WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.520 The following content is provided under a Creative 00:00:02.520 --> 00:00:03.970 Commons license. 00:00:03.970 --> 00:00:06.360 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 00:00:06.360 --> 00:00:10.660 continue to offer high-quality educational resources for free. 00:00:10.660 --> 00:00:13.350 To make a donation or view additional materials 00:00:13.350 --> 00:00:17.190 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 00:00:17.190 --> 00:00:18.320 at ocw.mit.edu. 00:00:25.410 --> 00:00:27.390 JULIAN BEINART: I've handed out a guide 00:00:27.390 --> 00:00:30.130 to what we're going to cover today. 00:00:30.130 --> 00:00:34.080 Now, I don't know how familiar you are with the material. 00:00:38.400 --> 00:00:43.230 Does anybody, for instance, have any familiarity 00:00:43.230 --> 00:00:47.430 with what is called space syntax? 00:00:47.430 --> 00:00:50.190 How much familiarity? 00:00:50.190 --> 00:00:53.280 STUDENT: I saw a presentation that someone 00:00:53.280 --> 00:00:55.570 who is working in England on space syntax 00:00:55.570 --> 00:00:59.400 gave to the National Capital Park and Planning Commission 00:00:59.400 --> 00:01:00.547 in DC. 00:01:00.547 --> 00:01:01.380 JULIAN BEINART: And? 00:01:01.380 --> 00:01:04.003 STUDENT: It was pretty interesting. 00:01:04.003 --> 00:01:05.670 JULIAN BEINART: When was this, recently? 00:01:05.670 --> 00:01:06.170 Or-- 00:01:06.170 --> 00:01:11.160 STUDENT: Yeah, 2011 I think. 00:01:11.160 --> 00:01:14.200 JULIAN BEINART: Do the book Space is a Machine? 00:01:14.200 --> 00:01:14.700 STUDENT: No. 00:01:14.700 --> 00:01:17.070 Is that what the reading was from? 00:01:17.070 --> 00:01:20.750 JULIAN BEINART: No, this is a voluminous document. 00:01:20.750 --> 00:01:23.712 It costs a lot of money to buy. 00:01:23.712 --> 00:01:24.838 STUDENT: [LAUGHS] 00:01:24.838 --> 00:01:25.630 JULIAN BEINART: Ah. 00:01:28.830 --> 00:01:35.220 It really is more of an expansion of the space syntax 00:01:35.220 --> 00:01:42.340 methodology and the idea than we have time for in this class. 00:01:42.340 --> 00:01:45.360 That's why I ask if anybody is familiar with it. 00:01:49.290 --> 00:01:50.670 OK. 00:01:50.670 --> 00:01:53.025 This is the last class in the first section. 00:01:57.030 --> 00:02:03.990 And we're concentrated again, very, very briefly, 00:02:03.990 --> 00:02:11.610 as we did on Tuesday, with theories 00:02:11.610 --> 00:02:19.200 which seem to be determined by the logic from social science. 00:02:25.050 --> 00:02:27.570 There are microtheories within each 00:02:27.570 --> 00:02:32.970 of these, lots of rules of thumb, lots of understanding 00:02:32.970 --> 00:02:36.440 which is not externalized theoretically. 00:02:36.440 --> 00:02:40.050 For instance, one of my favorites 00:02:40.050 --> 00:02:52.430 is Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue. 00:02:55.390 --> 00:03:16.120 A section through a building on Fifth Avenue, a section 00:03:16.120 --> 00:03:17.530 of a building on Park Avenue. 00:03:33.460 --> 00:03:37.920 On Fifth Avenue, the ground is significant. 00:03:40.460 --> 00:03:46.610 Everything that is built is connected 00:03:46.610 --> 00:03:49.070 to the ground by mechanical systems, 00:03:49.070 --> 00:03:52.385 generally an escalator for five or six floors. 00:03:54.950 --> 00:03:57.410 The basement is important because it's 00:03:57.410 --> 00:04:03.425 linked to a surface only one floor from the ground. 00:04:08.270 --> 00:04:12.050 Two buildings on Park Avenue which you know, 00:04:12.050 --> 00:04:16.670 Lever Brothers and Seagram's building. 00:04:16.670 --> 00:04:26.256 Lever Brothers gives up the ground for nothing. 00:04:26.256 --> 00:04:27.970 The ground is worthless. 00:04:31.080 --> 00:04:37.440 Seagram's building extends a plaza, 00:04:37.440 --> 00:04:41.895 in return for which it gets more bulk to build taller. 00:04:45.560 --> 00:04:51.620 The role of the ground in these two cases 00:04:51.620 --> 00:04:55.970 are the subject of an economic theory, which 00:04:55.970 --> 00:04:58.520 is just the rule of thumb. 00:04:58.520 --> 00:05:00.470 It's observed. 00:05:00.470 --> 00:05:03.470 I don't know of a rule of-- 00:05:03.470 --> 00:05:10.110 it's much like, well, other rules of thumb in our business. 00:05:10.110 --> 00:05:14.520 In fact, it's curious. 00:05:14.520 --> 00:05:16.680 In a discipline such as architecture, 00:05:16.680 --> 00:05:19.620 there are very few theoretical texts. 00:05:19.620 --> 00:05:21.495 There used to be theoretical texts. 00:05:24.290 --> 00:05:25.710 How do you learn architecture? 00:05:25.710 --> 00:05:26.710 Have you got a textbook? 00:05:30.450 --> 00:05:33.700 You can't learn science without a textbook. 00:05:33.700 --> 00:05:39.270 A textbook is the agreed-upon synthesized material 00:05:39.270 --> 00:05:40.520 which you need to know. 00:05:46.400 --> 00:05:51.710 I make this preface because some of the theoretical propositions 00:05:51.710 --> 00:05:57.410 we will look at today suffer from the same difficulty. 00:06:00.350 --> 00:06:12.020 But they, unlike the series which we looked at on Tuesday, 00:06:12.020 --> 00:06:16.640 where space was either neutral, or costly, 00:06:16.640 --> 00:06:20.570 or friction-producing, or a measure for recording 00:06:20.570 --> 00:06:24.350 a distribution of some process-- 00:06:24.350 --> 00:06:29.450 most of what we feel to be true and experience with the city 00:06:29.450 --> 00:06:30.185 is lost. 00:06:33.200 --> 00:06:35.840 None of the social science theories-- 00:06:35.840 --> 00:06:38.560 with the exception, perhaps, of the first one, 00:06:38.560 --> 00:06:41.510 which we discussed-- 00:06:41.510 --> 00:06:45.530 has any connection to valuing the built environment 00:06:45.530 --> 00:06:49.580 as something in itself. 00:06:49.580 --> 00:06:54.830 Kevin Lynch is the first of the protagonists of a theory which 00:06:54.830 --> 00:07:00.380 deals with equality of the built environment 00:07:00.380 --> 00:07:05.960 en masse, not a single building, but a system of buildings. 00:07:09.210 --> 00:07:12.525 Lynch starts his work-- 00:07:15.230 --> 00:07:21.050 there's an of Lynch's work at MIT just down the corridor. 00:07:21.050 --> 00:07:24.890 If you have time one day and you have nothing else to do, 00:07:24.890 --> 00:07:30.950 look at his notebook on his first visit to Italy 00:07:30.950 --> 00:07:35.630 when he was a young professor here at MIT. 00:07:35.630 --> 00:07:39.770 He does a detailed drawing of the path system linking 00:07:39.770 --> 00:07:45.890 the major squares and piazza, the piazza and churches, 00:07:45.890 --> 00:07:48.620 beautifully drawn. 00:07:48.620 --> 00:07:54.860 At the end of his four or five days in Florence, 00:07:54.860 --> 00:07:56.390 he writes a note. 00:07:56.390 --> 00:07:58.610 Why did I not ask the people what 00:07:58.610 --> 00:08:00.740 they do on Saturday nights? 00:08:00.740 --> 00:08:05.390 What about the activity in this town? 00:08:05.390 --> 00:08:08.280 Why don't I take that into account? 00:08:08.280 --> 00:08:11.120 Then he leaves Florence. 00:08:11.120 --> 00:08:20.360 His preoccupation with trying to understand the spatial pattern 00:08:20.360 --> 00:08:26.030 of cities through asking people is 00:08:26.030 --> 00:08:31.340 evident in his first book, The Image of the City. 00:08:31.340 --> 00:08:34.039 What is the image of the city? 00:08:34.039 --> 00:08:37.010 The image of the city is made up of three items. 00:08:37.010 --> 00:08:39.169 What are the three? 00:08:39.169 --> 00:08:42.160 You've read the book, I presume. 00:08:42.160 --> 00:08:44.698 What are the three? 00:08:44.698 --> 00:08:46.240 STUDENT: There's the experiment where 00:08:46.240 --> 00:08:48.070 they ask people on the street. 00:08:48.070 --> 00:08:49.778 JULIAN BEINART: Yes, and I didn't ask you 00:08:49.778 --> 00:08:53.240 for ho the study was done. 00:08:53.240 --> 00:08:59.090 I asked you, what are the three abstract components? 00:08:59.090 --> 00:09:04.430 I'll tell you-- identity, structure, and meaning. 00:09:04.430 --> 00:09:07.520 That equals image. 00:09:07.520 --> 00:09:10.430 And you find this out by cognitive mapping, 00:09:10.430 --> 00:09:14.420 by asking people how they find their way around cities-- 00:09:14.420 --> 00:09:18.590 Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and so on. 00:09:22.090 --> 00:09:25.765 What Lynch could not do in that study was deal with meaning. 00:09:28.550 --> 00:09:35.540 It's significant that the power that The Image of the City book 00:09:35.540 --> 00:09:41.750 had escapes the one component which bedevils us 00:09:41.750 --> 00:09:45.293 in our valuation of much of the built environment, 00:09:45.293 --> 00:09:46.085 and that's meaning. 00:09:49.860 --> 00:09:53.460 Kevin apologized twice in different publications 00:09:53.460 --> 00:09:56.430 for his inability to deal with meaning. 00:09:59.610 --> 00:10:06.930 I say that as a beginning to a discussion of his work. 00:10:11.050 --> 00:10:15.880 When, in this class, we asked people, 00:10:15.880 --> 00:10:21.010 when he was teaching here with me, what they remembered 00:10:21.010 --> 00:10:27.450 of the book, they would say landmarks, Z, Z, Z, 00:10:27.450 --> 00:10:30.430 a set of alphabetical items. 00:10:30.430 --> 00:10:34.570 And then says, that's not what I wrote the book for. 00:10:34.570 --> 00:10:36.520 I wrote the book to make it clear 00:10:36.520 --> 00:10:39.080 that if you want to know something about a city, 00:10:39.080 --> 00:10:43.360 you have to ask the people who live in it, 00:10:43.360 --> 00:10:49.240 not take formulaic generalizations. 00:10:49.240 --> 00:10:53.570 Of course, he was being a bit harsh on himself. 00:10:53.570 --> 00:10:59.470 But his last book-- 00:10:59.470 --> 00:11:02.065 I must say, one of the things about all the theories 00:11:02.065 --> 00:11:05.170 that I'll be discussing today is that they've 00:11:05.170 --> 00:11:08.590 published the ideas. 00:11:08.590 --> 00:11:11.010 They're not hermeneutic. 00:11:11.010 --> 00:11:12.740 They're not hermetic. 00:11:12.740 --> 00:11:16.940 They're not sealed off from examination. 00:11:23.130 --> 00:11:28.020 In architecture, so much of knowledge is internalized. 00:11:31.340 --> 00:11:34.910 Your sensibility to patterns is built up 00:11:34.910 --> 00:11:39.530 through much of the practice of priesthood. 00:11:44.630 --> 00:11:48.230 Lynch and the others today-- 00:11:48.230 --> 00:11:51.500 by the way, the others today will be in order-- 00:11:51.500 --> 00:11:59.280 Kevin Lynch, Christopher Alexander, John Habraken, 00:11:59.280 --> 00:12:01.170 space syntax. 00:12:01.170 --> 00:12:07.170 And then last, we'll look at the work of the British Land Use 00:12:07.170 --> 00:12:11.910 and Built Form group in Cambridge, England, Lionel 00:12:11.910 --> 00:12:12.450 March. 00:12:12.450 --> 00:12:14.430 Sir Lionel March. 00:12:14.430 --> 00:12:16.830 Oh, no, and he wasn't knighted. 00:12:16.830 --> 00:12:18.525 Sorry just Lionel March. 00:12:23.420 --> 00:12:27.950 For Lynch, the problem remains that-- 00:12:31.540 --> 00:12:33.350 let me see if I can find a phrase. 00:12:43.370 --> 00:12:46.160 No, there isn't one phrase that I can 00:12:46.160 --> 00:12:48.380 find which sums up his search. 00:12:48.380 --> 00:12:56.750 What I'll do with him is go through the performance 00:12:56.750 --> 00:13:07.310 of dimension theory, which is the last one, which he built up 00:13:07.310 --> 00:13:11.750 in this class and which is published in a book which 00:13:11.750 --> 00:13:13.700 was called A Theory of Good City Form 00:13:13.700 --> 00:13:21.300 and then appeared late as Good City Form, and use that as-- 00:13:21.300 --> 00:13:26.660 and then I will compare that with his writings 00:13:26.660 --> 00:13:32.210 on a utopian speculation that he made, just to give 00:13:32.210 --> 00:13:34.790 some embodiment to his ideas. 00:13:39.350 --> 00:13:48.830 Some generalizations-- unlike Christopher Alexander 00:13:48.830 --> 00:13:52.580 and John Habraken, Lynch's work is not a critique 00:13:52.580 --> 00:13:53.945 of contemporary urbanism. 00:14:00.370 --> 00:14:10.985 His philosophy is in relation to present-day city and time. 00:14:10.985 --> 00:14:17.610 He is completely interested in the complexity and difficulty 00:14:17.610 --> 00:14:24.130 we have understanding of the form of a city. 00:14:24.130 --> 00:14:32.292 He believes there are ranges of understanding, not standards. 00:14:32.292 --> 00:14:34.690 His theory, performance dimension, 00:14:34.690 --> 00:14:38.980 set up ranges within which different cultures could 00:14:38.980 --> 00:14:46.060 construct their own standards and which the dimensions could 00:14:46.060 --> 00:14:50.890 be compared one to another and then balanced 00:14:50.890 --> 00:15:00.910 again two meta-criteria, justice and application. 00:15:26.730 --> 00:15:30.960 Lynch's humanism comes from his appreciation 00:15:30.960 --> 00:15:35.820 of one of the major dimensions of the human system, 00:15:35.820 --> 00:15:37.620 and that's its capacity to learn. 00:15:45.820 --> 00:15:56.600 And therefore, his ideal utopia is 00:15:56.600 --> 00:16:02.420 a manifestation of human beings' ability 00:16:02.420 --> 00:16:05.180 to change culture and aspirations 00:16:05.180 --> 00:16:09.620 rather than the manifestation of some iron law. 00:16:09.620 --> 00:16:13.880 There's no drawing in his utopia. 00:16:13.880 --> 00:16:19.730 It's partly because of his decision 00:16:19.730 --> 00:16:24.440 that architecture doesn't help much 00:16:24.440 --> 00:16:27.980 in understanding urban form. 00:16:27.980 --> 00:16:34.520 I recall a disagreement I had in this class with him 00:16:34.520 --> 00:16:38.540 when I introduced Aldo Rossi's book, which 00:16:38.540 --> 00:16:40.880 was new at the time. 00:16:40.880 --> 00:16:45.710 And Lynch was very angry. 00:16:45.710 --> 00:16:52.220 And he writes about the denouncement of Aldo Rossi. 00:16:52.220 --> 00:16:55.850 I tried to argue that there was some merit in Rossi's 00:16:55.850 --> 00:17:02.600 speculation as an architect and so on. 00:17:02.600 --> 00:17:08.440 I don't understand why Lynch disparaged architecture 00:17:08.440 --> 00:17:10.099 as such. 00:17:10.099 --> 00:17:13.579 He didn't disparage architecture as a discipline. 00:17:13.579 --> 00:17:16.940 He disparaged the method in which architects 00:17:16.940 --> 00:17:21.740 took upon themselves the right to invent 00:17:21.740 --> 00:17:25.490 spatial ideas on their own-- 00:17:25.490 --> 00:17:27.630 again, without consultation. 00:17:30.590 --> 00:17:37.840 Lynch was so aghast at the idea of an imperial rulership 00:17:37.840 --> 00:17:43.230 of knowledge and hesitated every time 00:17:43.230 --> 00:17:49.680 to embrace something unless it had been acknowledged 00:17:49.680 --> 00:17:54.000 by human experience. 00:17:54.000 --> 00:17:59.520 Many of these people whose theories I talking about today 00:17:59.520 --> 00:18:05.700 are very much rooted in observing existing patterns 00:18:05.700 --> 00:18:06.900 and building on them. 00:18:09.530 --> 00:18:12.110 They differ in respect to the way 00:18:12.110 --> 00:18:15.650 in which they observe these patterns, what 00:18:15.650 --> 00:18:17.570 they make of them. 00:18:17.570 --> 00:18:21.380 I will show you that in Christopher Alexander's pattern 00:18:21.380 --> 00:18:28.160 language, he makes absolutely derivations 00:18:28.160 --> 00:18:32.330 from his observation of human behavior. 00:18:32.330 --> 00:18:37.760 John Habraken never makes a categorical, good or bad. 00:18:37.760 --> 00:18:40.340 John Habraken believes that all agreements 00:18:40.340 --> 00:18:45.410 are good because they are saturated with information 00:18:45.410 --> 00:18:48.610 from culture and so on. 00:18:48.610 --> 00:18:58.690 Lynch wishes to build a model for the world 00:18:58.690 --> 00:19:07.390 as if urbanism was at the beginning of its trajectory. 00:19:07.390 --> 00:19:12.310 He believes that, in the model of science, 00:19:12.310 --> 00:19:17.005 that science started from nowhere. 00:19:17.005 --> 00:19:21.100 It kept on repeating experiments, developing 00:19:21.100 --> 00:19:24.940 new and new identity, and new and new ideology, 00:19:24.940 --> 00:19:32.170 and reaching a point where it was much more sophisticated 00:19:32.170 --> 00:19:35.440 than where it began. 00:19:35.440 --> 00:19:40.030 So he starts off by setting out the dimensions 00:19:40.030 --> 00:19:41.380 that you had to take. 00:19:41.380 --> 00:19:45.850 This is Kepler looking at this, trying 00:19:45.850 --> 00:19:51.740 to derive a theory of the Earth's movement. 00:19:51.740 --> 00:19:55.630 Lynch is trying to set forth, what are the things that you 00:19:55.630 --> 00:19:59.290 have to take into account and measure 00:19:59.290 --> 00:20:03.820 in order to have a comprehensive view of a city 00:20:03.820 --> 00:20:07.030 independent of which place in the world it is, 00:20:07.030 --> 00:20:10.420 independent of which culture? 00:20:10.420 --> 00:20:25.800 He experiments with these and has 00:20:25.800 --> 00:20:39.190 a set of ideas which he writes about which set up 00:20:39.190 --> 00:20:46.930 the prologue to these ideas. 00:20:46.930 --> 00:20:52.240 I gave you, in the handout today, one of these subideas. 00:20:52.240 --> 00:20:55.300 It was the notion of adaptability. 00:20:55.300 --> 00:20:58.450 Again, adaptability would interest Lynch 00:20:58.450 --> 00:21:02.440 because it is the capacity of the human being 00:21:02.440 --> 00:21:06.460 to change patterns after learning. 00:21:06.460 --> 00:21:13.570 Adaptability in our class discussion was a separate item. 00:21:13.570 --> 00:21:19.060 It became, in the book, a subset of the item fit. 00:21:19.060 --> 00:21:24.610 I gave you this piece on adaptability 00:21:24.610 --> 00:21:30.760 as an example of how he would ask you to develop it. 00:21:30.760 --> 00:21:37.000 He said-- let me find an example of what I gave to you today. 00:21:49.050 --> 00:21:51.520 He tries to break down adaptability 00:21:51.520 --> 00:21:54.900 into subcategories. 00:21:54.900 --> 00:21:59.490 Manipulability, which is different from reversibility. 00:21:59.490 --> 00:22:00.750 What is resilience? 00:22:00.750 --> 00:22:03.510 What is the innovativeness? 00:22:03.510 --> 00:22:09.630 I then added-- in your thing, I've 00:22:09.630 --> 00:22:15.120 given you some handwritten response from Lynch, 00:22:15.120 --> 00:22:22.140 not because that you should read it, but here is an idea. 00:22:22.140 --> 00:22:26.066 He writes this piece on adaptability. 00:22:26.066 --> 00:22:28.800 See, it's circulated. 00:22:28.800 --> 00:22:37.140 Somebody, an economist, sends back a review of his ideas. 00:22:37.140 --> 00:22:41.290 And then he replies to the economist. 00:22:41.290 --> 00:22:45.990 This is a handwritten reply to a colleague. 00:22:45.990 --> 00:22:51.870 His imagination is that if we each, all the students 00:22:51.870 --> 00:22:56.910 of urbanism, took on the task of identifying 00:22:56.910 --> 00:23:02.430 in specific terms what these categories of inevitability, 00:23:02.430 --> 00:23:09.960 we would have a basis for a specific culture settling 00:23:09.960 --> 00:23:15.105 an item of reversibility in specific terms. 00:23:17.760 --> 00:23:20.670 Standards would imply that all of them 00:23:20.670 --> 00:23:23.260 are equal for all cultures. 00:23:23.260 --> 00:23:25.090 Of course, that's not true. 00:23:25.090 --> 00:23:27.240 You could have varying standards. 00:23:27.240 --> 00:23:33.900 But for Lynch, the idea was that we were in such a rough state, 00:23:33.900 --> 00:23:41.370 theoretically, that you had to set out these items more 00:23:41.370 --> 00:23:42.510 systematically. 00:23:46.930 --> 00:23:48.640 He didn't get very far. 00:23:48.640 --> 00:23:51.850 He died too young. 00:23:51.850 --> 00:23:55.660 And if he were here today, he'd add 00:23:55.660 --> 00:23:58.375 more than I'm able to explain on his behalf. 00:24:02.870 --> 00:24:06.250 In his collected works, there's a chapter 00:24:06.250 --> 00:24:09.070 called "A Place, Utopia". 00:24:09.070 --> 00:24:12.490 Now, it's interesting that this place, utopia, 00:24:12.490 --> 00:24:16.510 which is his speculation about what an ideal urban world would 00:24:16.510 --> 00:24:17.353 look like-- 00:24:17.353 --> 00:24:18.145 there's no drawing. 00:24:22.490 --> 00:24:26.450 In The Image of the City, he uses little drawings 00:24:26.450 --> 00:24:33.720 on the side of the text to add information visually. 00:24:33.720 --> 00:24:35.030 Here, there's no drawing. 00:24:38.370 --> 00:24:42.990 I'll just pick out a couple of items from "The Place, Utopia". 00:24:42.990 --> 00:24:46.260 Has anybody read "A Place, Utopia"? 00:24:46.260 --> 00:24:49.380 We're not wasting my time, then, or your time. 00:25:03.270 --> 00:25:10.150 I propose, he says, to leave-- 00:25:10.150 --> 00:25:13.110 I attempt something more modest here without losing 00:25:13.110 --> 00:25:15.180 track of society. 00:25:15.180 --> 00:25:19.990 I propose to leave it unaccounted for except where 00:25:19.990 --> 00:25:24.750 it springs from some feature of place. 00:25:24.750 --> 00:25:31.500 Everything about what I'm going to say, he says, 00:25:31.500 --> 00:25:35.280 is about how people relate to their surroundings, 00:25:35.280 --> 00:25:40.350 rather than out of a self-absorbed technical fantasy 00:25:40.350 --> 00:25:43.650 or mechanical consequence of social prescription 00:25:43.650 --> 00:25:44.850 on the other. 00:25:44.850 --> 00:25:48.270 In other words, what he's saying is that there are items which 00:25:48.270 --> 00:25:51.250 we can learn from simply from the way 00:25:51.250 --> 00:25:56.490 space is used and manipulated. 00:25:56.490 --> 00:26:00.250 Imagine an urban countryside, a highly varied but humanized 00:26:00.250 --> 00:26:00.750 landscape. 00:26:00.750 --> 00:26:04.980 It is neither urban nor rural in the old sense since houses, 00:26:04.980 --> 00:26:09.660 workplaces are set among trees, farms, and streams. 00:26:09.660 --> 00:26:12.960 Within this extensive countryside, 00:26:12.960 --> 00:26:16.500 there's a network of small, intensive urban centers. 00:26:16.500 --> 00:26:18.450 The countryside is as functionally 00:26:18.450 --> 00:26:22.320 intricate and interdependent as any contemporary city. 00:26:25.020 --> 00:26:36.090 The land, the space is not allocated to owners. 00:26:38.910 --> 00:26:43.980 The use of land is brief in the history of cities, 00:26:43.980 --> 00:26:50.370 so much like we've picked up from other sources. 00:26:50.370 --> 00:26:54.255 It is better for the land to be in the hands of a trust. 00:26:54.255 --> 00:26:58.740 He calls them a regional land trust. 00:27:03.040 --> 00:27:06.895 These tasks grant leases for the present enjoyment of space. 00:27:11.850 --> 00:27:15.120 Everyone is trained to read a place just as everyone 00:27:15.120 --> 00:27:18.360 is trained to read a good book. 00:27:18.360 --> 00:27:20.735 There are slow places and fast places. 00:27:25.960 --> 00:27:28.190 I can go through this in some detail. 00:27:28.190 --> 00:27:30.880 But you can read it yourself. 00:27:30.880 --> 00:27:37.930 What is significant about it is that he doesn't start off with 00:27:37.930 --> 00:27:43.660 a definition that a city is anything that cannot be 00:27:43.660 --> 00:27:50.680 replicated through a mixture of landscape and building. 00:27:50.680 --> 00:27:52.280 He doesn't depict the building. 00:27:52.280 --> 00:27:55.180 He sees, in a trained society, people 00:27:55.180 --> 00:27:58.240 will pick good buildings. 00:27:58.240 --> 00:28:01.780 They will make them from good materials. 00:28:01.780 --> 00:28:08.440 His emphasis is on depicting those spaces in buildings 00:28:08.440 --> 00:28:11.950 or infrastructure of a city which derive 00:28:11.950 --> 00:28:15.370 from the goodness of people. 00:28:15.370 --> 00:28:22.040 Now, people are not good. 00:28:22.040 --> 00:28:23.950 They're good and bad. 00:28:23.950 --> 00:28:26.020 Sometimes they are both. 00:28:26.020 --> 00:28:29.320 We are all good and bad in our life. 00:28:29.320 --> 00:28:33.220 There's an element in many of these theorists in depicting 00:28:33.220 --> 00:28:37.720 a society without political friction, 00:28:37.720 --> 00:28:40.240 without individual competition. 00:28:40.240 --> 00:28:45.670 John Habraken's agreements-- he says good agreements 00:28:45.670 --> 00:28:47.800 will be made independent of whether you're 00:28:47.800 --> 00:28:49.990 a Marxist or Capitalist. 00:28:49.990 --> 00:28:53.695 You will have to come to some agreement about where you enter 00:28:53.695 --> 00:28:57.730 a building, whether there is parking underground, 00:28:57.730 --> 00:29:02.125 or how many floors of building there are above ground. 00:29:05.550 --> 00:29:12.060 Christopher Alexander also bypasses the political impact 00:29:12.060 --> 00:29:15.360 on his work. 00:29:15.360 --> 00:29:17.370 He makes decisions about patterns 00:29:17.370 --> 00:29:21.150 which are not subject to intercourse 00:29:21.150 --> 00:29:23.850 for producing agreements. 00:29:23.850 --> 00:29:29.520 These patterns are decided upon through his examination 00:29:29.520 --> 00:29:31.530 of the nature of order. 00:29:35.300 --> 00:29:39.340 Alexander has an interesting trajectory in his work. 00:29:45.050 --> 00:29:47.720 His first book, Notes on the Synthesis of-- 00:29:47.720 --> 00:29:51.260 I don't know if any of you have paid particular attention 00:29:51.260 --> 00:29:53.570 to Alexander's work. 00:29:53.570 --> 00:29:58.460 Has anybody been an Alexander student? 00:29:58.460 --> 00:30:00.710 No. 00:30:00.710 --> 00:30:06.410 Christopher Alexander, when I first ran into him 00:30:06.410 --> 00:30:08.510 was at Harvard. 00:30:08.510 --> 00:30:15.140 And he had written Notes on the Synthesis of Form, which 00:30:15.140 --> 00:30:18.665 was an admiration and an attempt to understand how 00:30:18.665 --> 00:30:22.400 a culture, such as that in the Middle East, 00:30:22.400 --> 00:30:27.410 could make carpets without any explicit instruction 00:30:27.410 --> 00:30:33.980 as to how to do them, only an oral tradition, handed down, 00:30:33.980 --> 00:30:38.390 but allowing within that tradition enormous variation 00:30:38.390 --> 00:30:39.950 in the maintenance of quality. 00:30:43.560 --> 00:30:51.750 He looked to computation to enable us to, 00:30:51.750 --> 00:30:53.820 perhaps, do the same kind of thing. 00:30:53.820 --> 00:31:01.170 Let's maintain quality, although explicitly unclear 00:31:01.170 --> 00:31:02.760 about how we were doing it. 00:31:08.410 --> 00:31:13.630 He's moved through a number of phases in his work. 00:31:13.630 --> 00:31:14.665 No sooner did he-- 00:31:18.760 --> 00:31:26.560 been interested in optimization, then he 00:31:26.560 --> 00:31:32.510 wrote a piece about how to maximize communication, 00:31:32.510 --> 00:31:36.970 a silly piece in which he argues that in the zoning 00:31:36.970 --> 00:31:43.480 of suburban housing, the living room should be exposed 00:31:43.480 --> 00:31:50.800 to the street and curtains would be unnecessary, that people 00:31:50.800 --> 00:31:55.330 would enjoy partaking in the experience of being 00:31:55.330 --> 00:32:01.810 a community, a remark which might well apply to New York 00:32:01.810 --> 00:32:05.260 City but not to an American suburb. 00:32:05.260 --> 00:32:08.030 He then published a significant paper called-- 00:32:12.090 --> 00:32:15.200 "The Structure of a City is Not a Tree." 00:32:15.200 --> 00:32:17.340 It was more complicated than a tree, 00:32:17.340 --> 00:32:22.980 didn't have a central trunk with all its branches 00:32:22.980 --> 00:32:25.960 regularly sprouting from the trunk. 00:32:25.960 --> 00:32:29.550 But geometrically, he couldn't explain what it was. 00:32:29.550 --> 00:32:33.570 But he knew it wasn't a tree. 00:32:33.570 --> 00:32:39.870 And then-- partly, I think, because of his living 00:32:39.870 --> 00:32:46.380 on the west coast [CHUCKLES] where, perhaps, 00:32:46.380 --> 00:32:52.700 the counterculture has spread more ideas in American thought 00:32:52.700 --> 00:32:55.800 than anywhere else in the world-- 00:32:55.800 --> 00:33:04.530 he started arguing that there was a microunit which 00:33:04.530 --> 00:33:07.800 had spatial and social characteristics, what 00:33:07.800 --> 00:33:08.690 he calls patterns. 00:33:12.750 --> 00:33:15.720 Each microunit has a pattern. 00:33:15.720 --> 00:33:18.150 There are good patterns, and there are bad patterns. 00:33:24.581 --> 00:33:29.990 He studies a field of spatial and social relations. 00:33:29.990 --> 00:33:32.695 There are good, living patterns; bad, dead ones. 00:33:37.130 --> 00:33:42.230 We do not need grand planning or design for the whole town 00:33:42.230 --> 00:33:45.350 if each thing is made in a context which 00:33:45.350 --> 00:33:47.270 the other understands. 00:33:47.270 --> 00:33:51.425 The town emerges by itself and is continually repaired. 00:34:01.730 --> 00:34:05.010 He believes that society has-- 00:34:05.010 --> 00:34:07.340 it's a romantic notion-- 00:34:07.340 --> 00:34:10.940 has a history of patterns which are good patterns. 00:34:10.940 --> 00:34:14.030 They're good patterns because they're lived in, 00:34:14.030 --> 00:34:15.920 they're understood. 00:34:15.920 --> 00:34:19.520 Like Patrick Geddes, he tries-- 00:34:19.520 --> 00:34:26.580 remember, Patrick Geddes is the plane diagram 00:34:26.580 --> 00:34:34.199 which emotional, objective, experienced items all 00:34:34.199 --> 00:34:36.980 can fold into each other. 00:34:36.980 --> 00:34:45.480 Here, Alexander is very much again trying to link feeling 00:34:45.480 --> 00:34:46.650 and thought. 00:34:52.100 --> 00:34:57.030 A good pattern is one which is objectively correct 00:34:57.030 --> 00:35:00.670 but is also felt by you to be correct. 00:35:03.910 --> 00:35:07.990 A good example is in a piece in which 00:35:07.990 --> 00:35:11.650 he tries to explain to a young architecture 00:35:11.650 --> 00:35:17.200 student at Berkeley what he's all about. 00:35:17.200 --> 00:35:19.070 He says, look at this table. 00:35:19.070 --> 00:35:22.930 They're sitting in a cafe. 00:35:22.930 --> 00:35:24.700 He says, look at this table. 00:35:24.700 --> 00:35:27.010 It's made of wood. 00:35:27.010 --> 00:35:30.200 There's the difference between making the edge 00:35:30.200 --> 00:35:33.910 and finishing the edge of the wood with sandpaper, 00:35:33.910 --> 00:35:38.390 making the minimal transition from one service to another, 00:35:38.390 --> 00:35:42.300 versus the machine-like one, which our table is, 00:35:42.300 --> 00:35:49.690 which has just rounded it off in a very blunt, crude way. 00:35:49.690 --> 00:35:53.440 He asked the student, which of these two 00:35:53.440 --> 00:35:56.930 is a representation of your good self? 00:35:56.930 --> 00:36:00.610 The student doesn't understand what he's talking about. 00:36:00.610 --> 00:36:06.040 Why should the edge of a table represent 00:36:06.040 --> 00:36:10.570 your psychological whole? 00:36:10.570 --> 00:36:14.440 I quote, "but what if I ask you to tell me 00:36:14.440 --> 00:36:17.530 which of these two tables you're more willing to take 00:36:17.530 --> 00:36:20.830 as a picture of your own self? 00:36:20.830 --> 00:36:23.680 Which of the two would you consider a better candidate 00:36:23.680 --> 00:36:26.600 to picture of your own soul?" 00:36:26.600 --> 00:36:29.230 And so on-- everything. 00:36:32.800 --> 00:36:35.410 The trouble is that it's difficult to write 00:36:35.410 --> 00:36:38.470 such patterns. 00:36:38.470 --> 00:36:44.500 We don't have the tools yet. 00:36:44.500 --> 00:36:49.780 We may one day have them to do that. 00:36:49.780 --> 00:36:53.500 These patterns which are printed in the book, A Pattern 00:36:53.500 --> 00:37:02.410 Language, on biblical paper is almost a giveaway of a kind. 00:37:05.410 --> 00:37:11.140 For instance, Pattern on page 115-- 00:37:11.140 --> 00:37:14.230 there's abundant evidence to show that high buildings make 00:37:14.230 --> 00:37:14.980 people crazy. 00:37:18.350 --> 00:37:20.300 Now, objectively, this is not true. 00:37:23.230 --> 00:37:31.550 There may be reasons why tall buildings are harmful. 00:37:31.550 --> 00:37:38.000 But it is an abstract pattern or is a theoretical pattern 00:37:38.000 --> 00:37:40.320 derived from observation. 00:37:40.320 --> 00:37:42.880 It's not true. 00:37:42.880 --> 00:37:46.730 I can quote you from Herbert Gans, 00:37:46.730 --> 00:37:51.890 a well-known urban sociologist who once taught here at MIT. 00:37:51.890 --> 00:37:56.000 I quote, "thus, whether housing is high- or low-rise does not, 00:37:56.000 --> 00:38:00.650 by itself, make much difference." 00:38:00.650 --> 00:38:02.660 The luxury apartment house has been 00:38:02.660 --> 00:38:10.690 built in New York City for well over a century now, 00:38:10.690 --> 00:38:13.460 and no one has yet discovered that the buildings jammed 00:38:13.460 --> 00:38:18.830 on Park and Fifth Avenues and so forth generate pathology. 00:38:18.830 --> 00:38:20.930 Conversely, when poor people live 00:38:20.930 --> 00:38:24.500 in even the best-designed low-rise projects, 00:38:24.500 --> 00:38:27.240 they still do not escape the problems of poverty. 00:38:30.890 --> 00:38:33.260 Gans is correct. 00:38:33.260 --> 00:38:36.950 Why does Alexander make such a statement? 00:38:36.950 --> 00:38:41.030 He's too intelligent to know that his statement is 00:38:41.030 --> 00:38:42.620 incorrect. 00:38:42.620 --> 00:38:45.020 I don't know. 00:38:45.020 --> 00:38:48.140 I don't know. 00:38:48.140 --> 00:38:58.310 There's a kind of insistence that either you, in-- 00:38:58.310 --> 00:39:03.260 when I learned debating, I was taught that sometimes it's 00:39:03.260 --> 00:39:07.910 a good idea to throw out a statement, an assumption, 00:39:07.910 --> 00:39:14.570 a hypothesis just to make the argument more interesting. 00:39:14.570 --> 00:39:16.640 And if your opponent didn't catch up 00:39:16.640 --> 00:39:20.830 on the weakness of your argument, you would win. 00:39:20.830 --> 00:39:24.200 I don't think Alexander's into debating games. 00:39:24.200 --> 00:39:28.250 But it's often puzzled me why he took the trouble 00:39:28.250 --> 00:39:32.180 to assemble often very good ideas, very 00:39:32.180 --> 00:39:34.085 down-to-earth ideas. 00:39:34.085 --> 00:39:41.030 He, for instance, says single designers don't really 00:39:41.030 --> 00:39:44.960 produce comprehensive results. 00:39:44.960 --> 00:39:48.500 He says, I work in the College of Environmental Design 00:39:48.500 --> 00:39:54.380 at Berkeley, which was designed by a team of the best highly 00:39:54.380 --> 00:39:56.735 trained architects in our college. 00:39:59.270 --> 00:40:02.270 I can't put plants on the sill in my window 00:40:02.270 --> 00:40:05.090 because nobody ever thought about what 00:40:05.090 --> 00:40:07.700 the best position of the window would 00:40:07.700 --> 00:40:11.540 be in the section of the wall. 00:40:11.540 --> 00:40:15.560 They pushed the window to the inside 00:40:15.560 --> 00:40:19.220 to allow a maximum of use on the outside where 00:40:19.220 --> 00:40:22.760 there's no need for any use. 00:40:22.760 --> 00:40:27.650 Why do intelligent people make such stupid assumptions? 00:40:27.650 --> 00:40:30.920 They never consulted us. 00:40:30.920 --> 00:40:35.030 Well, if an architect were redesigning 00:40:35.030 --> 00:40:39.290 MIT's School of Architecture and asked me about my office, 00:40:39.290 --> 00:40:42.680 I don't know if I would remember to specify 00:40:42.680 --> 00:40:46.220 that the window needs to be on the outside of the wall 00:40:46.220 --> 00:40:51.500 to allow me the space on the inside for my plants 00:40:51.500 --> 00:40:52.685 or for whatever. 00:40:56.050 --> 00:40:59.950 So his observation is that somehow, the system 00:40:59.950 --> 00:41:01.330 isn't working. 00:41:01.330 --> 00:41:05.690 Modern urbanism is a mess. 00:41:05.690 --> 00:41:08.720 So he proposes a number of rules. 00:41:08.720 --> 00:41:11.000 I won't go through the rules. 00:41:11.000 --> 00:41:18.570 You can see them in his later book, 00:41:18.570 --> 00:41:21.640 A New Theory of Urban Design. 00:41:21.640 --> 00:41:27.470 There are rules about growing a whole, about piecemeal, 00:41:27.470 --> 00:41:32.740 unpredictable coherence, full of feeling, no single artist. 00:41:32.740 --> 00:41:39.770 There are many people involved, the whole idea of a thing 00:41:39.770 --> 00:41:40.870 having to have feeling. 00:41:45.620 --> 00:41:52.570 The seven rules-- let me find the one about-- 00:41:58.680 --> 00:42:02.170 rule number three, visions. 00:42:02.170 --> 00:42:06.300 Every project must first be experienced and then expressed 00:42:06.300 --> 00:42:10.482 as a vision which can be seen in the inner eye. 00:42:10.482 --> 00:42:14.870 I don't know where my inner eye is and how to use it. 00:42:14.870 --> 00:42:15.840 AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS] 00:42:15.840 --> 00:42:17.550 JULIAN BEINART: It must have this quality 00:42:17.550 --> 00:42:24.540 so strongly that it can also be communicated to others 00:42:24.540 --> 00:42:27.855 and felt by others as a vision. 00:42:38.290 --> 00:42:46.810 At least Alexander is attempting to be explicit about his ideas. 00:42:46.810 --> 00:42:51.490 Explicitness is an advantage in debate. 00:42:51.490 --> 00:42:55.690 And explicitness, even if you make mistakes, 00:42:55.690 --> 00:43:01.090 is better than dull hermiticism. 00:43:03.970 --> 00:43:08.080 And all of these people are generating explicitness 00:43:08.080 --> 00:43:11.905 as one of the aspects of their work. 00:43:25.200 --> 00:43:40.110 In the handout I gave to you, there's 00:43:40.110 --> 00:43:45.000 a piece from A New Theory of Urban Design, this. 00:43:51.990 --> 00:43:56.940 On the left is a piece of Rome, a plan of Rome 00:43:56.940 --> 00:44:01.110 around the Pantheon, medieval Rome, as opposed 00:44:01.110 --> 00:44:05.190 to an American suburb. 00:44:05.190 --> 00:44:08.190 What are the characteristics of the world 00:44:08.190 --> 00:44:12.330 depicted on the left-- a good world, according to Alexander? 00:44:17.450 --> 00:44:23.750 The whole is made up of parts which are unique but belong 00:44:23.750 --> 00:44:27.440 to families of shape. 00:44:27.440 --> 00:44:31.820 There are churches, which all have open space in front 00:44:31.820 --> 00:44:39.980 of them-- the Pantheon, and so on, Sant'Ignazio, Sant'Gesú. 00:44:39.980 --> 00:44:45.350 There are patterns of housing which repeat. 00:44:45.350 --> 00:44:52.850 There are decisions which are made through piecemeal addition 00:44:52.850 --> 00:44:55.820 rather than through a ramp in the industrial production. 00:44:58.870 --> 00:45:02.770 There's a family of belongingness of all the parts. 00:45:11.940 --> 00:45:17.970 In a sense-- although I don't know who had the vision which 00:45:17.970 --> 00:45:21.090 produced this plan, I don't think there was one person, 00:45:21.090 --> 00:45:25.810 one pope who said Rome would be this way-- 00:45:25.810 --> 00:45:30.420 but there were patterns, presumably, 00:45:30.420 --> 00:45:38.580 which people learned from other patterns 00:45:38.580 --> 00:45:43.590 and decided to reproduce them in a piecemeal way. 00:45:43.590 --> 00:45:46.830 So building up from experience, building up 00:45:46.830 --> 00:45:53.340 from categories of knowledge which had already been tested, 00:45:53.340 --> 00:45:57.728 as opposed to this machine-like production. 00:46:06.040 --> 00:46:09.241 Alexander is tough medicine. 00:46:09.241 --> 00:46:15.775 He can come across as an arrogant fool. 00:46:19.530 --> 00:46:22.710 He recently produced four volumes 00:46:22.710 --> 00:46:26.280 called The Nature of Order. 00:46:26.280 --> 00:46:27.570 He's even more explicit. 00:46:30.310 --> 00:46:32.770 In The Nature of Order, I have tried 00:46:32.770 --> 00:46:35.260 to construct a coherent picture of life 00:46:35.260 --> 00:46:39.940 on Earth which makes sense of these matters, that gives us 00:46:39.940 --> 00:46:43.840 something to live for and worth living for. 00:46:43.840 --> 00:46:48.100 Yes, like Geddes, I am trying, at the same time, 00:46:48.100 --> 00:46:52.900 to deal with the emotional world and the objective, ordinary 00:46:52.900 --> 00:46:54.010 world around us. 00:46:56.960 --> 00:47:01.040 What is extraordinary is he writes 00:47:01.040 --> 00:47:05.030 about A Pattern Language. 00:47:05.030 --> 00:47:08.810 By about 1975, these investigations, 00:47:08.810 --> 00:47:12.500 which I undertook with five colleagues, gave us gold. 00:47:12.500 --> 00:47:17.630 We discovered about 250 invariant spatial patterns. 00:47:17.630 --> 00:47:20.180 Each one was associated with the stability 00:47:20.180 --> 00:47:23.090 of human environmental studies. 00:47:23.090 --> 00:47:25.430 They were published in A Pattern Language. 00:47:25.430 --> 00:47:28.790 They have become a standard part of what is known and used 00:47:28.790 --> 00:47:29.720 by architects. 00:47:32.480 --> 00:47:38.520 Well, what's this all about? 00:47:38.520 --> 00:47:40.890 It's not true. 00:47:40.890 --> 00:47:43.760 So why does a man say something which is not true? 00:47:48.610 --> 00:47:51.430 It can only be provocative. 00:47:51.430 --> 00:47:56.020 And perhaps like John McEnroe shouting 00:47:56.020 --> 00:47:59.380 at an umpire in a tennis game, he 00:47:59.380 --> 00:48:06.680 had a reason for provoking response, dealing 00:48:06.680 --> 00:48:12.200 with satisfaction of his inner grief publicly. 00:48:12.200 --> 00:48:17.040 I can only, without doing a psychoanalysis of this, 00:48:17.040 --> 00:48:19.700 be surprised by it. 00:48:19.700 --> 00:48:28.220 The fact is that architects seldom read a book 00:48:28.220 --> 00:48:30.170 like Pattern Language. 00:48:30.170 --> 00:48:35.430 And they're not in the habit of taking a statement 00:48:35.430 --> 00:48:40.980 like "tall buildings are a danger to human health" 00:48:40.980 --> 00:48:43.680 seriously. 00:48:43.680 --> 00:48:45.810 One last thing before we move on-- 00:48:49.800 --> 00:48:56.260 in his latest work, he claims that there 00:48:56.260 --> 00:49:01.380 are a body of patterns. 00:49:04.150 --> 00:49:05.470 I'll use his words. 00:49:09.637 --> 00:49:12.340 The idea of how much life is in things 00:49:12.340 --> 00:49:16.000 is subjective in the sense of observation. 00:49:16.000 --> 00:49:18.640 This quality of life seems to be correlated 00:49:18.640 --> 00:49:22.840 with the repeated appearance of 15 geometric properties. 00:49:28.000 --> 00:49:30.430 The appearance of living structure in things 00:49:30.430 --> 00:49:32.110 is also correlated-- 00:49:32.110 --> 00:49:35.260 so on, and so on. 00:49:35.260 --> 00:49:40.120 He's now reduced the complexity to the repetition 00:49:40.120 --> 00:49:43.330 of 15 patterns. 00:49:43.330 --> 00:49:45.490 I haven't seen these patterns. 00:49:45.490 --> 00:49:48.100 I don't know what they are. 00:49:48.100 --> 00:49:52.640 But the observation that complexity can be reduced to 15 00:49:52.640 --> 00:49:54.250 repeated patterns-- 00:49:54.250 --> 00:49:58.420 they are probably centrally focused. 00:49:58.420 --> 00:49:59.640 I don't know what they are. 00:49:59.640 --> 00:50:04.180 He says they are true in art, in urbanism, 00:50:04.180 --> 00:50:08.200 in everything that speaks of life. 00:50:08.200 --> 00:50:11.770 What is it that speaks of life? 00:50:11.770 --> 00:50:17.260 I understand that walking down the street in Italy, 00:50:17.260 --> 00:50:21.250 in almost any small Italian town, 00:50:21.250 --> 00:50:28.600 will resonate a certain quality which evokes being alive. 00:50:28.600 --> 00:50:29.620 There's energy. 00:50:29.620 --> 00:50:32.410 There's organization. 00:50:32.410 --> 00:50:34.720 There's all of the elements that you 00:50:34.720 --> 00:50:39.490 might encounter, actually or subliminally, 00:50:39.490 --> 00:50:41.920 which would say this is lively. 00:50:41.920 --> 00:50:48.740 Versus a shopping center parking lot on Sunday afternoon, 00:50:48.740 --> 00:50:54.220 at any time of the week, would not evoke that. 00:50:54.220 --> 00:50:59.770 We can spend a couple of hours starting to write down, 00:50:59.770 --> 00:51:04.630 what would cause you to experience something as being 00:51:04.630 --> 00:51:07.100 alive and something which wasn't? 00:51:10.840 --> 00:51:16.390 I don't know what to say about the body of work of Alexander. 00:51:16.390 --> 00:51:21.220 It's going to be a pity that he has spent so much energy 00:51:21.220 --> 00:51:34.300 and will have such a little observable impact on the way we 00:51:34.300 --> 00:51:36.025 make buildings and make cities. 00:51:40.570 --> 00:51:43.690 You are a good test group. 00:51:43.690 --> 00:51:46.750 Have you been influenced by Christopher Alexander's work? 00:51:50.930 --> 00:51:52.970 A little bit? 00:51:52.970 --> 00:51:54.680 A little bit, yeah. 00:51:54.680 --> 00:51:56.950 I would say the same thing. 00:52:00.680 --> 00:52:03.910 John Habraken was head of the Department of Architecture 00:52:03.910 --> 00:52:08.750 here at MIT for a number of years. 00:52:11.270 --> 00:52:33.690 When he was in Holland, he wrote a little book called Supports 00:52:33.690 --> 00:52:37.710 in which he argued that there was a distinction between two 00:52:37.710 --> 00:52:41.595 aspects of building. 00:52:41.595 --> 00:52:47.760 The one which he called supports was the infrastructure which 00:52:47.760 --> 00:52:50.340 allowed habitation to take place-- 00:52:50.340 --> 00:52:55.680 all the pipes, all the structure, all the material. 00:52:55.680 --> 00:53:00.370 And he separated that from a human capacity-- 00:53:00.370 --> 00:53:02.010 which, for want of a better word, 00:53:02.010 --> 00:53:04.500 I think his word was indwelling-- 00:53:04.500 --> 00:53:07.320 that was the creative capacity that all people 00:53:07.320 --> 00:53:11.220 had to determine their own microenvironment. 00:53:17.660 --> 00:53:25.610 Supports were basic items which enabled individual creativity. 00:53:30.850 --> 00:53:49.160 When he decided to engage these ideas in a larger world, 00:53:49.160 --> 00:53:52.700 he came upon the idea that the best 00:53:52.700 --> 00:53:56.630 way to understand the actions of a city 00:53:56.630 --> 00:53:59.930 were to understand it is a set of agreements. 00:54:03.150 --> 00:54:10.220 Agreements are required for the production 00:54:10.220 --> 00:54:12.550 of any pieces of city. 00:54:16.800 --> 00:54:20.220 It's, of course, not actually true. 00:54:20.220 --> 00:54:33.370 But in his view, the agreements between differing parties, 00:54:33.370 --> 00:54:39.190 surprisingly, could produce environments 00:54:39.190 --> 00:54:42.625 in which certain aspects were agreed upon 00:54:42.625 --> 00:54:47.035 and certain aspects were not agreed upon. 00:54:50.020 --> 00:54:54.340 It's difficult to understand some of his material. 00:54:54.340 --> 00:55:00.550 He's written quite widely. 00:55:00.550 --> 00:55:04.960 His writings include pieces like The Control of Complexity, 00:55:04.960 --> 00:55:08.725 which is in your reading, a number of others. 00:55:13.280 --> 00:55:21.630 Essentially, his work is best explicated in a piece of work 00:55:21.630 --> 00:55:27.030 he did here at MIT called The Grunsfeld Variations. 00:55:27.030 --> 00:55:32.720 There's a publication of it available in the MIT 00:55:32.720 --> 00:55:33.815 publication list-- 00:55:33.815 --> 00:55:35.150 I don't know where that is-- 00:55:37.790 --> 00:55:41.370 a piece of work which he did with students. 00:55:41.370 --> 00:55:47.580 I will use it to explain, perhaps better, 00:55:47.580 --> 00:55:50.460 what his larger ideas are. 00:55:58.320 --> 00:56:01.470 The two diagrams you have in your handout-- 00:56:01.470 --> 00:56:10.650 the one is a plan of the Grunsfeld variation, 00:56:10.650 --> 00:56:11.579 which is this. 00:56:15.491 --> 00:56:18.020 This is a set of redesigned blocks 00:56:18.020 --> 00:56:21.260 in the Back Bay of Boston. 00:56:21.260 --> 00:56:24.590 Agreements are reached that there 00:56:24.590 --> 00:56:29.390 will be high-density but low-rise buildings. 00:56:29.390 --> 00:56:33.740 Agreement is reached that there will be parking underground. 00:56:33.740 --> 00:56:37.250 But halfway, there are streets. 00:56:37.250 --> 00:56:43.820 And the parking will be set in such a way 00:56:43.820 --> 00:56:47.240 that you can have two kinds of conditions-- 00:56:47.240 --> 00:56:52.760 a half-parking level, a full-parking level, 00:56:52.760 --> 00:56:55.100 and variations of the street height. 00:56:57.690 --> 00:56:59.520 I'm not sure that I remember what 00:56:59.520 --> 00:57:03.060 all the other agreements were. 00:57:03.060 --> 00:57:15.030 He then says we can learn from the tissue of this area. 00:57:15.030 --> 00:57:18.420 Exactly what he's learned, I don't know. 00:57:18.420 --> 00:57:22.140 It's not-- you have to look at each of these projects 00:57:22.140 --> 00:57:25.170 to understand what. 00:57:25.170 --> 00:57:28.230 But you can see in the diagrams, there 00:57:28.230 --> 00:57:37.650 are tendencies to reproduce the length of facades and so on. 00:57:37.650 --> 00:57:42.000 What he argues is that here are a set 00:57:42.000 --> 00:57:48.180 of different interpretations of a similar set of instructions. 00:57:51.430 --> 00:58:05.470 They all describe a variety of outcomes 00:58:05.470 --> 00:58:09.940 based on the same agreements, meta-agreements. 00:58:13.540 --> 00:58:20.470 In the little diagram, which I handed out to you by student, 00:58:20.470 --> 00:58:26.200 extending the physical structure of a small town 00:58:26.200 --> 00:58:33.340 in Ladakh, in northern India, he does these exercises 00:58:33.340 --> 00:58:38.425 with students, in which you start off with a basic theme. 00:58:42.090 --> 00:58:46.650 The theme is what the culture is already reproducing. 00:58:50.120 --> 00:58:52.640 You understand the variations that 00:58:52.640 --> 00:58:57.320 are possible on that theme, what agreements have 00:58:57.320 --> 00:59:02.930 to be made to extend the items in different ways, what becomes 00:59:02.930 --> 00:59:08.510 private, what becomes public, what is negotiated, and so on. 00:59:08.510 --> 00:59:14.330 And it sets up a pattern which can grow over time 00:59:14.330 --> 00:59:17.330 with new agreements made for the use of roofs 00:59:17.330 --> 00:59:19.550 as the density grows and so on. 00:59:26.410 --> 00:59:29.500 There are two problems with Habraken's work. 00:59:29.500 --> 00:59:33.670 One, again, it is essentially apolitical. 00:59:33.670 --> 00:59:40.090 I don't mean politics in the Democratic Party 00:59:40.090 --> 00:59:42.640 versus Republican Party sense. 00:59:42.640 --> 00:59:49.600 I meant in the notion that all agreements turn out 00:59:49.600 --> 00:59:56.110 to be responsible outcomes. 00:59:56.110 --> 00:59:57.310 I don't know what-- 00:59:57.310 --> 01:00:01.510 Habraken is using a methodology which 01:00:01.510 --> 01:00:06.190 distinguishes the existing form of Amsterdam 01:00:06.190 --> 01:00:12.050 from the new extension of Amsterdam by modern architects. 01:00:12.050 --> 01:00:16.525 Habraken claims that it's the modern architects who 01:00:16.525 --> 01:00:20.290 have lost all of the understanding of what 01:00:20.290 --> 01:00:22.870 agreements are. 01:00:22.870 --> 01:00:28.330 He doesn't specify what bad agreements are. 01:00:28.330 --> 01:00:32.230 Habraken doesn't do this on Long Island, where 01:00:32.230 --> 01:00:35.650 there may be waste space, buildings 01:00:35.650 --> 01:00:40.790 in the middle of sites with open space around them. 01:00:40.790 --> 01:00:46.330 These are all dense, built-together systems, 01:00:46.330 --> 01:00:54.280 much like the original plans and the early expansions 01:00:54.280 --> 01:00:55.900 of the city of Amsterdam. 01:00:59.720 --> 01:01:02.360 So I don't know what-- 01:01:02.360 --> 01:01:08.870 I can't explain the strategy. 01:01:08.870 --> 01:01:13.670 The strategy is that, again, like Alexander, you 01:01:13.670 --> 01:01:17.000 learn from what exists. 01:01:17.000 --> 01:01:22.430 You use your discerning capacity to build on what exists. 01:01:26.070 --> 01:01:32.610 You don't-- in Alexander's case, when he did Oregon experiment, 01:01:32.610 --> 01:01:37.080 he said, we will not build individual large buildings all 01:01:37.080 --> 01:01:39.370 by themselves. 01:01:39.370 --> 01:01:46.420 In the program, for every large building of classrooms, 01:01:46.420 --> 01:01:48.820 you need 10% of shops. 01:01:48.820 --> 01:01:51.580 You need 5% of open space. 01:01:51.580 --> 01:01:57.430 You need 20% of housing. 01:01:57.430 --> 01:02:03.400 All of these patterns are breaking down 01:02:03.400 --> 01:02:07.120 programs, which are large and mononuclear, 01:02:07.120 --> 01:02:15.040 into complex patterns and repeated in small parts, 01:02:15.040 --> 01:02:17.470 in small spatial entities. 01:02:21.140 --> 01:02:22.620 These people have-- 01:02:22.620 --> 01:02:28.730 John Habraken has gone quite far in developing technologies 01:02:28.730 --> 01:02:37.580 for user situations in support systems. 01:02:37.580 --> 01:02:46.730 But both Alexander and Habraken's notions 01:02:46.730 --> 01:02:51.560 are intellectually very responsible. 01:02:51.560 --> 01:02:52.970 They are conservative. 01:02:55.530 --> 01:02:59.510 I don't know what you do when you build a new town. 01:02:59.510 --> 01:03:01.320 You don't have any infrastructure 01:03:01.320 --> 01:03:09.210 to build a contrapuntal system around. 01:03:09.210 --> 01:03:11.850 And I'm sure that that can be resolved 01:03:11.850 --> 01:03:15.420 by assuming a set of agreements early on, 01:03:15.420 --> 01:03:20.490 based on some ingredients from the broader 01:03:20.490 --> 01:03:23.310 culture of the place and so on. 01:03:28.200 --> 01:03:34.515 We've got a few minutes to touch on a different set of stories. 01:03:40.090 --> 01:03:42.400 Billy Hillier and Julienne Hanson 01:03:42.400 --> 01:03:51.900 wrote a book called The Social Logic of Space in which they 01:03:51.900 --> 01:04:04.990 argued, essentially, that the spatial pattern which 01:04:04.990 --> 01:04:11.930 surrounds us affects us. 01:04:11.930 --> 01:04:14.330 They argued a lot against the notion 01:04:14.330 --> 01:04:19.670 of architectural determinism, which argues that architecture 01:04:19.670 --> 01:04:22.340 determines our lives. 01:04:22.340 --> 01:04:28.430 They showed that only under certain conditions 01:04:28.430 --> 01:04:32.780 does the spatial pattern really have effects. 01:04:32.780 --> 01:04:37.610 The space syntax-- syntax is a word from linguistics. 01:04:37.610 --> 01:04:44.480 It refers to the proper order of words in a sentence in order 01:04:44.480 --> 01:04:46.910 for it to make sense. 01:04:46.910 --> 01:04:51.140 In some languages, the verb precedes the noun-- 01:04:51.140 --> 01:04:54.500 I eat a fish. 01:04:54.500 --> 01:04:56.090 In other languages-- 01:04:56.090 --> 01:04:57.560 I, the fish, eat. 01:05:00.230 --> 01:05:06.420 Each has a syntax which makes sense. 01:05:06.420 --> 01:05:09.050 And linguists can probably explain the reasons 01:05:09.050 --> 01:05:14.440 why one system works and the other doesn't work. 01:05:19.300 --> 01:05:22.930 The work that has been known as space syntax 01:05:22.930 --> 01:05:26.410 really is more recent. 01:05:26.410 --> 01:05:29.380 It's the work which is published in this book, 01:05:29.380 --> 01:05:35.740 Space is the Machine, which is an extensive document. 01:05:35.740 --> 01:05:40.870 And if any of you are interested in this idea, 01:05:40.870 --> 01:05:43.510 you should probably try to read parts of it. 01:05:46.480 --> 01:05:51.040 Essentially, the argument is that behavior-- 01:05:57.990 --> 01:06:00.710 that you need to understand the space of the city 01:06:00.710 --> 01:06:04.370 before you can understand any of its elements. 01:06:04.370 --> 01:06:08.570 The space of the city, in the application 01:06:08.570 --> 01:06:15.590 of this space syntax model, is a theory 01:06:15.590 --> 01:06:19.310 based upon movement patterns. 01:06:19.310 --> 01:06:25.460 Crudely speaking, they say that the movement pattern in a city 01:06:25.460 --> 01:06:31.160 is a function of the pattern that is shaped in order 01:06:31.160 --> 01:06:35.330 to cause the movement or that allows the movement 01:06:35.330 --> 01:06:38.100 to take place. 01:06:38.100 --> 01:06:52.460 So in a town which has space for movement, 01:06:52.460 --> 01:06:56.030 they can distinguish in what they 01:06:56.030 --> 01:07:03.200 call high correlation, which is the number of connections 01:07:03.200 --> 01:07:08.360 that are possible with a minimum number of separate moves. 01:07:08.360 --> 01:07:17.540 And low correlation represents a change of pattern 01:07:17.540 --> 01:07:20.375 which involves the maximum number of moves. 01:07:24.010 --> 01:07:25.330 I'm putting it rather crudely. 01:07:29.360 --> 01:07:33.650 By this, you can characterize the layout 01:07:33.650 --> 01:07:41.465 of a town in terms of this capacity of movement to flow. 01:07:45.900 --> 01:07:52.680 They were correlating encounter rates with a space syntax 01:07:52.680 --> 01:07:53.760 methodology. 01:07:53.760 --> 01:07:58.510 In other words, if you wish to create a system in which there 01:07:58.510 --> 01:08:02.250 are random encounter acts, it was not only 01:08:02.250 --> 01:08:04.330 a function of density. 01:08:04.330 --> 01:08:05.905 It's a function, also, of pattern. 01:08:08.810 --> 01:08:12.810 And it's also-- although they're a little unclear about this, 01:08:12.810 --> 01:08:20.010 it's not so clearly a result of a particular land use pattern. 01:08:20.010 --> 01:08:24.930 If Marlene Dietrich was singing tonight in east Boston, 01:08:24.930 --> 01:08:27.960 I might go to east Boston. 01:08:27.960 --> 01:08:30.359 I wouldn't normally go to east Boston. 01:08:30.359 --> 01:08:32.748 AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS] 01:08:32.748 --> 01:08:34.290 JULIAN BEINART: But then the argument 01:08:34.290 --> 01:08:39.000 would be that Marlene Dietrich would sing in a space which 01:08:39.000 --> 01:08:42.569 is easily available to me. 01:08:42.569 --> 01:08:47.010 Andres Sevtsuk, who did his PhD here two years ago, 01:08:47.010 --> 01:08:51.300 has taken some elements of the space syntax model 01:08:51.300 --> 01:08:56.910 and correlated it with patterns of movement 01:08:56.910 --> 01:09:01.390 and commercial location in Cambridge. 01:09:01.390 --> 01:09:07.359 It's a branching off of space syntax. 01:09:07.359 --> 01:09:10.140 It's not really space syntax because it doesn't 01:09:10.140 --> 01:09:12.105 develop theoretical models. 01:09:15.149 --> 01:09:21.060 He just bases it on observation, a very fine, 01:09:21.060 --> 01:09:22.560 detailed observation. 01:09:28.819 --> 01:09:34.729 The value of space syntax, presumably, 01:09:34.729 --> 01:09:40.770 is in its correlation with social good dimensions. 01:09:40.770 --> 01:09:46.130 So for instance, the analysis of spatial patterns 01:09:46.130 --> 01:09:51.590 would suggest that crime rates are much lower where there 01:09:51.590 --> 01:10:01.100 is a high encounter rate, so that housing estates which 01:10:01.100 --> 01:10:05.960 turn their backs on to conventional streets 01:10:05.960 --> 01:10:10.580 and have their access from private, unguarded domains 01:10:10.580 --> 01:10:15.380 in the center, are much more likely to be 01:10:15.380 --> 01:10:20.810 available for burglary and others. 01:10:20.810 --> 01:10:23.060 And this correlates. 01:10:23.060 --> 01:10:25.410 Their work is expanded enormously. 01:10:25.410 --> 01:10:28.280 They have now have computer programs which 01:10:28.280 --> 01:10:31.985 you can buy and play yourself. 01:10:34.590 --> 01:10:38.940 They consult all over the world. 01:10:38.940 --> 01:10:45.770 I have shown you one of the little projects in one drawing. 01:10:45.770 --> 01:10:50.455 That's the Trafalgar Square problem. 01:10:53.030 --> 01:10:59.570 Now, you can say that everything that they've 01:10:59.570 --> 01:11:05.300 built as a theoretical model and what they've actually 01:11:05.300 --> 01:11:08.245 found on the ground is something that you, 01:11:08.245 --> 01:11:11.930 as an intelligent observer, could have told. 01:11:11.930 --> 01:11:17.120 There's something obvious about what this enormous investment 01:11:17.120 --> 01:11:21.710 of energy and mind produces. 01:11:21.710 --> 01:11:24.860 I was always told when I studied-- 01:11:24.860 --> 01:11:29.540 there's an class in urban sociology at Yale-- 01:11:29.540 --> 01:11:32.390 that I should understand that sociology 01:11:32.390 --> 01:11:37.040 is about everyday things and that you shouldn't be surprised 01:11:37.040 --> 01:11:45.408 if sociological conclusions accompany everyday observation. 01:11:45.408 --> 01:11:45.950 I don't know. 01:11:45.950 --> 01:11:52.730 It's a question which critics of space syntax 01:11:52.730 --> 01:11:56.480 have been very frequent to say, why 01:11:56.480 --> 01:12:01.490 waste the money on something which produces nothing new 01:12:01.490 --> 01:12:05.720 and just confirms what you can intuitively know? 01:12:05.720 --> 01:12:08.630 If there are obstacles to where people can walk, 01:12:08.630 --> 01:12:09.950 people won't walk there-- 01:12:12.470 --> 01:12:15.890 to reduce it to a rather, sort of base level. 01:12:20.490 --> 01:12:26.970 It had a-- what do you think of the presentation you heard? 01:12:26.970 --> 01:12:29.640 STUDENT: The one thing that I thought was interesting was, 01:12:29.640 --> 01:12:34.500 towards the end, he was proposing they were going to-- 01:12:34.500 --> 01:12:37.590 if you were to redevelop over the train yards in London. 01:12:37.590 --> 01:12:42.080 And he showed if you just put a grid down 01:12:42.080 --> 01:12:44.610 where the potential commercial streets would be, 01:12:44.610 --> 01:12:46.068 because they color-map the streets. 01:12:46.068 --> 01:12:47.193 JULIAN BEINART: Sure, sure. 01:12:47.193 --> 01:12:49.560 STUDENT: And he said, but if you did this pattern, 01:12:49.560 --> 01:12:51.750 then you can see, oh, this, according to him, 01:12:51.750 --> 01:12:57.240 would probably make a really good commercial street. 01:12:57.240 --> 01:12:59.370 And these would be residential. 01:12:59.370 --> 01:13:04.500 It's sort of a way to quantitatively understand 01:13:04.500 --> 01:13:10.860 non-grid patterns in a way that you could present to a planning 01:13:10.860 --> 01:13:11.820 board or a government. 01:13:11.820 --> 01:13:12.695 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah. 01:13:12.695 --> 01:13:15.330 STUDENT: It was interesting. 01:13:15.330 --> 01:13:22.740 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, the adjustments to the King's Cross 01:13:22.740 --> 01:13:25.800 site plan were interesting. 01:13:25.800 --> 01:13:30.100 I think a couple of things. 01:13:30.100 --> 01:13:37.140 Number one, it satisfies me when somebody methodologically shows 01:13:37.140 --> 01:13:41.955 that the form of things has meaning, has value. 01:13:46.070 --> 01:13:49.970 If you think that high encounter rates are a good thing, 01:13:49.970 --> 01:13:52.480 at least they will tell you how to accomplish it. 01:13:55.250 --> 01:14:00.010 And that's not a bad set of propositions. 01:14:03.800 --> 01:14:09.380 We understand, actually, very little about high encounter 01:14:09.380 --> 01:14:10.670 rates. 01:14:10.670 --> 01:14:12.605 We assume them to be good. 01:14:12.605 --> 01:14:17.960 And Manhattan has had a history of, since its early days, 01:14:17.960 --> 01:14:21.470 making sure that sidewalks on its major avenues 01:14:21.470 --> 01:14:25.040 are wide enough to take a lot of people. 01:14:25.040 --> 01:14:25.965 Tokyo hasn't. 01:14:29.090 --> 01:14:34.190 The sidewalks are too narrow for the pedestrian volume. 01:14:34.190 --> 01:14:38.120 And one could imagine that the encounter rates-- 01:14:41.910 --> 01:14:43.770 the difficulty about encounter rates 01:14:43.770 --> 01:14:49.140 is that, often, people use them to believe that that is good. 01:14:49.140 --> 01:14:51.900 Richard Sennett, I think, naively believes 01:14:51.900 --> 01:14:57.600 that it's good for public relations. 01:14:57.600 --> 01:15:01.800 When I walk down Fifth Avenue, I don't stop and talk to a woman 01:15:01.800 --> 01:15:07.200 with a fur and a dog. 01:15:07.200 --> 01:15:11.540 I'd probably be shot or be accused of-- 01:15:11.540 --> 01:15:14.550 you know. 01:15:14.550 --> 01:15:20.340 Crowds are not naturally places which enable-- 01:15:20.340 --> 01:15:23.610 often, they don't enable human communication. 01:15:23.610 --> 01:15:26.940 So encounter rates are, in themselves, 01:15:26.940 --> 01:15:30.120 not absolute good or absolute bad. 01:15:30.120 --> 01:15:34.980 But certainly, the notion that you feel-- 01:15:34.980 --> 01:15:36.540 when do you feel safer? 01:15:36.540 --> 01:15:39.540 In all cultures, when you are on streets 01:15:39.540 --> 01:15:41.430 with a lot of other people-- 01:15:41.430 --> 01:15:42.450 I can imagine. 01:15:42.450 --> 01:15:44.160 I've been in places where I've been 01:15:44.160 --> 01:15:47.640 shit-scared of being on the street 01:15:47.640 --> 01:15:49.710 with a lot of other people because they all 01:15:49.710 --> 01:15:54.450 look like criminals to me, because I couldn't 01:15:54.450 --> 01:15:58.170 read the situation well enough. 01:15:58.170 --> 01:16:03.300 The last set of stuff has a body of literature. 01:16:03.300 --> 01:16:08.220 And I've only chosen one page from one of the documents. 01:16:08.220 --> 01:16:11.790 There's a good book called Urban Space and Structures, which 01:16:11.790 --> 01:16:15.870 those of you serious about becoming urban designers 01:16:15.870 --> 01:16:18.240 need to read. 01:16:18.240 --> 01:16:26.370 It's edited by Leslie Martin and Lionel March, Cambridge 01:16:26.370 --> 01:16:33.190 University Press, 1972. 01:16:33.190 --> 01:16:35.890 The British have been interested in understanding 01:16:35.890 --> 01:16:38.485 spatial patterns largely through geometry. 01:16:43.180 --> 01:16:46.910 In the piece that I've given to you today, 01:16:46.910 --> 01:16:50.230 on the right-hand side is a section 01:16:50.230 --> 01:16:56.560 of the grid of New York from 42nd to 52nd and from Eighth 01:16:56.560 --> 01:16:57.855 Avenue to Park Avenue. 01:17:00.970 --> 01:17:05.650 The argument is relatively simple. 01:17:05.650 --> 01:17:10.810 If you took the amount of gross square footage 01:17:10.810 --> 01:17:18.760 built on this parcel in the black areas today, 01:17:18.760 --> 01:17:21.880 and you took away a number of the streets-- 01:17:21.880 --> 01:17:26.770 he took away every second street, more or less-- 01:17:26.770 --> 01:17:31.480 you could rebuild the same amount of square footage 01:17:31.480 --> 01:17:35.470 in the pattern on the right with only a maximum height 01:17:35.470 --> 01:17:39.715 of seven floors and large amounts of open space inside. 01:17:42.670 --> 01:17:46.630 Now, no architecture student I know of 01:17:46.630 --> 01:17:51.190 would come to that conclusion automatically. 01:17:51.190 --> 01:17:57.580 It's much like the use of the Fresnel lens 01:17:57.580 --> 01:18:02.485 in arguing population in a city. 01:18:20.830 --> 01:18:28.450 As you go outwards, if you want the same area of land, 01:18:28.450 --> 01:18:31.000 as you get further out, these bands 01:18:31.000 --> 01:18:36.040 need to become thinner because the area they cover is larger. 01:18:36.040 --> 01:18:38.950 So the total population in the center of the city 01:18:38.950 --> 01:18:44.710 can be housed in a thin band on the outside. 01:18:44.710 --> 01:18:53.480 This is not-- there's a diminishing amount of width 01:18:53.480 --> 01:18:58.070 required in each band as you go further out because the band 01:18:58.070 --> 01:18:59.570 becomes larger. 01:18:59.570 --> 01:19:01.910 It's a simple geometric observation 01:19:01.910 --> 01:19:05.890 which they apply to some estimates 01:19:05.890 --> 01:19:07.490 about urban population. 01:19:12.800 --> 01:19:16.190 The number of books published-- 01:19:16.190 --> 01:19:18.500 I will come back to the work of this group 01:19:18.500 --> 01:19:25.250 when we talk about prediction of growth and flexibility 01:19:25.250 --> 01:19:27.526 of building apparatus. 01:19:31.040 --> 01:19:37.030 A lot of this work came from a set of investigations that 01:19:37.030 --> 01:19:44.540 the British did at the end of the '39-'46 war 01:19:44.540 --> 01:19:48.810 in the rebuilding of British infrastructure-- hospitals, 01:19:48.810 --> 01:19:50.840 universities, and so on. 01:19:50.840 --> 01:19:52.670 I will do a series of case studies 01:19:52.670 --> 01:20:00.530 of a number of university plans showing two factors-- 01:20:00.530 --> 01:20:10.490 one, the idea that new groups of knowledge disciplines cohered-- 01:20:10.490 --> 01:20:16.680 microbiology as opposed to microphysics, biology 01:20:16.680 --> 01:20:22.020 and chemistry mixing together, and so on-- 01:20:22.020 --> 01:20:26.780 how these patterns could be accommodated 01:20:26.780 --> 01:20:34.190 in physical form which required the least adjustment over time. 01:20:34.190 --> 01:20:37.760 We will look at the Technical University in Berlin. 01:20:37.760 --> 01:20:45.050 We will look at MIT as examples of these patterns which 01:20:45.050 --> 01:20:49.070 maintain-- which promote high degrees of flexibility. 01:20:49.070 --> 01:20:51.660 Also, in the British writing about hospitals, 01:20:51.660 --> 01:20:53.930 the research done in hospitals. 01:20:53.930 --> 01:20:58.160 Knowing that hospitals change hospital science 01:20:58.160 --> 01:21:01.460 and the administration changes rapidly, 01:21:01.460 --> 01:21:04.910 how would you choose patterns which 01:21:04.910 --> 01:21:13.470 enabled the minimum disruption in the trajectory of change? 01:21:13.470 --> 01:21:18.180 So if any of you are interested in this kind of work, 01:21:18.180 --> 01:21:20.060 this is not the class to take. 01:21:20.060 --> 01:21:22.010 I can just tell you. 01:21:22.010 --> 01:21:24.990 We'll touch on some of this later on. 01:21:24.990 --> 01:21:29.280 But I can just read you some of the list of books 01:21:29.280 --> 01:21:30.780 this comes from. 01:21:30.780 --> 01:21:32.660 There's Philip Steadman's book called 01:21:32.660 --> 01:21:35.390 Architectural Morphology. 01:21:35.390 --> 01:21:40.280 There's Philip Steadman's book The Evolution of Design. 01:21:40.280 --> 01:21:46.370 There's Lionel March and Philip Steadman's book The Geometry 01:21:46.370 --> 01:21:52.250 of Environment, MIT Press, 1974. 01:21:52.250 --> 01:21:56.540 There's a couple of the more generally applied 01:21:56.540 --> 01:21:58.610 outcomes of much of this work. 01:22:02.580 --> 01:22:05.700 We've finished the first part of the three 01:22:05.700 --> 01:22:08.170 sections of this class. 01:22:08.170 --> 01:22:10.860 This first part was just an attempt 01:22:10.860 --> 01:22:15.300 to bring you up to speed on some things which you might not 01:22:15.300 --> 01:22:17.100 have known about. 01:22:17.100 --> 01:22:19.530 We start the serious work on-- 01:22:19.530 --> 01:22:20.340 what is today? 01:22:20.340 --> 01:22:21.990 Tuesday. 01:22:21.990 --> 01:22:24.990 We start the serious work on Thursday. 01:22:24.990 --> 01:22:32.190 We will start excavating the spatial pattern of existing 01:22:32.190 --> 01:22:36.750 cities after the Industrial Revolution. 01:22:36.750 --> 01:22:42.480 We'll, on Thursday, try to make sense 01:22:42.480 --> 01:22:47.790 of what industrialism meant, what 01:22:47.790 --> 01:22:51.510 it meant to spatial patterns in cities, what it meant 01:22:51.510 --> 01:22:55.770 to the invention of new instruments-- 01:22:55.770 --> 01:23:00.390 the mortgage system, deficit spending, and so 01:23:00.390 --> 01:23:08.700 on, the advent of poverty in accumulated situations 01:23:08.700 --> 01:23:12.370 in the West, and so on. 01:23:12.370 --> 01:23:14.910 And from that, we will make case studies 01:23:14.910 --> 01:23:17.040 of the major reactions-- 01:23:17.040 --> 01:23:22.200 London, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, and Chicago. 01:23:22.200 --> 01:23:27.630 This is a comprehensive look at some very detailed aspects 01:23:27.630 --> 01:23:31.500 of existing transformations. 01:23:31.500 --> 01:23:34.260 Hopefully, by the time we get to the end of the class, 01:23:34.260 --> 01:23:38.970 we'll be able to make theoretical generalizations 01:23:38.970 --> 01:23:46.690 better than the ones I've explained to you so far. 01:23:46.690 --> 01:23:49.570 Don't be too depressed. 01:23:49.570 --> 01:23:53.200 The remarkable thing is that we are building cities. 01:23:53.200 --> 01:24:01.180 We build them, perhaps, not as well spatially as we did 01:24:01.180 --> 01:24:04.380 150 years ago or 300 years ago. 01:24:06.910 --> 01:24:15.200 But there's no more cholera because of the great invention 01:24:15.200 --> 01:24:23.300 in 1854 in London, causing the biggest transformation 01:24:23.300 --> 01:24:29.810 of London by siphoning off wastewater 01:24:29.810 --> 01:24:37.630 on the east and west sides, north and south of London. 01:24:37.630 --> 01:24:41.160 All of this will build up a story 01:24:41.160 --> 01:24:49.110 about the complexity of actual urban situations, which 01:24:49.110 --> 01:24:52.740 I believe is better than too much time 01:24:52.740 --> 01:24:56.790 spending on abstract models. 01:24:56.790 --> 01:25:00.480 I don't know if we'll ever have a theory of city form 01:25:00.480 --> 01:25:08.700 which is universally agreed upon, able to be systematized. 01:25:08.700 --> 01:25:12.570 Some aspects of the performance of this field, which 01:25:12.570 --> 01:25:15.590 are moving more and more in this direction-- 01:25:15.590 --> 01:25:19.020 we certainly know more about public transportation 01:25:19.020 --> 01:25:24.120 and its engineering and science than ever before. 01:25:24.120 --> 01:25:29.400 We know very little about meaning. 01:25:29.400 --> 01:25:34.950 We build pickle-shaped tall buildings in London 01:25:34.950 --> 01:25:39.630 without even being able to measure the effect. 01:25:39.630 --> 01:25:41.250 And there are parts of the world which 01:25:41.250 --> 01:25:48.210 are looking to manifest urban identity without building 01:25:48.210 --> 01:25:51.480 the tallest building in the world, 01:25:51.480 --> 01:25:54.330 and a number of issues of that kind which are currently 01:25:54.330 --> 01:25:57.060 on the plate of urban designers. 01:25:57.060 --> 01:25:57.570 OK. 01:25:57.570 --> 01:25:59.410 I'll see you on Thursday. 01:25:59.410 --> 01:26:01.970 Have a good holiday.