 percent of operating costs, equal over a building’s life to the entire original cost of construction. Between the Energy Crisis of 1973 and 1990, the money spent on space heating in new American buildings dropped by a dramatic 50 percent.6
An adaptive building has to allow slippage between the differently-paced systems of Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space plan, and Stuff. Otherwise the slow systems block the flow of the quick ones, and the quick ones tear up the slow ones with their constant change. Embedding the systems together may look efficient at first, but over time it is the opposite, and destructive as well.
“Things that are good have a certain kind of structure,” he told me. “You can’t get that structure except dynamically. Period.
In nature you’ve got continuous very-small-feedback-loop adaptation going on, which is why things get to be harmonious. That’s why they have the qualities that we value. If it wasn’t for the time dimension, it wouldn’t happen. Yet here we are playing the major role in creating the world, and we haven’t figured this out. That is a very serious matter.”
Growth follows a simple goal of property owners: maximize what you control. The practice is ancient. In old cities of Europe and the Mideast, upper stories would jetty out farther and farther to increase the space on each floor, until neighbors could shake hands across the street from upper rooms.
two kinds of buildings that easily become loved. One, grand and deep, I call the High Road—durable, independent buildings that steadily accumulate experience and become in time wiser and more respected than their inhabitants. The other, quick and dirty, is the Low Road. Their specialty is swift responsiveness to their occupants. They are unrespectable, mercurial, street-smart. Among buildings as within them, differences of pace are everything.
Unusual flexibility made the building ideal for laboratory and experimental space. Made to support heavy loads and of wood construction, it allowed a use of space which accommodated the enlargement of the working environment either horizontally or vertically. Even the roof was used for short-term structures to house equipment and test instruments.
Not assigned to any one school, department, or center, it seems to always have had space for the beginning project, the graduate student’s experiment, the interdisciplinary research center.
believe the horizontal layout helped to encourage interaction between groups. In a vertical layout with small floor areas, there is less research variety on each floor. Chance meetings in an elevator tend to terminate in the lobby, whereas chance meetings in a corridor tended to lead to technical discussions.”
The wide wood stairs in Building 20 show wear in a way that adds to its myth. You feel yourself walking in historic footsteps in pursuit of technical solutions that might be elegant precisely because they are quick and dirty. And that describes the building: elegant because it is quick and dirty.
Like most Low Road buildings, Building 20 was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, Spartan in its amenities, often dirty, and implacably ugly. Whatever was the attraction? The organizers of the 1978 exhibit queried alumni of the building and got illuminating answers. “Windows that open and shut at will of the owner!” (Martha Ditmeyer) “The ability to personalize your space and shape it to various purposes. If you don’t like a wall, just stick your elbow through it.” (Jonathan Allan) “If you want to bore a hole in the floor to get a little extra vertical space, you do it. You don’t
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Grand, final-solution buildings obsolesce and have to be torn down because they were too overspecified to their original purpose to adapt easily to anything else. Temporary buildings are thrown up quickly and roughly to house temporary projects. Those projects move on soon enough, but they are immediately supplanted by other temporary projects—of which, it turns out, there is an endless supply. The projects flourish in the low-supervision environment, free of turf battles because the turf isn’t worth fighting over. “We did some of our best work in the trailers, didn’t we?” I once heard a
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Building 20 raises a question about what are the real amenities. Smart people gave up good heating and cooling, carpeted hallways, big windows, nice views, state-of-the-art construction, and pleasant interior design for what? For sash windows, interesting neighbors, strong floors, and freedom.
THE GARAGES OF SILICON VALLEY are no myth. And no accident. High-risk creative new directions in business are best taken by tiny start-up companies with no capital to spare for plant. They take root in buildings that no one else wants, like spare garages.
The wonder is that Low Road building use has never been studied formally, either for academic or commercial interest or to tease out design principles that might be useful in other buildings. What do people do to buildings when they can do almost anything they want? I haven’t researched the question either, but I’ve lived some of it. This book was assembled and written in two classic Low Road buildings.
January 1990 - Containers were invented in 1956 by Malcolm McLean of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, as a way to shortcut loading between ships, trucks, and flatcars. Made of aluminum, steel, and wood, they have a surprisingly comfortable space inside, and they close-pack efficiently with other containers.
One day I acquired a fax machine. There being no convenient place to park it, I used a saber saw to hack out a level place by the old steering wheel, along with a hole for the electrical and phone lines. It took maybe ten minutes and required no one else’s opinion. When you can make adjustments to your space by just picking up a saber saw, you know you’re in a Low Road building.
My research library was in a shipping container twenty yards away—one of thirty rented out for self-storage. I got the steel 8-by-8-by-40-foot space for $250 a month and spent all of $1,000 fixing it up with white paint, cheap carpet, lights, an old couch, and raw plywood work surfaces and shelves. It was heaven. To go in there was to enter the book-in-progress—all the notes, tapes, 5 × 8 cards, photos, negatives, magazines, articles, 450 books, and other research oddments laid out by chapters or filed carefully. When the summer sun made it too hot for work, I sawed a vent in the wood floor,
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People asked, “How can you stand it in there without windows?” All I could say was, “A library doesn’t need w...
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Such buildings leave fond memories of improvisation and sensuous delight. When I lived with an artists’ commune in an old church in New York state, I slept in the steeple in front of the rose window overlooking the stream below. The major problem was being pooped on by pigeons, so I made a canopy from the canvas of a large bad painting (art side up) and thereafter slept in comfort, cooed to my rest by flights of angels. Low Road buildings are peculiarly empowering.
It has all been done by the confident dictators of yesteryear, with no recourse to committees or wondering what other people will think about their additions and subtractions.1
Whatever grows to splendor becomes a target for levelers with punitive taxes and casual confiscations. And updating the services of any building that once had “perfect” amenities, because it could afford to, is a major trial. Try putting modern plumbing and heating into a stone Chatsworth—it’s like performing lung surgery on a tetchy giant. The High Road is high-visibility, often high-style, nearly always high-cost.
Like Washington, in 1797 he moved a brand-new wife and stepchild into a house built by his father.
McLaughlin, himself an owner-builder, sums up what happened at Monticello: Most owner-builders take inordinate lengths of time to complete their projects; Jefferson took fifty-four years. Many owner-builders construct dwellings larger than necessary; Jefferson, a widower, built a thirty-five-room mansion. Owner-builders invariably extemporize as they build, adding to and modifying their original design as the house grows. Jefferson built one house, tore much of it down, doubled its size, and continued to alter, remodel, improve, and add to it for decades. It is a wonder that the house was ever
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While working late in the unclosed house one night, Jefferson had to stop writing because his ink had frozen. After his wife’s deeply mourned death in 1782, he never married again, and Monticello became a widower’s hobby. As Conover Hunt puts it, there was no wife to declare, “You pull down one more wall and I’m out of here.”
We find in Washington a conservative revolutionary, with sensible ideas (the banquet room) and delight in a bold stroke (the two-story piazza); an accommodating Madison (wife here, mother there) improvising on vernacular wisdom; a fussily artistic Jefferson (busy octagons, perilous stairs) building in high idealism for a distant polity.
Near any institutional building more than a decade old, you are likely to find a host of clumsy Low Road expediencies—trailers, temporary add-ons, people working in windowless storage rooms, space rented in nearby commercial buildings.
In both libraries the stacks are open, nearly any book can be borrowed and taken home, and the London Library has an extremely busy Suggestions Book right by the door. The directors answer to nobody but their customers, and they answer quickly. Trust, intimacy, intense use, and time are what made these buildings work so well.
The members’ guidebook counsels, “It is a complicated building, and before trying to find your way about it and use it, study the plans. Knowledge of the shape of the building is the key to finding the books.” The guidebook adds, “People occasionally get mild electric shocks from the static electricity in the back stacks. Nothing can be done to prevent this, but if it bothers you, turn the lights on and off with your sleeve, not your hand.”
MOST BUILDINGS have neither High Road nor Low Road virtues. Instead they strenuously avoid any relationship whatever with time and what is considered its depredation. The very worst are famous new buildings, would-be famous buildings, imitation famous buildings, and imitation imitation buildings. Whatever the error is, it is catching.
The Media Lab building, I discovered, is not unusually bad. Its badness is the norm in new buildings overdesigned by architects.
A range of observers of architecture are now suggesting that the field may be bankrupt, the profession itself impotent, and the methods inapplicable to contemporary design tasks. It is further suggested that collectively they are incapable of producing pleasant, livable, and humane environments, except perhaps occasionally and then only by chance.3
Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment? Art flouts convention. Convention became conventional because it works. Aspiring to art means aspiring to a building that almost certainly cannot work, because the old good solutions are thrown away. The roof has a dramatic new look, and it leaks dramatically.
