1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:02,520 The following content is provided under a Creative 2 00:00:02,520 --> 00:00:03,970 Commons license. 3 00:00:03,970 --> 00:00:06,360 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 4 00:00:06,360 --> 00:00:10,660 continue to offer high-quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:10,660 --> 00:00:13,350 To make a donation or view additional materials 6 00:00:13,350 --> 00:00:17,190 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 7 00:00:17,190 --> 00:00:18,320 at ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:25,410 --> 00:00:27,390 JULIAN BEINART: I've handed out a guide 9 00:00:27,390 --> 00:00:30,130 to what we're going to cover today. 10 00:00:30,130 --> 00:00:34,080 Now, I don't know how familiar you are with the material. 11 00:00:38,400 --> 00:00:43,230 Does anybody, for instance, have any familiarity 12 00:00:43,230 --> 00:00:47,430 with what is called space syntax? 13 00:00:47,430 --> 00:00:50,190 How much familiarity? 14 00:00:50,190 --> 00:00:53,280 STUDENT: I saw a presentation that someone 15 00:00:53,280 --> 00:00:55,570 who is working in England on space syntax 16 00:00:55,570 --> 00:00:59,400 gave to the National Capital Park and Planning Commission 17 00:00:59,400 --> 00:01:00,547 in DC. 18 00:01:00,547 --> 00:01:01,380 JULIAN BEINART: And? 19 00:01:01,380 --> 00:01:04,003 STUDENT: It was pretty interesting. 20 00:01:04,003 --> 00:01:05,670 JULIAN BEINART: When was this, recently? 21 00:01:05,670 --> 00:01:06,170 Or-- 22 00:01:06,170 --> 00:01:11,160 STUDENT: Yeah, 2011 I think. 23 00:01:11,160 --> 00:01:14,200 JULIAN BEINART: Do the book Space is a Machine? 24 00:01:14,200 --> 00:01:14,700 STUDENT: No. 25 00:01:14,700 --> 00:01:17,070 Is that what the reading was from? 26 00:01:17,070 --> 00:01:20,750 JULIAN BEINART: No, this is a voluminous document. 27 00:01:20,750 --> 00:01:23,712 It costs a lot of money to buy. 28 00:01:23,712 --> 00:01:24,838 STUDENT: [LAUGHS] 29 00:01:24,838 --> 00:01:25,630 JULIAN BEINART: Ah. 30 00:01:28,830 --> 00:01:35,220 It really is more of an expansion of the space syntax 31 00:01:35,220 --> 00:01:42,340 methodology and the idea than we have time for in this class. 32 00:01:42,340 --> 00:01:45,360 That's why I ask if anybody is familiar with it. 33 00:01:49,290 --> 00:01:50,670 OK. 34 00:01:50,670 --> 00:01:53,025 This is the last class in the first section. 35 00:01:57,030 --> 00:02:03,990 And we're concentrated again, very, very briefly, 36 00:02:03,990 --> 00:02:11,610 as we did on Tuesday, with theories 37 00:02:11,610 --> 00:02:19,200 which seem to be determined by the logic from social science. 38 00:02:25,050 --> 00:02:27,570 There are microtheories within each 39 00:02:27,570 --> 00:02:32,970 of these, lots of rules of thumb, lots of understanding 40 00:02:32,970 --> 00:02:36,440 which is not externalized theoretically. 41 00:02:36,440 --> 00:02:40,050 For instance, one of my favorites 42 00:02:40,050 --> 00:02:52,430 is Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue. 43 00:02:55,390 --> 00:03:16,120 A section through a building on Fifth Avenue, a section 44 00:03:16,120 --> 00:03:17,530 of a building on Park Avenue. 45 00:03:33,460 --> 00:03:37,920 On Fifth Avenue, the ground is significant. 46 00:03:40,460 --> 00:03:46,610 Everything that is built is connected 47 00:03:46,610 --> 00:03:49,070 to the ground by mechanical systems, 48 00:03:49,070 --> 00:03:52,385 generally an escalator for five or six floors. 49 00:03:54,950 --> 00:03:57,410 The basement is important because it's 50 00:03:57,410 --> 00:04:03,425 linked to a surface only one floor from the ground. 51 00:04:08,270 --> 00:04:12,050 Two buildings on Park Avenue which you know, 52 00:04:12,050 --> 00:04:16,670 Lever Brothers and Seagram's building. 53 00:04:16,670 --> 00:04:26,256 Lever Brothers gives up the ground for nothing. 54 00:04:26,256 --> 00:04:27,970 The ground is worthless. 55 00:04:31,080 --> 00:04:37,440 Seagram's building extends a plaza, 56 00:04:37,440 --> 00:04:41,895 in return for which it gets more bulk to build taller. 57 00:04:45,560 --> 00:04:51,620 The role of the ground in these two cases 58 00:04:51,620 --> 00:04:55,970 are the subject of an economic theory, which 59 00:04:55,970 --> 00:04:58,520 is just the rule of thumb. 60 00:04:58,520 --> 00:05:00,470 It's observed. 61 00:05:00,470 --> 00:05:03,470 I don't know of a rule of-- 62 00:05:03,470 --> 00:05:10,110 it's much like, well, other rules of thumb in our business. 63 00:05:10,110 --> 00:05:14,520 In fact, it's curious. 64 00:05:14,520 --> 00:05:16,680 In a discipline such as architecture, 65 00:05:16,680 --> 00:05:19,620 there are very few theoretical texts. 66 00:05:19,620 --> 00:05:21,495 There used to be theoretical texts. 67 00:05:24,290 --> 00:05:25,710 How do you learn architecture? 68 00:05:25,710 --> 00:05:26,710 Have you got a textbook? 69 00:05:30,450 --> 00:05:33,700 You can't learn science without a textbook. 70 00:05:33,700 --> 00:05:39,270 A textbook is the agreed-upon synthesized material 71 00:05:39,270 --> 00:05:40,520 which you need to know. 72 00:05:46,400 --> 00:05:51,710 I make this preface because some of the theoretical propositions 73 00:05:51,710 --> 00:05:57,410 we will look at today suffer from the same difficulty. 74 00:06:00,350 --> 00:06:12,020 But they, unlike the series which we looked at on Tuesday, 75 00:06:12,020 --> 00:06:16,640 where space was either neutral, or costly, 76 00:06:16,640 --> 00:06:20,570 or friction-producing, or a measure for recording 77 00:06:20,570 --> 00:06:24,350 a distribution of some process-- 78 00:06:24,350 --> 00:06:29,450 most of what we feel to be true and experience with the city 79 00:06:29,450 --> 00:06:30,185 is lost. 80 00:06:33,200 --> 00:06:35,840 None of the social science theories-- 81 00:06:35,840 --> 00:06:38,560 with the exception, perhaps, of the first one, 82 00:06:38,560 --> 00:06:41,510 which we discussed-- 83 00:06:41,510 --> 00:06:45,530 has any connection to valuing the built environment 84 00:06:45,530 --> 00:06:49,580 as something in itself. 85 00:06:49,580 --> 00:06:54,830 Kevin Lynch is the first of the protagonists of a theory which 86 00:06:54,830 --> 00:07:00,380 deals with equality of the built environment 87 00:07:00,380 --> 00:07:05,960 en masse, not a single building, but a system of buildings. 88 00:07:09,210 --> 00:07:12,525 Lynch starts his work-- 89 00:07:15,230 --> 00:07:21,050 there's an of Lynch's work at MIT just down the corridor. 90 00:07:21,050 --> 00:07:24,890 If you have time one day and you have nothing else to do, 91 00:07:24,890 --> 00:07:30,950 look at his notebook on his first visit to Italy 92 00:07:30,950 --> 00:07:35,630 when he was a young professor here at MIT. 93 00:07:35,630 --> 00:07:39,770 He does a detailed drawing of the path system linking 94 00:07:39,770 --> 00:07:45,890 the major squares and piazza, the piazza and churches, 95 00:07:45,890 --> 00:07:48,620 beautifully drawn. 96 00:07:48,620 --> 00:07:54,860 At the end of his four or five days in Florence, 97 00:07:54,860 --> 00:07:56,390 he writes a note. 98 00:07:56,390 --> 00:07:58,610 Why did I not ask the people what 99 00:07:58,610 --> 00:08:00,740 they do on Saturday nights? 100 00:08:00,740 --> 00:08:05,390 What about the activity in this town? 101 00:08:05,390 --> 00:08:08,280 Why don't I take that into account? 102 00:08:08,280 --> 00:08:11,120 Then he leaves Florence. 103 00:08:11,120 --> 00:08:20,360 His preoccupation with trying to understand the spatial pattern 104 00:08:20,360 --> 00:08:26,030 of cities through asking people is 105 00:08:26,030 --> 00:08:31,340 evident in his first book, The Image of the City. 106 00:08:31,340 --> 00:08:34,039 What is the image of the city? 107 00:08:34,039 --> 00:08:37,010 The image of the city is made up of three items. 108 00:08:37,010 --> 00:08:39,169 What are the three? 109 00:08:39,169 --> 00:08:42,160 You've read the book, I presume. 110 00:08:42,160 --> 00:08:44,698 What are the three? 111 00:08:44,698 --> 00:08:46,240 STUDENT: There's the experiment where 112 00:08:46,240 --> 00:08:48,070 they ask people on the street. 113 00:08:48,070 --> 00:08:49,778 JULIAN BEINART: Yes, and I didn't ask you 114 00:08:49,778 --> 00:08:53,240 for ho the study was done. 115 00:08:53,240 --> 00:08:59,090 I asked you, what are the three abstract components? 116 00:08:59,090 --> 00:09:04,430 I'll tell you-- identity, structure, and meaning. 117 00:09:04,430 --> 00:09:07,520 That equals image. 118 00:09:07,520 --> 00:09:10,430 And you find this out by cognitive mapping, 119 00:09:10,430 --> 00:09:14,420 by asking people how they find their way around cities-- 120 00:09:14,420 --> 00:09:18,590 Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and so on. 121 00:09:22,090 --> 00:09:25,765 What Lynch could not do in that study was deal with meaning. 122 00:09:28,550 --> 00:09:35,540 It's significant that the power that The Image of the City book 123 00:09:35,540 --> 00:09:41,750 had escapes the one component which bedevils us 124 00:09:41,750 --> 00:09:45,293 in our valuation of much of the built environment, 125 00:09:45,293 --> 00:09:46,085 and that's meaning. 126 00:09:49,860 --> 00:09:53,460 Kevin apologized twice in different publications 127 00:09:53,460 --> 00:09:56,430 for his inability to deal with meaning. 128 00:09:59,610 --> 00:10:06,930 I say that as a beginning to a discussion of his work. 129 00:10:11,050 --> 00:10:15,880 When, in this class, we asked people, 130 00:10:15,880 --> 00:10:21,010 when he was teaching here with me, what they remembered 131 00:10:21,010 --> 00:10:27,450 of the book, they would say landmarks, Z, Z, Z, 132 00:10:27,450 --> 00:10:30,430 a set of alphabetical items. 133 00:10:30,430 --> 00:10:34,570 And then says, that's not what I wrote the book for. 134 00:10:34,570 --> 00:10:36,520 I wrote the book to make it clear 135 00:10:36,520 --> 00:10:39,080 that if you want to know something about a city, 136 00:10:39,080 --> 00:10:43,360 you have to ask the people who live in it, 137 00:10:43,360 --> 00:10:49,240 not take formulaic generalizations. 138 00:10:49,240 --> 00:10:53,570 Of course, he was being a bit harsh on himself. 139 00:10:53,570 --> 00:10:59,470 But his last book-- 140 00:10:59,470 --> 00:11:02,065 I must say, one of the things about all the theories 141 00:11:02,065 --> 00:11:05,170 that I'll be discussing today is that they've 142 00:11:05,170 --> 00:11:08,590 published the ideas. 143 00:11:08,590 --> 00:11:11,010 They're not hermeneutic. 144 00:11:11,010 --> 00:11:12,740 They're not hermetic. 145 00:11:12,740 --> 00:11:16,940 They're not sealed off from examination. 146 00:11:23,130 --> 00:11:28,020 In architecture, so much of knowledge is internalized. 147 00:11:31,340 --> 00:11:34,910 Your sensibility to patterns is built up 148 00:11:34,910 --> 00:11:39,530 through much of the practice of priesthood. 149 00:11:44,630 --> 00:11:48,230 Lynch and the others today-- 150 00:11:48,230 --> 00:11:51,500 by the way, the others today will be in order-- 151 00:11:51,500 --> 00:11:59,280 Kevin Lynch, Christopher Alexander, John Habraken, 152 00:11:59,280 --> 00:12:01,170 space syntax. 153 00:12:01,170 --> 00:12:07,170 And then last, we'll look at the work of the British Land Use 154 00:12:07,170 --> 00:12:11,910 and Built Form group in Cambridge, England, Lionel 155 00:12:11,910 --> 00:12:12,450 March. 156 00:12:12,450 --> 00:12:14,430 Sir Lionel March. 157 00:12:14,430 --> 00:12:16,830 Oh, no, and he wasn't knighted. 158 00:12:16,830 --> 00:12:18,525 Sorry just Lionel March. 159 00:12:23,420 --> 00:12:27,950 For Lynch, the problem remains that-- 160 00:12:31,540 --> 00:12:33,350 let me see if I can find a phrase. 161 00:12:43,370 --> 00:12:46,160 No, there isn't one phrase that I can 162 00:12:46,160 --> 00:12:48,380 find which sums up his search. 163 00:12:48,380 --> 00:12:56,750 What I'll do with him is go through the performance 164 00:12:56,750 --> 00:13:07,310 of dimension theory, which is the last one, which he built up 165 00:13:07,310 --> 00:13:11,750 in this class and which is published in a book which 166 00:13:11,750 --> 00:13:13,700 was called A Theory of Good City Form 167 00:13:13,700 --> 00:13:21,300 and then appeared late as Good City Form, and use that as-- 168 00:13:21,300 --> 00:13:26,660 and then I will compare that with his writings 169 00:13:26,660 --> 00:13:32,210 on a utopian speculation that he made, just to give 170 00:13:32,210 --> 00:13:34,790 some embodiment to his ideas. 171 00:13:39,350 --> 00:13:48,830 Some generalizations-- unlike Christopher Alexander 172 00:13:48,830 --> 00:13:52,580 and John Habraken, Lynch's work is not a critique 173 00:13:52,580 --> 00:13:53,945 of contemporary urbanism. 174 00:14:00,370 --> 00:14:10,985 His philosophy is in relation to present-day city and time. 175 00:14:10,985 --> 00:14:17,610 He is completely interested in the complexity and difficulty 176 00:14:17,610 --> 00:14:24,130 we have understanding of the form of a city. 177 00:14:24,130 --> 00:14:32,292 He believes there are ranges of understanding, not standards. 178 00:14:32,292 --> 00:14:34,690 His theory, performance dimension, 179 00:14:34,690 --> 00:14:38,980 set up ranges within which different cultures could 180 00:14:38,980 --> 00:14:46,060 construct their own standards and which the dimensions could 181 00:14:46,060 --> 00:14:50,890 be compared one to another and then balanced 182 00:14:50,890 --> 00:15:00,910 again two meta-criteria, justice and application. 183 00:15:26,730 --> 00:15:30,960 Lynch's humanism comes from his appreciation 184 00:15:30,960 --> 00:15:35,820 of one of the major dimensions of the human system, 185 00:15:35,820 --> 00:15:37,620 and that's its capacity to learn. 186 00:15:45,820 --> 00:15:56,600 And therefore, his ideal utopia is 187 00:15:56,600 --> 00:16:02,420 a manifestation of human beings' ability 188 00:16:02,420 --> 00:16:05,180 to change culture and aspirations 189 00:16:05,180 --> 00:16:09,620 rather than the manifestation of some iron law. 190 00:16:09,620 --> 00:16:13,880 There's no drawing in his utopia. 191 00:16:13,880 --> 00:16:19,730 It's partly because of his decision 192 00:16:19,730 --> 00:16:24,440 that architecture doesn't help much 193 00:16:24,440 --> 00:16:27,980 in understanding urban form. 194 00:16:27,980 --> 00:16:34,520 I recall a disagreement I had in this class with him 195 00:16:34,520 --> 00:16:38,540 when I introduced Aldo Rossi's book, which 196 00:16:38,540 --> 00:16:40,880 was new at the time. 197 00:16:40,880 --> 00:16:45,710 And Lynch was very angry. 198 00:16:45,710 --> 00:16:52,220 And he writes about the denouncement of Aldo Rossi. 199 00:16:52,220 --> 00:16:55,850 I tried to argue that there was some merit in Rossi's 200 00:16:55,850 --> 00:17:02,600 speculation as an architect and so on. 201 00:17:02,600 --> 00:17:08,440 I don't understand why Lynch disparaged architecture 202 00:17:08,440 --> 00:17:10,099 as such. 203 00:17:10,099 --> 00:17:13,579 He didn't disparage architecture as a discipline. 204 00:17:13,579 --> 00:17:16,940 He disparaged the method in which architects 205 00:17:16,940 --> 00:17:21,740 took upon themselves the right to invent 206 00:17:21,740 --> 00:17:25,490 spatial ideas on their own-- 207 00:17:25,490 --> 00:17:27,630 again, without consultation. 208 00:17:30,590 --> 00:17:37,840 Lynch was so aghast at the idea of an imperial rulership 209 00:17:37,840 --> 00:17:43,230 of knowledge and hesitated every time 210 00:17:43,230 --> 00:17:49,680 to embrace something unless it had been acknowledged 211 00:17:49,680 --> 00:17:54,000 by human experience. 212 00:17:54,000 --> 00:17:59,520 Many of these people whose theories I talking about today 213 00:17:59,520 --> 00:18:05,700 are very much rooted in observing existing patterns 214 00:18:05,700 --> 00:18:06,900 and building on them. 215 00:18:09,530 --> 00:18:12,110 They differ in respect to the way 216 00:18:12,110 --> 00:18:15,650 in which they observe these patterns, what 217 00:18:15,650 --> 00:18:17,570 they make of them. 218 00:18:17,570 --> 00:18:21,380 I will show you that in Christopher Alexander's pattern 219 00:18:21,380 --> 00:18:28,160 language, he makes absolutely derivations 220 00:18:28,160 --> 00:18:32,330 from his observation of human behavior. 221 00:18:32,330 --> 00:18:37,760 John Habraken never makes a categorical, good or bad. 222 00:18:37,760 --> 00:18:40,340 John Habraken believes that all agreements 223 00:18:40,340 --> 00:18:45,410 are good because they are saturated with information 224 00:18:45,410 --> 00:18:48,610 from culture and so on. 225 00:18:48,610 --> 00:18:58,690 Lynch wishes to build a model for the world 226 00:18:58,690 --> 00:19:07,390 as if urbanism was at the beginning of its trajectory. 227 00:19:07,390 --> 00:19:12,310 He believes that, in the model of science, 228 00:19:12,310 --> 00:19:17,005 that science started from nowhere. 229 00:19:17,005 --> 00:19:21,100 It kept on repeating experiments, developing 230 00:19:21,100 --> 00:19:24,940 new and new identity, and new and new ideology, 231 00:19:24,940 --> 00:19:32,170 and reaching a point where it was much more sophisticated 232 00:19:32,170 --> 00:19:35,440 than where it began. 233 00:19:35,440 --> 00:19:40,030 So he starts off by setting out the dimensions 234 00:19:40,030 --> 00:19:41,380 that you had to take. 235 00:19:41,380 --> 00:19:45,850 This is Kepler looking at this, trying 236 00:19:45,850 --> 00:19:51,740 to derive a theory of the Earth's movement. 237 00:19:51,740 --> 00:19:55,630 Lynch is trying to set forth, what are the things that you 238 00:19:55,630 --> 00:19:59,290 have to take into account and measure 239 00:19:59,290 --> 00:20:03,820 in order to have a comprehensive view of a city 240 00:20:03,820 --> 00:20:07,030 independent of which place in the world it is, 241 00:20:07,030 --> 00:20:10,420 independent of which culture? 242 00:20:10,420 --> 00:20:25,800 He experiments with these and has 243 00:20:25,800 --> 00:20:39,190 a set of ideas which he writes about which set up 244 00:20:39,190 --> 00:20:46,930 the prologue to these ideas. 245 00:20:46,930 --> 00:20:52,240 I gave you, in the handout today, one of these subideas. 246 00:20:52,240 --> 00:20:55,300 It was the notion of adaptability. 247 00:20:55,300 --> 00:20:58,450 Again, adaptability would interest Lynch 248 00:20:58,450 --> 00:21:02,440 because it is the capacity of the human being 249 00:21:02,440 --> 00:21:06,460 to change patterns after learning. 250 00:21:06,460 --> 00:21:13,570 Adaptability in our class discussion was a separate item. 251 00:21:13,570 --> 00:21:19,060 It became, in the book, a subset of the item fit. 252 00:21:19,060 --> 00:21:24,610 I gave you this piece on adaptability 253 00:21:24,610 --> 00:21:30,760 as an example of how he would ask you to develop it. 254 00:21:30,760 --> 00:21:37,000 He said-- let me find an example of what I gave to you today. 255 00:21:49,050 --> 00:21:51,520 He tries to break down adaptability 256 00:21:51,520 --> 00:21:54,900 into subcategories. 257 00:21:54,900 --> 00:21:59,490 Manipulability, which is different from reversibility. 258 00:21:59,490 --> 00:22:00,750 What is resilience? 259 00:22:00,750 --> 00:22:03,510 What is the innovativeness? 260 00:22:03,510 --> 00:22:09,630 I then added-- in your thing, I've 261 00:22:09,630 --> 00:22:15,120 given you some handwritten response from Lynch, 262 00:22:15,120 --> 00:22:22,140 not because that you should read it, but here is an idea. 263 00:22:22,140 --> 00:22:26,066 He writes this piece on adaptability. 264 00:22:26,066 --> 00:22:28,800 See, it's circulated. 265 00:22:28,800 --> 00:22:37,140 Somebody, an economist, sends back a review of his ideas. 266 00:22:37,140 --> 00:22:41,290 And then he replies to the economist. 267 00:22:41,290 --> 00:22:45,990 This is a handwritten reply to a colleague. 268 00:22:45,990 --> 00:22:51,870 His imagination is that if we each, all the students 269 00:22:51,870 --> 00:22:56,910 of urbanism, took on the task of identifying 270 00:22:56,910 --> 00:23:02,430 in specific terms what these categories of inevitability, 271 00:23:02,430 --> 00:23:09,960 we would have a basis for a specific culture settling 272 00:23:09,960 --> 00:23:15,105 an item of reversibility in specific terms. 273 00:23:17,760 --> 00:23:20,670 Standards would imply that all of them 274 00:23:20,670 --> 00:23:23,260 are equal for all cultures. 275 00:23:23,260 --> 00:23:25,090 Of course, that's not true. 276 00:23:25,090 --> 00:23:27,240 You could have varying standards. 277 00:23:27,240 --> 00:23:33,900 But for Lynch, the idea was that we were in such a rough state, 278 00:23:33,900 --> 00:23:41,370 theoretically, that you had to set out these items more 279 00:23:41,370 --> 00:23:42,510 systematically. 280 00:23:46,930 --> 00:23:48,640 He didn't get very far. 281 00:23:48,640 --> 00:23:51,850 He died too young. 282 00:23:51,850 --> 00:23:55,660 And if he were here today, he'd add 283 00:23:55,660 --> 00:23:58,375 more than I'm able to explain on his behalf. 284 00:24:02,870 --> 00:24:06,250 In his collected works, there's a chapter 285 00:24:06,250 --> 00:24:09,070 called "A Place, Utopia". 286 00:24:09,070 --> 00:24:12,490 Now, it's interesting that this place, utopia, 287 00:24:12,490 --> 00:24:16,510 which is his speculation about what an ideal urban world would 288 00:24:16,510 --> 00:24:17,353 look like-- 289 00:24:17,353 --> 00:24:18,145 there's no drawing. 290 00:24:22,490 --> 00:24:26,450 In The Image of the City, he uses little drawings 291 00:24:26,450 --> 00:24:33,720 on the side of the text to add information visually. 292 00:24:33,720 --> 00:24:35,030 Here, there's no drawing. 293 00:24:38,370 --> 00:24:42,990 I'll just pick out a couple of items from "The Place, Utopia". 294 00:24:42,990 --> 00:24:46,260 Has anybody read "A Place, Utopia"? 295 00:24:46,260 --> 00:24:49,380 We're not wasting my time, then, or your time. 296 00:25:03,270 --> 00:25:10,150 I propose, he says, to leave-- 297 00:25:10,150 --> 00:25:13,110 I attempt something more modest here without losing 298 00:25:13,110 --> 00:25:15,180 track of society. 299 00:25:15,180 --> 00:25:19,990 I propose to leave it unaccounted for except where 300 00:25:19,990 --> 00:25:24,750 it springs from some feature of place. 301 00:25:24,750 --> 00:25:31,500 Everything about what I'm going to say, he says, 302 00:25:31,500 --> 00:25:35,280 is about how people relate to their surroundings, 303 00:25:35,280 --> 00:25:40,350 rather than out of a self-absorbed technical fantasy 304 00:25:40,350 --> 00:25:43,650 or mechanical consequence of social prescription 305 00:25:43,650 --> 00:25:44,850 on the other. 306 00:25:44,850 --> 00:25:48,270 In other words, what he's saying is that there are items which 307 00:25:48,270 --> 00:25:51,250 we can learn from simply from the way 308 00:25:51,250 --> 00:25:56,490 space is used and manipulated. 309 00:25:56,490 --> 00:26:00,250 Imagine an urban countryside, a highly varied but humanized 310 00:26:00,250 --> 00:26:00,750 landscape. 311 00:26:00,750 --> 00:26:04,980 It is neither urban nor rural in the old sense since houses, 312 00:26:04,980 --> 00:26:09,660 workplaces are set among trees, farms, and streams. 313 00:26:09,660 --> 00:26:12,960 Within this extensive countryside, 314 00:26:12,960 --> 00:26:16,500 there's a network of small, intensive urban centers. 315 00:26:16,500 --> 00:26:18,450 The countryside is as functionally 316 00:26:18,450 --> 00:26:22,320 intricate and interdependent as any contemporary city. 317 00:26:25,020 --> 00:26:36,090 The land, the space is not allocated to owners. 318 00:26:38,910 --> 00:26:43,980 The use of land is brief in the history of cities, 319 00:26:43,980 --> 00:26:50,370 so much like we've picked up from other sources. 320 00:26:50,370 --> 00:26:54,255 It is better for the land to be in the hands of a trust. 321 00:26:54,255 --> 00:26:58,740 He calls them a regional land trust. 322 00:27:03,040 --> 00:27:06,895 These tasks grant leases for the present enjoyment of space. 323 00:27:11,850 --> 00:27:15,120 Everyone is trained to read a place just as everyone 324 00:27:15,120 --> 00:27:18,360 is trained to read a good book. 325 00:27:18,360 --> 00:27:20,735 There are slow places and fast places. 326 00:27:25,960 --> 00:27:28,190 I can go through this in some detail. 327 00:27:28,190 --> 00:27:30,880 But you can read it yourself. 328 00:27:30,880 --> 00:27:37,930 What is significant about it is that he doesn't start off with 329 00:27:37,930 --> 00:27:43,660 a definition that a city is anything that cannot be 330 00:27:43,660 --> 00:27:50,680 replicated through a mixture of landscape and building. 331 00:27:50,680 --> 00:27:52,280 He doesn't depict the building. 332 00:27:52,280 --> 00:27:55,180 He sees, in a trained society, people 333 00:27:55,180 --> 00:27:58,240 will pick good buildings. 334 00:27:58,240 --> 00:28:01,780 They will make them from good materials. 335 00:28:01,780 --> 00:28:08,440 His emphasis is on depicting those spaces in buildings 336 00:28:08,440 --> 00:28:11,950 or infrastructure of a city which derive 337 00:28:11,950 --> 00:28:15,370 from the goodness of people. 338 00:28:15,370 --> 00:28:22,040 Now, people are not good. 339 00:28:22,040 --> 00:28:23,950 They're good and bad. 340 00:28:23,950 --> 00:28:26,020 Sometimes they are both. 341 00:28:26,020 --> 00:28:29,320 We are all good and bad in our life. 342 00:28:29,320 --> 00:28:33,220 There's an element in many of these theorists in depicting 343 00:28:33,220 --> 00:28:37,720 a society without political friction, 344 00:28:37,720 --> 00:28:40,240 without individual competition. 345 00:28:40,240 --> 00:28:45,670 John Habraken's agreements-- he says good agreements 346 00:28:45,670 --> 00:28:47,800 will be made independent of whether you're 347 00:28:47,800 --> 00:28:49,990 a Marxist or Capitalist. 348 00:28:49,990 --> 00:28:53,695 You will have to come to some agreement about where you enter 349 00:28:53,695 --> 00:28:57,730 a building, whether there is parking underground, 350 00:28:57,730 --> 00:29:02,125 or how many floors of building there are above ground. 351 00:29:05,550 --> 00:29:12,060 Christopher Alexander also bypasses the political impact 352 00:29:12,060 --> 00:29:15,360 on his work. 353 00:29:15,360 --> 00:29:17,370 He makes decisions about patterns 354 00:29:17,370 --> 00:29:21,150 which are not subject to intercourse 355 00:29:21,150 --> 00:29:23,850 for producing agreements. 356 00:29:23,850 --> 00:29:29,520 These patterns are decided upon through his examination 357 00:29:29,520 --> 00:29:31,530 of the nature of order. 358 00:29:35,300 --> 00:29:39,340 Alexander has an interesting trajectory in his work. 359 00:29:45,050 --> 00:29:47,720 His first book, Notes on the Synthesis of-- 360 00:29:47,720 --> 00:29:51,260 I don't know if any of you have paid particular attention 361 00:29:51,260 --> 00:29:53,570 to Alexander's work. 362 00:29:53,570 --> 00:29:58,460 Has anybody been an Alexander student? 363 00:29:58,460 --> 00:30:00,710 No. 364 00:30:00,710 --> 00:30:06,410 Christopher Alexander, when I first ran into him 365 00:30:06,410 --> 00:30:08,510 was at Harvard. 366 00:30:08,510 --> 00:30:15,140 And he had written Notes on the Synthesis of Form, which 367 00:30:15,140 --> 00:30:18,665 was an admiration and an attempt to understand how 368 00:30:18,665 --> 00:30:22,400 a culture, such as that in the Middle East, 369 00:30:22,400 --> 00:30:27,410 could make carpets without any explicit instruction 370 00:30:27,410 --> 00:30:33,980 as to how to do them, only an oral tradition, handed down, 371 00:30:33,980 --> 00:30:38,390 but allowing within that tradition enormous variation 372 00:30:38,390 --> 00:30:39,950 in the maintenance of quality. 373 00:30:43,560 --> 00:30:51,750 He looked to computation to enable us to, 374 00:30:51,750 --> 00:30:53,820 perhaps, do the same kind of thing. 375 00:30:53,820 --> 00:31:01,170 Let's maintain quality, although explicitly unclear 376 00:31:01,170 --> 00:31:02,760 about how we were doing it. 377 00:31:08,410 --> 00:31:13,630 He's moved through a number of phases in his work. 378 00:31:13,630 --> 00:31:14,665 No sooner did he-- 379 00:31:18,760 --> 00:31:26,560 been interested in optimization, then he 380 00:31:26,560 --> 00:31:32,510 wrote a piece about how to maximize communication, 381 00:31:32,510 --> 00:31:36,970 a silly piece in which he argues that in the zoning 382 00:31:36,970 --> 00:31:43,480 of suburban housing, the living room should be exposed 383 00:31:43,480 --> 00:31:50,800 to the street and curtains would be unnecessary, that people 384 00:31:50,800 --> 00:31:55,330 would enjoy partaking in the experience of being 385 00:31:55,330 --> 00:32:01,810 a community, a remark which might well apply to New York 386 00:32:01,810 --> 00:32:05,260 City but not to an American suburb. 387 00:32:05,260 --> 00:32:08,030 He then published a significant paper called-- 388 00:32:12,090 --> 00:32:15,200 "The Structure of a City is Not a Tree." 389 00:32:15,200 --> 00:32:17,340 It was more complicated than a tree, 390 00:32:17,340 --> 00:32:22,980 didn't have a central trunk with all its branches 391 00:32:22,980 --> 00:32:25,960 regularly sprouting from the trunk. 392 00:32:25,960 --> 00:32:29,550 But geometrically, he couldn't explain what it was. 393 00:32:29,550 --> 00:32:33,570 But he knew it wasn't a tree. 394 00:32:33,570 --> 00:32:39,870 And then-- partly, I think, because of his living 395 00:32:39,870 --> 00:32:46,380 on the west coast [CHUCKLES] where, perhaps, 396 00:32:46,380 --> 00:32:52,700 the counterculture has spread more ideas in American thought 397 00:32:52,700 --> 00:32:55,800 than anywhere else in the world-- 398 00:32:55,800 --> 00:33:04,530 he started arguing that there was a microunit which 399 00:33:04,530 --> 00:33:07,800 had spatial and social characteristics, what 400 00:33:07,800 --> 00:33:08,690 he calls patterns. 401 00:33:12,750 --> 00:33:15,720 Each microunit has a pattern. 402 00:33:15,720 --> 00:33:18,150 There are good patterns, and there are bad patterns. 403 00:33:24,581 --> 00:33:29,990 He studies a field of spatial and social relations. 404 00:33:29,990 --> 00:33:32,695 There are good, living patterns; bad, dead ones. 405 00:33:37,130 --> 00:33:42,230 We do not need grand planning or design for the whole town 406 00:33:42,230 --> 00:33:45,350 if each thing is made in a context which 407 00:33:45,350 --> 00:33:47,270 the other understands. 408 00:33:47,270 --> 00:33:51,425 The town emerges by itself and is continually repaired. 409 00:34:01,730 --> 00:34:05,010 He believes that society has-- 410 00:34:05,010 --> 00:34:07,340 it's a romantic notion-- 411 00:34:07,340 --> 00:34:10,940 has a history of patterns which are good patterns. 412 00:34:10,940 --> 00:34:14,030 They're good patterns because they're lived in, 413 00:34:14,030 --> 00:34:15,920 they're understood. 414 00:34:15,920 --> 00:34:19,520 Like Patrick Geddes, he tries-- 415 00:34:19,520 --> 00:34:26,580 remember, Patrick Geddes is the plane diagram 416 00:34:26,580 --> 00:34:34,199 which emotional, objective, experienced items all 417 00:34:34,199 --> 00:34:36,980 can fold into each other. 418 00:34:36,980 --> 00:34:45,480 Here, Alexander is very much again trying to link feeling 419 00:34:45,480 --> 00:34:46,650 and thought. 420 00:34:52,100 --> 00:34:57,030 A good pattern is one which is objectively correct 421 00:34:57,030 --> 00:35:00,670 but is also felt by you to be correct. 422 00:35:03,910 --> 00:35:07,990 A good example is in a piece in which 423 00:35:07,990 --> 00:35:11,650 he tries to explain to a young architecture 424 00:35:11,650 --> 00:35:17,200 student at Berkeley what he's all about. 425 00:35:17,200 --> 00:35:19,070 He says, look at this table. 426 00:35:19,070 --> 00:35:22,930 They're sitting in a cafe. 427 00:35:22,930 --> 00:35:24,700 He says, look at this table. 428 00:35:24,700 --> 00:35:27,010 It's made of wood. 429 00:35:27,010 --> 00:35:30,200 There's the difference between making the edge 430 00:35:30,200 --> 00:35:33,910 and finishing the edge of the wood with sandpaper, 431 00:35:33,910 --> 00:35:38,390 making the minimal transition from one service to another, 432 00:35:38,390 --> 00:35:42,300 versus the machine-like one, which our table is, 433 00:35:42,300 --> 00:35:49,690 which has just rounded it off in a very blunt, crude way. 434 00:35:49,690 --> 00:35:53,440 He asked the student, which of these two 435 00:35:53,440 --> 00:35:56,930 is a representation of your good self? 436 00:35:56,930 --> 00:36:00,610 The student doesn't understand what he's talking about. 437 00:36:00,610 --> 00:36:06,040 Why should the edge of a table represent 438 00:36:06,040 --> 00:36:10,570 your psychological whole? 439 00:36:10,570 --> 00:36:14,440 I quote, "but what if I ask you to tell me 440 00:36:14,440 --> 00:36:17,530 which of these two tables you're more willing to take 441 00:36:17,530 --> 00:36:20,830 as a picture of your own self? 442 00:36:20,830 --> 00:36:23,680 Which of the two would you consider a better candidate 443 00:36:23,680 --> 00:36:26,600 to picture of your own soul?" 444 00:36:26,600 --> 00:36:29,230 And so on-- everything. 445 00:36:32,800 --> 00:36:35,410 The trouble is that it's difficult to write 446 00:36:35,410 --> 00:36:38,470 such patterns. 447 00:36:38,470 --> 00:36:44,500 We don't have the tools yet. 448 00:36:44,500 --> 00:36:49,780 We may one day have them to do that. 449 00:36:49,780 --> 00:36:53,500 These patterns which are printed in the book, A Pattern 450 00:36:53,500 --> 00:37:02,410 Language, on biblical paper is almost a giveaway of a kind. 451 00:37:05,410 --> 00:37:11,140 For instance, Pattern on page 115-- 452 00:37:11,140 --> 00:37:14,230 there's abundant evidence to show that high buildings make 453 00:37:14,230 --> 00:37:14,980 people crazy. 454 00:37:18,350 --> 00:37:20,300 Now, objectively, this is not true. 455 00:37:23,230 --> 00:37:31,550 There may be reasons why tall buildings are harmful. 456 00:37:31,550 --> 00:37:38,000 But it is an abstract pattern or is a theoretical pattern 457 00:37:38,000 --> 00:37:40,320 derived from observation. 458 00:37:40,320 --> 00:37:42,880 It's not true. 459 00:37:42,880 --> 00:37:46,730 I can quote you from Herbert Gans, 460 00:37:46,730 --> 00:37:51,890 a well-known urban sociologist who once taught here at MIT. 461 00:37:51,890 --> 00:37:56,000 I quote, "thus, whether housing is high- or low-rise does not, 462 00:37:56,000 --> 00:38:00,650 by itself, make much difference." 463 00:38:00,650 --> 00:38:02,660 The luxury apartment house has been 464 00:38:02,660 --> 00:38:10,690 built in New York City for well over a century now, 465 00:38:10,690 --> 00:38:13,460 and no one has yet discovered that the buildings jammed 466 00:38:13,460 --> 00:38:18,830 on Park and Fifth Avenues and so forth generate pathology. 467 00:38:18,830 --> 00:38:20,930 Conversely, when poor people live 468 00:38:20,930 --> 00:38:24,500 in even the best-designed low-rise projects, 469 00:38:24,500 --> 00:38:27,240 they still do not escape the problems of poverty. 470 00:38:30,890 --> 00:38:33,260 Gans is correct. 471 00:38:33,260 --> 00:38:36,950 Why does Alexander make such a statement? 472 00:38:36,950 --> 00:38:41,030 He's too intelligent to know that his statement is 473 00:38:41,030 --> 00:38:42,620 incorrect. 474 00:38:42,620 --> 00:38:45,020 I don't know. 475 00:38:45,020 --> 00:38:48,140 I don't know. 476 00:38:48,140 --> 00:38:58,310 There's a kind of insistence that either you, in-- 477 00:38:58,310 --> 00:39:03,260 when I learned debating, I was taught that sometimes it's 478 00:39:03,260 --> 00:39:07,910 a good idea to throw out a statement, an assumption, 479 00:39:07,910 --> 00:39:14,570 a hypothesis just to make the argument more interesting. 480 00:39:14,570 --> 00:39:16,640 And if your opponent didn't catch up 481 00:39:16,640 --> 00:39:20,830 on the weakness of your argument, you would win. 482 00:39:20,830 --> 00:39:24,200 I don't think Alexander's into debating games. 483 00:39:24,200 --> 00:39:28,250 But it's often puzzled me why he took the trouble 484 00:39:28,250 --> 00:39:32,180 to assemble often very good ideas, very 485 00:39:32,180 --> 00:39:34,085 down-to-earth ideas. 486 00:39:34,085 --> 00:39:41,030 He, for instance, says single designers don't really 487 00:39:41,030 --> 00:39:44,960 produce comprehensive results. 488 00:39:44,960 --> 00:39:48,500 He says, I work in the College of Environmental Design 489 00:39:48,500 --> 00:39:54,380 at Berkeley, which was designed by a team of the best highly 490 00:39:54,380 --> 00:39:56,735 trained architects in our college. 491 00:39:59,270 --> 00:40:02,270 I can't put plants on the sill in my window 492 00:40:02,270 --> 00:40:05,090 because nobody ever thought about what 493 00:40:05,090 --> 00:40:07,700 the best position of the window would 494 00:40:07,700 --> 00:40:11,540 be in the section of the wall. 495 00:40:11,540 --> 00:40:15,560 They pushed the window to the inside 496 00:40:15,560 --> 00:40:19,220 to allow a maximum of use on the outside where 497 00:40:19,220 --> 00:40:22,760 there's no need for any use. 498 00:40:22,760 --> 00:40:27,650 Why do intelligent people make such stupid assumptions? 499 00:40:27,650 --> 00:40:30,920 They never consulted us. 500 00:40:30,920 --> 00:40:35,030 Well, if an architect were redesigning 501 00:40:35,030 --> 00:40:39,290 MIT's School of Architecture and asked me about my office, 502 00:40:39,290 --> 00:40:42,680 I don't know if I would remember to specify 503 00:40:42,680 --> 00:40:46,220 that the window needs to be on the outside of the wall 504 00:40:46,220 --> 00:40:51,500 to allow me the space on the inside for my plants 505 00:40:51,500 --> 00:40:52,685 or for whatever. 506 00:40:56,050 --> 00:40:59,950 So his observation is that somehow, the system 507 00:40:59,950 --> 00:41:01,330 isn't working. 508 00:41:01,330 --> 00:41:05,690 Modern urbanism is a mess. 509 00:41:05,690 --> 00:41:08,720 So he proposes a number of rules. 510 00:41:08,720 --> 00:41:11,000 I won't go through the rules. 511 00:41:11,000 --> 00:41:18,570 You can see them in his later book, 512 00:41:18,570 --> 00:41:21,640 A New Theory of Urban Design. 513 00:41:21,640 --> 00:41:27,470 There are rules about growing a whole, about piecemeal, 514 00:41:27,470 --> 00:41:32,740 unpredictable coherence, full of feeling, no single artist. 515 00:41:32,740 --> 00:41:39,770 There are many people involved, the whole idea of a thing 516 00:41:39,770 --> 00:41:40,870 having to have feeling. 517 00:41:45,620 --> 00:41:52,570 The seven rules-- let me find the one about-- 518 00:41:58,680 --> 00:42:02,170 rule number three, visions. 519 00:42:02,170 --> 00:42:06,300 Every project must first be experienced and then expressed 520 00:42:06,300 --> 00:42:10,482 as a vision which can be seen in the inner eye. 521 00:42:10,482 --> 00:42:14,870 I don't know where my inner eye is and how to use it. 522 00:42:14,870 --> 00:42:15,840 AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS] 523 00:42:15,840 --> 00:42:17,550 JULIAN BEINART: It must have this quality 524 00:42:17,550 --> 00:42:24,540 so strongly that it can also be communicated to others 525 00:42:24,540 --> 00:42:27,855 and felt by others as a vision. 526 00:42:38,290 --> 00:42:46,810 At least Alexander is attempting to be explicit about his ideas. 527 00:42:46,810 --> 00:42:51,490 Explicitness is an advantage in debate. 528 00:42:51,490 --> 00:42:55,690 And explicitness, even if you make mistakes, 529 00:42:55,690 --> 00:43:01,090 is better than dull hermiticism. 530 00:43:03,970 --> 00:43:08,080 And all of these people are generating explicitness 531 00:43:08,080 --> 00:43:11,905 as one of the aspects of their work. 532 00:43:25,200 --> 00:43:40,110 In the handout I gave to you, there's 533 00:43:40,110 --> 00:43:45,000 a piece from A New Theory of Urban Design, this. 534 00:43:51,990 --> 00:43:56,940 On the left is a piece of Rome, a plan of Rome 535 00:43:56,940 --> 00:44:01,110 around the Pantheon, medieval Rome, as opposed 536 00:44:01,110 --> 00:44:05,190 to an American suburb. 537 00:44:05,190 --> 00:44:08,190 What are the characteristics of the world 538 00:44:08,190 --> 00:44:12,330 depicted on the left-- a good world, according to Alexander? 539 00:44:17,450 --> 00:44:23,750 The whole is made up of parts which are unique but belong 540 00:44:23,750 --> 00:44:27,440 to families of shape. 541 00:44:27,440 --> 00:44:31,820 There are churches, which all have open space in front 542 00:44:31,820 --> 00:44:39,980 of them-- the Pantheon, and so on, Sant'Ignazio, Sant'Gesú. 543 00:44:39,980 --> 00:44:45,350 There are patterns of housing which repeat. 544 00:44:45,350 --> 00:44:52,850 There are decisions which are made through piecemeal addition 545 00:44:52,850 --> 00:44:55,820 rather than through a ramp in the industrial production. 546 00:44:58,870 --> 00:45:02,770 There's a family of belongingness of all the parts. 547 00:45:11,940 --> 00:45:17,970 In a sense-- although I don't know who had the vision which 548 00:45:17,970 --> 00:45:21,090 produced this plan, I don't think there was one person, 549 00:45:21,090 --> 00:45:25,810 one pope who said Rome would be this way-- 550 00:45:25,810 --> 00:45:30,420 but there were patterns, presumably, 551 00:45:30,420 --> 00:45:38,580 which people learned from other patterns 552 00:45:38,580 --> 00:45:43,590 and decided to reproduce them in a piecemeal way. 553 00:45:43,590 --> 00:45:46,830 So building up from experience, building up 554 00:45:46,830 --> 00:45:53,340 from categories of knowledge which had already been tested, 555 00:45:53,340 --> 00:45:57,728 as opposed to this machine-like production. 556 00:46:06,040 --> 00:46:09,241 Alexander is tough medicine. 557 00:46:09,241 --> 00:46:15,775 He can come across as an arrogant fool. 558 00:46:19,530 --> 00:46:22,710 He recently produced four volumes 559 00:46:22,710 --> 00:46:26,280 called The Nature of Order. 560 00:46:26,280 --> 00:46:27,570 He's even more explicit. 561 00:46:30,310 --> 00:46:32,770 In The Nature of Order, I have tried 562 00:46:32,770 --> 00:46:35,260 to construct a coherent picture of life 563 00:46:35,260 --> 00:46:39,940 on Earth which makes sense of these matters, that gives us 564 00:46:39,940 --> 00:46:43,840 something to live for and worth living for. 565 00:46:43,840 --> 00:46:48,100 Yes, like Geddes, I am trying, at the same time, 566 00:46:48,100 --> 00:46:52,900 to deal with the emotional world and the objective, ordinary 567 00:46:52,900 --> 00:46:54,010 world around us. 568 00:46:56,960 --> 00:47:01,040 What is extraordinary is he writes 569 00:47:01,040 --> 00:47:05,030 about A Pattern Language. 570 00:47:05,030 --> 00:47:08,810 By about 1975, these investigations, 571 00:47:08,810 --> 00:47:12,500 which I undertook with five colleagues, gave us gold. 572 00:47:12,500 --> 00:47:17,630 We discovered about 250 invariant spatial patterns. 573 00:47:17,630 --> 00:47:20,180 Each one was associated with the stability 574 00:47:20,180 --> 00:47:23,090 of human environmental studies. 575 00:47:23,090 --> 00:47:25,430 They were published in A Pattern Language. 576 00:47:25,430 --> 00:47:28,790 They have become a standard part of what is known and used 577 00:47:28,790 --> 00:47:29,720 by architects. 578 00:47:32,480 --> 00:47:38,520 Well, what's this all about? 579 00:47:38,520 --> 00:47:40,890 It's not true. 580 00:47:40,890 --> 00:47:43,760 So why does a man say something which is not true? 581 00:47:48,610 --> 00:47:51,430 It can only be provocative. 582 00:47:51,430 --> 00:47:56,020 And perhaps like John McEnroe shouting 583 00:47:56,020 --> 00:47:59,380 at an umpire in a tennis game, he 584 00:47:59,380 --> 00:48:06,680 had a reason for provoking response, dealing 585 00:48:06,680 --> 00:48:12,200 with satisfaction of his inner grief publicly. 586 00:48:12,200 --> 00:48:17,040 I can only, without doing a psychoanalysis of this, 587 00:48:17,040 --> 00:48:19,700 be surprised by it. 588 00:48:19,700 --> 00:48:28,220 The fact is that architects seldom read a book 589 00:48:28,220 --> 00:48:30,170 like Pattern Language. 590 00:48:30,170 --> 00:48:35,430 And they're not in the habit of taking a statement 591 00:48:35,430 --> 00:48:40,980 like "tall buildings are a danger to human health" 592 00:48:40,980 --> 00:48:43,680 seriously. 593 00:48:43,680 --> 00:48:45,810 One last thing before we move on-- 594 00:48:49,800 --> 00:48:56,260 in his latest work, he claims that there 595 00:48:56,260 --> 00:49:01,380 are a body of patterns. 596 00:49:04,150 --> 00:49:05,470 I'll use his words. 597 00:49:09,637 --> 00:49:12,340 The idea of how much life is in things 598 00:49:12,340 --> 00:49:16,000 is subjective in the sense of observation. 599 00:49:16,000 --> 00:49:18,640 This quality of life seems to be correlated 600 00:49:18,640 --> 00:49:22,840 with the repeated appearance of 15 geometric properties. 601 00:49:28,000 --> 00:49:30,430 The appearance of living structure in things 602 00:49:30,430 --> 00:49:32,110 is also correlated-- 603 00:49:32,110 --> 00:49:35,260 so on, and so on. 604 00:49:35,260 --> 00:49:40,120 He's now reduced the complexity to the repetition 605 00:49:40,120 --> 00:49:43,330 of 15 patterns. 606 00:49:43,330 --> 00:49:45,490 I haven't seen these patterns. 607 00:49:45,490 --> 00:49:48,100 I don't know what they are. 608 00:49:48,100 --> 00:49:52,640 But the observation that complexity can be reduced to 15 609 00:49:52,640 --> 00:49:54,250 repeated patterns-- 610 00:49:54,250 --> 00:49:58,420 they are probably centrally focused. 611 00:49:58,420 --> 00:49:59,640 I don't know what they are. 612 00:49:59,640 --> 00:50:04,180 He says they are true in art, in urbanism, 613 00:50:04,180 --> 00:50:08,200 in everything that speaks of life. 614 00:50:08,200 --> 00:50:11,770 What is it that speaks of life? 615 00:50:11,770 --> 00:50:17,260 I understand that walking down the street in Italy, 616 00:50:17,260 --> 00:50:21,250 in almost any small Italian town, 617 00:50:21,250 --> 00:50:28,600 will resonate a certain quality which evokes being alive. 618 00:50:28,600 --> 00:50:29,620 There's energy. 619 00:50:29,620 --> 00:50:32,410 There's organization. 620 00:50:32,410 --> 00:50:34,720 There's all of the elements that you 621 00:50:34,720 --> 00:50:39,490 might encounter, actually or subliminally, 622 00:50:39,490 --> 00:50:41,920 which would say this is lively. 623 00:50:41,920 --> 00:50:48,740 Versus a shopping center parking lot on Sunday afternoon, 624 00:50:48,740 --> 00:50:54,220 at any time of the week, would not evoke that. 625 00:50:54,220 --> 00:50:59,770 We can spend a couple of hours starting to write down, 626 00:50:59,770 --> 00:51:04,630 what would cause you to experience something as being 627 00:51:04,630 --> 00:51:07,100 alive and something which wasn't? 628 00:51:10,840 --> 00:51:16,390 I don't know what to say about the body of work of Alexander. 629 00:51:16,390 --> 00:51:21,220 It's going to be a pity that he has spent so much energy 630 00:51:21,220 --> 00:51:34,300 and will have such a little observable impact on the way we 631 00:51:34,300 --> 00:51:36,025 make buildings and make cities. 632 00:51:40,570 --> 00:51:43,690 You are a good test group. 633 00:51:43,690 --> 00:51:46,750 Have you been influenced by Christopher Alexander's work? 634 00:51:50,930 --> 00:51:52,970 A little bit? 635 00:51:52,970 --> 00:51:54,680 A little bit, yeah. 636 00:51:54,680 --> 00:51:56,950 I would say the same thing. 637 00:52:00,680 --> 00:52:03,910 John Habraken was head of the Department of Architecture 638 00:52:03,910 --> 00:52:08,750 here at MIT for a number of years. 639 00:52:11,270 --> 00:52:33,690 When he was in Holland, he wrote a little book called Supports 640 00:52:33,690 --> 00:52:37,710 in which he argued that there was a distinction between two 641 00:52:37,710 --> 00:52:41,595 aspects of building. 642 00:52:41,595 --> 00:52:47,760 The one which he called supports was the infrastructure which 643 00:52:47,760 --> 00:52:50,340 allowed habitation to take place-- 644 00:52:50,340 --> 00:52:55,680 all the pipes, all the structure, all the material. 645 00:52:55,680 --> 00:53:00,370 And he separated that from a human capacity-- 646 00:53:00,370 --> 00:53:02,010 which, for want of a better word, 647 00:53:02,010 --> 00:53:04,500 I think his word was indwelling-- 648 00:53:04,500 --> 00:53:07,320 that was the creative capacity that all people 649 00:53:07,320 --> 00:53:11,220 had to determine their own microenvironment. 650 00:53:17,660 --> 00:53:25,610 Supports were basic items which enabled individual creativity. 651 00:53:30,850 --> 00:53:49,160 When he decided to engage these ideas in a larger world, 652 00:53:49,160 --> 00:53:52,700 he came upon the idea that the best 653 00:53:52,700 --> 00:53:56,630 way to understand the actions of a city 654 00:53:56,630 --> 00:53:59,930 were to understand it is a set of agreements. 655 00:54:03,150 --> 00:54:10,220 Agreements are required for the production 656 00:54:10,220 --> 00:54:12,550 of any pieces of city. 657 00:54:16,800 --> 00:54:20,220 It's, of course, not actually true. 658 00:54:20,220 --> 00:54:33,370 But in his view, the agreements between differing parties, 659 00:54:33,370 --> 00:54:39,190 surprisingly, could produce environments 660 00:54:39,190 --> 00:54:42,625 in which certain aspects were agreed upon 661 00:54:42,625 --> 00:54:47,035 and certain aspects were not agreed upon. 662 00:54:50,020 --> 00:54:54,340 It's difficult to understand some of his material. 663 00:54:54,340 --> 00:55:00,550 He's written quite widely. 664 00:55:00,550 --> 00:55:04,960 His writings include pieces like The Control of Complexity, 665 00:55:04,960 --> 00:55:08,725 which is in your reading, a number of others. 666 00:55:13,280 --> 00:55:21,630 Essentially, his work is best explicated in a piece of work 667 00:55:21,630 --> 00:55:27,030 he did here at MIT called The Grunsfeld Variations. 668 00:55:27,030 --> 00:55:32,720 There's a publication of it available in the MIT 669 00:55:32,720 --> 00:55:33,815 publication list-- 670 00:55:33,815 --> 00:55:35,150 I don't know where that is-- 671 00:55:37,790 --> 00:55:41,370 a piece of work which he did with students. 672 00:55:41,370 --> 00:55:47,580 I will use it to explain, perhaps better, 673 00:55:47,580 --> 00:55:50,460 what his larger ideas are. 674 00:55:58,320 --> 00:56:01,470 The two diagrams you have in your handout-- 675 00:56:01,470 --> 00:56:10,650 the one is a plan of the Grunsfeld variation, 676 00:56:10,650 --> 00:56:11,579 which is this. 677 00:56:15,491 --> 00:56:18,020 This is a set of redesigned blocks 678 00:56:18,020 --> 00:56:21,260 in the Back Bay of Boston. 679 00:56:21,260 --> 00:56:24,590 Agreements are reached that there 680 00:56:24,590 --> 00:56:29,390 will be high-density but low-rise buildings. 681 00:56:29,390 --> 00:56:33,740 Agreement is reached that there will be parking underground. 682 00:56:33,740 --> 00:56:37,250 But halfway, there are streets. 683 00:56:37,250 --> 00:56:43,820 And the parking will be set in such a way 684 00:56:43,820 --> 00:56:47,240 that you can have two kinds of conditions-- 685 00:56:47,240 --> 00:56:52,760 a half-parking level, a full-parking level, 686 00:56:52,760 --> 00:56:55,100 and variations of the street height. 687 00:56:57,690 --> 00:56:59,520 I'm not sure that I remember what 688 00:56:59,520 --> 00:57:03,060 all the other agreements were. 689 00:57:03,060 --> 00:57:15,030 He then says we can learn from the tissue of this area. 690 00:57:15,030 --> 00:57:18,420 Exactly what he's learned, I don't know. 691 00:57:18,420 --> 00:57:22,140 It's not-- you have to look at each of these projects 692 00:57:22,140 --> 00:57:25,170 to understand what. 693 00:57:25,170 --> 00:57:28,230 But you can see in the diagrams, there 694 00:57:28,230 --> 00:57:37,650 are tendencies to reproduce the length of facades and so on. 695 00:57:37,650 --> 00:57:42,000 What he argues is that here are a set 696 00:57:42,000 --> 00:57:48,180 of different interpretations of a similar set of instructions. 697 00:57:51,430 --> 00:58:05,470 They all describe a variety of outcomes 698 00:58:05,470 --> 00:58:09,940 based on the same agreements, meta-agreements. 699 00:58:13,540 --> 00:58:20,470 In the little diagram, which I handed out to you by student, 700 00:58:20,470 --> 00:58:26,200 extending the physical structure of a small town 701 00:58:26,200 --> 00:58:33,340 in Ladakh, in northern India, he does these exercises 702 00:58:33,340 --> 00:58:38,425 with students, in which you start off with a basic theme. 703 00:58:42,090 --> 00:58:46,650 The theme is what the culture is already reproducing. 704 00:58:50,120 --> 00:58:52,640 You understand the variations that 705 00:58:52,640 --> 00:58:57,320 are possible on that theme, what agreements have 706 00:58:57,320 --> 00:59:02,930 to be made to extend the items in different ways, what becomes 707 00:59:02,930 --> 00:59:08,510 private, what becomes public, what is negotiated, and so on. 708 00:59:08,510 --> 00:59:14,330 And it sets up a pattern which can grow over time 709 00:59:14,330 --> 00:59:17,330 with new agreements made for the use of roofs 710 00:59:17,330 --> 00:59:19,550 as the density grows and so on. 711 00:59:26,410 --> 00:59:29,500 There are two problems with Habraken's work. 712 00:59:29,500 --> 00:59:33,670 One, again, it is essentially apolitical. 713 00:59:33,670 --> 00:59:40,090 I don't mean politics in the Democratic Party 714 00:59:40,090 --> 00:59:42,640 versus Republican Party sense. 715 00:59:42,640 --> 00:59:49,600 I meant in the notion that all agreements turn out 716 00:59:49,600 --> 00:59:56,110 to be responsible outcomes. 717 00:59:56,110 --> 00:59:57,310 I don't know what-- 718 00:59:57,310 --> 01:00:01,510 Habraken is using a methodology which 719 01:00:01,510 --> 01:00:06,190 distinguishes the existing form of Amsterdam 720 01:00:06,190 --> 01:00:12,050 from the new extension of Amsterdam by modern architects. 721 01:00:12,050 --> 01:00:16,525 Habraken claims that it's the modern architects who 722 01:00:16,525 --> 01:00:20,290 have lost all of the understanding of what 723 01:00:20,290 --> 01:00:22,870 agreements are. 724 01:00:22,870 --> 01:00:28,330 He doesn't specify what bad agreements are. 725 01:00:28,330 --> 01:00:32,230 Habraken doesn't do this on Long Island, where 726 01:00:32,230 --> 01:00:35,650 there may be waste space, buildings 727 01:00:35,650 --> 01:00:40,790 in the middle of sites with open space around them. 728 01:00:40,790 --> 01:00:46,330 These are all dense, built-together systems, 729 01:00:46,330 --> 01:00:54,280 much like the original plans and the early expansions 730 01:00:54,280 --> 01:00:55,900 of the city of Amsterdam. 731 01:00:59,720 --> 01:01:02,360 So I don't know what-- 732 01:01:02,360 --> 01:01:08,870 I can't explain the strategy. 733 01:01:08,870 --> 01:01:13,670 The strategy is that, again, like Alexander, you 734 01:01:13,670 --> 01:01:17,000 learn from what exists. 735 01:01:17,000 --> 01:01:22,430 You use your discerning capacity to build on what exists. 736 01:01:26,070 --> 01:01:32,610 You don't-- in Alexander's case, when he did Oregon experiment, 737 01:01:32,610 --> 01:01:37,080 he said, we will not build individual large buildings all 738 01:01:37,080 --> 01:01:39,370 by themselves. 739 01:01:39,370 --> 01:01:46,420 In the program, for every large building of classrooms, 740 01:01:46,420 --> 01:01:48,820 you need 10% of shops. 741 01:01:48,820 --> 01:01:51,580 You need 5% of open space. 742 01:01:51,580 --> 01:01:57,430 You need 20% of housing. 743 01:01:57,430 --> 01:02:03,400 All of these patterns are breaking down 744 01:02:03,400 --> 01:02:07,120 programs, which are large and mononuclear, 745 01:02:07,120 --> 01:02:15,040 into complex patterns and repeated in small parts, 746 01:02:15,040 --> 01:02:17,470 in small spatial entities. 747 01:02:21,140 --> 01:02:22,620 These people have-- 748 01:02:22,620 --> 01:02:28,730 John Habraken has gone quite far in developing technologies 749 01:02:28,730 --> 01:02:37,580 for user situations in support systems. 750 01:02:37,580 --> 01:02:46,730 But both Alexander and Habraken's notions 751 01:02:46,730 --> 01:02:51,560 are intellectually very responsible. 752 01:02:51,560 --> 01:02:52,970 They are conservative. 753 01:02:55,530 --> 01:02:59,510 I don't know what you do when you build a new town. 754 01:02:59,510 --> 01:03:01,320 You don't have any infrastructure 755 01:03:01,320 --> 01:03:09,210 to build a contrapuntal system around. 756 01:03:09,210 --> 01:03:11,850 And I'm sure that that can be resolved 757 01:03:11,850 --> 01:03:15,420 by assuming a set of agreements early on, 758 01:03:15,420 --> 01:03:20,490 based on some ingredients from the broader 759 01:03:20,490 --> 01:03:23,310 culture of the place and so on. 760 01:03:28,200 --> 01:03:34,515 We've got a few minutes to touch on a different set of stories. 761 01:03:40,090 --> 01:03:42,400 Billy Hillier and Julienne Hanson 762 01:03:42,400 --> 01:03:51,900 wrote a book called The Social Logic of Space in which they 763 01:03:51,900 --> 01:04:04,990 argued, essentially, that the spatial pattern which 764 01:04:04,990 --> 01:04:11,930 surrounds us affects us. 765 01:04:11,930 --> 01:04:14,330 They argued a lot against the notion 766 01:04:14,330 --> 01:04:19,670 of architectural determinism, which argues that architecture 767 01:04:19,670 --> 01:04:22,340 determines our lives. 768 01:04:22,340 --> 01:04:28,430 They showed that only under certain conditions 769 01:04:28,430 --> 01:04:32,780 does the spatial pattern really have effects. 770 01:04:32,780 --> 01:04:37,610 The space syntax-- syntax is a word from linguistics. 771 01:04:37,610 --> 01:04:44,480 It refers to the proper order of words in a sentence in order 772 01:04:44,480 --> 01:04:46,910 for it to make sense. 773 01:04:46,910 --> 01:04:51,140 In some languages, the verb precedes the noun-- 774 01:04:51,140 --> 01:04:54,500 I eat a fish. 775 01:04:54,500 --> 01:04:56,090 In other languages-- 776 01:04:56,090 --> 01:04:57,560 I, the fish, eat. 777 01:05:00,230 --> 01:05:06,420 Each has a syntax which makes sense. 778 01:05:06,420 --> 01:05:09,050 And linguists can probably explain the reasons 779 01:05:09,050 --> 01:05:14,440 why one system works and the other doesn't work. 780 01:05:19,300 --> 01:05:22,930 The work that has been known as space syntax 781 01:05:22,930 --> 01:05:26,410 really is more recent. 782 01:05:26,410 --> 01:05:29,380 It's the work which is published in this book, 783 01:05:29,380 --> 01:05:35,740 Space is the Machine, which is an extensive document. 784 01:05:35,740 --> 01:05:40,870 And if any of you are interested in this idea, 785 01:05:40,870 --> 01:05:43,510 you should probably try to read parts of it. 786 01:05:46,480 --> 01:05:51,040 Essentially, the argument is that behavior-- 787 01:05:57,990 --> 01:06:00,710 that you need to understand the space of the city 788 01:06:00,710 --> 01:06:04,370 before you can understand any of its elements. 789 01:06:04,370 --> 01:06:08,570 The space of the city, in the application 790 01:06:08,570 --> 01:06:15,590 of this space syntax model, is a theory 791 01:06:15,590 --> 01:06:19,310 based upon movement patterns. 792 01:06:19,310 --> 01:06:25,460 Crudely speaking, they say that the movement pattern in a city 793 01:06:25,460 --> 01:06:31,160 is a function of the pattern that is shaped in order 794 01:06:31,160 --> 01:06:35,330 to cause the movement or that allows the movement 795 01:06:35,330 --> 01:06:38,100 to take place. 796 01:06:38,100 --> 01:06:52,460 So in a town which has space for movement, 797 01:06:52,460 --> 01:06:56,030 they can distinguish in what they 798 01:06:56,030 --> 01:07:03,200 call high correlation, which is the number of connections 799 01:07:03,200 --> 01:07:08,360 that are possible with a minimum number of separate moves. 800 01:07:08,360 --> 01:07:17,540 And low correlation represents a change of pattern 801 01:07:17,540 --> 01:07:20,375 which involves the maximum number of moves. 802 01:07:24,010 --> 01:07:25,330 I'm putting it rather crudely. 803 01:07:29,360 --> 01:07:33,650 By this, you can characterize the layout 804 01:07:33,650 --> 01:07:41,465 of a town in terms of this capacity of movement to flow. 805 01:07:45,900 --> 01:07:52,680 They were correlating encounter rates with a space syntax 806 01:07:52,680 --> 01:07:53,760 methodology. 807 01:07:53,760 --> 01:07:58,510 In other words, if you wish to create a system in which there 808 01:07:58,510 --> 01:08:02,250 are random encounter acts, it was not only 809 01:08:02,250 --> 01:08:04,330 a function of density. 810 01:08:04,330 --> 01:08:05,905 It's a function, also, of pattern. 811 01:08:08,810 --> 01:08:12,810 And it's also-- although they're a little unclear about this, 812 01:08:12,810 --> 01:08:20,010 it's not so clearly a result of a particular land use pattern. 813 01:08:20,010 --> 01:08:24,930 If Marlene Dietrich was singing tonight in east Boston, 814 01:08:24,930 --> 01:08:27,960 I might go to east Boston. 815 01:08:27,960 --> 01:08:30,359 I wouldn't normally go to east Boston. 816 01:08:30,359 --> 01:08:32,748 AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS] 817 01:08:32,748 --> 01:08:34,290 JULIAN BEINART: But then the argument 818 01:08:34,290 --> 01:08:39,000 would be that Marlene Dietrich would sing in a space which 819 01:08:39,000 --> 01:08:42,569 is easily available to me. 820 01:08:42,569 --> 01:08:47,010 Andres Sevtsuk, who did his PhD here two years ago, 821 01:08:47,010 --> 01:08:51,300 has taken some elements of the space syntax model 822 01:08:51,300 --> 01:08:56,910 and correlated it with patterns of movement 823 01:08:56,910 --> 01:09:01,390 and commercial location in Cambridge. 824 01:09:01,390 --> 01:09:07,359 It's a branching off of space syntax. 825 01:09:07,359 --> 01:09:10,140 It's not really space syntax because it doesn't 826 01:09:10,140 --> 01:09:12,105 develop theoretical models. 827 01:09:15,149 --> 01:09:21,060 He just bases it on observation, a very fine, 828 01:09:21,060 --> 01:09:22,560 detailed observation. 829 01:09:28,819 --> 01:09:34,729 The value of space syntax, presumably, 830 01:09:34,729 --> 01:09:40,770 is in its correlation with social good dimensions. 831 01:09:40,770 --> 01:09:46,130 So for instance, the analysis of spatial patterns 832 01:09:46,130 --> 01:09:51,590 would suggest that crime rates are much lower where there 833 01:09:51,590 --> 01:10:01,100 is a high encounter rate, so that housing estates which 834 01:10:01,100 --> 01:10:05,960 turn their backs on to conventional streets 835 01:10:05,960 --> 01:10:10,580 and have their access from private, unguarded domains 836 01:10:10,580 --> 01:10:15,380 in the center, are much more likely to be 837 01:10:15,380 --> 01:10:20,810 available for burglary and others. 838 01:10:20,810 --> 01:10:23,060 And this correlates. 839 01:10:23,060 --> 01:10:25,410 Their work is expanded enormously. 840 01:10:25,410 --> 01:10:28,280 They have now have computer programs which 841 01:10:28,280 --> 01:10:31,985 you can buy and play yourself. 842 01:10:34,590 --> 01:10:38,940 They consult all over the world. 843 01:10:38,940 --> 01:10:45,770 I have shown you one of the little projects in one drawing. 844 01:10:45,770 --> 01:10:50,455 That's the Trafalgar Square problem. 845 01:10:53,030 --> 01:10:59,570 Now, you can say that everything that they've 846 01:10:59,570 --> 01:11:05,300 built as a theoretical model and what they've actually 847 01:11:05,300 --> 01:11:08,245 found on the ground is something that you, 848 01:11:08,245 --> 01:11:11,930 as an intelligent observer, could have told. 849 01:11:11,930 --> 01:11:17,120 There's something obvious about what this enormous investment 850 01:11:17,120 --> 01:11:21,710 of energy and mind produces. 851 01:11:21,710 --> 01:11:24,860 I was always told when I studied-- 852 01:11:24,860 --> 01:11:29,540 there's an class in urban sociology at Yale-- 853 01:11:29,540 --> 01:11:32,390 that I should understand that sociology 854 01:11:32,390 --> 01:11:37,040 is about everyday things and that you shouldn't be surprised 855 01:11:37,040 --> 01:11:45,408 if sociological conclusions accompany everyday observation. 856 01:11:45,408 --> 01:11:45,950 I don't know. 857 01:11:45,950 --> 01:11:52,730 It's a question which critics of space syntax 858 01:11:52,730 --> 01:11:56,480 have been very frequent to say, why 859 01:11:56,480 --> 01:12:01,490 waste the money on something which produces nothing new 860 01:12:01,490 --> 01:12:05,720 and just confirms what you can intuitively know? 861 01:12:05,720 --> 01:12:08,630 If there are obstacles to where people can walk, 862 01:12:08,630 --> 01:12:09,950 people won't walk there-- 863 01:12:12,470 --> 01:12:15,890 to reduce it to a rather, sort of base level. 864 01:12:20,490 --> 01:12:26,970 It had a-- what do you think of the presentation you heard? 865 01:12:26,970 --> 01:12:29,640 STUDENT: The one thing that I thought was interesting was, 866 01:12:29,640 --> 01:12:34,500 towards the end, he was proposing they were going to-- 867 01:12:34,500 --> 01:12:37,590 if you were to redevelop over the train yards in London. 868 01:12:37,590 --> 01:12:42,080 And he showed if you just put a grid down 869 01:12:42,080 --> 01:12:44,610 where the potential commercial streets would be, 870 01:12:44,610 --> 01:12:46,068 because they color-map the streets. 871 01:12:46,068 --> 01:12:47,193 JULIAN BEINART: Sure, sure. 872 01:12:47,193 --> 01:12:49,560 STUDENT: And he said, but if you did this pattern, 873 01:12:49,560 --> 01:12:51,750 then you can see, oh, this, according to him, 874 01:12:51,750 --> 01:12:57,240 would probably make a really good commercial street. 875 01:12:57,240 --> 01:12:59,370 And these would be residential. 876 01:12:59,370 --> 01:13:04,500 It's sort of a way to quantitatively understand 877 01:13:04,500 --> 01:13:10,860 non-grid patterns in a way that you could present to a planning 878 01:13:10,860 --> 01:13:11,820 board or a government. 879 01:13:11,820 --> 01:13:12,695 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah. 880 01:13:12,695 --> 01:13:15,330 STUDENT: It was interesting. 881 01:13:15,330 --> 01:13:22,740 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, the adjustments to the King's Cross 882 01:13:22,740 --> 01:13:25,800 site plan were interesting. 883 01:13:25,800 --> 01:13:30,100 I think a couple of things. 884 01:13:30,100 --> 01:13:37,140 Number one, it satisfies me when somebody methodologically shows 885 01:13:37,140 --> 01:13:41,955 that the form of things has meaning, has value. 886 01:13:46,070 --> 01:13:49,970 If you think that high encounter rates are a good thing, 887 01:13:49,970 --> 01:13:52,480 at least they will tell you how to accomplish it. 888 01:13:55,250 --> 01:14:00,010 And that's not a bad set of propositions. 889 01:14:03,800 --> 01:14:09,380 We understand, actually, very little about high encounter 890 01:14:09,380 --> 01:14:10,670 rates. 891 01:14:10,670 --> 01:14:12,605 We assume them to be good. 892 01:14:12,605 --> 01:14:17,960 And Manhattan has had a history of, since its early days, 893 01:14:17,960 --> 01:14:21,470 making sure that sidewalks on its major avenues 894 01:14:21,470 --> 01:14:25,040 are wide enough to take a lot of people. 895 01:14:25,040 --> 01:14:25,965 Tokyo hasn't. 896 01:14:29,090 --> 01:14:34,190 The sidewalks are too narrow for the pedestrian volume. 897 01:14:34,190 --> 01:14:38,120 And one could imagine that the encounter rates-- 898 01:14:41,910 --> 01:14:43,770 the difficulty about encounter rates 899 01:14:43,770 --> 01:14:49,140 is that, often, people use them to believe that that is good. 900 01:14:49,140 --> 01:14:51,900 Richard Sennett, I think, naively believes 901 01:14:51,900 --> 01:14:57,600 that it's good for public relations. 902 01:14:57,600 --> 01:15:01,800 When I walk down Fifth Avenue, I don't stop and talk to a woman 903 01:15:01,800 --> 01:15:07,200 with a fur and a dog. 904 01:15:07,200 --> 01:15:11,540 I'd probably be shot or be accused of-- 905 01:15:11,540 --> 01:15:14,550 you know. 906 01:15:14,550 --> 01:15:20,340 Crowds are not naturally places which enable-- 907 01:15:20,340 --> 01:15:23,610 often, they don't enable human communication. 908 01:15:23,610 --> 01:15:26,940 So encounter rates are, in themselves, 909 01:15:26,940 --> 01:15:30,120 not absolute good or absolute bad. 910 01:15:30,120 --> 01:15:34,980 But certainly, the notion that you feel-- 911 01:15:34,980 --> 01:15:36,540 when do you feel safer? 912 01:15:36,540 --> 01:15:39,540 In all cultures, when you are on streets 913 01:15:39,540 --> 01:15:41,430 with a lot of other people-- 914 01:15:41,430 --> 01:15:42,450 I can imagine. 915 01:15:42,450 --> 01:15:44,160 I've been in places where I've been 916 01:15:44,160 --> 01:15:47,640 shit-scared of being on the street 917 01:15:47,640 --> 01:15:49,710 with a lot of other people because they all 918 01:15:49,710 --> 01:15:54,450 look like criminals to me, because I couldn't 919 01:15:54,450 --> 01:15:58,170 read the situation well enough. 920 01:15:58,170 --> 01:16:03,300 The last set of stuff has a body of literature. 921 01:16:03,300 --> 01:16:08,220 And I've only chosen one page from one of the documents. 922 01:16:08,220 --> 01:16:11,790 There's a good book called Urban Space and Structures, which 923 01:16:11,790 --> 01:16:15,870 those of you serious about becoming urban designers 924 01:16:15,870 --> 01:16:18,240 need to read. 925 01:16:18,240 --> 01:16:26,370 It's edited by Leslie Martin and Lionel March, Cambridge 926 01:16:26,370 --> 01:16:33,190 University Press, 1972. 927 01:16:33,190 --> 01:16:35,890 The British have been interested in understanding 928 01:16:35,890 --> 01:16:38,485 spatial patterns largely through geometry. 929 01:16:43,180 --> 01:16:46,910 In the piece that I've given to you today, 930 01:16:46,910 --> 01:16:50,230 on the right-hand side is a section 931 01:16:50,230 --> 01:16:56,560 of the grid of New York from 42nd to 52nd and from Eighth 932 01:16:56,560 --> 01:16:57,855 Avenue to Park Avenue. 933 01:17:00,970 --> 01:17:05,650 The argument is relatively simple. 934 01:17:05,650 --> 01:17:10,810 If you took the amount of gross square footage 935 01:17:10,810 --> 01:17:18,760 built on this parcel in the black areas today, 936 01:17:18,760 --> 01:17:21,880 and you took away a number of the streets-- 937 01:17:21,880 --> 01:17:26,770 he took away every second street, more or less-- 938 01:17:26,770 --> 01:17:31,480 you could rebuild the same amount of square footage 939 01:17:31,480 --> 01:17:35,470 in the pattern on the right with only a maximum height 940 01:17:35,470 --> 01:17:39,715 of seven floors and large amounts of open space inside. 941 01:17:42,670 --> 01:17:46,630 Now, no architecture student I know of 942 01:17:46,630 --> 01:17:51,190 would come to that conclusion automatically. 943 01:17:51,190 --> 01:17:57,580 It's much like the use of the Fresnel lens 944 01:17:57,580 --> 01:18:02,485 in arguing population in a city. 945 01:18:20,830 --> 01:18:28,450 As you go outwards, if you want the same area of land, 946 01:18:28,450 --> 01:18:31,000 as you get further out, these bands 947 01:18:31,000 --> 01:18:36,040 need to become thinner because the area they cover is larger. 948 01:18:36,040 --> 01:18:38,950 So the total population in the center of the city 949 01:18:38,950 --> 01:18:44,710 can be housed in a thin band on the outside. 950 01:18:44,710 --> 01:18:53,480 This is not-- there's a diminishing amount of width 951 01:18:53,480 --> 01:18:58,070 required in each band as you go further out because the band 952 01:18:58,070 --> 01:18:59,570 becomes larger. 953 01:18:59,570 --> 01:19:01,910 It's a simple geometric observation 954 01:19:01,910 --> 01:19:05,890 which they apply to some estimates 955 01:19:05,890 --> 01:19:07,490 about urban population. 956 01:19:12,800 --> 01:19:16,190 The number of books published-- 957 01:19:16,190 --> 01:19:18,500 I will come back to the work of this group 958 01:19:18,500 --> 01:19:25,250 when we talk about prediction of growth and flexibility 959 01:19:25,250 --> 01:19:27,526 of building apparatus. 960 01:19:31,040 --> 01:19:37,030 A lot of this work came from a set of investigations that 961 01:19:37,030 --> 01:19:44,540 the British did at the end of the '39-'46 war 962 01:19:44,540 --> 01:19:48,810 in the rebuilding of British infrastructure-- hospitals, 963 01:19:48,810 --> 01:19:50,840 universities, and so on. 964 01:19:50,840 --> 01:19:52,670 I will do a series of case studies 965 01:19:52,670 --> 01:20:00,530 of a number of university plans showing two factors-- 966 01:20:00,530 --> 01:20:10,490 one, the idea that new groups of knowledge disciplines cohered-- 967 01:20:10,490 --> 01:20:16,680 microbiology as opposed to microphysics, biology 968 01:20:16,680 --> 01:20:22,020 and chemistry mixing together, and so on-- 969 01:20:22,020 --> 01:20:26,780 how these patterns could be accommodated 970 01:20:26,780 --> 01:20:34,190 in physical form which required the least adjustment over time. 971 01:20:34,190 --> 01:20:37,760 We will look at the Technical University in Berlin. 972 01:20:37,760 --> 01:20:45,050 We will look at MIT as examples of these patterns which 973 01:20:45,050 --> 01:20:49,070 maintain-- which promote high degrees of flexibility. 974 01:20:49,070 --> 01:20:51,660 Also, in the British writing about hospitals, 975 01:20:51,660 --> 01:20:53,930 the research done in hospitals. 976 01:20:53,930 --> 01:20:58,160 Knowing that hospitals change hospital science 977 01:20:58,160 --> 01:21:01,460 and the administration changes rapidly, 978 01:21:01,460 --> 01:21:04,910 how would you choose patterns which 979 01:21:04,910 --> 01:21:13,470 enabled the minimum disruption in the trajectory of change? 980 01:21:13,470 --> 01:21:18,180 So if any of you are interested in this kind of work, 981 01:21:18,180 --> 01:21:20,060 this is not the class to take. 982 01:21:20,060 --> 01:21:22,010 I can just tell you. 983 01:21:22,010 --> 01:21:24,990 We'll touch on some of this later on. 984 01:21:24,990 --> 01:21:29,280 But I can just read you some of the list of books 985 01:21:29,280 --> 01:21:30,780 this comes from. 986 01:21:30,780 --> 01:21:32,660 There's Philip Steadman's book called 987 01:21:32,660 --> 01:21:35,390 Architectural Morphology. 988 01:21:35,390 --> 01:21:40,280 There's Philip Steadman's book The Evolution of Design. 989 01:21:40,280 --> 01:21:46,370 There's Lionel March and Philip Steadman's book The Geometry 990 01:21:46,370 --> 01:21:52,250 of Environment, MIT Press, 1974. 991 01:21:52,250 --> 01:21:56,540 There's a couple of the more generally applied 992 01:21:56,540 --> 01:21:58,610 outcomes of much of this work. 993 01:22:02,580 --> 01:22:05,700 We've finished the first part of the three 994 01:22:05,700 --> 01:22:08,170 sections of this class. 995 01:22:08,170 --> 01:22:10,860 This first part was just an attempt 996 01:22:10,860 --> 01:22:15,300 to bring you up to speed on some things which you might not 997 01:22:15,300 --> 01:22:17,100 have known about. 998 01:22:17,100 --> 01:22:19,530 We start the serious work on-- 999 01:22:19,530 --> 01:22:20,340 what is today? 1000 01:22:20,340 --> 01:22:21,990 Tuesday. 1001 01:22:21,990 --> 01:22:24,990 We start the serious work on Thursday. 1002 01:22:24,990 --> 01:22:32,190 We will start excavating the spatial pattern of existing 1003 01:22:32,190 --> 01:22:36,750 cities after the Industrial Revolution. 1004 01:22:36,750 --> 01:22:42,480 We'll, on Thursday, try to make sense 1005 01:22:42,480 --> 01:22:47,790 of what industrialism meant, what 1006 01:22:47,790 --> 01:22:51,510 it meant to spatial patterns in cities, what it meant 1007 01:22:51,510 --> 01:22:55,770 to the invention of new instruments-- 1008 01:22:55,770 --> 01:23:00,390 the mortgage system, deficit spending, and so 1009 01:23:00,390 --> 01:23:08,700 on, the advent of poverty in accumulated situations 1010 01:23:08,700 --> 01:23:12,370 in the West, and so on. 1011 01:23:12,370 --> 01:23:14,910 And from that, we will make case studies 1012 01:23:14,910 --> 01:23:17,040 of the major reactions-- 1013 01:23:17,040 --> 01:23:22,200 London, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, and Chicago. 1014 01:23:22,200 --> 01:23:27,630 This is a comprehensive look at some very detailed aspects 1015 01:23:27,630 --> 01:23:31,500 of existing transformations. 1016 01:23:31,500 --> 01:23:34,260 Hopefully, by the time we get to the end of the class, 1017 01:23:34,260 --> 01:23:38,970 we'll be able to make theoretical generalizations 1018 01:23:38,970 --> 01:23:46,690 better than the ones I've explained to you so far. 1019 01:23:46,690 --> 01:23:49,570 Don't be too depressed. 1020 01:23:49,570 --> 01:23:53,200 The remarkable thing is that we are building cities. 1021 01:23:53,200 --> 01:24:01,180 We build them, perhaps, not as well spatially as we did 1022 01:24:01,180 --> 01:24:04,380 150 years ago or 300 years ago. 1023 01:24:06,910 --> 01:24:15,200 But there's no more cholera because of the great invention 1024 01:24:15,200 --> 01:24:23,300 in 1854 in London, causing the biggest transformation 1025 01:24:23,300 --> 01:24:29,810 of London by siphoning off wastewater 1026 01:24:29,810 --> 01:24:37,630 on the east and west sides, north and south of London. 1027 01:24:37,630 --> 01:24:41,160 All of this will build up a story 1028 01:24:41,160 --> 01:24:49,110 about the complexity of actual urban situations, which 1029 01:24:49,110 --> 01:24:52,740 I believe is better than too much time 1030 01:24:52,740 --> 01:24:56,790 spending on abstract models. 1031 01:24:56,790 --> 01:25:00,480 I don't know if we'll ever have a theory of city form 1032 01:25:00,480 --> 01:25:08,700 which is universally agreed upon, able to be systematized. 1033 01:25:08,700 --> 01:25:12,570 Some aspects of the performance of this field, which 1034 01:25:12,570 --> 01:25:15,590 are moving more and more in this direction-- 1035 01:25:15,590 --> 01:25:19,020 we certainly know more about public transportation 1036 01:25:19,020 --> 01:25:24,120 and its engineering and science than ever before. 1037 01:25:24,120 --> 01:25:29,400 We know very little about meaning. 1038 01:25:29,400 --> 01:25:34,950 We build pickle-shaped tall buildings in London 1039 01:25:34,950 --> 01:25:39,630 without even being able to measure the effect. 1040 01:25:39,630 --> 01:25:41,250 And there are parts of the world which 1041 01:25:41,250 --> 01:25:48,210 are looking to manifest urban identity without building 1042 01:25:48,210 --> 01:25:51,480 the tallest building in the world, 1043 01:25:51,480 --> 01:25:54,330 and a number of issues of that kind which are currently 1044 01:25:54,330 --> 01:25:57,060 on the plate of urban designers. 1045 01:25:57,060 --> 01:25:57,570 OK. 1046 01:25:57,570 --> 01:25:59,410 I'll see you on Thursday. 1047 01:25:59,410 --> 01:26:01,970 Have a good holiday.