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Bricks and Mortar Masters

June 20, 2014

I remember watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time and feeling that slow but steady building of dread as Hal, in his even and increasingly creepy voice, began to draw his digital noose tighter and tighter around the crew of Discovery One until a sole survivor is left. There is much to be said about what has become one of the most influential films of all time. I only want to say that the idea of technology meeting us directly as Hal does the crew is our typical vision of how what we make might indeed begin to try to make something of us. While we worry about robots taking over the world (one of my favourite genres—I commend you to the very aptly titled Robopocalypse if you need a summer read and perhaps sometime in the future a summer movie to watch if Spielberg can get the money together), we would be as well served to worry about how the design of our buildings, neighbourhoods and cities shapes the way we interact. We think less often about how other forms of technology play their shaping role among us. Some of those very non-Hal agents that we live with are the offices, houses, schools, and other buildings arranged across the landscapes of our communities and cities. Here is a proposal: What if we thought of our buildings as part of the population of our lives? I'm not suggesting they are alive in the way that Hal was (though Robopocalypse shows how that might happen). Christopher Alexander has estimated (Vol. 2 of his remarkable The Nature of Order) that there may be about 2 billion buildings in the world. If we round off human population to 7 billion, then there are roughly four people per building. With a 50-100 year renewal, we need to build about 30 million a year to keep up. Alexander points out that with 500,000 architects globally, each would have to build 60 per year. That is of course very interesting in itself and reflects that most buildings are not designed by architects. But I digress. We have among us, around us, between us, a population of agents that is very numerous indeed. Spaces within and between buildings define significant aspects of our experiences as a human civilization. How much can we actually shape our space? Very often, very little. Most of us are lucky if we can personalize our workspace or decorate a room or two in our homes the way we like. But, then, how much does space influence socialization? Don't we socialize in spite of space? We just find a way, a place. Certainly that is true. But we might consider what William Whyte showed us in 1979 via his study of how we humans use plazas in cities. His “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” is highly instructive and often very humourous (I want to thank Greg Spencer (Munk School) for reminding me in a very recent coffee conversation that the film remains worth watching). I don’t think that buildings boss us around completely, but the ways we design space, right down to some rather small details, are clearly active agents in shaping our human lives. The play area that looks like a construction site featured early in the film is hilarious—we would never allow it today with our McPadded and legally sanctioned safe (translate: boring) playgrounds. Some of Whyte's insights are that people sit where there are places to sit. If there is no seating in a plaza, there is much less socializing. They calculated it as 1 sitting place for every 30 square feet of plaza. It was also observed that socially dense areas get denser, we like the comfort of a herd, even if we don’t know the people in it. We also like corners, ledges, double wide benches and moveable chairs, even if we move them in weirdly random ways, we just want to be able to tweak a space before we commit. There are many other insights and significant amounts of other research have run down the path of humans and our relationship to spaces, I just want to say that our buildings are not in total control but they are far from non-factors in our efforts to build human connections and deepen community. In his book, The Nature of Place, Avi Friedman adds his own insight about needing human places to eat, to meet, to read and to pass the time. When the shaping of those spaces comes from large organizational entities like planning departments, courts, or government regulation, it is well worth asking if those larger processes enable us to adequately assert what we need together rather than just what the codes and structures need. Friedman notes that the first set of comprehensive zoning bylaws enacted in Canada occurred in Kitchener, ON, in 1924 under the guidance of Thomas Adams and Horace Seymour. How have such embracing directives changed the dynamic between our human societies and the society of buildings and spaces that structure our interactions? A great, deal and in rather complex ways, I would suggest. A final anecdote. JG Ballard wrote a novel in the 1970s called Concrete Island which I recently read. The premise is that a successful architect goes off the road in his Jaguar and ends up stranded in the space created by three large highway structures. Once there, the isolation enforced by what has been built profoundly changes the shape of Maitland’s life. Though passive in one sense, in another he becomes the Robinson Crusoe of car-saturated modernity. The space was far from neutral, even if it was not exactly fully in control of what happens to Maitland and can’t be held responsible in the way a human agent might. So, while our buildings may not be the boss of us, we would do well to attend to the role of our 2 billion silent citizens who do play a role in shaping who and what we are.