So the blogosphere is abuzz with some early entries to the Re:Burbia competition, and I thought I’d take this occasion to explain why I personally had no interest in the competition.  For anyone not familiar with the competition, the brief states “In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution and we want you to create the vision!”.  My basic response to this question is that we don’t redirect these existing spaces to promote all those wonderful things; we redirect the people living in those spaces to to our existing urban centers.

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.

It looks like there was an interesting late submission to the Re:Vision Dallas competition by Little Diversified Architectural Consulting, which seems to address a lot of the ideas we were hoping to integrate into our own proposal; there’s extensive green space, an attempt to create a diversity of experience and address the issue of verticality, and a decent amount of systems thinking.  They seem to be using fairly well-understood systems (greywater treatment, PV panels, green roofs etc), but it’s at least nice to see more people presenting these elements as a central aspect of a design proposal.

More eye candy after the break

Contributing to an ongoing conversation in the office, this post relates to Ryan’s comments about a new development paradigm as well as some of our thinking developed for the Dallas Re:vision competition.

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.

I posted earlier about the development process, trying to express some ideas that have been floating around the office regarding how buildings are financed, designed, and built.  What was lacking from that post was any consideration of what happens once the building has been built.  As builders, architects tend to think of buildings as artifacts, objects to be photographed and admired.  This approach ignores the reality that architecture is an element in the dynamic process of human society.

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.

One of the biggest shocks I had after graduating from architecture school and working in an office was that architects don’t generally work at the same scale as we’re trained to in school.  My design eduction emphasized creatively approaching a site and considering what mix of uses would be appropriate, investigating demographic trends, exploring how architecture can influence cultural development, and proposing new types of build environments.  It quickly became clear that most architectural firms do little or none of that; they are hired essentially to provide window-dressing for a project which is dictated primarily by either a developer’s market analysis or an institution’s project brief.  While there are plenty of counter-examples, the majority of buildings seem to be built in a system in which the architect is not the primary decision-maker as to what should be built.

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.

In response to Ryan’s comments below, I will take the second part of his question as he dealt with the first. I come down squarely on the side of CNC production, but I think the interesting bit is not what we produce, but how we produce it.

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.

Tom, Agustina and I had an interesting conversation over beers the other night about the emerging role of computers in the design and construction process.  To my mind two main questions emerged: what is a useful role for computation in the design process and how does architecture respond to the impact of CNC manufacturing processes on the constraints imposed on the builder.  These are both very expansive topics, so I’ll stick to the first.

After reading and discussing Tom’s post, I thought I’d throw out some more ideas.  I think the biggest challenge to start with is developing a coherent message about how we think the country should go about addressing the ‘green revolution’

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.