When modern architects righteously abandoned ornament on buildings, they unconsciously designed buildings that were ornament.  In promoting Space and Articulation over symbolism and ornament, they distorted the whole building into a duck. They substituted for the innocent and inexpensive practice of applied decoration on a conventional shed the rather cynical and expensive distortion of program and structure to promote a duck… It is now time to reevaluate the once-horrifying statement of John Ruskin that architecture is the decoration of construction, but we should append the warning of Pugin: It is all right to decorate construction but never construct decoration.

-Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas

I’ve never been able to come to terms with Venturi – he simultaneously challenges and disgusts me.  It makes me feel a little like a heathen that neither wants to be baptized nor go to hell.

The Vivos design is based on a spoke and hub complex, with 10 radiating wings surrounding a 2 story central dome. Vivos designed its shelters to provide as much comfort as reasonably possible for its co-owners, with a population density of 1 person per 100 square feet of floor area. FEMA recommends just 50 square feet per person for long-term shelter.

The Vivos web site has a lovely bar along the bottom which lists “Nuclear War / Bio War / Terrorism / Anarchy / Electromagnetic Pulse / Solar Flares / Pole Shift / Killer Comet / Global Tsunami / Planet X / Super Volcano” to remind you of all the horrible things that are probably JUST ABOUT TO HAPPEN!

Notice the 3 man-sized safes for the storing of loot

I’m not sure if this is for real – the renderings look like screen captures from someone’s weekend project on The Sims and the idea seems to have been borrowed from Fallout, but I have no doubt that there’s a market for this.  I wonder what other frontiers are waiting to be gentrified?

This is the second proposal I’ve seen lately which involves renovating 60′s-era missile silos (the other being for a secure data center).  What other uses could these things serve?  They would probably make great wine/cheese caves!

Here’s an Atlas-F silo for sale which has been renovated into “a 2300 sq. ft. 2-story (3 bedroom, 2 bath) luxury home with fiber optic lighting and a contemporary finished interior… Breathtaking mountain views surround this lovely, secure home.”

Designer lighting and tan carpet really set off the 2000-lb blast doors!

If you’re looking for crushed stone, a rock drill and some dynamite is all you need, but to get large usable slabs of stone requires a bit more finesse.  Cararra marble used to be quarried by drilling a series of holes on the edge of a cliff, inserting wooden ‘wedges’ and then soaking these with water – the expansion would cause the stone to crack along the line of holes and the resulting ‘bench’ was then moved to another facility to be cut to the proper sizes.

Modern methods are much cooler, and use two basic tools; gallery saws and wire saws.  A gallery saw is basically a 12-foot long chain saw for cutting stone.  They move along tracks and can cut either vertically or horizontally.  Wire saws are basically big motors attached to a huge rubber band studded with diamond discs.  The rubber band gets wrapped around the piece of rock you want to cut, then the wire saw pulls it tight and starts rotating it.  The diamond discs slowly slice the stone in half, like a cheese wire.

This video shows one of those chain saws in action.

Here’s a horizontal cut

This shows the wire saw – isn’t the space created after removing the slabs amazing?

And here’s what happens after the cutting’s finished…

It seems he’s finally started to think about the effects of climate change, and seems to have come to the conclusion that climate change poses a more serious threat to the world.  He gave a talk at TED in which he outlined his analysis of the problem:

CO2 = P x S x E x C

Meaning this: the climate emissions of human civilization are the result of four driving forces:

* Population: the total number of people on the planet (which is still increasing because we are not yet at peak population).

* Services: the things that provide prosperity (and because billions of people are still rising out of poverty and because no global system will work unless it’s fair, we can expect a massively increased demand for the services that provide prosperity).

* Energy: the amount of energy it takes to produce and provide the goods and services that our peaking population uses as it grows more prosperous (what some might call the energy intensity of goods and services). Gates believes it’s likely cutting two-thirds of our energy waste is about as good as we can do.

* Carbon: the amount of climate emissions generated in order to produce the energy it takes to fuel prosperity.

Those four, he says, essentially define our emissions (more on that later). In order to reach zero emissions, then, at least one of these values has to fall to zero. But which one? He reckons that because population is going to continue to grow for at least four decades, because billions of poor people want more equitable prosperity, and because (as he sees it) improvements in energy efficiency are limited, we have to focus on the last element of the equation, the carbon intensity of energy. Simply, we need climate-neutral energy. We need to use nothing but climate-neutral energy.

To do that, we need an “energy miracle.” We need energy solutions that don’t yet exist, released through a global push for clean energy innovation. That, in turn, demands that a generation of entrepreneurs push forward new ideas for renewable energy, unleashing “1,000 promising ideas.” He described one of his own investments, but went on to note that we need hundreds of other ambitious companies as well, and he plans to put his own efforts into this arena.

This is a very accessible way to approach the problem; it comes with a handy acronym, presents the problem as a simple equation that needs solving, and makes intuitive sense.  Framed in this way I have to agree with him; developing net-zero energy sources seems like the best way to zero out the problem.

So after reading this I felt all warm and fuzzy; Bill Gates is on the case, and he has tonnes of cash to throw at it!  Surely we’ll have this engineering problem solved in the next decade or so right?

Then I read this response written by Joe Romm (former Acting Assistant Secretary at DOE and current senior fellow at the Center for American Progress), which basically shreds both Gate’s premise and his solution.  Here’s the basic problem; quantifying ‘Services’ distorts reality beyond utility, developing ‘energy miracles’ will take too long to work, and even if it didn’t we already have all the technology we need to fix the problem.

So I have thought a lot about whether Gates is right that we need multiple “energy miracles” developed through a $10 billion-a-year government R&D effort to stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm.

Put more quantitatively, the question is — What are the chances that multiple (4 to 8+) carbon-free technologies that do not exist today can each deliver the equivalent of 350 Gigawatts baseload power (~2.8 billion Megawatt-hours a year) and/or 160 billion gallons of gasoline cost-effectively by 2050? [Note -- that is about half of a stabilization wedge.] For the record, the U.S. consumed about 3.7 billion MW-hrs in 2005 and about 140 billion gallons of motor gasoline.

Put that way, the answer to the question is painfully obvious: “two chances — slim and none.” Indeed, I have repeatedly challenged readers and listeners over the years to name even a single technology breakthrough with such an impact in the past three decades, after the huge surge in energy funding that followed the energy shocks of the 1970s. Nobody has ever named a single one that has even come close.

…

I don’t know why the energy miracle crowd can’t see the obvious — so I will elaborate here. I will also discuss a major study that explains why deployment programs are so much more important than R&D at this point. Let’s keep this simple:

• To stabilize below 450 ppm, we need to deploy by 2050 some 12 to 14 stabilization wedges (each delivering 1 billion tons of avoided carbon) covering both efficient energy use and carbon-free supply (see here). The technologies we have today, plus a few that are in the verge of being commercialized, can provide the needed low-carbon energy [see "How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution (updated)"].
• Myriad energy-efficient solutions are already cost-effective today. Breaking down the barriers to their deployment now is much, much more important than developing new “breakthrough” efficient TILTs, since those would simply fail in the marketplace because of the same barriers. Cogeneration is perhaps the clearest example of this.
• On the supply side, deployment programs (coupled with a price for carbon) will always be much, much more important than R&D programs because new technologies take an incredibly long time to achieve mass-market commercial success. New supply TILTs would not simply emerge at a low cost. They need volume, volume, volume — steady and large increases in demand over time to bring the cost down, as I discuss at length below.
• No existing or breakthrough technology is going to beat the price of power from a coal plant that has already been built — the only way to deal with those plants is a high price for carbon or a mandate to shut them down. Indeed, that’s why we must act immediately not to build those plants in the first place.

For better or worse, we are stuck through 2050 with the technologies that are commercial today (like solar thermal electric) or that are very nearly commercial (like plug-in hybrids).

I have discussed most of this at length in previous posts (listed below), so I won’t repeat all the arguments here. Let me just focus on a few key points. A critical historical fact was explained by Royal Dutch/Shell, in their 2001 scenarios for how energy use is likely to evolve over the next five decades (even with a carbon constraint):

“Typically it has taken 25 years after commercial introduction for a primary energy form to obtain a 1 percent share of the global market.”

Note that this tiny toe-hold comes 25 years after commercial introduction. The first transition from scientific breakthrough to commercial introduction may itself take decades. We still haven’t seen commercial introduction of a hydrogen fuel cell car and have barely seen any commercial fuel cells — over 160 years after they were first invented.

The article goes on to discuss how technologies move from lab discoveries to commercial energy sources – the gist is; it takes a really long time and we should be spending the next 40 years trying to push existing technologies into wider use rather than trying to develop brand new ones.

For Rogers, the concept was about the care and commitment of people who contributed to building the cathedral, a decades-long task, yet would never see its completion. Its implications on vision and strategy development seemed to be about their outcome, a recognition that the successful implementation of the strategy may not be measured until long after it authors have moved on.

I think  starts to hint at the basic reason I’m so ambivalent about the project I posted earlier where a cathedral was converted into a bookstore. There’s something serene and foreign in the concept of thousands of people devoting their lives to a project they know they will never see finished; the sacrilege of that conversion in my mind has less to do with replacing religion with commerce and more to do with respecting the aspirations of all those craftsmen.  Especially in the US, there are very few objects which have remained important for more than a couple generations. We’re not going to be able to embrace long-term sustainability as a culture without retaining some reverence for the past; they’re two perspectives on the same process.

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

And then some commentary from Sean Carrol, writing on my favorite physics blog, Cosmic Variance:

Without knowing much of anything about the relevant issues, I nevertheless suspect that this moral might be a bit too pat. Sure, people can fall in love with beautiful theories, to the extent that they overestimate their relationship to reality. But it seems likely to me that the correct way of understanding all this, once it’s properly understood, will look pretty beautiful as well. General relativity is widely held up as an example of a beautiful theory — and it is, when understood in its own language. But if you put the prediction of GR in the Solar System into the language of pre-existing Newtonian physics (which you could certainly do), it would look ugly and ad hoc. Likewise, Newton’s theory itself is quite elegant, when phrased in the language of potentials on a fixed spacetime background; but if you express the theory in terms of differential geometry (which you could certainly do), it looks like a mess. Sometimes the beauty/ugly distinction between theoretical conceptions is more a matter of how well we understand them, and less about their intrinsic qualities.

So my counter-hypothesis would be that it wasn’t beauty that was the problem, it was complacency. If you have a model that is beautiful and works well enough, you’re tempted to take pride in it rather than pushing it to extremes and looking for problems. I suspect that there is a very beautiful theory of economics out there waiting to be developed, one that understands perfectly well that individuals aren’t rational and markets aren’t perfect. One that has even more impressive-looking equations than the current favored models! Beauty isn’t always a cop-out.

Both those links are well worth a full read (the NY Times one is fairly long – schedule a cozy evening for it). In the spirit of dialogue, my feeling is that both Paul and Sean are coming at this from opposite ends of a single phenomena; well defined systems which involve feedback loops quickly become chaotic at larger scales. This is true for weather (we understand the basics of fluid dynamics and thermodynamics, but weather forecasts will never be very accurate), it’s true for the scale shift from quantum to relativistic, and it’s true for enormous economic systems. In other words, beautiful theories can both be true and useless – it’s all a question of scale.

I mention this because there was a post a few days ago on WorldChanging titled “57 Million Chances to Get Housing Right”, discussing the potential impact of substituting sustainable developments for typical developments over the next few years:

he National Research Council’s Transportation Research Board calculated the greenhouse gas savings if new housing was more compact and put homes close to jobs and other amenities. “Driving and the Built Environment:  Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emission,” a report requested by Congress and published last week, determined that 57 million US homes will be needed by 2030 to accommodate population growth and replacement housing. … So what are the benefits to the climate? According to this study, they were fairly modest. Assuming:

• 75 percent of development is compact…
• leads to residents driving 25 percent less…
• the result is vehicle miles traveled, fuel use, and CO2 emissions of new and existing households would decline up to 8 percent by 2030, increasing to up to 11 percent by 2050.

In order to achieve more substantial progress, a second report identifies 4 primary ‘roadblocks’:

1. Inadequate infrastructure: a lack of public transit, insufficient, or aging utilities, and under-performing schools in city centers and other areas that are prime locations for sustainable development.
2. An uncertain regulatory process: myriad local government requirements, planning and zoning restrictions, fire and other code limitations, extensive project-specific environmental review processes, and local opposition (“no growth” advocates and unhappy neighbors).
3. Higher economic costs: a typically more expensive construction process, longer permitting time, and additional infrastructure burdens make sustainable development in existing neighborhoods less economically competitive than constructing in undeveloped areas.
4. Skewed tax incentives: local governments prefer to permit large single-use retail buildings to maximize sales tax revenue and minimize infrastructure costs, rather than mixed-use development.

And this is why I mention the incremental/systemic issue; a thousand new urbanist developments like Mueller won’t make half as much impact as a few systemic changes.  Our systems were not built to promote sustainable cities, and the first thing you learn in economics is that incentives matter.  In order to implement the massive changes which are needed in our built environment, we need to fundamentally restructure the incentives which influence them.  As helpful as Mueller and it’s type of development are, they are struggling against multiple systems which undervalue such developments.

In the short term, systemic change may be as difficult to implement as massive incremental changes, but from the perspective of a developer or designer who is hoping to generate change there is one key difference between incremental and systemic proposals; systemic proposals at a small scale can become models for new systems at larger scales.  The data above shows that applying ‘New Urbanism’ universally is an inadequate solution; it is an insufficient model for systemic change.  What we need are new perspectives capable of fundamentally reducing our energy consumption and encouraging long-term planning by individuals, proposals that not only take advantage of higher-quality infrastructure but supplement it as well, proposals which are not only profitable, but which encourage business practices which will be sustainable in the long term.  In my opinion, even a modestly successful proposal which addresses these aspirations is more valuable than another highly successful New Urbanist development.

For those of you who don’t read a lot of Sci-Fi, the term ‘sietch’ comes from Frank Herbert’s masterpiece ‘Dune’.  The dune series takes place largely on a planet covered by (you guessed it) dunes; an entire planet covered by desert.  The inhabitants of the planet live in scattered settlements built into rock formations and their culture is largely based around an eons-long process of capturing water from the atmosphere to terraform the planet into a lush green forest.  The project above is a proposal which takes these settlements as a conceptual starting point and applies the idea to the imminent water shortage in the American Southwest.  From AMNP’s description:

MATSYS has created a subterranean city – taking the idea of waterbanking one step further, creating an underground canal system that both provides water to the inhabitants and allows for necessary irrigation of the proposed garden spaces in the center of each of the sietch’s cells.

There are so many things to love about this project; the apocalyptic desperation of moving underground, the synthesis of urban space and food production, the geothermal cooling approach, the voronoi diagram of the towers and canals, etc.  These are the types of though experiments that we need more of in theoretical architecture.

I’m generally annoyed at architectural proposals this divorced from the reality of what can be practically implemented; what makes this project different is that it starts from the perspective that eventually we will be forced to start thinking with a much longer time horizon that we have been, then proposes a design that could be plausible in this inevitable future.  This seems more like a contingency plan for an uncomfortable future than an ill-conceived and under-informed plan for what to do now.

I have mixed feelings about this project.  On the one hand, the design itself is both sensitive to the nature of the existing building and interesting in its own right.  The space is being used as a book store, and the ‘stacks’ have been placed in the center of the space two levels high to retain the open majestic feeling of the nave.  The apse had been converted into a reading area filled with seats surrounding a cross-shaped table.  In all, the design is well executed.

But there’s something about this project that makes me uneasy.  Something about taking a cathedral – likely the result of centuries of work by thousands of craftsmen built as a sanctuary from the world of the profane being converted into a retail store seems like an unflattering commentary on the world we live in.

I’m neither religious nor a fan of historical preservation, so it surprises me that this project makes me uneasy; I suspect this is reflecting a growing uneasiness I’ve been feeling about our culture’s recent experiment with consumerism.  I feel like the slow monetization of virtually every aspect of our lives leaves us with a world that is lacking in both poetry and humanity.  Perhaps I’m just growing old enough to feel nostalgic for a past that never existed.

I was pondering how one might go about elevating a building (think tree-house) and it occurred to me that there might be some interesting starting points in the platonic solids.  Wikipedia led me to this guy, who interests me for a couple reasons.  First, it uses a square base and cap, allowing it to be used to construct spaces which don’t have odd angles on top of it.  Second, it stacks both horizontally and vertically – this basic geometry can be repeated outward to make a square grid and upward to make multiple stories.  Finally, I suspect this is the optimal structural way to support a square in space using only tensile/compressive members (ie, no shear walls).

There’s a great article in the Atlantic which gets to the heart of the reason I have no interest in ‘fixing’ the suburbs:

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas—roads, sewer and water lines—cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.

There is a level of density beyond which redevelopment isn’t worth the energy, and as fuel prices increase over the next decade, that level of density is likely to increase dramatically.  One of the basic assumptions of the suburban model is that the inhabitants of the suburbs can commute from their houses to their jobs, then from their jobs to the big-box store to buy cheezy puffs, then to their favorite chain restaurant, and then back home to watch TV.  As the suburbs become less and less affluent, the inhabitants of these spaces will have less and less disposable income to spend on fuel (assuming they can afford transportation, or course).  In other words, the collapse of the suburbs is likely to be swift and catastrophic; without the benefit of low fuel prices and above-average levels of discretionary income, these developments will quickly become impossible to occupy at any cost.

Poverty cannot exist in isolation; in order for people to form slums, they must also have access to food.  I don’t see the suburbs becoming viable slums; they are too far removed from either sources of employment or dense population centers.  They cannot easily be turned into farmland, and even if they could farming has become a lost art in our society.  My guess is that the current pattern of abandonment will continue, and the suburbs will slowly decay and return to nature.

This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built. Hollow doors and wallboard are less durable than solid-oak doors and lath-and-plaster walls. The plywood floors that lurk under wood veneers or carpeting tend to break up and warp as the glue that holds the wood together dries out; asphalt-shingle roofs typically need replacing after 10 years. Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall—their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up.

The biggest wild-card in my mind is the future value of arable farmland.  Brad has some interesting thoughts about the steady decline in the effectiveness of industrial farming; it seems the use of intensive fertilization and pesticides is slowly degrading our farmland soil and killing off many of the microbes required to for plant life.  If we are forced to abandon high-yield farming and return to the agricultural yields of 20′s, feeding the recently-expanded population is likely to become a challenge which will make arable farmland much more valuable.  This may well be accelerated by decreasing oil reserves and increasing extraction costs.  If agricultural yields decline faster than the suburbs crumble, I can see a situation in which farmers actively clear suburban tracts; sort of like Amazonian slash-and-burn agriculture except full of noxious fumes.

UPDATE:

AMNP just linked to what I think is by far the best entry in the competition, titled “LET THEM BURN“:

Superstudio’s Seventh City (”Continuous Conveyor Belt City”) moves with its 8 million inhabitants. In front of the city is a factory that builds the new districts, and behind it, another factory that destructs the older ones. It is an image of the american suburb: its main characteristic is not to sprawl, but to move. Continuously, new suburbs are built, and old suburbs are abandoned (see Detroit).
This movement is older than the suburb itself: the US have a long tradition of ghost cities, aimed at a semi-nomadic population and left in place after use.

These ghost towns sometimes become attractions for tourists, such as the cities of the Gold Rush. The crisis has accelerated the process.

For sure, all the vacant developments will not become touristic attractions.

We propose to use the other ones for great popular parties, during which the houses will be set to fire one by one. This new ritual is inspired by the Detroit “Devil’s Nights” and european tradtional festivals.

This destruction-consumation is to become a huge potlatch.

Let the suburbs die. There is nothing left to do with the territories consumed by residential sprawl.

More eye candy after the break

From Inhabitat’s text:

Little conceived their plan for the mixed-used development based on Darwin’s “Entangled Bank” theory, in which a complex network is made up from simple elements. The community was designed to be completely self-reliant through a series of innovative sustainable techniques and the efficient use of natural resources. Made up of residences, retail, and educational components, the complex also includes communal sky pastures, 80,000-square-feet of vertical farmland, and a 20,000-square-foot grain field that provides food for the city’s inhabitants.

The structure itself uses photovoltaic panels on the southern facade to power the residential units within the building and includes a series of vertical axis wind turbines to provide power to the central development. Energy needs aside, the architects also incorporate greywater treatment facilities on the premises that recycle and redistribute used domestic water and retention ponds to capture water runoff into their design for a sustainable city.

I’m a little dubious of the ‘completely self-reliant’ claims, and even if they were true I’m not sure that the idea of the city as a cluster of hermetically sealed blocks is really the best approach to urbanism.

This was one of the aspects of the competition brief that I found problematic; cities are efficient because they allow systems and resources to be shared, gaining efficiency through specialization.  Trying to separate entire blocks from the ‘grid’ seems to fundamentally miss this point.  In my mind there’s a big difference between encouraging distributed systems (PV panels, green space, passive heating and cooling) and encouraging ‘self sufficient’ city blocks.

One of the concepts which emerged from the competition was of challenging homeownership as the preferable means to acquiring personal stability:

One could argue that the notion of homeownership, and the fact of being tied to a place, are antiquated. Instead it’s the public spaces of the proposal which will be important and the residential spaces are more like sleeping pods. Property ownership will become less attractive as a tool for financial security encouraging more flexible arrangements. Mobility in the labor market will become increasingly important as economic opportunity continues to decline. Entertainment begins to shift from passive consumption to an interactive, interpersonal creation; gardening, gaming, sports, roomba-hacking, etc.

As was to be expected we were not the first to think of this. Le Corbusier, writing in 1931, proposed the “Freehold Maisonettes” as a “great rent-purchase scheme:”

No actual rent is paid; the tenants take shares in the enterprise; these are payable over a period of twenty years, and the interest represents a very low rent. By the system of rent purchase the bad old property systems no longer exist.

Another concept from the Dallas conversations dealt with the idea of shared spaces and shared systems in the interest of driving efficiency. We considered ideas such as shared kitchens, laundry facilities, gardens, guestrooms, and cooperative workspaces with the goal of paring down this infrastructure from the residential unit and instead concentrating it into centers which serve groups of residents. Again, Corbu beat us to it:

Modern achievement…replaces human labour by the machine and by good organization. The provision of food…is arranged by a special purchasing service, which makes for quality and economy. From a vast kitchen the food is supplied as required to be eaten, either privately or in the communal restaurant.

Rem Koolhas, writing in the 1970’s, touched on similar concepts in describing the Waldorf-Astoria:

The model of the hotel undergoes a conceptual overhaul and is invested with a new experimental ambition that creates Manhattan’s definitive unit of habitation, the Residential Hotel – place where the inhabitant is his own houseguest, instrument that liberates its occupants for total involvement in the rituals of metropolitan life. Everyday life has reached a unique level of complexity… Its unfolding requires elaborate…support systems that are uneconomical in the sense that peak use of décor, space, personnel, gadgetry and artifacts is only sporadic. In addition, this infrastructure is perpetually threatened with obsolescence…which results inevitably in a growing aversion to make household investments. The Residential Hotel transcends this dilemma by separating the private and public functions of the individual household and then bringing each to its own logical conclusion. “Patrons” could avail themselves not only of the usual living facilities in an ultramodern hotel but, in addition, of services that might readily enable them to expand and supplement their own living quarters, and so arrange for the occasional entertainment of their friends…Such a unit of habitation is in effect a commune. Its inhabitants pool their investments to finance a collective infrastructure for the “method of modern living.”

In conclusion our ideas, as with most, are not new but rather represent a vertical integration of concepts in answer to the emerging question of homeownership. It becomes not so much a matter of originality as it does about execution and implementation, the realization of which is the novelty.

Stepping back to consider architecture as a process allows us to consider a much wider variety of concerns; the lifetime cost of building maintenance, the environmental impact of powering the building, the cultural flows that the building mediates, etc.  Let me touch on a couple such topics before getting into any ideas about how things might be improved.

This first topic is ownership.  The social habits surrounding private property, ownership, renting, and public goods are so ingrained in our daily lives that we (or I, at least) rarely bother to consider them as social constructions, and probably for good reason; attempts to change these habits seem to meet practically universal failure.  That’s not to say that considering how they could be tweaked isn’t worth some thought; in many ways the recent popularity of ‘Sustainability’ is an attempt to shift these very social norms.  The research into aligning the interests of various economic participants referred to in the previous post is another example of people considering the ways in which minor tweaks in the social contracts surrounding productive enterprises can lead new and better outcomes.

Access to land and buildings is generally distributed in one of two ways: through rental or ownership.  In the context of something small and portable like a lawnmower, these two approaches (renting & owning) are clear cut; you either buy the lawnmower and use it or you rent one and return it when you’re done.  Two elements of architecture complicate this model; it’s cost and the duration of the average person’s use of it.  Buying a building with a 30-year mortgage is not the same as buying a lawnmower with cash; the building is essentially owned by the lender for the first 10 years, and while the occupant might believe the building ‘belongs’ to them and be motivated to maintain it for that future date when they will own it free & clear (or sell it), this belief seems more based on a long-term social contract than the fact of their absolute control over the building.  On the other hand, properties are often rented to individuals for more than the 30 years they would have been paying off a mortgage.  After that length of time, it seems odd that the occupant is considered nothing more than a renter to be evicted after a few months of rent delinquency.  The cost of building likewise makes it risky to be a landlord; the building’s tenants have an unprecedented capacity to destroy the building’s value, and the landlord has little recourse in the case of a problematic tenant – security deposits are laughably small compared to the damage which can be inflicted.

Another topic is that of mobility.  There have been studies recently linking home-ownership to unemployment; the theory is that families with significant financial investments in a specific property have less options for finding employment.  The modern workplace is defined by increasing specialization, globalized production chains and high employee turnover.  We no longer live in a world where college graduates work at a single large firm their entire lives, then retire in the family homestead. The housing market does not seem to have adapted to this reality; even before the turmoil in the housing market moving from one house to another was a significant undertaking.

There’s no reason these concerns should be part of the architectural design process, but there’s no reason these concerns shouldn’t be a part of the architectural design process either.  I suspect that the end result of a broader design approach will be successful.  So here’s one idea.

A Proposal

Co-operatives ave existed in many forms over the centuries.  Most modern co-operatives derive from experiments in the late 1700′s, but the co-operative as a business model seems to have started to flourish only in the past century.  The term co-operative has a lot of cultural baggage, it tends to evoke dirty hippy communal farms or worker collectives in the eastern bloc.  I mention co-operatives purely as an organizational form; I’m not promoting any political or social ideology.  As an organizational form cooperatives have many benefits.

Lets start with a quick survey of different types of cooperatives.  They’re often organized either around production (employee-owned business or farms) or consumption (grocery stores or banks).  In some cases they are run through volunteerism, but more commonly they simply serve as a structure for organizing the interactions and interests of their members (who in the case of productive cooperatives are essentially employees).  The primary difference between a cooperative and a typical firm is that cooperatives are formed to profit the members of the cooperative, rather than the owners of the firm.  In other words, an effort is made to structurally eliminate the employer/employee (or owner/renter) conflict.

Housing cooperatives became popular around the turn of the century in New York City, apparently because legal instruments for condo ownership had not been invented yet and some method of organizing group ownership of large buildings was needed.  Currently around 20% of the residential units in NYC are operated as co-operatives and  San Francisco also has a large number of cooperative housing facilities.  Co-operative housing facilities allocate a space in the building through various types of contracts which essentially establish a monthly rent; rents are usually established at a level which breaks even with monthly expenses.  Some type of administration is usually voted into place to facilitate maintenance.

The distinguishing characteristic of co-operative housing is that the building is owned by its residents and decisions about the maintenance or development of the building are made by the tenants (sometime mediated by an elected board or other administrative entitiy).  New residents generally are no expected to buy their spaces outright at the beginning of their occupancy, but rather are contractually inducted into the co-operative and begin participating in financial obligations of the co-operative on a monthly basis.  In most cases tenants can ‘sell’ their space to new tenants, either at a fixed price agreed upon when they joined or at a price determined by the market.  In this way, they are able to extract any equity built over their time as residents.  Because cooperatives do not generate ‘profit’ for the property owner and any surplus revenue generated is owned by the tenants, the cost of living in a co-operative is generally lower than either renting a similar space, and due to the inherent efficiencies of shared infrastructure, the cost of ‘buying’ a space in a co-operative is generally lower than the cost of ‘buying’ a stand-alone space of similar size.

Just prior to WWII, the federal government tried a program along these lines which failed due to inept management and criticism from private developers.  Despite this failure, the administrator of the program gave a convincing list of benefits of such an arrangement to congress (keep in mind this statement refers to a government-funded co-operative):

Advantages for Workers

1. Permits the building of substantial financial reserves for bad times through the elimination of down payments and high rents for housing.
2. Allows interchangeability of housing units to account for changing family conditions.
3. Enables a family to maintain a substantial investment in a “facility in which it will always have a personal need.”
4. Prevents individual foreclosures through cooperative risk sharing.
5. Group maintenance and repair is possible and can be accomplished at less cost while also maintaining a uniform community appearance.
6. During times of financial stress the program will permit large-scale refinancing and a more effective means for investment protection.

Advantages for the Government

1. Affords a better protection for the Government’s investment by reason of the occupants’ direct concern and interest in their homes.
2. Eliminates a sudden flood of housing in the real estate market at the conclusion of the emergency, because “occupants in the Mutual Housing program will have been selected on the basis of their probable permanence, high credit ratings..”
3. Improves the chance of recouping original investment by permitting the purchase of the project by its residents.
4. Creates a stable and responsible community with lower defense worker turn-over.
5. Creates a new and valuable pattern for home building.

Advantages for the Host Community

1. Acquires a group of carefully selected stable new citizens.
2. “Full participation of the residents of the project in community affairs and in the sharing of the community expenses.”^[18]

The only new idea I have to add to all this is that it might be interesting to consider a hybrid development/housing co-operative; an organization which both facilitates new buildings and administers them after they’ve been built.  On the housing side, such an organization would be structured based on existing models with one minor change; rents would be set slightly above expenses, slowly generating equity for the co-op over time.  As this equity grew, it could be used to develop more projects, which would bring in more members, accelerating the growth of the equity pool.  Members of the co-op could still sell their space and with it their accumulated equity in the pool, and by building new facilities members would have more choices if they decided to swap units with other co-op members.  The development side of the co-op could be structured like any other development corporation; it could hire architects and engineers and have paid developers on staff to identify potential new projects and facilitate the process.

Once such a system had reached a critical mass the incentives for everyone involved would be fairly aligned; new tenants would move in under the knowledge that they could exchange their space for another space in a large number of other facilities without the transaction costs of buying and selling a house, and the slightly increased rent would be understood to be a fair exchange for the existence of the facility in which they lived (without others paying into the equity fund the building wouldn’t have been built).  In the beginning the incentives aren’t as clearly aligned; the tenants of the first building would have to volunteer to pay more than was absolutely required to facilitate building another facility they might be uninterested in moving into.  On the other hand, increasing the member base of the co-operative could reduce each member’s risk exposure, making their investment more valuable.  The accumulated equity could also be used as collateral against future loans, so in many ways paying into the equity fund would be similar to paying off a mortgage.

In the context of the 21th century, there is another benefit worth pointing out; aligning the interests of the entity developing a building and the long-term users of a building encourages focusing long-term economic factors such as energy consumption.  Many systems which would produce net cost savings over at 30-year building lifecycle are not incorporated due to their increase up-front cost; eliminating the conflict of interest between the long-term users of a building and the short-term investors eliminates this inefficiency.

There are clearly a lot of details which would need to be considered, but as a general approach, a hybrid development/housing co-operative would seem to provide a new mechanism for building and occupying spaces.  This approach would encourage long-term thinking during the design phase, responsible stewardship of the building by its tenants, and provide a model of home occupancy which strikes a balance between the mobility of renting and the investment potential of buying.

The development ecosystem has become defined by a couple primary actors; clients, developers, investors, institutions, builders and regulatory agencies.  Decisions as to what should be built is made by these actors, then architects and engineers are commissioned to implement these decisions.  I see a lot of benefits to this ecosystem, it is good at responding to market forces, partitions risk to appropriate parties, and works well in the free-market economy.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t do a great job of addressing objectives which are not easily monetized; coherent communities, sustainable building practices, innovation and others.  My feeling is that to change the outcomes of development, we must first change the ecosystem in which development occurs.

The issue of how buildings come to be has been a frequent topic of conversation at happy hour, and I’d like to throw out a potential model which the office seems to be moving towards exploring; vertically integrating the development process.  Typical developments emerge out of the competing interests of the parties involved; developers and investors hope to quickly recoup their investment and make a profit, regulatory agencies (when they’re working well) attempt to safeguard the interests of the general public, builders are motivated to create something legally satisfying the building plans at the lowest possible cost, and architects try to build something they can be proud of (to publish in glossy magazines), and clients trust that the end product will meet their needs.  Vertically integrating this process is an attempt to eliminate as many parties as possible and to align the interests of the parties which remain.  Rather than partitioning these concerns, a vertically integrated development would combine them under the auspices of one or two entities.

Precedents for similar paradigms exist in various domains.  Employee-owned businesses have been tried by multiple companies, and the results have been encouraging.  Economically speaking, a typical owner/employee relationship is one in which the employee’s incentive is to do as little work as possible for a given salary, and the owner’s incentive is to pay as little as possible for a given amount of work.  Since enforcement is inherently difficult (and costly), these incentives inevitably lead to efficiency losses.  By distributing a portion of a businesses profits to the employees, the conflict of interest can be eliminated.

A similar situation exists for rental properties; the owner of the asset being rented is motivated to maintain and properly use the asset, while the renter has no stake in the long-term maintenance of the asset.  This applies to apartment renters failing to call for repairs until the problem becomes catastrophic, equipment renters not performing scheduled maintenance, or loan recipients mishandling financial assets and declaring bankruptcy. ¹

In essence, when various actors are forced to work together in a situation where their interests are in conflict, the end result will not be optimal for any of the actors; by aligning these interests the end result can only improve.

To my knowledge, there has not been a lot of discussion of what this means for architectural/urban development; changing the development paradigm is a first step.  From one perspective this means that architects become developers; we identify a project that we consider worth building, act as facilitators for financial investment, coordinate with regulatory agencies, and build the project.  This model eliminates the conflict of interest between architects and builders, architects and developers and developers and end clients.  Because such an approach is inherently speculative in nature, the end client is the community (or market, if you prefer thinking economically) at large.  Such an approach requires ‘architects’ to think in a different manner; it’s up to the architect to strike the correct balance between building costs and end value, and it’s the architects responsibility to understand the demographics, community, and environmental forces in which they are building.

The next step in exploring how the development process can be hacked is to consider what happens after the building is built; who ‘owns’ the building and how is the use of the building appropriated.  This topic deserves it’s own post so I’ll leave it at that.

CNC fabrication allows us to engage the materials firsthand at a 1:1 scale without having the craftsman in the middle. This allows for a direct feedback loop to exist between the maker and the medium. This iterative (rather than algorithmic or evolutionary) process engages the architect to the material and opens up a flow of feedback which one would be hard-pressed to write computer code for (see my comments to Ryan’s post).

Moreover, what is produced is now limited, not by templates, but rather by the designer’s intention and serves to free up making from the mass-standardization of industrial production. Instead we can engage materials and making in a process of prototyping and infinite customization.

In school, I had a fantasy of building software capable of parametrically defining building systems, then coupling that with evolutionary algorithms in which you could give the software a set of constraints (space sizes, adjacency relationships, demographic data, pedestrian flows over the site), and then the computer would spit out 100 potential designs for you to choose from.  Tools like Revit are starting to address the first part of my fantasy; parametric systems which can be manipulated easily.  This simplifies the process of representing a design, and my guess is that these tools will become more capable over time and the process of drawing, 3d modeling, engineering and detailing will slowly converge into a some computer interface that’s as much a coding environment as a digital drafting table.  My opinion is that this is good, but not all that exciting.  It’s like using a mechanical pencil rather than a wood one; the tools reduce the amount of redundancy in my life and allow me to focus on solving problems, but the problem at hand is fundamentally the same.

There are two possibilities that do interest me; the first is the possibility of network effects (aka the wikipedia effect, or the wisdom of crowds) and the second is the possibility of shifting the fundamental design process.

Newton’s famous statement about ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’¹ addresses what I’m calling network effects.  Knowledge tends to build on itself, and as the velocity of knowledge exchange increases, its production rate increases exponentially; I suspect the internet will be considered the most significant invention of the past millenia².  We’ve only started to see what the cheap exchange of information makes possible; Wikipedia, Linux, ArXiv, Youtube, blogging.  Architecture (as usual) has had little to say about this subject, probably due in part to the fact that architectural knowledge (should I say ‘skill’?) is much harder to express and record than encyclopedia articles.  Design is more a way of thinking than a set of facts, but there are still elements of architecture which can be categorized, recorded, quantitatively compared and iteratively improved.  What is missing is a structure for accomplishing this.  We need a way to represent the elements of architecture that can be represented and a structure for exploring and improving them.

Design in general takes place in a context of various constraints and objectives, these are what I’m referring to as the ‘fundamental design process’.  Computers change the constraints of the design problem by eliminating the difficulty of numerical analysis; it is no longer ‘difficult’ to generate structural members for free-form surfaces, or to evaluate the dynamic structural loads on geodesic domes, or to view the lighting conditions of a room before building it.  As I said, these capabilities are nice but not very exciting.  What is exciting to me is the process of developing these tools, the process of developing ways to capture new types of data in the design process.  Multiple competing constraints influence the design of any project; budget, materiality, site, aesthetics, form, etc.  The task of designing is generally regarded as a task of form-building – the architect attempts to synthesize a 3d form which optimizes the various constraints.  The cheapening of numerical analysis makes it possible to shift the burden of form-making from the imagination of the designer to a digital representation in the computer.  We can now quickly model shapes and view them from any angle.  To an extent, this allows the designer to shift his attention from form making to other concerns, and provides tools for investigating these concerns.

Charles Perrow published an interesting book called ‘Normal Accidents‘, which is an anthropological study of catastrophe.  He argues that all systems fail given enough time and that to reduce the frequency and severity of catasrophes we must address the systems which fail (rather than blaming actors in such systems, ie blame the people).  His basic argument is that there are two fundamental factors which influence the probability of a system failure: the complexity of the system and the interconnectedness of the system. Complexity here refers to non-linear causation chains; a complex system is one in which a cause cannot be clearly determined by observing an effect.  Interconnectedness refers to the degree of coordination required between components of a system.  He argues that as complexity and interconnectedness increase, the probability of failure must also increase.

A current example of this phenomena is the financial crisis; the financial markets over the past 20 years have become increasingly interconnected as a method of ‘spreading risk’.  The effect of distributing risk in this manner is that a failure anywhere in the system affects the system as a whole, making localized failure virtually impossible.  Further, the closed nature of the investment vehicles involved in the collapse (CDO‘s, CDS‘s, etc) have created a system which is extremely complex, as it is impossible to ascertain what the effect of a failure in one part of the economy will have on the rest of the economy.  Some have argued that the financial crisis was inevitable – I’m starting to think that might be true.

I mention this by way of introducing what I think must be a central aspect of any ‘recovery’; decentralized competition.  An example of what I’m referring to is the design architecture of the UNIX operating system.  UNIX was designed at Bell Labs in the late 60′s, and it’s underlying architecture is the foundation of most non-Windows operating systems today (Linux, OSX, BSD, etc).  The UNIX philosophy can be stated simply as “Small Pieces, Loosely Joined“.  UNIX was designed as a collection of small programs, each of which did a single task.  Each of these small pieces was designed to communicate with each other using standard interfaces which were well known in advance.  This allowed each component of the operating system to be built to do its specific task as well as possible, and to be replaced if a better implementation was built.

The result of this philosophy is a software ecosystem which encourages competition without sacrificing the network effect.  Individuals could contribute small pieces in a way which incrementally improved the whole, without being experts on the system as a whole.  This is the basic idea which underpins a large portion of the truly revolutionary aspects of the internet; wikis, open-source software development, collaborative news sites, weblogs, etc.

I believe that builders and developers (and banks, for that manner) can learn a great deal from the success of the internet and modern computer software – this is one of the largest lessons.  I believe that any strategy for revolutionizing our built environment must embrace this philosophy by building systems which are loosely coupled and limited in scope.

As a concrete counter-example I would point to the ‘New Urbanist’ movement.  I think many of the objectives of this movement are valid; increased density, a heterogenous mixture of building and use typologies are good ideas.  What new Urbanism lacks is decentralized control, and as a result ‘New Urbanist’ developments always feel artificial to me – more like Disney World than Europe.  My belief is that dense, heterogenous urban centers must be created by changing the underlying incentive structures, not by planning them from scratch.