Subject Matters I by John J. Parman

Subject Matters I

John J. Parman

Jointly published by

Pallas Bookstore & Gallery / @_p_a_l_l_a_s_

Contents Foreword .................................................................................. Opener On Slow (2007) .................................................................................... 1 Coda (2007) ........................................................................................ 6 On Slow (2006)....................................................................................8 On Slow (2009)...................................................................................13 On housing production (1976) .......................................................... 21 On housing production (2019) .......................................................... 37 On participatory design (1978) .......................................................... 58 On participatory design (2019) .......................................................... 65 On architectural research (1984) ....................................................... 73 Author profile.................................................................................... 90

Foreword Subject Matters includes my own work and work written with

others, most of it for publication. At least one of the journals has disappeared, while updates to websites disrupted some archives. Even when an article can be accessed, you often need an academic affiliation to do so without paying exorbitantly just to read it. All of this spurred me to put this together. In doing so, I haven't hesitated to edit in some cases. I'm an editor, after all, so that impulse is always there. But I've tried not to rewrite my own history as a writer: if an article made predictions that didn't pan out, I let them stand. Elizabeth Snowden, founder of the Pallas Bookstore & Gallery in San Francisco and my partner in our editorial studio, helped bring this and other books I've produced to life by her willingness to put them on display. Tipping my hat to Pallas, I've used my photocollages as illustrations. Those wanting topic-appropriate images can readily find them on the web. In the fall of 1972, I met Richard Bender. He became my advisor, my sponsor, and ultimately my writing partner. A good deal of what I've written over these nearly 50 years had him as coauthor and often as instigator, prodding me to work on things he occasioned. It is therefore with true gratitude that I dedicate this series to him.

On Slow (2007): Not too slow, not too smart Can we “slow” the growth of San Francisco’s metropolitan region without stopping it? By Slow, we refer to the Slow Food movement and its CittaSlow offshoot, especially in their emphasis on the value and pleasures of regional difference. “Without stopping it” is to acknowledge the region’s projected growth. Our title’s smart refers to smart growth—livable is another favored adjective, both endorsing density without always asking what it means in practice. Like the Buddha, we seek a middle way between Slow and smart that aims at enjoyment and conviviality. Like the Californians we’ve both become, we want to have our cake and eat it, too. The problem space Between 2007 and 2030, the nine counties that make up the Bay Region will grow in population from 7.2 million to 8.7 million people, a net gain of about 1.5 million people.1 Will these newcomers be housed within the 700,000 acres of currently developed land, about 15.5% of the region’s total land area of 4.5 million acres? Or will they continue to erode the undeveloped balance, reducing still further the land available for farming, recreation, wildlife, and the maintenance of the region’s ecosystem? (No small matter, as it includes much of the river delta that supplies many California cities with water—an area for which substantial low-density residential development has been proposed.2) This is half of the problem; the other half has to do with the density of development required within the region’s already developed areas simply to maintain their current boundaries. (Ideally, it would be possible to pull them in, especially where low-density sprawl has penetrated mindlessly into farmland or the ecosystem.) Greenbelt Alliance and others have tried to determine what density would be required, but this analysis does not fully consider the qualitative side of the problem: what increases in density would actually mean for a neighborhood in human, experiential terms.3 So, the “problem space” that the region poses is how to accommodate future growth in ways that preserve and even reclaim open space, yet do so in ways that are not just “sound” in terms of

current planning dogma (e.g., “dense, compact, and transit-served”), but also create appropriate settings for a humane and enjoyable life as this is broadly understood by those who live and work in its towns and cities. In framing it in this way, we want to emphasize that the future of the region must be thought of holistically, seeing open space preservation and fine-grained development as connected ideas, both of which point to the pleasure and prosperity that the region can offer its residents. Greenbelt Alliance’s prescription Focused on preserving open land, Greenbelt Alliance has formulated a program that is widely accepted by other policyshaping organizations in the region. Here is the gist: Growth boundaries: cities, towns, and other communities in the region should agree to establish inviolable boundaries for development. Lands falling outside them (but within their jurisdiction) are to be left as open space, whether under private or public ownership. Walkable urbanism: to accommodate future growth, cities and towns should require a higher density of development, especially around transit (train and light rail stations) and transit corridors (arterials served by buses). Even when transit is not yet in place, patterns of development should anticipate it by favoring compactness and higher density.

Opposition to this program came initially from owners of large land parcels that fell outside of the growth boundaries established on the urban edge. Elections in these communities often feature ballot measures aimed at creating exceptions for specific parcels. Opposition is also coming from some of the affected urban neighborhoods. The Association of Bay Area Governments sets goals for housing development in the region that, if disregarded, can theoretically impact a city’s ability to tap regional grants for affordable housing and other purposes. In Berkeley, for example, meeting the goal would require the construction of 14 16-story housing towers in its downtown core, according to the city’s planning staff. The state has also mandated development “bonuses” that increase multiunit housing density in a way that overrides local zoning.

Density and its enemies So. density is emerging as a major point of contention in the region. In the urban core, it is focused on absolute density—height and bulk—and how it contributes to or detracts from the community around it. In urban neighborhoods, the question of impact is heightened. Style, use, ownership, and a desire to preserve the existing fabric figure in the debates about each and every project. In the newer suburbs, intensification of established areas to preserve greenspace vies with efforts to carve out new territory for office campuses and large single-family home developments. Especially in cities and their older suburbs, the debate about density comes down to two positions: that it’s good because it provides affordable housing and prevents sprawl; or that it’s bad because it undermines a community’s existing character (and, by implication, its property values: Berkeley was extensively downzoned in the 1970s by residential real estate interests, representing middle- and upper-middle-class owners). In recent years, these positions have hardened, with each side refusing to acknowledge the other. Adding density is “entirely good” and preservationists “almost always wrong” (about the historic merits of what they try to preserve) and vice versa. This deadlocked situation has created a vacuum that developers and politicians have not failed to fill and exploit. Fear of overdevelopment has led to constant skirmishes in Berkeley around the issues of growth and density. Measure P, put on the ballot by petition, sought to limit the height of new construction in the city. A more recent measure sought to maintain a current, restrictive landmarks ordinance. Both measures failed, but the second lost by a much smaller margin. As in other U.S. cities, San Francisco and Berkeley have politicized development so that almost every project of any size has to be reviewed in a way that stretches out the entitlements process inordinately and makes the owner or developer liable to a variety of political pressures. The time and money involved favor politicallyconnected developers with the deep pockets needed to get through it. This creates a “duopoly” that links their interests with their political gatekeepers. It produces projects of a scale and nature at odds with their surroundings and even with the city itself as a place with a unique character—oversized and overly prepackaged. Prewar

developers left room for demotic content in their projects, not just in the retail mix, but also in the ways that “communal” open space was provided and used. In the grip of the duopoly, we have lost this art. Our cities fail to encourage ordinary people to participate in their reshaping over time. There’s no flux, and no real life. Slow in the Bay Region The Slow Movement has tremendous resonance in the Bay Area, where a love of good food and wine has led to a renaissance in local organic farms catering to food halls and farmers’ markets. The wineries started this, moving from purely domestic mass products to high-end “appellation” wines that compete globally for prizes and buyers. Chefs like Alice Waters, one of Slow Food’s international vice-presidents, have extended this by creating a regional cuisine based on the availability of locally grown, seasonal ingredients. Even the Berkeley public schools have now embraced it, with the chef Ann Cooper running its kitchens. The Slow Movement can seem like something from The Theory of the Leisure Class, yet its manifesto has a commonsensical truth. Whether we are thinking of food or city life, the pleasures of living well are worth defending in the face of external forces, not least our own ignorance and negligence. A metropolis like ours would benefit from Slow thinking, but not too slow. Efforts to apply the Slow Food perspective to urban life began in small towns in Tuscany, worried about the impact of tourism and development. The CittaSlow (CitySlow) offshoot that resulted limits itself to “cities” of no more than 50,000 residents. This places it below the threshold of Berkeley, which has about 110,000 residents. It ignores the fact that cities like San Francisco are made up of districts and neighborhoods that are not so different in size or in the pressures they face from the Italian hill towns whose citizens first penned Cittaslow’s manifesto 18 years ago. Resisting the forces of Fast Preserving the quality of urban life means accommodating growth in sustainable ways. This is the other side of Slow. In urging local producers to find global markets, Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini acknowledged that growth can be positive, an indication of quality and urbanity. This is a crucial distinction. Folco Portinari’s Slow

Food manifesto, written in 1989, attacked speed rather than growth as the enemy of “a better future.” The 20th century, he wrote, that “began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model.” He asserted that “real culture is about developing taste rather than demeaning it,” arguing for “a firm defense of material pleasure” as “the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life” that “in the name of productivity has changed our way of being and threatens our environment.”4 The forces arrayed against the quality of our urban life are also Fast, and “smart” development is too often part of it—as in our willingness to accept bad design if it hits a density target. And nogrowth is smart growth’s inevitable twin, locked in a battle that produces mediocrity and sameness. Just as we oppose Fast in this sense, we oppose a Slow that clings without reflection to what exists. Slow is not the same as No. Growth is desirable if it enables a region to remain “alive,” and to “rediscover the flavors and savors” (quoting Portinari) that make it what it is. That this also requires pruning and paring has to be faced as part of this active cultivation. There are signs of change. Politically-connected architects who regularly secured commissions in San Francisco based on their ability to push projects through the entitlements process are finding that they’ve lost their touch. Much better architects are showing that pleasure is affordable, and that not every new building has to cater to empty-nest baby boomers returning from the suburbs. If a proper balance can be restored between the city as a looser framework for development and its citizens as more active city makers, then life will be more pleasurable and the region will be better protected. Notes: 1. At Risk: The Bay Area Greenbelt, 2006 edition, Greenbelt Alliance, 2006, pp. 2-3. 2. See Jane Wolff, Delta Primer, William Stout, 2003. 3. Smart Infill, Greenbelt Alliance, 2008, also the source for my "gist." 4. The quotes are from Fabio Parasecoli, “Postrevolutionary Chowhounds,” Gastronomica. Summer 2003. Cittaslow’s founding charter is in English on the Cittaslow UK website. Also see Paul L. Knox, “Creating Ordinary Places: Slow Cities in a Fast World,” Journal of Urban Design, February 2005.

Coda: Our Slow Bay manifesto (2007) Here is a first draft of a manifesto for a Slow Bay Region that affords urbanity and pleasure while still accommodating the growth in population that experts are projecting. Create boundaries for density, not just growth We need to cut through the current impasse by agreeing on what we mean by density in each and every area where development can still occur. Density is not just an abstraction; it has to serve communities and support their existing residents as well as new ones. There’s nothing wrong with establishing goals for density, but they have to contribute in clear and fundamental ways to the experiential qualities that make each place what it is (or what it could be). Make urbanity count We need a robust vision of the region’s urbanity that takes lessons from its rich culture of food and wine, not shrinking from creativity, experimentation, and the demotic element that challenges and changes tastes, and is unafraid of outside influences—knowing that the region will absorb them and make them its own. Then we need to put this vision first. Restore the demotic; end the duopoly The tendency of Bay Regional cities to politicize development at almost every scale, making owners and leaseholders jump through endless hoops, is depriving us of the spontaneous contributions of individuals, operating within rules that are broad enough to allow creative interpretation. It makes for a duopoly that favors large projects that are shaped by “global” assumptions about market preferences, and that attract only the biggest players. There are exceptions, but this is too much the norm. See the region as a whole Understanding the region holistically, especially as an ecosystem, would immediately put a halt to insanities like the current pressure to develop the Delta, one of California’s main sources of fresh water, as single-family housing. It would encourage us to invest much more

in transit and much less in freeways, and to value open land like our first-born. Honor our real traditions The historic patterns of the region have favored a humane density in urban development coupled with the preservation of the natural landscape. They have always acted as a brake to heedless sprawl, and making them the law of the land would solve a lot of problems. Put our money where our mouth is Americans tend to wait until the future they dreaded arrives before dealing with it. We have to break this habit. The best way to do so is to fall in love again with a region that, for many of us, captured our hearts when we first set eyes on it, savored its delicious food and wine, and walked its captivating streets. Something this beautiful demands our indulgence, our generosity, and our commitment. We know how to treat it well, and yet we have so often failed to do so. It’s time to change. This essay and its coda were written with Richard Bender for the Forms in the City/Spaces in the Metropolis Conference, Rome, Italy, 2-3 April 2007, and published in Rassegna di Architettura e Urbanistica no. 126, September– December 2007, pp. 50–55.

On Slow (2006): The pleasures of the demotic city By demotic I mean arising from the individual, everyday actions of ordinary people, motivated by their immediate needs and circumstances and responding intuitively and sometimes creatively to the traditions and patterns of the society in which they find themselves. The pleasures that a city offers reflect both the nature and administration of its underlying framework and the tastes and initiatives of its citizens. They also reflect the relative power and influence of these two realms. Ideally, each is a check to the excesses of the other—and the cityscape is a useful indicator of where this balance stands. (By cityscape, I mean everything that pedestrians can reasonably expect to take in as they walk, including the parts of buildings in public view, the activities they house that are publicly accessible, the adjoining public and semi-public open spaces.) A 2006 review1 by the New York Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff discusses one aspect of this. In doing so, he shows how this demotic realm has become a tug-of-war between these two interests, polis and demos. Atlantic Yards’ public settings In his critique of the proposed redevelopment of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, Ouroussoff commented on the weaknesses of its public settings. He bemoaned the city’s abdication of its role as their steward and sponsor, and noted how the architect, Frank Gehry, turned public courtyards into private enclaves, embedded in the complex’s larger mass. This, Ouroussoff wrote, reflects Gehry’s professional “coming of age…during the planning debates of the 1970s, when architects were dismantling the planning formulas of late Modernism in favor of dense urban villages.” Since then, “a growing number of architects, mostly European, have challenged that approach. Rather than splitting sprawling developments into more intimate spaces, they deliberately focus on the collision between the two: between the heroic scale of urban infrastructure and the fine-grained texture of the home.” Ouroussoff speculated that architects of this stripe “might have chosen to create a dialogue between the public zones at ground level” and elements of the

surrounding city. He lamented the decision by Bruce Ratner, Atlantic Yards’ developer, not to implement—on grounds of cost—a proposal to cap the roof of the project’s basketball arena with a public garden that “seemingly floating in the skyline, might have evolved into one of New York’s most original public spaces.” He added that “such decisions could well determine whether Atlantic Yards will feel like a privileged enclave or belong to the community as a whole. One imagines what might have been possible if the city had the resources or the will to support such a vision.” To me, a shift in power from the developer to the city does not fundamentally change the duopoly they both enjoy over projects of this scale. And isn’t this scale itself really the inevitable result of that circumstance? To justify an investment that includes the built-in political diversions that are the developer’s price of entry and the politicians’ main motivation requires a large, intensively redeveloped site. Yet we know from bitter experience how often this formula disappoints. The devil’s bargain that these projects represent fatally compromises the larger community’s ability to shape and influence the cityscape over time. We experience this here, too, and our cities are less pleasurable in consequence. Paved with good intentions In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek noted that socialist regimes always opt for the case-by-case regulation of development, rather than allowing it to be based on rule of law. He argued that the hegemony of political power that characterizes socialist regimes inevitably breeds corruption. The fact that the money doesn’t directly change hands here doesn’t make its effects any less corrosive. Thanks to case-by-case regulation, an apparatus of scrutiny is now in place in San Francisco that bottlenecks the flow of projects and shifts the owner’s focus primarily to securing entitlements. This has proven to be destructive to the city’s urbanity. While the interest in better design quality shown recently by San Francisco’s Mayor and Planning Director is welcome, it is meaningless without a concomitant willingness to loosen the grip of political power. That means limiting case-by-case assessment and restoring rule of law and the reasonable use of precedent.

In his final book, The Fatal Conceit, Hayek pointed to the traditions and patterns that are the real basis of society. A fallacy of socialism is its belief that laws and institutions are the result of conscious design. They are not, he argues; society is self-organizing, and traditions and patterns persist because they are robust in an evolutionary sense. This is not to say that “design” is absent, but rather that society in all its aspects is the unfolding outcome of different contributions, some from above, many more from below. This flow of ideas from every quarter is the source of the demotic city’s pleasures. The duopoly of power that gives us an Atlantic Yards and its equivalents here produces behemoths, mostly, that even when phased lack the vitality that cities built by other means usually manage to achieve. Ironically, a single owner—Tokyo’s Minoru Mori comes to mind—has more incentive than a duopoly to loosen the frame initially and then work like hell to keep it interesting. In San Francisco, classic build-and-sell developers of large projects have tended toward bulkiness and mediocrity. The Port and Airport, both monopolies, have done better with projects of this scale. True public-private partnerships, like Mission Bay and Yerba Buena Center, have shown mixed results. With culture in the mix, Yerba Buena Center has a better middle block than Mission Bay has a UCSF research campus. Given the decades and millions of dollars expended on these different projects, the results are mixed. There has to be a better way to approach the city’s development. Restoring the virtuous circle In an article in the Financial Times, the food writer Philippa Davenport commented on the “virtuous circle of producers, chefs, and public” she found in San Francisco. She cited the Ferry Building—its shops, restaurants, and farmers’ markets—as exemplifying a region in which city and countryside have made a common cause of food. “The quality, the imagination, and the innovation are breathtaking,” she wrote.2 How is it that the food of northern California is so widely and generously celebrated, but contemporary placemaking here is not? Restaurants and markets, chefs, farmers, and the public have managed to join forces around this source of daily pleasure, raising it to a global standard, but our buildings and settings have not experienced a comparable

transformation. There are instances when everyone rallies round and the results are good, but urbanity is mostly missing in action. Anyone who has seen Ostia Antico outside of Rome knows that the press of in-migration to the capital region (as we would call it now) at the height of Roman power led to an urban density—fivestory walkups—that looks familiar. That same pressure led to real efforts to achieve a level of public sanitation that is recognizably modern, and to the aqueducts and other monuments of infrastructure. Like the Spanish in reference to their American colonies, the Romans had a clear, almost archetypal sense of what a city should be. One function of the Roman state was to provide this frame, but Roman citizens had a corresponding obligation to defend and enliven it. The whole arc of Roman life was focused on this symbiotic relationship, which posited an active, socially mobile, and above all pleasure-loving existence, rooted in family, friends, the city, and the land. We have no comparably demotic impulse to create a framework that orders the city and yet encourages, even demands that its citizens fill it in—a constant flux of activity within that greater whole. This happens here and there, but it is not yet a guiding idea that would rebalance things. So, how can we begin to realize it in San Francisco? We cook and garden, watching things change from this to that to something else, seeing the rich variation that tradition affords and how chance and even error can prod a creative response. Part of the pleasure a city affords is its ability to allow for this. It’s what gives the city’s parts and pieces their authenticity, and it argues for a looser frame and for agreements on placemaking that make room for the demotic, establishing patterns that ordinary citizens can activate, both as their right and as a vitally necessary role. We need a looser frame because there are limits to what that frame can do. So much of what is bad in recent development flows from the hubris of politicians and their planners about what can actually be achieved through regulation. However well-intentioned, what officials think about the design of an entry or of fenestration is really just their opinions, matters of individual taste. That’s not really their business. We expect the city to inspect the food and the kitchens of our restaurants, but not to choose the restaurant’s cuisine or dictate our choices from the menu. Placemaking is no different.

Allowing for a demotic impulse is a way of “cultivating” the cityscape through its buildings and other elements. The roof terraces and substantial balconies of Rome’s historic core create a secondary order of variation that brings the public realm alive and reconnects people to nature, even in the heart of the city. This is an aspect of green design that has gone missing here in new development: the deliberate and fertile expression of human habitation. At Tokyo’s Ark Hills complex, tenants and neighbors pay for the privilege of tending the gardens that are this private development’s public realm. This is a reasonable transaction in a crowded city—one that gives Ark Hills such beauty as it has. A city is like a river, but we’ve turned ours into a glacier. Too much is fixed that should really be the city’s demotic flux. In The Nature of Order, Christopher Alexander suggests the presence of life as the way to gauge the rightness of things. That measure of vitality also speaks to the demotic nature of much of the pleasure that a city gives us. We need more of it here. Notes: 1. Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Skyline for Sale,” New York Times, June 4, 2006. He uses the term “late Modernism” here to describe the modernism of the 1970s, but this has also been used to describe Modernism’s revival in the late 1990s. So, which is it? Perhaps we should rename the latter “neo-modernism” or even “modernist revival.” 2. Philippa Davenport, “America’s golden state enjoys its salad daze,” Financial Times, July 1/2, 2006. Written for the “Pleasure” issue of _line, fall 2006.

On Slow (2009): Urban terroir Terroir refers to the conditions of terrain and microclimate in winegrowing regions and, more specifically, within a given vineyard. It takes in those attributes of place that influence the grapes and thus the wine. Terroir is an evolving context, subject to human intervention and to the vicissitudes of nature in a larger sense. It evolves, but the pace of evolution of its different elements can vary radically. As a mix of the found and the cultivated, terroir can be improved, revived, diminished, and even destroyed. We use words like structure, scale, density, and fabric to describe the urban context, but these are all elements of something larger. By calling this “something larger” terroir, we raise the possibility of cultivation, but against a deeper background—the regional ecosystem in which a city is situated. Terroir could also be said to be that part of nature we can influence. Thus, its boundaries are potentially vast. Exurbia, the embodiment of our economically and culturally divided society, is also a byproduct of a cultivation strategy that treats social displacement in its different forms as an externality. The question of who cultivates, and why, is as legitimate for city making as it is for farming, fishing, or forestry. Reclaiming terroir In The Architecture of the City, Aldo Rossi writes of scale that “it is conceivable that a change in scale modified an urban artifact in some way; but it does not change its quality.” Citing the urban geographer Richard Ratcliff, he adds, “To reduce metropolitan problems to problems of scale means to ignore…the actual structure of the city and its conditions of evolution.”1 Rossi then quotes the critic Giuseppe Samonà, writing in the mid-1960s: It is absolutely out of the question, in my opinion, to nurture any idea of gigantic spatial parameters. In truth, we find ourselves, as at all times, in a situation that, from a general point of view, presents man and his space in well-balanced proportion, and in a relationship analogous to that of the ancients, except that in today’s relationship all the spatial measures are greater than were the more fixed ones of fifty years ago.2

The key words here are "quality," "well-balanced proportion," and "relationship." To be avoided are “gigantic spatial parameters” which ignore or traduce the relationship between “man and his space.” Terroir posits human cultivation, and cultivation in an urban sense is how a city becomes “our space.” In cultivating our urban terroir, we address and value the relationship itself. Whatever furthers it—scale, for example—becomes part of the terroir, cultivated both for its own sake and for what it can contribute to the outcomes we desire to achieve and also to sustain. Sustainability is intrinsic to terroir, one reason why we cultivate it. Structure and scale (for example) lack this connotation. They can be dead, to use Christopher Alexander’s apt word for it; terroir is organic, alive."3 What gives terroir efficacy compared to words like density or fabric is that it explicitly takes in humanity and nature, so we cannot treat it as a thing unmoored from both. Resisting gigantism Samonà cautions us that scale is necessarily a human scale, or gigantism may result. In a different context, Wallace Stegner described his talkative aunt. Finally noticing the huge rock formation rising dead ahead of them—they were in a car—she was rendered speechless, unable to wrap her mind around it. “You have to get used to an inhuman scale,” Stegner wrote.4 Cities can also have a scale that diminishes the possibility of a human relationship. If we build canyons that become wind tunnels, we have to reclaim the affected streets and plazas, and bring them back to life. If every act of building has the potential to further the human relationship, then gigantism is really an egotism that disregards that possibility. As this suggests, gigantism flows from a willful or mindless ignorance with respect to terroir. Preservationists that reflexively resist higher-density development, privileging their own neighborhoods over the region’s remaining open space, show a similar egotism, yet their fears of gigantism seem justified by experience. 5 Why is it that we get gigantism much more often than we get urbanity? One could say, borrowing from Jean-François Lyotard, that the “grand narrative” of regional open space preservation, so well accepted by Bay Area opinion makers, has become a pretext for the “soft terrorism” of Smart Growth. The results fall right in line

with Lyotard’s now 30-year-old critique: “On the one hand, the system can only function by reducing complexity, and on the other, it must induce the adaptation of individual aspirations to its own ends. The reduction in complexity is required to maintain the system’s power capability.”6 This power capability is very much in place. Reforming it doesn’t mean streamlining the process—we tried that under former Mayor Willie Brown—but taking it out of the hands of politicians, restoring consensus and rule of law, yet doing so as postmodernists, accepting nuance and difference. Rethinking tradition Entire swaths of San Francisco—neighborhoods we know and love—were built based on a shared understanding of the city’s terroir. The introduction of taller, more massive buildings, first in the financial district and then in lower-density industrial areas to the north and south, ended that consensus. Especially south of Market, the results are mixed. Yet there are a growing number of examples of higher-density projects that achieve the kind of urbanity that we associate with the best of the city’s established districts. Certain architects stand out in their ability to do this across a range of building types and scales, and their work in the city is worth studying as potential precedents.7 The best new tall buildings around the city’s Mission Street corridor make room for the people on the ground. These aren’t lifeless plazas, either. They’re run just as well as they’re designed, and their owners clearly get that a civic gesture not only buys them constant goodwill, but makes their properties stand out from the competition. The best mid-sized developments create open space and through-block porosity, add balconies that people really use, and vary the height and shape of the buildings and their elements to avoid a monolithic look that substitutes groundscraper for blocky highrise. Rethinking cultivation Pattern books were part of a consensus about city form at different levels that made the rule of law in development possible. Although pattern books posited specific designs, they were liberally interpreted by individual builders. More importantly, they reflected a shared understanding of how neighborhoods took shape, with the

underlying house pattern reflecting the way the individual blocks were divided up In A Pattern Language,8 Alexander and his collaborators documented the elements that make everyday life worth living. It may be timely to take their work further—to update the patterns that supported the urbanity of our cities through the early postwar decades, but then fell into disuse as the desire for a higher density took hold. We have never really replaced these older patterns, which could be tailored to each and every block. Without them, we are cast adrift in the politicized world of case by case, and cultivation becomes a shouting match. With them, city making can shift back to what it was for eons: a widely-shared human activity.9 The cultivation of urban terroir requires this kind of working consensus. Despite a planning apparatus and an elaborate playbook, the recent development of cities like San Francisco and Berkeley has mainly reflected the developer-influenced whims of politicians, with each new project serving as a vehicle for securing contributions and bragging rights. Only GSA and the genuinely civic groups responsible for the new public museums have used this license intelligently. Since those philosopher-kings and queens are not always available, putting cultivation back in the hands of the community is safer. The city’s leadership still has a role to play in guiding cultivation. They are the stewards, to use a word that often arises in university campus planning. Part of their responsibility, part of what they guide, is the urban terroir. They have to balance the claims of the region—the necessary preservation of open land, for example—with the claims of the community to live well within necessarily higher densities. They have to connect the dots, do the math, and help the community understand and explore its options—not in abstract, but literally neighborhood by neighborhood. Most of all, they have to avoid the “grand narratives” that paper over false solutions, and acknowledge that consensus can only really be achieved at the local level, as an evolving, constantly negotiated resolution. The community, too, has responsibilities. Neighborhoods are alive because the people who live in them care about and participate in their cultivation. One way to make this happen is to devolve power to them, but to hand that power over with stipulations. How a higher density is to be achieved is ideally a neighborhood decision. Friedrich Engel’s idea that the housing crisis could be solved by re-

thinking how existing housing is used is relevant to a number of San Francisco and Berkeley districts. Density does not always mean bigger—it can also mean used more intensively. Many neighborhoods are working to address urban crime and post-earthquake recovery—topics that force them to interact with adjoining blocks to pursue shared interests and initiatives. They could also come to grips with how to meet their communal obligations to the region—to absorb expected population growth, reduce congestion and pollution, use water and energy more efficiently, and preserve the larger ecosystem while maintaining, reviving, and creating urbanity where it counts. Rethinking participation At a time when, in virtually every other walk of life, people go online to find information and plug into specific communities to understand their options and track and cultivate their personal interests, the mechanisms of “community” are inefficient and out of touch. The remarkable Obama campaign exemplified what can happen when the means and methods of the rest of life are applied to neighborhood-scale organizing and initiatives: a dialogue becomes possible across “interested” communities, which the official city can support, participate in, and sometimes help frame or augment.10 Our cities need to face reality and begin to leverage the tools that everyone else is using now on an individual basis, and put urban cultivation on a new footing, so that this shared civic responsibility can be carried out in a more open and balanced way—with terroir in mind. Politics will continue—this is not an argument for “good government.” That said, bringing the city and the community back on the same page is a necessity, both to define a new consensus about each city’s cultivation, one neighborhood at a time, and to recognize that the relationship between them has to change. The cities' discretionary powers—their easy recourse to case by case— will be curtailed, while the individual communities will have more to do. Every neighborhood will need to tend its own vineyard, with a better understanding of how this contributes to the city's terroir.

Notes: 1. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, 1982, pages 160–161. 2. Rossi is quoting (on page 161) from an essay by Giuseppe Samonà, published in 1964. 3. Alexander’s insistence in The Nature of Order, that we measure the built realm by its vitality radically asserts its connection to the rest of life. Alexander, the Tolstoy of architectural theory, is much criticized for his discursive and messianic writings, but on the fundamentals he has always been on to something. 4. Wallace Stegner, “Thoughts in a Dry Land,” Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, Modern Library, 2002, pages 52–54. The quote reads, “You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.” 5. It is not just regional open space that is treated as an externality by gigantism of this sort; the homeless are another “urban externality” that mysteriously drops out of the frame of neighborhood preservation on the one hand and highdensity redevelopment on the other. One could mention the exclusionary nature of public employment here, too: no sign of the poor sweeping up the parks, for example, and their rifling of recycling bins is considered a crime in the well-todo neighborhoods of Berkeley. 6. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, page 61. The book was first published in 1979. It’s interesting that Rossi, Alexander, Lyotard, and others—like Ivan Illich, Jane Jacobs, and Paul Feyerabend—whose works also have a bearing, directly or indirectly, on the theme of terroir, were all writing around the same time. That period was characterized by left/right debates on issues that are back on the table today, from oil shortages to urban terrorism. It ended with the U.S. and the U.K. shifting rightward toward unfettered global capitalism. As the U.S. now shifts the other way, let’s hope we learned something in the interim. 7. For example: SOM’s UCSF Mission Bay Housing; Pelli Clarke Pelli on Mission Street; Jim Jennings and Studios' Foundry Square on Howard Street; Stanley Saitowitz on Folsom Street and on 14th Avenue; Leddy Maytum Stacey on Sixth Street; Thom Mayne/Morphosis on Seventh Street; and David Baker on Eighth Street and elsewhere. There are others, but collectively they are the exception and banality is the rule in a city that is remarkably and even courageously cosmopolitan in many other respects. 8. Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language, Oxford University Press, 1977. Alexander is best at recording specific attributes of towns and cities—their settings at different scales—that make them truly livable and enjoyable. His willingness to say that we know if a place or a building is alive or dead restores ordinary people to their rightful place as measurers of all they survey. When we start to consider new patterns of city making that are in tune with humanity and nature, we often find that Alexander has been there before us. We may not agree with his account of the terrain, but we can appreciate what he knows and what he’s seen.

9. Ivan Illich comments on modernity’s “loss of proportionality” or “common sense” (in The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley, Anansi, 2005, pages 136–137): This loss of proportionality points to the historical uniqueness of modernity, its incomparability. The poetic, performative quality of existence was erased and forgotten in field after field… And in this transition from a world based on experience of fit, of appropriateness, to a world which I can’t even name, a world in which words have lost their contours, what was once called common sense has been washed out. Common sense, as this term was used of old, meant the sense of what fits, what belongs, what is appropriate. It was by common sense, for example, that the physician understood the limits of what he could and should do. Illich and Alexander share a sense that modernity is fatal to humane patterns of living/being. I think they would argue, in contrast to Samonà’s statement about scale in a modern context, that gigantism is inherent—that is, a constant danger—in the modern loss of proportionality and common sense (as Illich puts it). In an earlier introduction to Illich and his work (Ivan Illich in Conversation, Anansi, 1992, page 15), David Cayley writes that Illich, drawing on the work of Leopold Kohr, who pioneered a philosophy of social size, claimed that: To each social environment there corresponds a set of natural scales. … In each of these dimensions, tools that require time periods or space or energies much beyond the order of corresponding natural scales are dysfunctional. In Rivers North, Illich describes the introduction of tempered scales in music (pages 134–136)—a passage that suggests to me that modernity requires us to find “tempered” forms that can be harmoniously combined. We have to “learn not to hear disharmony,” he says. Perhaps we have to learn not see it, either, in order both to feel at home in the modern city and begin to reclaim it for ourselves. It is in this spirit that I point to Saitowitz’s Congregation Beth Sholom and Mayne’s Federal Office Building, each of which has been accused (by John King and Dean Macris, respectively) of disharmony—buildings that are tempered as the latter building’s neighbor, the SoMA Grand, is not. Seeing them, I felt that each fits harmoniously with its context, but in a new way. By studying this new way, we may be able to find new patterns of city making that are suited to the city we’ve become. (By patterns I mean precedents that suggest ideas about how to work—plan, design, and build—in a given context.) 10. In Berkeley, Kitchen Democracy provides an online forum to discuss and weigh in on issues of public debate. There are signs that the city’s leaders are paying attention. Some question if this is really participation, but it may be where it needs to go to be effective. Written for the “Slow” issue of _line, January 2009.

On housing production (1976): The factory without walls: industrialization in residential construction Since the 1930s there has been a call for the industrialization of residential construction in the U.S. This effort has had a very specific image—the image of the auto industry and of the gradual domination of the housing industry by larger and larger firms involved in factory production of housing units. This image reflected the belief that the methods of the auto industry—the assembly lines and mass production, as well as the industry's financing and marketing methods—could be brought to bear on the problems of housing. The image of industrialization But the experience of the last 45 years seems to show that industrialization in the housing industry has occurred at another level, and in another form. This has involved mass production as well, of building materials, products, and tools, but in a more significant way it has involved creation of an industry that serves builders and that has provided new methods, tools, materials, and products that greatly expand the number of persons who can so describe themselves. In this way the entire industry has been transformed. One of the results of this transformation is that more people can participate effectively in the building process, and a larger variety of options now exist between products, tools, materials, and methods which are capital-intensive and those which are labor-intensive. This trend has implications which are already being felt in the housing industry, and which may change it more dramatically in the future, opening it to new kinds of workers—women, the unskilled, the young and excluded; and to new approaches to production and development that are better suited to meeting the nation's housing needs and less rigid and tradition-bound in terms of how and by whom housing is provided. This essay considers some of the principal efforts made toward the old idea of housing industrialization and then considers the problems faced by housing, the implications of present trends in the 32

industry, and its possible directions. Our aim is to say something about housing industrialization in the future—its image, substance, objectives, and the means for their accomplishment. Our view in 1976 may be finally as narrow as the idea of industrialization in 1930 appears today, but it may be useful in providing a framework for approaching housing that takes into account our present needs. The dream of mass production Proponents of industrialized housing have been consistently spellbound by the image of General Motors. This dream of the mass-produced house and the mass manufacturer of housing has taken increasingly sophisticated forms since 1930, but the basic feature of the dream has remained the same: the transition of the housing industry from a fragmented group of many small firms, each using obsolete methods to serve highly localized markets, to a much smaller number of larger firms, each mass-producing housing to serve sufficiently aggregated markets. The dream has been fueled by spurts in prefabricated housing production during World War II and by the apparent success of mass-produced, factory-built housing in Europe, the Soviet Union, Japan, and the Middle East. Yet in the United States, while the mobile home has captured an increasing percentage of the low-cost, retirement, and transient-worker market, the prefabricated house (or "modular," "industrialized," "manufactured," or "factory-built" house) has never managed to supplant conventional housing construction, and no firms have emerged among housing producers whose size and volume of production would place them, even by analogy, on a par with American auto manufacturers. The failure to realize this dream has not been for lack of effort. This can be illustrated by a capsule history of such attempts. Several firms with names like "General Houses" or "American Houses" were started in the early 1930s to make and market steel-frame prefab housing. These firms had backers such as Inland Steel and General Electric, but despite in one case a direct connection with a major retail chain, SearsRoebuck, and despite apparently favorable initial publicity, they were unable to set up adequate dealer networks or reach volume production of any magnitude. The idea of using prefab housing in public housing programs is fairly old; the number of units involved offered the market an

opportunity to capitalize and experiment with new techniques. (Some prefab concepts are quite old, also: John Grosvenor Atterbury built a concrete panel building in New York City in the 1890s; prefabricated metal buildings, like the Crystal Palace, are even older.) But this concept was not applied at any real scale until World War II, when the press of new workers in industrial areas made rapid production of housing a necessity. Prefab housing surged during the war, with a total output of nearly 200,000 units, of which 116,000 were used in federal housing programs. The federal government also tried to help prefab housing achieve better marketplace acceptability, underwriting a demonstration of such housing at Indian Rock, Maryland, in 1941. This demonstration, which used the houses of a number of manufacturers and had a site designed by a prominent land planner, in some ways resembled the recent federal demonstration program, Operation Breakthrough. The end of the war brought a second housing crisis, a shortage of middle-income housing for returning veterans. The government responded with a comprehensive program, the Veterans Emergency Housing Program (or Wyatt Program, after housing "czar" Wilson Wyatt) aimed at overcoming the shortage by the use of wartime emergency powers to coordinate housing and building material manufacture, allocate resources to residential construction, and underwrite factory production of housing by giving wartime plants and money to manufacturers. The Wyatt Program represents the high point in government efforts to reshape the building industry and achieve increased housing production. It called for a first-year production target of 2.7 million units in 1946, of which 31.8 percent (800,000 units) would be prefabricated. No program since has been as comprehensive, ambitious, or willing to intervene in the private sector. The program carried forward the central planning approaches of the war years, the same approaches which in fact led to increased industrialization of housing production in Europe and the Soviet Union in the postwar era. It is important to note that the program was backed by the industrial unions, the United Auto Workers in particular, which had much to gain from the continuation of production in wartime factories. The Wyatt Program was not successful. The coalition of federal agencies on which it depended broke down; conversion of wartime

factories became a difficult and protracted business; approval of prefab units for Veterans Administration (VA) mortgages was not made in a blanket sense, putting manufacturers at the mercy of individual officials, the needed financial mechanisms were also not forthcoming. In the absence of interim payments and mortgages that could be rapidly processed, the time-saving qualities of prefabrication became irrelevant. Conventional methods, which were suited to the climate of existing practices in government and finance, did better. In 1946, the first year of the Wyatt Program, there were 280 prefabrication firms in existence, many backed by larger firms with no connection to construction. By 1949, there were only 85. Interest in prefabricated housing simmered in the 1950s and 1960s, with continued limited manufacture and sporadic interest by the armed forces. In the second half of the 1960s, however, two sets of circumstances coincided and gave rise to a new interest in factorybuilt or industrialized housing by the federal government and the private sector. The first of these was a resurgence of interest and support for housing research. Such research had previously been conducted on a limited basis by the Armed Forces, the National Bureau of Standards, and the Housing and Home Finance Agency. With the formation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the mid-1960s, research efforts expanded and HUD began to consider larger, more ambitious programs. The second set of circumstances was the identification by several national advisory groups of a national housing shortage of crisis proportions. The National Commission on Urban Problems (chaired by Senator Paul Douglas), the President's Committee on Urban Housing (chaired by Edgar Kaiser), and the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (ch by Governor Otto Kerner) were particularly concerned with the lack of adequate housing for lower-income groups. They stressed that the production of between 20 and 26 million housing units over a 10-year period would be necessary to alleviate this shortage. The Kerner Report also took the view that the failure to meet this objective would result in continued urban chaos. The Douglas and Kaiser reports were issued prior to formulation of the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act and influenced it

in several ways, the most significant of which was the addition of the so-called Proxmire Amendment, Section 108, which authorized HUD to conduct an experimental housing program. This gave rise to the federal In-City Low Cost Housing Program, aimed at identifying constraints to volume production of housing and carrying out demonstrations of experimental approaches to housing provision, including factory-built housing. In January 1969 the Nixon administration took over the White House and George Romney was appointed Secretary of HUD. He soon after introduced a new program, Operation Breakthrough, which went further than the In-City Program in suggesting factorybuilt housing as an answer to the need for volume housing production. It became the major focus of HUD's research efforts for the next several years. Operation Breakthrough tried to do three things simultaneously: underwrite the design and development of new housing systems and their demonstration on nine prototype sites; \ eliminate institutional and other constraints to industrialized housing (such as the lack of marketplace acceptability, lack of truly national building codes and transport regulations, union hostility, unacceptability to lenders, and lack of FHA approval on a uniform basis); and aggregate sufficiently large markets for manufacturers of industrialized housing by making their products suitable for use in the FHA subsidized-interest programs and by earmarking 25,000 such units for their products exclusively. The Operation Breakthrough Program was able to carry out its demonstration, although with delays and at a smaller scale than was initially anticipated, but it was not able to increase the share of factory-built housing within the total housing market. The program faltered for several reasons—cuts in its overall budget, problems with design and development of the housing units, problems with HUD's "performance criteria" (standards that describe the qualities of a product) for the housing, and, midway in the program, a federal moratorium on housing subsidies. This lack of success brings us back to a central question: how is it that factory-built housing, which enjoys reasonable success elsewhere in the world, has remained only a negligible factor in American housing, despite periodic efforts to stimulate its growth?

The answer is two-fold. First, the aggregated market for standardized, factory-built housing that exists in Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union does not exist here. Aggregation can really only occur where the government takes a role in creating projects or allocating production, so that an acceptable volume of steady production can be maintained. Second, the nature of conventional residential construction in the U.S. has become increasingly streamlined and amenable to the use of prefabricated components and semiskilled or unskilled workers. It has also grown increasingly productive, as was evidenced by its ability earlier in this decade to surpass 2 million units per year in construction volume. The Breakthrough Program assumed this was impossible and tended to view conventional construction as hidebound and slow to innovate. Factory-built housing has remained negligible in the U.S. because improved technology and organization have allowed conventional construction methods to remain competitive, while no special circumstances, such as government aggregation of large projects or adequately large markets, have emerged to give the factory assembly of housing units a competitive edge over conventional on-site assembly. From the 1920s forward, the dream of factory mass-produced housing in the U.S. consistently saw residential construction as static and backward. While it's true that conventional construction may harbor counterproductive practices, its central tendency since World War II has been toward greater productivity through the use of new tools, products, and organizational methods. This is also industrialization, but it has mostly gone unnoticed among those calling for assembly-line manufacturing of housing in factories. The situation today Residential construction today combines the use of prefabricated components with on-site assembly and finishing of the housing unit. This process continues to use on-site labor, the function of which has changed from handcrafting such typical building elements as the windows, doors, walls and floors, roofs, and molding to assembling them as prefabricated components, ever larger and more complex. The use of prefabricated components has simplified the onsite construction process. On-site handcrafting has been shifted to the factory, where it has benefited from the application of new tools and

methods. The resulting building products are not only more directly usable by on-site workers, but are less labor-intensive in general. The use of more complex components, such as units that combine kitchen, bathroom, and mechanical core in a single package, results in a highly simplified construction process. What is possible using complex components has not been realized fully in the U.S., but has been amply demonstrated in Japan and Italy. The use of simpler components is now common in housing construction in the U.S. The general simplification of residential construction processes has been reinforced by simplifying the means by which the various building components are combined in the assembly process. The latter simplification is best described in terms of its objectives, which apply to components, construction methods, and tools. The first objective is to decrease the time needed for a worker to master the skills needed to use a building product or tool. Ideally the product or tool should be so straightforward that any worker can use it competently with brief training. As a result, the level of skill needed in residential construction will be lower and the number of workers able to participate in it will grow correspondingly. The second objective is to increase worker. In general, this has meant that new building products and tools seek to do more in fewer steps. Prefinished panels have replaced hand-tiled bathroom walls, while nail guns have replaced hammers and nails. Workers have discovered synergies among tools and products that allow even greater productivity in the field than envisioned by their makers. The changes that have occurred in the organization, methods, tools, and products of residential construction have turned today's residential building site into a place of final assembly—almost a factory without walls, to which are brought a host of prefinished building parts, to be assembled by workers whose tasks increasingly resemble those of other industrial workers. There are other resemblances between the residential building site and the modem industrial assembly line and its working conditions. Suburban tract sites, for example, have come to resemble assembly lines in configuration. Their site plans are designed to accommodate special equipment for putting in foundations, utility lines, streets, and sidewalks. The sitedevelopment and housing-assembly processes have been coordinated to allow them to occur concurrently. Assembly of the

housing units tends to be carried out by workers moving from house to house, as opposed to the industrial assembly line, where workers tend to remain in one place while the work moves by them. Urban sites tend to be more complicated than suburban ones, and their similarities with industrial assembly lines tend to be in terms of working conditions and the nature of the work force. The last decade has seen the construction site come increasingly under the domain of such federal regulations as the Occupational Safety and Health Act and various civil rights and equal opportunity actions taken by Congress. Compliance with these measures has changed the urban building site, making it a safer workplace and introducing to it a number of workers who were previously excluded from it or from certain jobs within it. The combination of better on-site worker safety, better opportunities for employment, and simplified methods of construction has meant that the construction industry has attracted a younger, more varied work force. If this trend continues, the presence of women and of ethnic and racial minorities should be commonplace at construction sites in five or 10 years. The end of exclusionary practices and the potential for greater use of unskilled workers should tend to make construction wages more on a par with industrial wages over the same period.

Self-help techniques and systems buildings It is important to note two interesting developments in the area of building design and construction: the phenomenon of self-help housing, and the steady development of systems buildings of increasing sophistication. Self-help housing has roots in the same tradition that has fostered the do-it-yourself movement within the U.S. middle class, and such phenomena as urban squatter housing developing countries. It is one means of attacking the problem of providing housing for the poor, and it has demonstrated a better track record in this effort than have the industrialized housing systems imported from Europe and elsewhere. Self-help housing is an amalgam of the idea of the owner-built house with more recent developments in building tools and products and in social policy. It is based on the observation that housing requires either time or money to buy the services of others, and time is a major resource, even for the U.S. middle class.

Self-help techniques have been greatly improved by the development of products and tools, like fast-drying paint and the paint roller, that are widely available and make it possible for an unskilled person to perform tasks quickly at an acceptable level of quality. Variations of the self-help approach have been tried in different parts of the U.S. over the past five years, particularly in urban areas where local governments have become the holders of large amounts of low-income housing. Another set of experiments has been based in rural agricultural and Native reservations. Self-help's expansion as an approach to housing construction depends on a number of factors—changes in housing policy, income distribution, building codes, and the issuance of building and occupancy permits—which depend in turn on the attitude of government toward the validity of self-help techniques as a method of alleviating the housing shortages of the poor. The governments of some cities have made preliminary moves toward approval of selfhelp techniques, while the federal government has interested itself mainly through research efforts. Systems buildings are made up of systems of components. One such family of these buildings is derived from British school construction systems like CLASP, designed in the 1950s. The first of the American branch of this family was the School Construction System Development (SCSD) project, designed by a team of architects led by Professor Ezra Ehrenkrantz. SCSD called for specific building components to be developed by manufacturers in response to performance criteria set out by the system's designers. The manufacturers assumed the burden of development costs because the program had aggregated some $20 million in California public school projects, beyond which lay a much larger potential market in national school building programs. Many of the systems that came after SCSD found it difficult to replicate its approach because of the difficulty of aggregating a sufficiently large market to attract manufacturers willing to develop new components. As a result, the tendency is to work with existing components. But some system designers consider, in abstract, the relationship between building components and building functions, and work with these relationships in developing their systems. This approach is promising.

Both systems and conventional buildings tend to achieve flexibility of use through repetitive design, rather than through careful analysis and planning for future changes in occupancy. Also, builders tend to ignore total or life costs of operation, maintenance, replacement, and renovation in favor of a focus on first costs. This new approach to systems design makes a thorough analysis of occupancy patterns and building life costs, recognizing that buildings vary in their need for flexibility and in the useful life beyond which they will require renovation. The building systems that result from this new approach are more like systems of rules than kits of parts. This level of abstraction ensures that the buildings that meet the rules will have greater diversity in appearance and better suitability to purpose than those using specific components. In the last decade, some interesting experiments have combined aspects of self-help with systems building approaches. One example is a concept developed by the Dutch architect John Habraken that provides the dweller with an infrastructural frame—supports and utilities for the dwelling unit—but leaves it to the dweller to provide the infill of needed components that fit within it. Townland, one of Operation Breakthrough's selected housing systems, is an example. While it was not fully implemented, a modified example of it was built in Seattle as part of that program. These experiments represent an attempt to integrate capitalintensive and labor-intensive approaches within an overall organizational framework. They display a new attitude toward the boundary between public and private, moving this boundary closer to the dwelling unit. (Something similar occurs in the concept of a condominium). They provide added opportunities for diversity in unit design and fit-out than is possible in conventionally developed building types like row houses and multistory apartment blocks. Shifts in demands and organizational responses Any forecast of the future reflects how one sees the present. Our present is characterized by shifts in the demands put on housing and the organizational means used to provide it. These trends include: An increase in capital-intensive methods for the manufacture of materials, components, and tools for residential construction, with concurrent development of new tools and methods for the preparation, financing, support, and servicing of residential projects.

An increase in labor-intensive methods for the renovation, completion, and finishing of dwelling units, with simultaneous efforts to simplify these methods, make them more appropriate to individual and small-group use, and provide the organizational frameworks to make these methods and their users more effective participants in the construction process. Increase in the assertion of self-reliance by individuals and groups, with accompanying demands that larger organizations accommodate themselves to individual and group demands to have a significant input as to the layout, form, and style of a dwelling. Concern for the performance and safety of buildings and building products: durability, quality of construction or fabrication; consistency in meeting performance standards; safety in construction and operation; safety under certain conditions (fire, earthquake); economy of operation. Concern for the impact of development on existing environmental conditions.

If these trends continue, a transformation may occur in the processes and products of residential development with implications for the roles of participants in the processes, their organization, and the nature of the dwellings themselves. We will look at each in turn. For the participants; the implications include: Building product and component manufacturers and distributors will play a bigger role in the total process of residential development by providing the necessary framework for self-help or do-it-yourself construction efforts on the part of individuals and groups. The role of the contractor may tend to divide into two specialized roles: (1) providing the physical infrastructure—building supports and utilities, site development-for residential development; (2) catering to individuals and groups seeking to complete or renovate their dwelling units. The role of banks and other financial institutions may divide along similar lines, with banks providing financing to contractors engaged in large-scale infrastructure development on the one hand, and financing to individuals and groups for small-scale housing unit construction and renovation on the other. The role of government will shift to regulating land use, development patterns, and building frameworks, and the performance of building products, and components, with less emphasis on interior fit-out details.

The role of the residential developer may be to provide the prerequisites to completing dwellings rather than the finished dwellings themselves. Architects will focus on the prerequisites and their interface with dwellers. Infill will be addressed separately as a service and also as self-help.

Looking next at the organization of the residential construction and development process, these trends imply that: Manufacturers will have to provide building products and components of increasing sophistication, aimed at the self-help or owner-built housing unit. This means that: (1) distribution of these products will be geared to a new market of individual consumers; (2) products will be standardized and compatible, competing on quality, performance, and cost, not on small differences in dimension, method of installation, or fit with other products; (3) product research, development, and evaluation will grow in importance. The construction process will change so that: (l) heavy equipment and capital-intensive methods will be used on infrastructure;(2) building construction will stop short of the dwelling unit or will provide only a portion of it rather than a finished unit; (3) construction of the dwelling unit will be possible in several ways, including completion by contractors (as in residential development today), completion by a second contractor acting for the owner or group of owners, or completion by the owner or group directly. The completion process may be capital-intensive or labor-intensive, depending on the needs and resources of the dwellers. The process of financing residential development will change so that: (1) construction financing can include only the infrastructure; (2) mortgage packages can pay for only the infrastructure; (3) flexibility can exist in paying for the completed housing unit, with financing provided not only through mortgages covering the complete cost of the dwelling unit (including infrastructure), but through multistep mortgages or other loan packages which pay for the infrastructure and for the phases of the unit's completion, depending on the needs and resources of the dweller or dweller group. Government regulation will shift so that: (1) the federal government will increasingly regulate building products and components, ensuring their national use without facing state and local barriers; (2) local and regional government will focus on land-use and development patterns; (3) local regulatory bodies will focus on the safety and soundness of housing rather than on design and technical details; (4) local building departments will be more service-oriented, a major source of information to dwellers and dweller groups about methods and products, and hence a source of information for developers, builders, owners, and dwellers within their jurisdictions.

Developers will provide a variety of services, depending on what is required, including: (1) land packages; (2) infrastructure for housing development; (3) housing at different levels of completion; and (4) completed housing. Designers will serve three sets of clients—developers of large-scale infrastructure, manufacturers of building products and components, and individual or group dwelling-unit owners and developers. Each client has different requirements: (I) large-scale infrastructural developers need flexibility in terms of replacement, upgrading, accommodating dwelling units, and meeting impact requirements; (2) manufacturers of building products and components are focused on performance, appearance, and marketability, compatibility with other products and with infrastructure, performance within systems of components, feasibility of mass-production, and ease of installation and removal; (3) individual and group dwelling-unit owners and developers seek to optimize the dwelling unit's performance given such constraints as dweller preferences and resources, infrastructure, product and component cost and availability, and sale and resale value.

Finally, these trends imply dwelling units which: Draw from an increasingly sophisticated array of products and components. Can be completed, modified, or renovated by dwellers themselves. Can be completed using sophisticated, capital-intensive equipment and components, or using simpler, more labor-intensive approaches. Can be completed or modified incrementally. Can be completed, modified, and operated with minimal use of energy. Are highly adaptive to local conditions and needs. Are infill to a building's infrastructural framework.

Industrialized housing systems In tracing the development of industrialized housing systems since the 1930s and in outlining directions for their future development, we have seen that they have gone from a narrow preoccupation with factory mass-production to a greater rationalization of the fieldassembly process, together with improvements in tools and building products and components. Present trends indicate a further shift toward greater diversity in the construction process, and greater dependence manufacturers outside of the building industry. If we 44

tried to arrive at a definition of industrialized housing systems which reflected this, it might be as follows An industrialized housing system is one that uses the tools, processes, and resources of industry, finance, and government to complete a building process that meets predetermined objectives for the system's performance, the means by which it is realized, and the nature of its outcomes.

The situation of residential development has become visibly more complex, especially in the last five years. So, too, have the problems addressed by the housing industry. In the 1930s, industrialized housing was defined in terms of mass-production. This idea of it predominated through the late 1960s. If residential development is to occur today and address such diverse demands as concern with overbuilding, minimizing energy use, increasing user control of elements of the design and construction process, and avoiding rigid solutions that shorten a building's useful life, this posits a housing industry and building systems organized to allow a greater diversity of approaches to its products and services. Making this happen will be the industry's main challenge over the next quarter century. The transformation of residential development and the creation of new building systems hinge on the recognition by individual participants in the building process—contractors, developers, users, designers, bureaucrats, lenders—that their roles in it are mutually dependent and interactive. This transformation will require their coordinated as well as their independent efforts.

Sources

1. Industrialized housing § Richard Bender, A Crack in the Rear-View Mirror: A View of Industrialized Building (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973). § Albert G. H. Dietz and Laurence S. Cutler (eds.), Industrialized Building Systems for Housing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971). 2. The SCSD Program and other building-system projects § James Benet, et al., SCSD: The Project and the Schools (New York: Educational Facilities Laboratories, 1967). § Richard Bender, "Alphabet Soup (From SCSD to URBS to ABS with BSD)," in Kenneth F. Reinschmidt, ed.: Systems Building (Gaithersburg, Md.: Committee on Systems Building, American Society of Civil Engineers/ National Science Foundation, 1972). § John Boice, A History and Evaluation of SCSD (Menlo Park, Ca.: Building Systems Information Oearinghouse, n.d.). 3. Self-help housing § N. J. Habraken, Supports (New York: Praeger, 1972). § John F. C. Turner and Robert Fichter (eds.), Freedom to Build (New York: Macmillan, 1972). 4. Operation Breakthrough § A Report on Operation Breakthrough (Washington, D.C.: Technical Panel, Advisory Committee to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (AC-HUD), Building Research Advisory Board (BRAB), National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences, (1974). § Design and Development of Housing Systems for Operation Breakthrough (Operation Feedback, Volume I) (Washington, D.C.: Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1973). § Industrialization Forum. Volume 6, No. l. Special issue devoted to Operation Breakthrough; University of Montreal, 1975). Written with Richard Bender for California Management Review, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, Spring 1976, pp. 46–56. Excerpted in Roger Montgomery and Daniel R. Mandelker, ed's., Housing in America, 2nd ed., Bobbs-Merrill, 1979, pp. 113– 115. A "revisionist view that highlights the important fact that productivity with respect to building materials and site labor has risen dramatically," they wrote.

On housing production (2019): That was then, this is now: notes on the evolution of industrialized housing Introduction “The technology that carries the promise of mass production too easily turns multiplication into forms of degrading repetition.” – Colin St. John Wilson1 “I wonder, for the future of our profession and society as a whole, what the hell we’re going to be doing in 20 years? We’ll be living in 1,000-square-foot apartments, because that’s all we can afford.” – Chuck Davis2

In the early 1970s, U.C. Berkeley Professor Richard Bender led a team, of which I was part, that evaluated Operation Breakthrough, an industrialized housing demonstration program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development—HUD—under Nixon appointee George Romney, a former CEO of American Motors, a car company. Bender and I concluded that HUD and the various large companies involved in the program misjudged the actual productivity of conventional construction. Despite industry fragmentation and regulatory differences from locale to locale, contractors made effective use of lightweight power tools, and components, materials, and products that were prefabricated to standard dimensions. Building sites were industrialized and their output could be readily tailored to local markets. Today, after a 45-year hiatus, factory production of housing is enjoying a comeback the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere. National and even global companies are offering modular housing “products,” including volumetric and panelized systems. Crosslaminated timber (CLT) is also in the picture as a component of multi-story timber buildings. The high cost of conventional multiunit housing construction in the Bay Area’s urban core gives modular housing an edge. As a result, Factory OS, the largest local manufacturer, has succeeded where earlier ventures like Blu Homes and ZETA failed. For industrialized housing to have long-term viability, it will have to prove its competitiveness on cost, schedule, technical

performance, and design quality against conventional construction. In the early 1970s, conventional construction readily beat factorybuilt systems on each of these measures. The so-called Great Recession of 2008 pummeled the Bay Area’s construction industry, depleting its workforce of experienced people. The overall cost of housing rose, driven by a glacially slow entitlements process, fastrising land costs, prevailing wage agreements in the urban core (raising the cost of labor), and growing inequality among prospective homebuyers. Factory-built housing is a response to these factors. If they change, will it persist? Right now, it has an edge on cost, schedule, and technical performance. Its weak point is customization—even panel systems are less flexible than conventional construction. But factory-built systems are acceptable now in part because what for-profit and non-profit developers and some tech companies offer are variations on relatively standard solutions, each aimed at a specific price point. While a downturn in new housing starts is widely expected, that event may prove less significant to regional companies like Factory OS than the situation of housing development in a broader sense. That larger context takes in regulation, technology, lifestyles, and many other factors, known and unknown. As it reshapes the designbuild-occupy-service-upgrade trajectory, the landscape could transform disruptively. The distinction we make now between factory-built and conventional construction could be meaningless. An outlier like Katerra, which wants to optimize across that trajectory, may the real model. Or it may have arrived too soon. U.S. industrialized housing through Operation Breakthrough Operation Breakthrough followed earlier efforts by the federal government to industrialize housing production. During the Johnson Administration, HUD and New York City’s Urban Development Corporation tried to renovate older apartment buildings with prefabricated units. Two decades earlier, immediately after World War II, the Veterans Emergency Housing Program (or Wyatt Program, for Wilson Wyatt, the Truman Administration “housing czar”), anticipating a shortage of middleincome housing for returning veterans, set an ambitious goal in 1946 of building 2.7 million new units per year, partly in wartime factories retooled for prefabrication. Had it gone forward, the Wyatt

Program would have involved the federal government directly in a mass housing strategy, extending the central planning model adopted by the U.S. Government in World War II.3 Operation Breakthrough and the UDC project reflected the production goal set by the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act—a goal similar to the Wyatt Program’s 22 years earlier: Building or rehabilitating 26 million housing units in 10 years—a rate much higher than any previous production level. To achieve this goal, HUD anticipated in 1969 a progressive increase in required construction of housing units over the 10-year period, reaching 2.6 million units in 1973.4

Nixon and Romney sought to enlist the private sector to provide housing at a mass scale. They assumed that if housing could be produced like cars, higher volume would make units cheaper. Harold Finger, who came to HUD from NASA to run Operation Breakthrough, believed that the advent of housing manufacture would disrupt the conventional housing “industry” and cut through the regulatory and labor issues that contributed to its fragmentation and inefficiency. This optimism was shared by the private sector. Part of it was grounded in the belief that the U.S. Government would be an active partner in housing production. Most Operation Breakthrough manufacturers anticipated Government housing programs would be a large market for their housing systems. In 1969, HUD estimated that 4 million new housing units would be constructed under Government housing programs during the next decade, an average of 400,000 a year. In the beginning of 1973, the Federal Government suspended its major subsidized housing programs pending a complete reevaluation of the Federal role in housing. … This suspension had a major effect on several Operation Breakthrough manufacturers. In 1974, the national housing construction rate dropped below 1.4 million units a year, about half the construction rate assumed by Operation Breakthrough plans.5

There was also clear initial investor interest in industrialized housing’s potential. These different public and interests converged in Stirling Homex, a publicly listed company in New York that drew headlines when it shipped its volumetric units to Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Camille and proposed to build a factory there with Federal Housing Authority—FHA—participation.

[On July 2, 1975], the Securities and Exchange Commission accused the bankrupt Stirling Homex Corporation, once one of the nation's leading modular homebuilders, of creating phantom sales, making illegal political contributions, using illegal bugging equipment and making payoffs to union officials. The suit charged in particular that from 1970 through 1972 Stirling Homex materially falsified its records by the fraudulent recording and reporting of fictitious sales. About $12.5 million of sales reported in a 1971 financial report were either fictitious or improperly recorded, the S.E.C. said, including about $8 million of sales from a proposed $15-million project in Mississippi with the Greater Gulf Housing Corporation.6

Stirling Homex went bankrupt and its founders went to jail. Alodex, a Memphis-based modular housing company backed by the founders of Holiday Inn, failed less dramatically. According to Larry Dodge, who consulted with Alodex, it decided to test its concept in a deliberately chosen “hardest case”: scattered site housing in East St. Louis, Illinois. Alodex won the endorsement of the city’s mostly African-American leaders by proposing to open a factory there and build some 2,000 units of scattered-site housing.7 At its peak, around 1970, Alodex had nearly $90 million of construction work in progress and a staff of 250 people. It was operating in 10 states under the leadership of Lloyd Clark, a builder. Alodex's problems became apparent shortly after it was reorganized as a national company rather than a Memphis area operation. In 1969 Mr. Clark, a well-known building contractor, approached [Alodex] with a proposal to merge [their] operations. … As part of the expansion, Alodex stock was offered for sale to the public. Under Mr. Clark, who left Alodex in 1973, the company expanded from single-family residential work to construction of turn-key housing for government agencies and big projects, none of which included provisions to cover cost increases. The company also expanded into … condominiums and multifamily units. Problems appeared in the summer of 1971, a few months after a public offer of Alodex stock. The prospectus did not make clear the large losses suffered by the company on some projects.8

Larry Dodge, an architect with Building Systems Development (BSD), a consultancy founded by U.C. Berkeley Professor Ezra Ehrenkrantz, consulted with Aerojet General and TRW on a spunglass fiber modular housing concept, which they proposed to apply to an Operation Breakthrough demonstration site in Sacramento. The initial concept was a two-story module spun on a mandrel. Developed at TRW’s R&D campus in Redondo Beach, California, 51

it was housing as imagined by scientists and engineers who worked on NASA and military aerospace projects. “What’s the minimum size a window can be?” was a typical question. However, TRW’s head marketer rejected the concept, opting for more conventional housing produced using glass-fiber panels enclosing a layer of honeycomb Hexcel insulation.9 The aerospace industry’s interest in manufactured housing reflected its ambition to diversify with a product that could take up slack in its factory production lines. (Boeing was involved in the Townland project in Seattle.) It also reflected a belief in the applicability of the so-called systems approach, first pioneered in World War II, to the challenge of meeting ambitious housing production goals set in 1946 and renewed in 1968. Others involved in the building industry—aluminum, glass, steel, and timber companies—also participated in these initiatives, hoping to find new outlets for their products and demonstrate how their materials and housing innovations together could deliver superior performance. One precedent for Operation Breakthrough was the mid-1960s School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) program, in which BSD was heavily involved. At the time, California was building public schools in substantial numbers. Legislation allowed districts to band together to bid these projects, which generated interest in industrializing their construction. SCSD proposed a modular, steel-frame system. Inland Steel was an investor, eager to get a foothold in the market. While SCSD failed, one of its components—a multi-zone roof-top air-conditioning unit designed by Lennox—found a national market in conventionally built school projects. “We enjoyed 15 years of spin-off work,” according to Ted Gilles, who helped develop the product for Lennox. What made it successful was its flexibility: “With flexible ducts, we could jiggle the layout,” he said. Flexibility was one of SCSD’s design criteria for the components, which applied equally to any new school that fell within the standard mid-1960s typology. This was “why packaged units wound up on the roof,” Gilles added.10 When Richard Bender’s research team looked at conventional tract housing in the Bay Area—the kinds of projects that Operation Breakthrough envisioned shifting to factory production—it found the consistent use of locally produced prefabricated components like roof joists and handheld tools like nail guns that could be used by

small crews to frame and enclose units quickly. Houses produced in this manner used materials and elements that were geared to fast assembly by semi-skilled labor. The only skilled workers on those jobs were the “mud guys” who smoothed over sheetrock imperfections. It resulted in housing that hit its price point, met local codes, and let the developer offer a range of types. Operation Breakthrough’s prototypes, in contrast, were hindered by code fragmentation and undone by their inability to support the kind of mass customization the housing market required.11 Only the kind of captive market that public housing can deliver or a substantial cost difference could have saved them. Demonstrating the latter on a national basis in the absence of a captive market would have required deep-pocketed investors to accept heavy early losses before achieving full-scale mass production. From Operation Breakthrough’s demise through 2008 Operation Breakthrough resulted in “model” legislation enabling states to issue permits for modular housing that overrode local inspections. (California has such a process, focused on volumetric units.) It failed to shift most housing production to factories. Until the “Great Recession” of 2008, conventional construction was the norm for all types of housing except mobile homes and vacation “kit homes.” Yet, across this period, market-rate housing typologies became increasingly standardized, especially in the use of prefab assemblies like window walls and curtain walls, and interior elements like kitchen cabinets. While mass customization continued, the band of customization narrowed while the cost advantages of field construction were eroded by prevailing wage contracts in the urban core and the multiplier effect of general contractors working with subs, each adding their markup. The “Great Recession” stopped new construction in general in its tracks and flushed skilled construction labor out of urban markets. Downturns leave some players as the last ones standing. The Great Recession divided the urban housing world between “marketecture,” which emphasizes the residential unit, either by pushing its luxury or subdividing it aggressively, depending on the price point, and “community” developments that, even if they mix subsidized and market-rate housing, engage communities of neighbors and residents in their planning and design. In general,

“community” developments emphasize shared settings, including open space, over residential units. The real estate consultant David Chen, who recently surveyed western European housing, identified projects commissioned by building associations there as having similar traits.12 While it can and has been applied to community projects, factory-built housing is geared to “marketecture,” which lends itself to standard building forms and layouts. (The simplest applications are hotels and serviced apartments that use single modular units without side-wall penetrations.) Industrialized housing’s revival in the Bay Area and elsewhere In a 1967 paper, Richard Bender wrote of the building systems that were then being put forward, These systems make buildings, but they do not make buildings with properties important in relation to the whole problem. … We must avoid the approach that says, “Here are the technologies available to make buildings. Now let’s figure out how to build better buildings with these.” This approach starts from a solution and goes looking for a problem to solve. Creating building systems is not enough. We need a new, more subtle kind of building system which does more than produce buildings. We must produce buildings which will function in the fullest social, human sense.13

In 1973, commenting on the industrialized housing of the Operation Breakthrough era, Bender added, For those whose picture of modern production is the auto assembly line, building seems far from industrialized. But perhaps it is just this view of industrialization (as only machinery, tools, production lines, and automation) that has been standing in the way of significant advances.14

When Bender and I visited Factory OS’s factory in March 2018, we saw prototype units—6-sided wood-frame boxes—that shift conventional construction to an assembly line. This is industrialized housing as George Romney envisioned it half a century ago. David Baker told me later that Factory OS’s 6-sided units are more weatherproof and damage-resistant when shipped by truck than 4sided units. Locking off the units while the building is finished around them minimizes damage as the trades do their work. That damage can be considerable, he said, requiring a hefty budget for ongoing repairs.15

That Factory OS is successful also reflects the region’s current situation: an acute shortage of skilled construction workers; conventional construction costs that exceed what the housing market can support; a long-term shortfall in new housing construction in the urban core, especially around the rail transit corridors that San Francisco and other cities have prioritized for new development; and the possibility of tapping semi-skilled but unionized construction labor at the region’s edge and bringing it into factories to produce volumetric modules for multifamily housing. Factory OS now serves the West Coast and cities as far east as Denver, with a catalogue of 20 different supportive (exhomeless), affordable, market-rate “workforce,” and student housing designs, including studios and 1- and 2-bedrooms. The company is producing employee housing for Google. Its designs have width, length, and height constraints, but can support façade articulation. A 2-year Carpenters Union contract keeps wages stable. The company aims to increase its cost savings over conventional from 20% to 30%.16 RAD Urban produces 4-sided steel-frame volumetric units in a factory in Lathrop, CA.17 Z-Modular in Birmingham, AL, owned by a steel foundry, gives away the design and technology of its steelframe volumetric units to local factories, supplying the steel to fabricate them.18 Katerra, founded by Wolfe Homes entrepreneur Fritz Wolfe, attracted a $2 billion investment from Mayoshi Son’s Vision Fund. Katerra has aggressively acquired talent and manufacturing capacity in its quest to vertically integrate housing production and extend the reach of industrialization from the factory to the building site. Shipping is seen as an extension of the factory floor, which led Katerra to focus on component-based rather than volumetric systems. “Why ship air?” it asks. Katerra sees itself as a technology company that builds “platforms” for developers with enough backlog of new housing projects on flat sites to support large-scale production. Katerra rationalizes designs to meet these constraints, producing “tiers” of housing to meet market and regulatory requirements. A given tier offers the quality and performance expected by the developer’s targeted buyers. Katerra believes that its platforms can deliver better cost-to-value than its competition, with greater customization than is possible with volumetric units. Like

the auto industry, it chose California’s residential energy regulations as its standard. This is a higher standard than some other states, and some developers have resisted paying for the higher performance. Katerra’s vertical integration includes manufacturing cross laminated timber (CLT) components, lighting components, and plumbing fixtures. Prefabricated plumbing walls are “in planning,” I was told in February 2019.19 Although Katerra advertises the design freedom it offers developers, one architecture firm I interviewed said its decisions sometimes prioritized manufacturing by allocating square footage where it wouldn’t generate a return for the developer. A Bay Area developer questioned its track record here and noted that its “closed system” would work against it compared to “open-source” competitors.20 Katerra’s Seattle architecture team pointed to the challenge of working nationally. In California, it ran into problems getting state inspections for its panelized units, as the company that handles them only had experience with volumetric units. They see Katerra as a work in progress, appreciating Katerra’s efforts to optimize housing production by eliminating waste and harnessing technology to bridge between the different steps involved more effectively. What sets it apart from its competitors is its view of housing production as an end-to-end manufacturing process that links factories, shipping, and building sites. Its efforts to vertically integrate are part of this, aimed at reducing costs, limiting waste and unneeded variation, and optimizing cost to value on a tiered basis for quality and performance.21 Other developments in industrialized housing Ikea recently announced that it will take a modular approach to its numerous products, developing “platforms” for products that previously varied slightly in their dimensions. By standardizing height, width, and depth, Ikea hopes to rationalize manufacture and tailor it to changes in its retail model—a consumer preference for smaller in-city stores and for products that are delivered preassembled or put together at the buyer’s residence by Ikea personnel or designated third parties.22 Ikea and Skanska jointly own a company, BoKlok Housing AB, that builds affordable multi-unit housing in Scandinavia and the

U.K. using a volumetric system fitted out by Ikea. Aiming at younger buyers with modest incomes, BoKlok has produced 11,000 units since 1997.23 ByggHouse and Lindbäcks are two Swedish companies involved with industrialized housing. Interest in it there and also in Japan has continued without interruption over the decades when the idea was dormant here. ByggHouse makes components and tools for housing producers, while Lindbäcks Bygg AG produces 2- to 4-story modules for student, family, and senior multi-unit housing of up to 16 stories. According to David Baker, Lindbäcks cranes temporary roofs over its buildings during construction to deal with bad weather. Its modules hang the floors from the exterior walls to eliminate redundancy in unit floors and ceilings. According to Baker’s colleague Brad Leibin, Lindbäcks’s factories are designed so a person weighing as little as 130 pounds can perform any step the manufacturing process requires. Lindbäcks’s goal is for women to make up at least half of its factory workforce, he added.24 While Japan has had an equally long involvement in prefabricated housing, it faces a shortage of homebuyers owing to its aging, declining population. Two manufacturers, Toyota and Panasonic, are merging their housing businesses as Prime Life Technologies to focus on “town development” and to integrate smart houses with smart cars and other accessories of a younger-generation lifestyle.25 Sekisui House, which claims to be the largest housing producer in Japan, has teamed with Woodside Homes to produce a concept home for Builder magazine to be unveiled at Summerlin, a planned community near Las Vegas. Sekisui House applies a proprietary metal joint system to its housing projects, which are marketed as healthy and sustainable. Expanding globally is its response to declining sales in Japan.26 Industrialized housing and modularity Companies that produce panelized and component-based systems are tapping industrialized housing’s longstanding interest in modularity. While construction in general has considerable “default modularity” due to the standard dimensions of its most ubiquitous components, Europe, including the former Soviet Bloc, applied modularity to large-scale housing development before World War II

and then through the 1980s, initially in the service of postwar reconstruction. Reinier de Graff recounts part of this history in his 2016 essay, “Architektur ohne Eigenschaften” (“Architecture without Qualities”).27 Building on prewar and wartime experience, East Germany’s DDR evolved panel systems, applied to urban housing development, until its collapse in 1989. In 1999, I saw newly repainted examples in the former East Berlin, strikingly midcentury modern, but Graff writes that by 2014 many were torn down or reconfigured beyond recognition, “an ideological cleansing.” The East German standardization effort is generally viewed as a radical phenomenon of the past. But how radical was it? It can also be explained as simply the all-out pursuit of a universally available minimum standard. Like communism itself, the whole effort contains a curious paradox. Even though it necessitated “radical” change, its ultimate goal—“normal” conditions for the largest possible number of people—was surprisingly mundane.28

Graff describes parallel developments in the Netherlands, noting the French influence on its systems. The technical adaptation of the French system to suit Dutch building regulations had been made possible by large public subsidies to help solve a pressing housing shortage in the Netherlands—such policies being, at least during those years, as common in the west as in the east.29

Following Germany’s reunification, large scale housing was steadily “normalized” to the market. Now, Graff writes, “Normal (East) German workers can barely afford the ‘normalized’ homes.”30 For a while the east and the west, despite their political differences, seem to have run on parallel tracks. Produced in the millions, abundantly applied in both the western and eastern hemispheres, the prefabricated panels are—at almost improbably poetic level—an expression of a global bond, a form of consensus in the context of an otherwise deep ideological rift, a universal response to a globally felt urgency.31

This looks back to modernism’s early ambition to provide worker housing of a high standard at mass scale, in contrast to the tenement housing that modern architects regarded as a blight. Modular, 58

panelized systems that could be manufactured locally and erected quickly in different configurations was an accepted solution that government programs and subsidies made possible. In 1977, I spent three months as a visiting researcher at Stichting Architecten Research (SAR), founded by John Habraken at the Technical University of Eindhoven. SAR was a clearinghouse for research on modular approaches to housing components, buildings, sites, and communities. Its “tissue method” aimed to provide a basis for user participation in multi-unit developments, a goal of specific interest to such architects of that era as Herman Hertzberger, Lucien Kroll, and Frans van der Werf. SAR developed two related approaches to housing focused on “supports” and on “territories.” This reflected the nature of Dutch postwar Dutch housing, especially in new towns and rebuilt areas— row houses of different heights with a uniformity that spoke to cultural aspirations for equality but made for blocks, neighborhoods, and districts that appeared as “built diagrams.” But SAR also had proposals like Le Corbusier’s Radiant City in mind as it focused on what it called the support and tissue levels. At the support level, the support plan makes allowances for different materials and construction systems, so that the basic spatial character of a given support can be maintained despite those differences. It also provides opportunities for variations in dwelling arrangement and configuration. At the tissue level, similar allowances are made for the problems of fitting a given tissue model to actual site conditions, and for its elaboration at the support level.32

The tissue level is “a planning level…more specific than a land use plan, but less specific than a support plan in terms of stipulating the characteristics of a given territory.”33 SAR’s tissue method was a later development in its thinking, reflecting its interest in making users active participants in housing’s development and evolving use. This reflects another aspect of Dutch housing at the time: the residents were responsible for more of the interior fit-out—for example, for the hardwood floors, which were designed to be demountable—than is normal elsewhere. The units were delivered as shells, whether they were to be owned, rented, or held cooperatively (through building societies, for example).

Projects like van der Werf’s Molenvliet Project in Papendrecht and the Lunetten Project near Utrecht applied SAR’s approaches to fairly large developments that, despite their size, “allowed users to have control over the volume, layout, and façade detailing.” Lunetten extended this to the site plan.34 While not directly informed by SAR’s methodology, Lucien Kroll took its underlying philosophy further. His MéMé (Maison Médicale) Project at the Woluwe-Saint-Lambert campus of UCL (Université Catholique de Louvain) was inspired by Giancarlo De Carlo and French social theorists. Kroll engaged the faculty and students to create housing that can be radically altered, inside and out. Visiting it in 2010, Rafffaella Poletti wrote that “the years have witnessed a succession of incongruous and disrespectful alterations perpetrated by the university, which has never wanted to accept the value of this architecture.”35 MéMé realized John Habraken’s dream of granting housing’s users a “fine-grained exercise of power.”36 Habraken’s original proposal was that the specifics of the dwelling unit should be left to its occupants, while the specifics of the support (the building housing the dwelling or the block in which the dwellings are situated) should be determined jointly by the dwellers and the community. This argument has now been extended: as the dweller controls the dwelling, so the neighborhood controls the neighborhood, and the district the district. Each exercise of decision-making power at the given level of territorial use involves the interaction of the users of the territory and the users of the broader territory to which that territory belongs. Decisions that are appropriately made by the neighbors themselves are left to them, within the framework of rules about the formation of neighborhoods.37

SAR initially embraced industrialized housing, but with a focus on infill. “SAR’s founders looked forward to the possibility of industrial production of ‘detachable units’ (SAR’s term for those parts of the dwelling under direct control of the household.) These were pictured…as consumer products.”38 An effort “to develop a panel system (for infill) based on SAR’s principles of dimensional and positional coordination…was stymied by…Dutch government standards for residential living spaces” that were “irrational” from SAR’s standpoint but inflexibly enforced, resulting in panels of too many widths.39

We are back to the problem Ikea is trying to resolve: the need to develop platforms of products with standard dimensions to simplify manufacture and still meet consumer demand and regulatory fiat. In developing compatible platforms for a given line of housing, Katerra has the same issue. “Principles of dimensional and positional coordination” are again relevant, and SAR and the East Germans, among others, laid the groundwork. (The UK’s Building Research Establishment did similar work to support Council Housing.) Getting housing out of its box Even a casual survey of contemporary multi-unit housing in the Bay Area reveals the similarities across a range of projects of the same scale. What you find more and more are decorated boxes that reflect their zoning envelope. Kroll’s MéMé is admirable for its effort to break out of the box by playing radically with form. It gave residents the possibility of altering the supports, not just the infill—a freedom reflected in its freewheeling façade. Potentially, with UCL cooperation, alterations could have continued indefinitely. In the Bay Area, the main exceptions to the decorated box are affordable multifamily projects with strong participation by likely residents and neighbors. The work of David Baker Architects includes some of the best of these projects. They standardize repetitive elements—dwelling units, hallways, and the housing blocks that enclose them—and tailor shared settings to the needs of the community. The repetitive elements are set off by minor but telling variations like color, balconies, and solar shading, while the shared spaces are concentrated so they work together synergistically to give residents collectively a greater sum than the usual box can provide, effectively extending their personal space. Open spaces are an important part of this, connecting the housing with its neighborhood and supporting activities like urban agriculture that are popular but rarely found in market-rate multi-unit housing.40 In the Bay Area, David Baker Architects’ projects are starting to incorporate factory-built housing. A recent example, The Union Flats, sustains the quality it has achieved with conventional construction. The challenge, especially on smaller sites, is the tailwags-dog nature of volumetric units, for which the box is ideal for fast erection. The Garden Village project by Stanley Saitowitz’s Natoma Studio for RAD Urban in Berkeley uses the units as

“building blocks” to create visual interest. RAD Urban’s next project on Telegraph Avenue and 51st Street in Oakland’s Temescal district is less differentiated. New laws that override local zoning and a pervasive regional sense of “housing crisis” are leading cities to approve big boxy schemes, out of scale with neighboring buildings, that they might have rejected in the past.41 Missing Middle Housing seeks to revive prewar multifamily housing typologies that were supplanted by postwar suburban tract housing and garden apartments; and urban “boxes above parking podiums” and residential towers. This repertoire of developer “products” is seen as lacking nuance, especially in its ability to fit housing into existing neighborhoods. Co-founders Daniel and Karen Parolek argue for the variety of multifamily housing options that prewar towns and cities offered, given their potential to contribute significant added density. The idea is to minimize the need for dramatic increases in height and bulk by enabling more modest increases in density across the existing fabric.42 Karen Parolek sees form-based codes as a bulwark against the “big crap” likely to be built as new state laws in California override local control of development through existing zoning.43 Form-based codes specify “street and building types (or mix of types), build-to lines, number of floors, and percentage of built site frontage.”44 SAR anticipated this approach in its 1977 report, Deciding on Density.45 A 2014 redevelopment plan for BART Pleasant Hill Station takes a form-based approach, as does Missing Middle Housing’s 2018 proposal to redevelop BART North Berkeley Station. 46 Aside from preserving local communities’ decision-making power through zoning, form-based codes encourage a mix of buildings and open spaces that, even at a higher density, produce a richer, more urbane fabric. California’s new laws put housing production above other factors, which may create a Hobson’s choice between a lack of housing production in the transit-served urban core and a lack of urbanity as developers takes advantage of bonus densities and expedited, statemandated entitlements. Bigger, boxier housing projects could soon be the Bay Region’s norm. Is this the price of being housed at all? Graff might say, “Don’t pay it. Look for an ‘ordinary’—a ‘new normal’—that delivers livability.”

Looking beyond housing to regional livability “Speeding up housing production” was the starting point of my research. Various factors slow it in the Bay Region, including the growing inequality of would-be buyers and renters of housing. A recent Financial Times article on housing trends points not only to factory-built housing but also to corporate ownership and management of rental housing and potentially of the neighborhoods where it’s located. This is controversial—not all tenants are happy, and some cities are wary of the loss of competition and potential for monopoly pricing—but both trends relate to a third: the higher energy and ecological demands that governments and consumers impose on housing. They make data more important and dwellers more amenable to smart home systems and third-party digital management. If new housing is Alexa-controlled, developers like Google-owned Sidewalk Labs want to extend this to districts.47 The new term “modern methods of construction” (MMC) reflects the way the design-build-operate trajectory that defines the building industry is being transformed. Katerra and others are trying to shape this, but their focus is U.S. housing developers. Some European multifamily projects, like Germany’s baugruppen, share the livability of affordable projects here that also engage residents and neighbors as active participants in their planning and design.48 If we want housing to “function in the fullest social, human sense,” as Bender argued in 1967,49 then we have ask what such livability means in a given urban context. With these place-specific requirements in hand, we also have to ask how a metropolitan region and its communities can achieve it. Focusing on livability frees us from seeing housing as “things”—as density targets, unit counts, and production targets. They still matter, of course, but they may blind us to livability’s bigger picture: the opportunities that come with it and the strategies it implies. Horst Rittel saw housing as a wicked problem—intractable and complex, its presenting issues symptoms of larger problems. Our housing problem falls squarely in his definition. With a regional economy the size of the Netherlands, our metropolis is an entrepôt of ideas and innovation. Yet we struggle to house people decently and provide other basic services effectively. Despite our wealth, our public realm is frayed by decades of underinvestment. It is becoming less and less livable.

Singapore is a city-state, so any comparison to the Bay Region is inexact, but it’s worth considering. Singapore's welfare-capitalist mass housing strategy combines ownership through long-term, inheritable leases with the possibility of moving “up, down, and across” the public housing on offer. Size, location, and quality are based on family means and preferences, with a consistently high (and rising) minimum standard. Education, healthcare, and transit are part of Singapore’s welfare-capitalist mix. Subsidies are tied to employment, but the children’s social mobility isn’t harmed if their parents don’t earn very much. They get good housing and their kids get a good education. Healthcare is universal. And it accomplishes this without a huge tax burden—Singapore levies globally competitive flat taxes on companies and workers. Can the Bay Region match Singapore’s benchmark? Can we overcome the chronic below-market housing shortages in our transit-served inner core by rethinking? How would our doing so impact existing housing in our communities? Can we have housing and urbanity, at the price points we need to sustain healthy growth? Housing production alone won't answer these questions, but they're worth pondering. They form an agenda for the next decades. Notes 1. Colin St. John Wilson, “Two Letters on the State of Architecture,” 1964 and 1981,” Journal of Architectural Education, XXXV: 1, Fall 1981, p. 10. 2. Transcript of Bay Area architect Chuck Davis in conversation with his former EHDD Partner, the architect Marc L’Italien, Albany, CA, 29 March 2018. 3. Richard Bender and John Parman, “The Factory Without Walls: Industrialization in Residential Construction, California Management Review, XVIII: 3, Spring 1976, pp. 47–48. 4. Operation Breakthrough—Lessons Learned About Demonstrating New Technology, Comptroller General of the United States, 2 November 1976, p. 2. 5. Op. Cit., p. 18 6. Robert J. Cole, “U.S. Says Stirling Homex Reported Phantom $ales,” New York Times, 3 July 1975. 7. Notes of a conversation with the architect-planner Larry Dodge, Berkeley, 9 August 2019. 8. Regentald Stuart, “Alodex Millionaires’ Pitfall,” New York Times, 8 April 8 1976, page 55. 9. Larry Dodge, Berkeley, 9 August 2019.

10. Barbara A. Checket-Hanks: “The 1960s: Heat Pumps, A/C Blast Off,” ACHR News, 25 April 2001. 11. Richard Bender and John Parman, “The Factory Without Walls: Industrialization in Residential Construction,” Op.Cit., pp. 46–56. 12. Kriestien Ring and Geoffrey London, “Owner Occupied,” Assemble Papers, 3 March 2017, reprinted from Future West, University of Western Australia Faculty of Arts, Business, Law, and Education, Perth. 13. Richard Bender, “Industrialization and Low-Cost Housing,” paper, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, 1968, pp. 3–4. 14. Richard Bender, A Crack in the Rear-View Mirror, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973, p. 1. 15. Notes of a conversation with David Baker, FAIA, David Baker Architects, San Francisco, 31 January 2019. 16. Notes of a conversation with Andrew Meagher, Design Director, Factory OS, 15 October 2019. 17. Sara Pacelko, AIA, at a SPUR panel on modular housing, Oakland, 13 November 2018 and at an AIA San Francisco panel on modular housing, 18 July 2018. Pacelko is a design director with RAD Urban. 18. Fei Tsen, SPUR panel on housing innovation, 5 June 2018, comment to the author. Tsen is the founder of Windflower Properties, a multifamily housing developer. She was Board President, Treasure Island Development Authority and Real Estate Director, Port of San Francisco. 19. Notes of a phone conversation with Craig Curtis, Michelle Ha, Peter Spruance, and Chester Weir, Katerra, Seattle, 8 February 2019. Curtis is the head of architecture, formerly with Miller-Hull. 20. Katerra phone conversation, 8 February 2019. 21. Conversations with BAR, 5 December 2018 and 22 January 2019; conversations with Fei Tsen, 26 April and 5 June 2019. 22. Richard Milne, “Ikea dismantles tradition to see inspiration from car industry,” Financial Times, 2 October 2019. 23. India Block, “Ikea is bringing its low-cost modular units to the UK,” Dezeen, 26 June 2019 https://www.dezeen.com/2019/06/26/ikea-buildlow-cost-housing-uk/; Hilary Osborne, “Ikea gets green light to build affordable homes in UK,” Guardian, 25 June 2019. BoKlok Housing AB website https://www.boklok.com/ 24. ByggHouse has an outpost in the U.S. https://bygghouse.com/; Jack Balderrama Morley, “Production Line: How Sweden is Pioneering Automated, Prefab Construction,” Architizer, https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/industry/swedish-modularhousing/; David Baker, “A Traveler’s Perspective on Housing

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

Affordability,” David Baker Architects Blog, https://www.dbarchitect.com/us/news_blog/364/A%20Traveler's%20Pers pective%20on%20Housing%20Affordability.html?; notes of a meeting with Brad Leibin and Jonas Weber, David Baker Architects, San Francisco, 1 February 2019; David Baker’s comment on Lindbäcks’s craned-on roof was made in passing during a meeting at his San Francisco office in the summer of 2019. Kyodo Reuters (news service), “Toyota and Panasonic to merge housing units and team up on ‘smart town’ business, Japan Times, 9 May 2019. John McManus, “Sekisui and Its Woodside Homes Will Team up on BUILDER Chöwa Concept Home for 2020 Unveiling,” Architect, 24 March 2019. Reinier de Graff, “Architektur ohne Eigenschaften,” Four Walls and a Roof, Harvard, 2017, pp. 31–53. Graff, ibid., p. 53. Graff, ibid., p. 52. Graff, ibid., p. 53. Graff, ibid., p. 53. John Parman, “A Visitor’s Observations,” Open House, Vol 3, No. 1, 1978, p. 37. Parman, Ibid., p. 37. Parman, Ibid., p. 39. Rafffaella Poletti, “Lucien Kroll: utopia interrupted, Domus, 30 June 2010. Parman, op. cit., p. 37. Parman, ibid., p. 38. Parman, ibid., p. 37. Parman, ibid., p. 37. See also SAR 73: the methodical formulation of agreements concerning the direct dwelling environment, which sets out these principles for supports and tissue (or fabric). I’m working with David Baker Architects on a book on multi-family housing, and have reviewed its portfolio in detail and discussed it with principals David Baker, Daniel Simons, and Amanda Loper. This reflects my own observations and conversations with Berkeley architect David Trachtenberg. Remarks of Karen Parolek, SPUR San Francisco modular housing panel, 18 July 2019. Missing Middle Housing’s website: https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ Parolek, ibid. Form-Based Codes Institute, “Form-Based Codes Defined”: https://formbasedcodes.org/definition/ Deciding on Density, SAR, Eindhoven, Netherlands, June 1977. Form-Based Codes Institute, “Pleasant Hill BART Station,” with links to the February 2014 plan https://formbasedcodes.org/codes/pleasant-hillbart-station/; Missing Middle Housing, A Thoughtful Approach to Form and Scale: Envisioning the Future of North Berkeley BART, October

2018 https://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/08Opticos.pdf 47. Aleksandra Wisniewska, “How will we live in the 2020s?” Financial Times, 12–13 October 2019. 48. Call with Daniel Chen, who made a four-month tour of examples of this work in Germany, Denmark, and elsewhere. Chen was formerly an investment banker with Morgan Stanley focused on real estate. For baugruppen, see Geoffrey London in conversation with Kristien Ring: “Owner Occupied,” Assembled Papers, 3 March 2017. 49. Bender, “Industrialization and Low-Cost Housing,” op. cit., pp. 3–4. A paper written in October 2019 while a visiting scholar in architecture at the College of Environmental Design, U.C. Berkeley, and published in Common Place no. 14, Autumn 2019 (https://issuu.com/j2parman/docs/cp14)

On participatory design (1978): SAR: A Visitor's Observations Since its foundation in 1964, SAR1 has been concerned with the extension of user control over the decision-making processes by which the physical environment is shaped and reshaped and its uses determined. SAR's initial focus was on user control at the dwelling level and user influence (shared jointly with the community) at the "supporting" level (a term meant to embrace those elements of the dwelling environment which fell within community rather than individual control. The word "community" is meant to include both private and public bodies exercising control over territories at a level greater than the individual dwelling). This interest in user "right of say" has been steadily refined in the dozen years of SAR's existence. As it was first put forward by N.J. Habraken, SAR's founding director in De Dragers en de Mensen, (Supports and People), in 1961, the responsibility for decision making about the physical environment was to be shared equally by individuals and the community. Habraken called this balance of responsibilities "the natural relationship," and it runs through much of his writing as a continuing theme. SAR's development of this theme has taken the form of identifying different levels of territorial use within the physical environment, and developing tools to aid in or make possible an effective and mutually satisfactory (to all participants) process of territorial control. These tools have had two major purposes: 1. To evaluate alternative patterns of use; 2. To communicate the rules of a given use pattern—rules which assure the maintenance of the pattern without specifying its detailed elaboration.

The determination of a use pattern at a given level of territorial use, while assuring the realization of certain objectives, also makes it possible to defer decisions about the actual elaboration of the pattern—decisions which, if taken at the outset, even by democratic means, would unnecessarily reduce the freedom of those individuals entering the decision-making process at a later point. A use pattern at a given territorial level, then, would be a model, an abstract

representation of certain general arrangements of built and spatial elements. Two types of freedom would be afforded by such model: 1.

The freedom to adjust it to the situation presented by the site of its application; The freedom to elaborate it in any manner permitted by the rules which govern it.

The two models SAR has developed are not precisely analogous, although they are intended to fit together and mesh with other levels of territorial use. At the support level, the support plan makes allowances for different materials and construction systems, so that the basic spatial character of a given support can be maintained despite these differences. It also provides opportunities for variations in dwelling arrangement and configuration (that is, it leaves open the elaboration of the support at the dwelling level). At the "tissue" level (a planning level that could be described as being more specific than a land-use plan, but less specific than a support plan in terms of stipulating the characteristics of a given territory) similar allowances are made for the problems of fitting a given tissue model to actual site conditions, and for its elaboration at the support level. Besides developing these tools, SAR has been interested in their application, primarily within multi-unit housing projects. Some of these applications have involved some degree of user participation, ranging from user choice among a limited set of alternatives (i.e., depth of the dwelling, modifications in layout, the addition of certain amenities, etc.) to user control over internal arrangements, dwelling volume, façade details, and even over siting and other aspects of site planning. At the time of SAR's establishment, there was widespread interest in building industrialization, and SAR's founders looked forward to the possibility of industrial production of "detachable units" (SAR's term for those parts of the dwelling under the direct control of the household). These were first pictured as consumer products that one could rent or purchase and use to create a dwelling. Something like this was actually developed as a prototype by a Dutch manufacturer. While SAR pursued its efforts toward industrialization, other companies in the Netherlands sought to adapt its methods as the basis for their own housing 70

production, A building firm, Nijhuis, for example, tried to develop a panel system (for infill) based on SAR's principles of dimensional and positional coordination, but this effort was stymied by the need to meet Dutch government standards for residential living spaces— standards which presented inconsistencies in dimensioning and had to be met exactly. This required Nijhuis to provide panels in a many more widths that it anticipated, which undermined the usefulness of SAR's approach to coordination for this type of production. SAR has continued to press its case for dimensional and positional coordination (now incorporated in the new Dutch standard for modular coordination, NEN 2880), and to work for reform in Dutch housing standards. But its interest in industrialization per se has waned. Its major concern today is with the issue of user participation, or, more broadly, with the "democratization" of environmental decision making at all levels. The direction of its thinking can be seen in some of the more recent statements by its past and present directors. Habraken sees SAR's goal as the realization of a "fine-grained exercise in power,"2 while John Carp sees it as "the decentralization of territorial control."3 Carp provides the best summary of SAR's present direction: the principle behind SAR's efforts is "territorial control on the basis of territorial use," and its aim, therefore, is the alteration of existing patterns of territorial control, which Habraken finds overly centralized and which Carp finds lacking in appropriate mechanisms to insure user participation at every level of territorial use. Carp notes that the individual has control over his or her immediate space and, in concert with other household members, over the dwelling itself. But there is a gap between this level of control and the next one in which, in the Netherlands, users participate directly. User participation in environmental decisionmaking jumps from the level of the individual household to the much more general level of the land use plan. The involvement of users in determining the character of the block, the neighborhood, or the district is not legally prescribed. In the Netherlands, this has led to cities like Eindhove in which it is difficult to distinguish districts and neighborhoods as coherent units. One sees far greater evidence of a preoccupation, at the city government level, with regional markets or the city's importance as a business center than of a concern for the needs of city residents at

the district or neighborhood level, for there are no mechanisms at those levels to make such needs felt, nor are there any organizations at that level specifically chartered to respond to them. In Eindhoven, amenities like swimming pools, parks, recreation areas, playgrounds, etc., are allocated by the city on a demographic basis. The concern is for people served in a statistical sense rather than for meeting the more exact needs of each district and each neighborhood. Facilities like parks and playgrounds—which would seem logically to be the province of these more local units—have become the responsibility of the city, to whom individual householders must turn in order to alter or improve them. But the city is precisely the wrong level: it can deal well with generalities, as in, for example, land use planning, where the existence of appropriate mechanisms assures both a democratic process of formulation and an emphasis on function which avoids the more specific elaboration that properly should be determined at a lower level. But (the evidence of Eindhoven suggests) the city is less well-equipped to deal with more specific, lower-level decisions. Confronted by the need to take such decisions, it tends to treat the needs of neighborhoods and districts in a general way, posing general solutions (so many parks, so many sports halls) that translate to a monotonous overall environment, an environment of generalities. This is reminiscent of Habraken's attack on mass housing—the original point of departure for SAR's work. Habraken's initial proposal was that the specifics of the dwelling unit should be left to its occupants, while the specifics of the support (the building housing the dwelling or the block in which the dwellings are situated) should be determined jointly—by the dwellers and the community. This argument has now been extended: as the dweller controls the dwelling so the neighborhood controls the neighborhood, and the district the district. Each exercise of decision-making power at a given level of territorial use involves the interaction of the users of the territory (e.g., "neighbors") and the users of the broader territory to which that territory belongs (e.g., "neighborhoods" or "the district"). Decisions that are appropriately made by the neighbors themselves are left to them, within the framework of rules about the formation of neighborhoods. Decisions that are collectively made by neighborhoods acting as a

district are made at that level, without infringing on the decisionmaking power appropriately delegated to each neighborhood. One recognizes this as a version of representative democracy, aimed at accommodating change within an ordered society and mindful of the need to preserve that society's basic fabric. That fabric is rooted in individual and collective responsibility, what the Syndicalists referred to as self-management. Society is ordered not through the imposition of order, but through each person taking responsibility for the territory he uses, and each group taking responsibility for the larger territory that supports its immediate activities—a series of "nested wholes." SAR has been accused of pursuing its ideas in a vacuum, without any real regard for the actual situation of, for example, the building industry in the Netherlands or the real needs of householders in Dutch cities. It appears to have taken this criticism to heart, at least to the point of abandoning some of its own ideas and methods or modifying them to meet a changing situation. Carp attributes SAR's defensiveness about its work to its own attitude of self assertion. Such defensiveness has been self-defeating, as has been the attempt to find a scapegoat ("the developer," "mass housing," etc.) for existing environmental problems. If SAR's aim is to establish a more firmly democratic process, it must be the result of an effort which involves everyone and which evolves naturally, not in terms of a predetermined image of the outcome, particularly when it is actually the interim result of an ongoing process.4 The desire for a more broadly-based effort has led SAR to seek closer ties with other groups sharing similar concerns. These have tended to be counterparts to SAR within other professions, notably planning. The immediate benefit of such exchanges has been the mutual confirmation of problems found and the solutions posed. But some have questioned SAR's main premise, that extending democratic decision-making to those planning levels where it does not now exist will improve their overall quality. Is it true, they ask? SAR's confidence in its ideas has been strengthened by the successful application of its approach to several recent projects. An example is Molenvliet in Papendrecht, the Netherlands, designed by the Rotterdam architectural firm, Kokon, under the direction of Frans van der Werf. This project made it possible for users to control the volume, layout, and façade detailing of their dwellings. A

second project—Lunetten, near Utrecht, also designed by Kokon in concert with five other architects-- extended user participation to the level of decision-making about the site plan and its elaboration. Lunetten also made the first use of SAR's tissue method as a tool for participation. (Van der Werf also used it to develop the site plan of Molenvliet, but as a design tool, not as a means for participation.) In their present form, SAR's methods are not easily grasped by people with no special training in reading the abstractions of architects and planners. (As Appleyard notes, this is a general tendency of these professions5.) It is significant that Van der Werf and his colleagues, in designing Lunetten, directly illustrated site alternatives rather than use the tissue method's abstractions. But SAR's more important focus appears to be to "convert" these professions—to bringing about a major change in their attitude. This extends to government administrators and policymakers, as well. SAR's present "spirit of reconciliation" stems not only from the pragmatic need to cooperate with these groups to achieve change, but also from the recognition that they are also questioning much that they did in the past, and searching for the means to arrive at a more open-ended decision-making process—one which can involve users directly instead of relying on and imposing official guesswork. In a broader sense, SAR has also been concerned with all the participants in town and city development, if only through its praise—so evident in Habraken's writing—of the ordinary events of everyday life and the mundane decisions of ordinary people, which Habraken sees as the real building blocks of society. This idea of people taking part in shaping the community, individually and communally, goes to the heart of SAR's interests. When this spirit is understood and infused in a building project by an architect like Frans van der Werf, its creative possibilities and the responsibilities it places on all participants come to fore. But this is like life itself.

Notes: 1.

2. 3. 4.

Stichting Architecten Research (the Foundation for Architectural Research) at the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands. I was a Visiting Researcher at SAR from October through December 1977, funded by a Pre-dissertation Fellowship from the Council for European Studies at Columbia University. N.J. Habraken: "The Limits of Professionalism," in Architectural Association Quarterly, 8:1; pp. S2-59. John Carp: Short Statement by John Carp, SAR; presentation at the International Day for Human Ecology Vienna, Austria, May 1977. John Carp: The SAR and the Lesson of St. Nicholas, presentation at the Conference on Building Industrialization, Technical University of Hannover, Germany, October 1975.

Written originally for SAR's journal Open House, 3:1, 1978, pp. 36–40.

On participatory design (2019): Our Giancarlo De Carlo–inflected dialogue Paolo Ceccarelli: This year is the 100th anniversary of Giancarlo De Carlo’s birth. The best way to remember him is to promote the project he started with ILAUD by addressing some central problems. It would be important to have contributions from persons who dealt directly with ILAUD or worked on issues similar to those De Carlo proposed for ILAUD. Richard Bender: I’ve long admired Giancarlo De Carlo. It has been 70 years since Truman enacted the Fair Deal, and 50 years since the Housing Act of 1968. Across these decades, the focus has shifted from large-scale, top-down solutions to bottom-up ones. Today, we see megacities where the newest and biggest mix with pervasive poverty. Our current housing and social crises would have been as familiar to De Carlo in the 1950s as they were later and are today. John Parman: De Carlo’s emphasis on the human and communal as missing pieces of the modernist program, and his insistence on the need to read the city-region, as he called it, and to ground development and redevelopment in participation, make him relevant to issues that we’ve discussed and written about under the rubric of Slow Urbanism. De Carlo comes at them from a different angle. RB: De Carlo was at two of the last CIAM meetings that the Team X group attended. The topic was “habitat” and the split began there. This was around the time I first went to Zurich. I’d met most of the older CIAM people when Sert came to Harvard. As late as 1959, when I spent time with Bakema in Rotterdam while the Dutch group was preparing for the final CIAM meeting, De Carlo wasn’t visible. Paolo, do you know what his connection was to CIAM? How did it happen? PC: In 1955, Ernesto Nathan Rogers invited De Carlo—despite his criticism of CIAM and of Rogers, too—to join a meeting in Le Sarraz to prepare for the 10th CIAM congress in Dubrovnik. On one side were the “oldies”—Giedion, Roth, Wogensky, Max Bill,

Jacqueline Tirwitt, and Rogers; on the other were the “young Turks”—Peter Smithson, Shad Woods, Aulis Blomsted, Reima Pietilä, De Carlo, and others. The newcomers began to share ideas and to criticize the approach of the older establishment. To address an increasingly difficult relationship, it was decided to put the organization of the Dubrovnik congress in the hands of younger members like Bakema, van Eyck, Candilis, Woods, and Alison and Peter Smithson. De Carlo wasn’t at the Dubrovnik congress in 1956 or the next one in Aix-en-Provence, but he formed relationships with these younger colleagues and in 1959 participated in the last CIAM congress in Otterloo, where he was attacked by the older members as a traitor to CIAM’s principles. CIAM collapsed in Otterloo and its young members went on to found Team X as a radical alternative. RB: Between my last year with Sert at the GSD and the years I spent with the Haefeli Moser Steiger office in Zurich, I knew or met most of the Zurich and Rotterdam CIAM people, but it would have taken me months to remember/assemble a list as complete as this! I arrived in Zurich while Dr. Steiger was in Dubrovnik. He spent my first lunch with him venting about it. JP: Unlike some of the “Young Turks” who followed them—like Christopher Alexander and the New Urbanists—Team X worked consciously within modernism. They, and De Carlo in particular, sought to redirect modernism rather than supplant it. RB: De Carlo’s larger cohort—Ivan Illich, Metabolists like Maki and Tange, and the British economist and philosopher Barbara Ward, part of C.A. Doxiadis’s circle—pointed to the paradox that scarcity lived side by side with abundance. They wanted to restore wholeness. We still face the same paradox. Unequal wealth fractures our cities and our society. As we see in the Bay Area, disproportionate wealth seeks enclaves and remoteness in ways that undermine the richness of everyday life. Housing, increasingly a continuation of work for many people, trades the drama of shopping and the aromas of the kitchen for things that can be delivered. Life for ordinary people now comes piecemeal—ever-smaller fractions of what they need sold to them at a constantly fluctuating market price.

JP: Fifty years on, the surge in the urban homeless reflects the unaffordability of the city’s most basic elements. Illich’s idea of shadow work that transcends the cash economy is desperately needed, because so many people make so little. If Urbino—a town in steep decline when De Carlo arrived—is a precedent, then he might tell us, “Start where you are!” as Zen puts it: “These are the city’s conditions.” They confront us, so we have to look beneath the surface, where the fabric of a place remains ripe for revival. In reading it, we discover how. RB: De Carlo appreciated that cities and their buildings are unfinished. It’s in this sense that they’re alive, but that life depends on communities that learn to work with them over time—that are inspired to do this by the fabric itself or by its rediscovery. De Carlo’s emphasis on educating the community is like what the Campus Planning Study Group at Berkeley set out to do—to explain the place to a community that, due of its lack of understanding, was in danger of destroying it. Part of that process was to clarify the rules and concepts underlying the campus, so the community could both recognize error when it saw it and imagine better ways to build. But they also learned how to read the place in a larger sense—how the buildings and settings interact across a terrain that, while bordered like an urban park, varies from formality to informality as it takes cues from Beaux Arts classicism, European and regional modernism, arts & crafts vernacular, and nature itself. JP: Peter Carolin of Cambridge University helped organize a larger-scale effort, Cambridge Futures, to enable the people of that city-region to understand it in similar terms and then picture how it might grow without losing its intrinsic character and qualities. The question of scaling a fabric to new requirements looms large in the Bay Area, where debates about adding density are constant and highly polarized. This isn’t unique to here, of course. Where cities have removed the past to make room for development at a radically different scale, as in China, there’s invariably a countermovement, however late and ineffectual, to preserve something of what's left. What we lack are successful examples of how to scale up for new growth without crushing the life of the existing city in the process.

RB: Minoru Mori, a lifelong student of Le Corbusier, tried mightily to harmonize the new scale he believed major cities required to compete globally with the old scale that made his own of city, Tokyo, so remarkably livable. He foresaw with horror what you and I saw repeated in many of the city’s wards—the supplanting of the old fabric by technically proficient towers that are impossible to distinguish from one another. "Generic" means you no longer know where you are. Roppongi Hills was Mori’s most ambitious effort to define a new scale that maintain its connection to human scale and movement, so it could be transformed much as streets can be to fit into the surrounding fabric in ways that feel convivial, as Illich would say, rather than oppressive. It’s a bold prototype that like all such didn't completely succeed. JP: It opened in tandem with Shiodome, the redevelopment of Shimbashi Station when Japan Rail was privatized. The financial realities of that transaction resulted in a zero-sum assembly of towers. It also created a wall between the station and the Ginza District when access would be expected. Only the station itself has anything like this, and everything above it frustrates it. RB: The difference is stark. Mori, a dominant land owner in Minami-Aoyama, followed the lead of his patient, site-assembling father. They knew the district intimately, and their aims for it necessitated their engaging the community household-by-household to convince the owners of the ward’s many small parcels to join them and participate in its transformation. Enough were convinced to make it happen. Shiodome, in contrast, is pure expediency wrought at a comparable scale as Roppongi Hills but without any sense of what might hold it together, let alone tie it convincingly to its surroundings. It’s an outlier, heedless of urbanity in the same way that the wonderfully urbane Tokyo Forum was heedless of cost. JP: When I joined you in Tokyo in May 1989, living in Mejiro, a district that you compared to the Brooklyn of your childhood, I was struck by its remarkably subtle fabric, weaving together a low, dense pattern of nearly-attached houses, narrow lanes, and shrines and temples, placed almost randomly in a given neighborhood as a counterpoint, a moment of respite and beauty. In 1989, we lived in

an example of modest neighborhood infill—the former house of our friend's grandfather, redeveloped as a three-story condominium building, taller than the adjoining houses but respectful of how they met the street and their unvarying yet subtly varying appearance. It occurred to me then that if the average height of Tokyo buildings was only 1.3 stories, it could scale up without too much disruption. RB: The whole question of scale and the related question of how communities engage with the different forces that push them to add density—or impose it on them—has a long history, and not just in Tokyo. When CIAM and Team X split, one part took a “clientdown” view of buildings, typologies, and programs, while the other took a “community-up” view emphasizing site and user needs. The first pushed for “urban-scale” density, while the second was more nuanced and contextual, as De Carlo’s work in Urbino illustrates. But the split also reflected experience in the cities in the developing world. Participation took in the self-help movement, which harnessed local means and traditions to compensate for the lack of financing and as a way to work around authoritarian, aid-fueled, often corrupt regimes bent on applying western or Soviet models. JP: Nor is the west immune. De Carlo overlaps Thatcher’s gutting of public housing in the U.K. and Nixon’s efforts to find market solutions, off the government’s books, for public housing. RB: And the self-help movement surfaces here, too. UHAB in the Bronx is an example, very similar to developing world examples and funded by the some of the same philanthropies. It’s also an era when squatters appear in New York, San Francisco, London, and Copenhagen—inspired by examples in the south of Europe, in Caracas, and elsewhere. The famous Wall in Hong Kong, public housing gone rogue, is another example. Urbino had a different problem: how to stanch population flow and revive the economy. De Carlo’s work there is relevant to postindustrial cities like Antwerp or Detroit, yet it exemplifies how architects can orchestrate change by engaging and educating a community—living with it. It’s an important model in this respect.

JP: Part of its power is that can be applied equally to fast-growing cities. Self-help is also very much in the picture when you consider that that growth often results from population surges that quickly overwhelm existing supports and services, with little means to develop them. RB: “What would Giancarlo do?” is a reasonable starting point for today’s urbanists as they face unprecedented rural-to-urban migration and the flood of refugees from regional warfare. Tom Friedman noted recently how the first 50 years after World War II were great ones for weaker states. Superpowers used aid to win their affection. Climate change and population growth weren’t problems. Smart phones weren’t ubiquitous, so their negatives weren’t a factor. And China wasn’t in the WTO, so other low-wage countries were still competitive. Soon after that, those advantages disappeared. Meanwhile, the Cold War ended, replacing superpowers and globalization with regional parity and nationalism. Cold War revival may alter this, but right now we have what Friedman calls “zones of disorder” from which masses of people are fleeing. We have tent cities of homeless in our cities, and encampments of refugees at our borders. In China, India, and Nigeria, rural-to-city migrants similarly find shelter where they can. It’s not new—when I worked in São Paulo in the sixties, as many people as now live in San Francisco arrived and settled on its outskirts every year. The responses were dictatorship, Brasilia, leftwing and rightwing populism, and pockets of progress, like Jaime Lerner’s Curatiba. JP: So, what would Giancarlo do? RB: The Argentinian-American architect and educator Horacio Camino wrote that “We are wrapped up in disciplines that lack social purpose and understanding of human behavior, and we deliver only rhetoric and fail to provide a service to the community.” Education, he added, “should be responsive to life.” De Carlo’s critique of CIAM is very similar. He saw architects as the midwives of community transformation, acknowledging humbly that the community does the work, pregnant with the desire for change and

faced with all of its obstacles. To quote Camino again, “they take a broad, fresh look, wherever life is and where the challenges are.” As De Carlo’s Urbino shows, that fresh look includes reading the place itself, to use his word. Can you read a city the scale of Lagos? I think you can. Maybe it’s another form of self-help, that kind of engagement that lives with a place as terrain, settlement, and movement, that finds and eases the pressure points, finds and cultivates or builds on what works or holds promise. Like De Carlo in Urbino, it’s explaining a city to itself so those who shape it have a starting point, a why. When so many people are from somewhere else, living often at the barest subsistence, this can seem like delay, but it’s not—it’s a deliberation that will set a better course. The more that ordinary people feel they’re part of it, the more readily they will join in, make it their cause. Written with Richard Bender for Giancarlo De Carlo and ILAUD: A Movable Frontier, Paolo Ceccarelli, ed., Fondazione OAMI, Milan, 2019. We added the invitation to contribute that we received from Ceccarelli and his response to a question we posed because both felt like part of our dialogue.

On architectural research (1984): The question of style in research This essay addresses the question of style in research. We first took this up as guest editors of the Journal of Architectural Education (May 1979). For that issue, we asked a diverse group of architectural researchers to comment on their style of research. Asked to define style, we said that it meant "how people do something" or "the way one performs an activity." We also meant for style to be interpreted as the force that animates researchers and influences their choice of methods in carrying out their research. As Albert Einstein wrote, "When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. "1 The state of research We were involved for several years in evaluating a national research institute doing environmental design research. At each visit, we saw the same thing: much of the work we saw, while methodologically "sound," was of relatively little interest. Some of it was trivial. We had seen the same phenomenon in our department: a tendency to confuse the adherence to an "acceptable research methodology" with making a real contribution to the field. Around the same time, we encountered Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, a book that argues that the methods of science are not substantively different from the methods of any other organized human activity (legislation, for example). Feyerabend says: The image of 20th century science in the minds of scientists and laymen is determined by technological miracles such as color television, the moon shots, the infra-red oven, as well as by the somewhat vague but still quite influential rumor, or fairy-tale, concerning the manner in which these miracles are produced. According to the fairy-tale the success of science is the result of a subtle, but carefully balanced combination of inventiveness and control. Scientists have ideas. And they have special methods for improving ideas. The theories of science have passed the test of method. They give a better account of the world than ideas which have not passed the test. But the fairy-tale is false. There is no special method that guarantees success or makes it probable. Scientists do not solve problems because they

possess a magic wand—methodology or a theory of rationality—but because they have studied a problem a long time, because they know the situation fairly well, because they are not too dumb.2

We wondered if environmental design research had not become overly enamored of methodology and the appearance of scientific rigor, and if this scientism was not choking off a good deal of interesting work and channeling a considerable effort into keeping up appearances rather than pursuing significant lines of thought. In organizing our issue of the JAE, we enlisted a range of respondents, some of whom were clearly working in research areas most people would categorize as "scientific." Others, however, had abandoned the methods associated with the sciences—behavioral or otherwise—in favor of more experimental approaches that served them better in getting at the heart of their chosen subject. What follows is a brief account of the main issues raised by some of our respondents, together with our thoughts about what these issues imply for the organization of environmental design research in an academic setting. For purposes of brevity, we have not quoted from all the articles published as part of this JAE issue, since in some cases more than one article dealt with a similar topic. We have also drawn on three other sets of observations (those of Proshansky, Brill and Vellecco, and Bender) that were not part of the issue. "Clerical" research Christopher Arnold notes that "the mass of today's research is not directed toward the pursuit of knowledge but toward its authentication." 3 This leads to what he calls "clerical" research: Clerical work consists of copying documents containing ideas and information developed by others, providing numerical data, organizing data ·in ways devised by others, and drawing conclusions through the use of precise criteria set at a higher level. The essence of clericalism is the suspension of judgment and its replacement by automatic methods. This is a description of much research: thought is replaced by the accumulation of data. By some paradoxical quirk, the clerical interpretation of numerical data is then hailed as the measure of truth, while insight and judgment are deemed unscientific and suspect.

Authentication becomes problematic in much environmental design research because "the kinds of objective and measurable criteria that

are the basis of the natural and physical sciences do not exist in the combined physical, social, cultural, and political context of the environmental world." As a result, "we must be prepared to accept a much broader basis of authentication, and we must, as the practicing designer does, be prepared to accept that the search is much more important than clerical authentication." Arnold also argues against the penchant for drawing a distinction between design and research: It is symptomatic of current attitudes that Progressive Architecture, in attempting to define research for purposes of its awards program, defined research as that which is not design. I think that the poor quality of most environmental research; and the general insecurity and gloom of many of its practitioners, stems from the subliminal realization that the real research is going on in design offices.

Rather than remain fixated on clerical authentication, Arnold suggests that environmental design researchers should search for a more appropriate style of research. From his perspective: The designer's style is a more fruitful model for environmental research than the process of authentication. The testing and evaluation of design-style research will remain to some extent unsusceptible to numerical objective evaluation—qualitative and appropriate only within a particular cultural context. As such, we cannot afford to limit research to value-free evaluation, because the environment is predominantly a qualitative and value-rich field. A "value-free" environment design research will also tend to be valueless.

Problems communicating As John Habraken points out,4 In architecture today there is no map we share. We may or may not share certain skills, beliefs and attitudes—perhaps even some ideologies and languages, but there is certainly no map of the world that we share. In fact, we are not even sure that we share the same world. A commonly understood and accepted map may never be possible.

For the researcher, "this primitive state has its disadvantages." One of them is isolation—not "the isolation of individuals in the sciences who may be so specialized that they can only talk to a few others" but an existential one: "We do not know where we are." The lack of commonalities creates a distinct problem for the field: 86

Clearly the odds are against those who do design research. The field is unknown. There is no commonly accepted ideology to bind supporters, protectors and interactors together. There is no commonly shared body of knowledge to explain what the research is all about and where it can bring us. There is no track record for those who are able to offer support. For the same reason, those from the profession who could interact with the researchers often find it difficult to do so (and they are usually operating in small scale organizations that don't allow them to spend much time on interactions with no immediate payoff). In short, those who can interact have no tradition to support. Those who create research agendas offer widely different theories, are often removed from the social context to which their work must contribute, and are often not even knowledgeable about each other's work.

The need for an ideology Habraken also argues that one cannot create a better climate for research in design through research management alone. Rather, this requires "stating a belief, embracing a speculative theory that is broad and convincing enough to make people then concentrate resources and energy on the narrower issue of design." An ideology. he believes, is a prerequisite for making progress in the field: There must be an outline that allows us to distinguish relevant from irrelevant directions. The ideology allows us to draw the first contours on the world. We put our research in. There is no research without an ideology, just as there is no science without it. We must distinguish between the two and feel free to discuss both. To stay with an ideology without applying it in our own area of knowledge and expertise is ineffective. To stay within our fields without exposing ourselves in the larger context of human concerns, where no one is an authority, is dangerous. Not to know the distinction is perhaps the most objectionable of all.

Evolving a research style Clare Cooper Marcus suggests that the evolution of a particular researcher's style follows from personal decisions based on intuitions about what is genuinely appropriate to the subject matter being researched.5 Just as my method of investigation differs from earlier work (and from most standard techniques), so do my ways of sampling and analysis. I am no longer interested in statistical, random sampling or quantitative analysis. Not to say they are wrong—they are just not right for me in my current state of intellectual/personal development.

What prodded her to alter her approach was the sense that she was "only scratching the surface of what the environment means to people. My research style, as it has evolved, has grown more and more intertwined with what is happening to me personally. To ignore the connection would be less than honest." The process of hypothesis creation is for her a personal, intuitive process: If I don't know where to go next with some hypothesis or idea., I let go of it, and stop trying to direct it or conduct it (we speak of "conducting" research!). I let it become itself, lead me, evolve out of its inner being. I am convinced by now, through my readings in oriental philosophy, that research, just as life in general, must be approached with acceptance, without holding on, letting things flow and evolve in their own good time. To "tease out" a research problem seems as alien to me now as to tease out a personal problem: my belief is that the solution to each will evolve as one lives one's life, and that to worry about a solution will actually block its emergence.

Challenging design preconceptions For Herbert McLaughlin, principal of the architectural and planning firm of Kaplan/McLaughlin/Diaz, research or inquiry is intended "to challenge commonly held assumptions about design, with special reference to established patterns of solutions for certain building types."6 This research "is guided by a broad set of hypotheses about the nature of architects, their self-images, their predilections, their concern with form rather than function, and the nature of the design process." Mclaughlin sees architects as resisting research that seeks to analyze or even discuss their typical range of solutions to various design problems: Such a discussion might well lead to a serious analysis of the characteristic successes and failures of such prototypes. The prototype which the architect finds most appropriate to his visual preconception may prove to be functionally flawed. Therefore, research which questions the basic validity of different design approaches is seldom encouraged by architects. They prefer research which tinkers with minor refinements to established and visually desirable prototypes.

To counter this tendency, Mclaughlin has developed a research methodology that "emphasizes analysis of general patterns of use and user opinion" and seeks "significant differences in opinion, of

satisfaction. " He sees this approach as particularly well-suited to its subject matter: Compulsory buildings are buildings in which the user has very little choice about whether or not he is going to use, or be affected by, the building. Such buildings include hospitals, public housing, housing for the elderly, jails, and other institutions which frequently are not only compulsory environments, but have clients who are substantially different in their outlooks and attitudes from the real users.

In this area of research, it is especially important that the architects come to understand the ways in which the users of the building are likely to make use of it. Their challenge is to understand the differences in viewpoint between themselves and the users in a manner that relates to the design process and the architects' need for the right information at the right moment. Mclaughlin says, We are interested in "practical" results which can be utilized readily in practice. This has affected not only subject matter and techniques, but the personnel assigned to projects. We have placed much emphasis on using practicing architects on research assignments. Almost invariably, our experience has been that when we integrate academics into our research projects, they are unaware of the design issues, techniques, and constraints involved, and unable to define problems and seek solutions efficiently.

Research pluralism arising from practice Francis Ventre of the National Bureau of Standards maintains that focusing research on the problems of practice has led its Center for Building Technology "to organize research that straddles disciplinary lines," giving rise to "previously untried combinations of disciplines."7 Such "research pluralism" is necessary for a research unit that works with several quite different constituencies, each of whom functions within a distinctive frame of reference, which in turn assigns technical knowledge a different role, and requires validation of a different kind. Not degree, but kind: knowledge takes different forms in order to be effective within the several institutional frames of reference.

Ventre sees the research style of the Center responding to shifts in demand by shifting itself: The research style of the future will reflect the knowledge needs of the building enterprise—needs which are terribly diffuse. How can they be focused in order to sketch a program of future research? The great focuser of this diffuse industry is, of course, the act of decision making, and the style of future research will be centered on the integrative studies needed to inform decision making as it relates to the built environment. Designers themselves must articulate both what they need to know and how that knowledge should be presented to them and their clients. The design decision—whether in the hands of the "form giver" or the community of users—is the major, guiding intelligence of the building industry. If you would ask "what is the future style of building research," the ultimate response lies in the nature of the designer's questions.

Not only pluralism of disciplines, but pluralism of methods and approaches may be the result of this increasing focus on the particular needs of building designers, rather than on the needs of regulators or industrial groups. Research as an everyday activity Jan Wampler observes that for him.8 Research is going on all the time, without program or direction -a random, stumbling process, never organized or recorded in any formal way. It is simply observing the built world around me in relationship to an idea—if it can really be called an idea. Most of the time, it just seems to be a thought. If any word describes the process, perhaps it is "watching." The built world and the people who build it become both my laboratory and my library. They are the resource and reference for developing a thought, testing it, refining it—or, as is the case most of the time, discarding it and starting all over. Slowly, this random process may produce something of an idea that can built on. To set aside a time to do research would be impossible for me.

The researcher as a flâneur Lars Lerup believes that "in architecture proper, the void created by the passing of behaviorist research will be left empty unless we reassess and redefine the nature of research."9 Behaviorism no longer serves him as a meaningful basis for research or for design:

The reason for the demise of behaviorism is not a change of heart among all researchers—most are probably continuing as usual. Rather, it is a realization among a few of us that the basic assumptions of behaviorism are incorrect. What we have come to realize is that the relationship between people and the physical setting is not a natural and inevitable one, but an artificial, socially constructed liaison of considerable complexity. For research, this realization ought to have an important effect: by definition, the behaviorist search is for facts, not for something vague, fluid or invisible. But behaviorist facts are fiction.

Even behaviorists can take advantage of this realization, Lerup says. One real purpose for seeking facts—or fiction, as it may be—is to find inspiration and impetus for our creativity. I suspect that we have lost little by this reassignment of facts as fiction. The behaviorists have lost their moral superiority but simultaneously gained freedom to roam previously prohibited areas. Their research is momentarily freed from its solemn mission to provide the factual substance for the built as a social prophylactic.

With this freedom comes the heady possibility that researchers or architects—Lerup makes no real distinction between them—will become flâneurs, roamers or wanderers, willing to disregard utilitarian purposes in order to explore other considerations that are ultimately of importance. The roaming and straying within language and architecture, and particularly outside the concept of buildings as utensils, is both threatening and potentially fruitful. The attitude and concerns of the roamer, the flâneur, are modernist. The flâneur is a disconcerting figure in modern life, particularly to the behaviorists, because he shoots without aiming, wanders without a direct purpose, understanding for no other reason than knowing. This may initially seem incompatible with design defined as purposeful action, but not if we see design within the confines of language on a conceptual level and within architecture proper at a level of design. What we may see in this is that the built is not an envelope that shapes our lives, that human behavior cannot be expressed in built form, that in fact there is an abyss between that which inspires and that which is designed (an abyss that is the key piece in the modernist project). We have come to see that not even made things can be reduced to human dimensions, but must be accepted in their stark otherness. The designed is not a reflection of the world, nor its expression.

Create and then test Baruch Givoni argues against the customary distinction between the "creative" and "technical" aspects of research, the creative being typically described as the development of new concepts and theories, and the technical as the testing of these concepts and theories.10 "This distinction is artificial and can greatly limit the actual scientific value of research. Moreover, many researchers are equally engaged in both aspects of the research process." He adds: The research methods of the various subjects I have studied were developed and expanded with time and experience. In many cases, it was found that by combining different approaches, drawn from many different scientific disciplines, it was possible to reach a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomena under study. The diversity of relationships between theoretical work and experimentation have led to the "creative" part of research, and the formulation of new ideas.

Science versus aesthetics Henry Cowan sees a basic difference between scientific and aesthetic research that is critical in a field like architecture that draws on both.11 One essential feature of scientific research is the repeatability of the results. If one scientist obtains one result, others must get the same answer within a reasonable margin of error. If they fail to do so, the work of the first is invalidated. This characteristic of scientific research does not generally apply to the search for new aesthetic concepts. Although in architecture, significant advances have resulted from applied scientific research, most are still achieved through the traditional aesthetic approach.

But Cowan observes that: "architects often make decisions on visual grounds—that is, they choose a solution because they like the look of it, but then they present a technical reason for their decision because of the great prestige that attaches to science. He suggests: This raises the important question of whether integration can be achieved between building science and architectural aesthetics. Computer analysis may help at least to clarify the practical implications of aesthetic decisions. We are already using mathematical models successfully to analyze vertical transportation and space planning—both part of architectural design rather than building science.

However, before aesthetics can be integrated into any scientific framework, it is necessary to define far more precisely what constitutes (at the present time) a beautiful—or at least an aesthetically acceptable—building. In the Georgian era, the principles of Palladian architecture were so clearly stated that it should be possible to write a computer program to produce drawings for a well-mannered building in the Palladian style. Perhaps no one would consider the effort worthwhile simply to prove a point, but if it can be done for one historical style, it should also be possible for modern architecture. This would enable us to study aesthetic implications of innovations in building science, and the effect of aesthetic decisions on the interior environment of a building.

Finding the right research models As Harold Proshansky, writing about the Environmental Research Division of the Center for Building Technology,12 points out: The classical model of basic research that characterizes the physical sciences is almost by definition of very limited utility when applied to problems, issues and events outside the domain of these fields of inquiry. Basic research with other kinds of research models is a critical necessity when the nature of the phenomena, the kinds of questions that can be asked, and the theoretical-empirical developments in the problem area are significantly different from what is the case in the physical and biological sciences. Engineering, architecture and the behavioral sciences require their own kind of basic research, indeed one that involves conceptualizations and theoretical developments of a far less abstract nature than what is conceived of in classical physics or chemistry. With an increasing urban technology, the problems of the physical world invariably involve questions of human behavior and experience. The research that is necessary requires not only appropriate theoretical conceptions but methodological innovations that will allow the meaning of these concepts to be preserved in the process of testing their derived empirical generalizations,

In line with our own observations, Proshansky concludes that: In engineering, architecture, planning and the behavioral sciences, the last four decades have established a critical truism: the use of an abstract theoretical paradigm for answering conceptual and empirical questions in these fields has led to a meager and largely isolated set of results which by their nature have had no impact on the major questions, problems and phenomena of these fields.

Research of a non-disciplinary nature As Michael Brill and Marguerite Villecco point out,13 Because environmental/design research always reassesses the "problem-asgiven," it develops problem statements that do not automatically generate one type of solution, and that are without bias towards a single discipline's normal repertoire of solutions.

They note that many problems within society recur "precisely because they cannot be solved along specific disciplinary lines. Such problems remain unsolved, frequently because they fail to attain 'legitimate' status within a single discipline." If they are to be dealt with, researchers must bring "an extensive repertoire of methods into play, from what we may call hard science, soft science, and the design, planning and engineering disciplines themselves." Noting the problem of communication also cited by John Habraken, Brill and Villecco attribute it to the fact that environmental design research is "an endeavor of many disciplines, with a wide range of values; its value base is not as easily known or categorized as those of so-called normative disciplines." It is also "a relatively youthful discipline without a single, accepted theoretical base." To compensate for this, and to achieve a greater degree of mutual understanding among different researchers within the field, environmental design research, should make its operating values and assumptions as explicit as possible for each project, so that those who receive its products and act upon them can know the context of their development and assess the range of cases in which the work may be applicable

Research is not design Brill and Villecco argue that environmental design research "can be distinguished from design and the distinction is critical for those proposing, doing, using, or assessing research." For them, Design is unique, its products are singular, and its methods less important than its results. Design is product-oriented; it is justified as the solution to a problem and the method need not be replicated for evaluation. Design practice frequently welcomes intuitive leaps as it seeks to resolve the complexity of program and context into a single form. Its values are implicit in its product and its evaluation qualitative as well as quantitative.

Environmental design research, on the other hand, is concerned with the frameworks for all the activities that affect design, which allow evaluation and design to take place within a rational context. Research is process- as well as product-oriented. The process must be replicable and its methods documented as a basis for evaluation of each research project's internal validity. It takes a specialized view of the world in order to push at limits and to new levels of understanding. It is exclusive, rather than inclusive, by nature. The purpose of research is to advance the state of the art of design. And while intuitive leaps used to create knowledge are an accepted or even preferred method in design, in research, intuition must be tested for its utility against specific research objectives. Environmental design research is not singular, but concerned with sets of cases and generic application; it must be generalizable to more than a unique situation.

How research is organized has implications Richard Bender notes that the way research is organized affects both its products and the researchers involved. He has identified four types of research organization: subject/discipline; productoriented; project/problem; and stage/phase. Each has advantages and disadvantages.14 Subject/discipline research "tends to facilitate communication concerning the work," but is of limited value "in attempting research dealing with complex interdisciplinary topics." Research groups organized by discipline have a tendency to overstate their potential contribution toward a broad research objective. They look for rewards and status recognition from their peers within their discipline, rather than in terms of their performance in relation to specific research objectives. They have a strong tendency to do research because it interests them, rather than because it has a high probability of yielding important results. Product-oriented research "brings together people who have what is considered to be the appropriate combination of disciplines and experiences needed to develop results that are the objectives of the research unit." Such groups can address multi-disciplinary problems, and communication within them is fostered by their common focus. Communication within specific disciplines may suffer, however, as the group becomes more important than the backgrounds of its individual members, and it can become hard for individuals to keep up in their fields, although they may be extremely knowledgeable about the product. Project/problem research is similar in advantages and disadvantages to product-oriented research.

Stage/phase research attempts to organize the research process so that those best at applied research deal with projects at a certain phase, while others involved in basic research are free to pursue the underlying research issues. The problem lies in the ultimate integration of these activities, and the danger is that the results of one activity will be unconnected to and largely useless for another.

Bender argues that "research activity is a process that will become organized by conducting research." As one becomes aware of the drawbacks of a particular organization, those drawbacks will force changes in the organization, and these changes may mitigate the drawbacks and improve the overall situation of the research effort. Problems and opportunities The most important theme emerging from these different points of view is the question of methodological breadth or narrowness. Those looking at research from the standpoint of a scientific background emphasize the breadth available within scientific methodology, while others note that the problems of environmental design range beyond the boundaries of scientific research. Cowan in particular makes this point, asking how one can reconcile scientific research with, for example, research on aesthetic grounds. Those viewing the matter from the standpoint of aesthetics or the human psyche are much more skeptical of the true breadth of the scientific method and its appropriateness as a means for dealing with important problems of environmental design research (which, Lerup argues, subsumes the problem of design). With Proshansky, they echo Feyerabend's contention.15 It is clear that the idea of a fixed method or of a fixed theory of rationality rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings. To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, "objectivity," "truth," it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.

Lerup and Arnold conclude that the problem with much environmental design research is that it represents the misapplication of the methods of science—that it is motivated by

scientism (a desire to maintain the appearance of being scientific) or a false belief that one has developed a scientifically valid research method. Lerup argues that the realization that one is pursuing a spurious methodology may even be liberating, because it frees one to try other approaches and contend with other problems. Arnold argues that the reason that so much of environmental design research is trivial is that it is caught up in a desire for authentication (or "clerical research," as he calls it) rather than in the search for new knowledge. Habraken adds that researchers in environmental design must define an ideology that enables them to search effectively for new knowledge. This ideology is something different from a hypothesis that can be refuted at the discovery of the first counter evidence (as Cowan suggests); rather, it is embraced as a guide to action over a period of time, in spite of evidence to the contrary, so the researcher can actually make progress in the work. (This is Marcus's view, which aligns with Feyerabend's position.) In a discussion of his work designing the Gossamer Albatross, a human-powered airplane, the inventor Paul MacCready noted the difficulty of doing certain types of research within the structures of larger and smaller research units (i.e., within a large aerospace firm and within his own much smaller research firm). MacCready designed his plane while on vacation, watching birds and paying attention to their turning radius.16 (See Wampler's "watching.") His experience suggests that ultimately there may not be any prescribed way to organize research in order to reliably produce certain types of insights. In fact, research organizations seem better suited to develop research findings, apply them to specific problems, and so on. It may be possible to create a "climate" in which such insights may occur—certainly, there were circumstances that permitted MacCready to arrive at his, but they come down to having a momentary freedom from other demands, including an organization's demand to produce insights of this nature. The preceding discussion also argues for "loosening" the sense of what environmental design research is, how it should be organized, and what makes it valid or invalid. Being human, it is difficult for us to cease making judgments. It is equally difficult for institutions to avoid the same habit. But we have to recognize that the nature of the field supports Feyerabend's notion that the widest variety of approaches is appropriate. In tending to limit the range of

acceptable approaches, and to prejudge the validity of research, we have tended to ignore a number of issues of major human importance. One problem is the possibility of fraud, but Arnold points to the example of Sir Cyril Burt and his spurious studies of inherited intelligence to suggest that science itself is hardly immune from this. The benefits outweigh the risk, if any, of a wholesale run on the research marketplace by poseurs and opportunists. The real purpose of granting this freedom of approach is to free people to approach their research problems in a manner that suits them—to develop a style that reflects their particular intelligence and enables them to arrive at answers (or raise deeper questions). This freedom does not negate the need to organize research, to teach research methods, and even to use these methods as valid starting points for different types of problems. It's an important background for research—a cultural exposure that may be rejected or disregarded but that remains a useful part of one's training. Notes: 1. William Stockton, quoting Janos Plesch quoting Albert Einstein in "Celebrating Einstein, New York Times, 18 February 1979. 2. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, Verso, London, 1978, pp. 300, 302. 3. Christopher Arnold, "The Clerk and the Ignoramus," Journal of Architectural Education 32:2-3, May 1979. 4. N. John Habraken, "Notes of a Traveller," Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) 32:4-7, May 1979. 5. Clare Cooper Marcus, "How to Solve Problems without Really Trying," JAE 32:12-14, May 1979. 6. Herbert McLaughlin, "Notes on Research in Practice," JAE 32:15, May 1979. 7. Francis Ventre, "How Institutions Shape a Research Style," JAE 32:16-19, May 1979. 8. Jan Wampler, 'Watching," JAE 32:20-21, May 1979. 9. Lars Lerup, "Research for Appearance," JAE 32:22-25, May 1979. 10. Baruch Givoni, "Creativity and Testing in Research," JAE 32:26-27, May 1979. 11. Henry Cowan, ''Aesthetic Concepts and Scientific Research," JAE 32:2829, May 1979. 12. Harold M. Proshansky, memorandum on the evaluation of Environmental Design Research Division of the Center for Building Technology, National Bureau of Standards, March 12, 1979.

13. Michael Brill and Marguerite Villecco, "Environmental Design Research: Concepts, Methods, and Values," paper written for the Design Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, February 1981. 14. Richard Bender, "Research and Architecture: Research and the Practice of Architecture," paper written for McCue Boone Tomsick, San Francisco, 25 April 1973. 15. Paul Feyerabend, Op. Cit., p. 28. 16. This account is based on an address by MacCready at the 1981 convention of the American Institute of Architects California Council, Los Angeles, reported to us by Peter Dodge of EHDD, San Francisco. An account of MacCready's process for the Gossamer Albatross also appears in the September/October 1981 issue of Industrial Design. Written with Richard Bender as a chapter in Architectural Research, James C. Snyder, ed., Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1984. I assisted Bender and Christopher Arnold in putting together the Journal of Architectural Education issue cited.

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John J. Parman is an editorial advisor to ARCADE, Architect's Newspaper, ORO Editions' A+RD research imprint, and Room One Thousand, the annual edited by graduate students at U.C. Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, where he is a visiting scholar. In 1983, he and Laurie Snowden founded Design Book Review, edited by Richard Ingersoll and Cathy Lang Ho, and published it until 1998. In 1989, he and Richard Bender founded the Urban Construction Laboratory to address a range of urban topics. In 2019, he and Elizabeth Snowden founded Snowden & Parman, an editorial consultancy, continuing their ongoing collaboration. Educated in architecture and planning, Parman lectured at U.C. Berkeley and California College of the Arts in the mid-1980s and again in 2004. He had a 40-year career in the field, with stints at EHDD, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and then at Gensler, where as editorial director he launched two of its flagship publications, Dialogue (2000) and the Design Forecast (2013). His team's work received the highest awards from Graphis and Arc International, and was twice a finalist for Folio awards for editorial excellence.

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Pallas Bookstore & Gallery was founded by Elizabeth Snowden to showcase rare and unusual art, design, and architecture books and ephemera; exhibit bespoke creative work in varied media; and put on small-scale events and performances. Pallas's hours vary. They're posted weekly on Instagram (@_p_a_l_l_a_s) or by appointment. Pallas is located at 1111 Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, just west of Van Ness Avenue, on the south side of the street.