[GBlist] Big thought du jour

[Sarah Holland/David Foley <hollandfoley@acadia.net>]

Just to "cause trouble...."
-----
Professor Howard Davis
from the Introduction to:


The Culture of Buildings, Oxford University Press

November 1999 
INTRODUCTION

Two Billion Buildings

In succession 
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth ...

T S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quartets

The Built World

There are between 1 and 2 billion buildings on the Earth. How did they come
to be, and how can the knowledge of their origins help us improve buildings
in the future?

This book argues that large-scale improvements to the built world do not
depend solely on the individual acts of architects and city planners;
instead, they depend largely on the gradual transformation of the building

culture - the coordinated system of knowledge, rules, and procedures that is
shared by people who participate in the building activity and that
determines the form buildings and cities take.

Only recently has systematic exploration of the nature of the built world
begun, along with the beginnings of a general understanding of just how it
comes to be the way it is. We understand quite a bit about various
components of this world, taken individually - about architectural styles,
or the prices of building materials, or the history of zoning regulation, or
the ways in which building plans have evolved hand in hand with social life,
or how the craft economy was replaced by modern manufacturing, or the role
building developers play in the emergence of land-use patterns.

What is lacking is a general framework of thought in which all of these
things are related - a framework in which the process of building production
as a
whole is understood in terms of the various components that make it up. Such
a framework is needed, and not only from an academic point of view The built
world is not in very good shape, and the responsibility for this situation
cannot be laid at the hand of any one profession. It is counterproductive to
lay blame primarily, on architects, or banks, or an uneducated public, or
any one sector of society. Architects are right when they say that the arye
at the mercy of building codes and client committees and have no time to do
a good job within available fees. Builders are right when they say that
architects leave too much out of drawings. Ordinary citizens are right when
they complain about lifeless cities and the lack of affordable housing.
Building officials are right when they are strict in their enforcement of
codes. Insurance companies are right when they exert pressure on the
building codes. Bankers are right when they base their lending decisions on
appraisers, who are right in the way they base their appraisals on the
current market. Architectural educators are right in their criticisms of the
profession, and the profession is right in its criticism of the schools.



Everyone one is "right yet the built environment does not really get better.
It satisfies the quantifiable and separate needs of individual institutions,
but as many people have pointed out, much of it is fragmented, lacking in
humanity, without real depth of feeling. The widespread acknowledgment of
these problems makes it critical to look at the history, of their cultural
and institutional sources. The idea that increased knowledge about the
building culture might lead to the improvement of the built world is the
central purpose of this book.

The Culture of Building

The culture of building is the coordinated system of knowledge, rules,
procedures, and habits that surrounds the building process in a given place
and time. 

The building culture is responsible for the character and formation of the
collection of everyday buildings, In addition to individual, well-known
buildings, at a given time and place. This culture is a collective
phenomenon: thousands of different buildings are produced through shared
processes held together by shared knowledge- what to build and also of how
to build-rather than through individual acts of creation.

Within a building culture, construction is rarely a solitary act, isolated
from the material, social, and aesthetic world around it. A building's
construction is almost always embedded in a recognizable web of human
relationships between many participants: contractors, craftspeople, clients,
building users, architects, building officials, bankers, materials
suppliers, surveyors, building appraisers, real estate brokers,
manufacturers. This web of relationships, in turn, is characterized by the
predictable ways people carry out their jobs and the predictable ways they
deal with each other.

As in any culture, the actions of members of the building culture are guided
by a relatively small number of rule systems and habits of belief and
behavior. These define the culture itself. The participants in the building
process share common understandings that may be only partly understood by
the larger culture outside them. But at the same time, the building culture
is a part of the larger world, embedded in it, and the two worlds share
ideas, business practices, attitudes about buildings and the environment,
and forms of education and training.

The product of the building culture is the built world as a whole-the world
of houses and warehouses, churches and libraries, schools and factories,
barns and shops, the monumental and the everyday, the imported and the
vernacular, the famous and the unknown. This world, much larger than the
world with which architects usually concern themselves but intimately tied
to it, is what makes up people's everyday experience of buildings and
towns-and vast quantities of money and resources are used toward its
construction.

-- 
Holland & Foley Building Design L.L.C.
232 Beech Hill Rd.
Northport, Maine 04849 USA
p: (207) 338-9869 f: (207) 338-9859 e: hollandfoley@acadia.net


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