A pattern language

It seems unlikely that any process which treats childbirth as a sickness could possibly be a healthy part of a healthy society.

“Pregnancy is no state of emergency from which the mother may hopefully be returned to ‘normality’ after the birth of the child. . . . It is a highly active, potent, developmental process of the family going forward to its natural culmination in delivery.” (I. H. Pearse and L. H. Crocker, The Peokhain Experiment, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946, p. 153.)

The existing obstetrics service in most hospitals follows a well outlined procedure. Having a baby is thought of as an illness and the stay in the hospital as recuperation. Women who are about to deliver are treated as “patients” about to undergo surgery. They are sterilized. Their genitals are scrubbed and shaved. They are gowned in white, and put on a table to be moved back and forth between the various parts of the hospital. Women in labor are put in cubicles to pass the time with virtually no social contact. This time can last for many hours. It is a time when father and children could be present to provide encouragement. But this is not permitted. Delivery usually takes place in a “delivery room” which has the proper “table” for childbirth.

6s birth places

Except for the particular workings of the delivery table the room has the same properties as an operating theater. The birth becomes a time for separation rather than togetherness. It may be as long as 12 hours before the mother is even allowed to touch her baby, and if she was sedated for the delivery, even longer before she may see her husband.

For about fifteen years there has been a subtle movement to try and recapture the essence of childbirth as a natural phenomenon. There has been no loud protest against obstetricians and hospital rules, but a rather quiet one: several good books, word of mouth, concerned professionals and nonprofessionals, the La Leche League, a few groups around the country whose prime concern is with birth, and the re-emergence of the nurse-midwife. The original effort of these people was aimed at “natural” childbirth, the name being applied in an attempt to bring the concept of childbirth back to a normal physiological occurrence. Lately the focus of the effort has been expanded to include an altered environment for childbirth and to include the family in a positive way. (For an architectural slant, see Lewis Mumford, The Urban Prospect, New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1968, p. 25.)

We quote now from Judith Shaw’s description of a good birth place. She is describing a place comparable to a small nursing home, perhaps associated with a local health center, and with emergency connections to the local hospital:

A small basket for the baby would be provided. . . . The nurse-midwife would be there always to provide post-partum care. . . . The nurse-midwife, who lives in, would have a small suite containing a bedroom, sitting room-kitchen and bath. . . .

The eating place would be communal. Each baby would have a place too (his movable basket) so that the mother can bring her child with her to feed or to watch. . . . The pattern farmhouse kitchen (139) could play an important role in this building.

. . . families can come not only to have babies but have their prenatal care, learn methods of natural childbirth, possibly child care, maybe just to talk and in general to become familiar with the place they will come to for the delivery.

The birthing place should have accommodations for the entire family. They can occupy a suite in which they live and in which the mother gives birth to the baby. . . . Since the delivery would take place in the family suite, the baby, mother, and the family can be

together immediately. Each suite would have to be equipped with running water and a simple table on which to lay the baby, wash it and give it its initial examination.

Therefore:

Build local birth places where women go to have their children: places that are specially tailored to childbirth as a natural, eventful moment—where the entire family comes for prenatal care and education; where fathers and midwives help during the hours of labor and birth.

family event

♦J# 4^4

Include rooms where after the birth the mother and her baby can stay together with the other members of the family—sleep together, eat together, cook together—common areas at the HEART (129), couple’s REALM (I 36), FARMHOUSE KITCHEN (139) ; provide a partly private garden to walk in—half-hidden garden (ill), garden wall (17 3) ; for the shape of the building, gardens, parking, and surroundings, begin with building complex (95). . . .

66 HOLY GROUND*
	~rr

331

. . . we have defined the need for a full life cycle, with rites of passage between stages of the cycle—life cycle (26) ; and we have recommended that certain pieces of land be set aside because of their importance and meaning—sacred sites (24). This pattern gives the detailed organization of the space around these places. The organization is so powerful, that to some extent it can itself create the sacredness of sites, perhaps even encourage the slow emergence of coherent rites of passage.

*2» •{-

What is a church or temple? It is a place of worship, spirit, contemplation, of course. But above all, from a human point of view, it is a gateway. A person comes into the world through the church. He leaves it through the church. And, at each of the important thresholds of his life, he once again steps through the church.

The rites that accompany birth, puberty, marriage, and death are fundamental to human growth. Unless these rites are given the emotional weight they need, it is impossible for a man or woman to pass thoroughly from one stage of life to another.

In all traditional societies, where these rites are treated with enormous power and respect, the rites, in one form or another, are supported by parts of the physical environment which have the character of gates. Of course, a gate, or gateway, by itself cannot create a rite. But it is also true that the rites cannot evolve in an environment which specifically ignores them or makes them trivial. A hospital is no place for a baptism; a funeral home makes it impossible to feel the meaning of a funeral.

In functional terms, it is essential that each person have the opportunity to enter into some kind of social communion with his fellows at the times when he himself or his friends pass through these critical points in their lives. And this social communion at this moment needs to be rooted in some place which is recognized as a kind of spiritual gateway for these events.

What physical shape or organization must this “gateway” have

33² 66 HOLY GROUND

in order to support the rites of passage, and in order to create the sanctity and holiness and feeling of connection to the earth which makes the rites significant.

Of course, it will vary in detail, from culture to culture. Whatever it is exactly that is held to be sacred—whether it is nature, god, a special place, a spirit, holy relics, the earth itself, or an idea—it takes different forms, in different cultures, and requires different physical environments to support it.

However, we do believe that one fundamental characteristic is invariant from culture to culture. In all cultures it seems that whatever it is that is holy will only be felt as holy, if it is hard to reach, if it requires layers of access, waiting, levels of approach, a gradual unpeeling, gradual revelation, passage through a series of gates. There are many examples: the Inner City of Peking; the fact that anyone who has audience with the Pope must wait in each of seven waiting rooms; the Aztec sacrifices took place on stepped pyramids, each step closer to the sacrifice; the Ise shrine, the most famous shrine in Japan, is a nest of precincts, each one inside the other.

Layers of access.

Even in an ordinary Christian church, you pass first through the churchyard, then through the nave; then, on special occasions, beyond the altar rail into the chancel and only the priest himself is able to go into the tabernacle. The holy bread is sheltered by five layers of ever more difficult approach.

This layering, or nesting of precincts, seems to correspond to

333

a fundamental aspect of human psychology. We believe that every community, regardless of its particular faith, regardless of whether it even has a faith in any organized sense, needs some place where this feeling of slow, progressive access through gates to a holy center may be experienced. When such a place exists in a community, even if it is not associated with any particular religion, we believe that the feeling of holiness, in some form or other, will gradually come to life there among the people who share in the experience.

Therefore:

In each community and neighborhood, identify some sacred site as consecrated ground, and form a series of nested precincts, each marked by a gateway, each one progressively more private, and more sacred than the last, the innermost a final sanctum that can only be reached by passing through all of the outer ones.

At each threshold between precincts build a gate—main gateways (53) ; at each gate, a place to pause with a new view toward the next most inner place—zen view (134); and at the innermost sanctum, something very quiet and able to inspire—perhaps a view, or no more than a simple tree, or pool—pools and

STREAMS (64) , TREE PLACES (1 7 I ) . . . .

in each house cluster and work community_} provide the smaller bits of common land_y to provide for local versions of the same needs:

335

CHOOSING A LANGUAGE FOR YOUR SUBJECT

For this reason, of course, the task of choosing a language for your project is fundamental. The pattern language we have given here contains 253 patterns. You can therefore use it to generate an almost unimaginably large number of possible different smaller languages, for all the different projects you may choose to do, simply by picking patterns from it.

We shall now describe a rough procedure by which you can choose a language for your own project, first by taking patterns from this language we have printed here, and then by adding patterns of your own.

1. First of all, make a copy of the master sequence (pages xix-xxxiv) on which you can tick off the patterns which will form the language for your project. If you don’t have access to a copying machine, you can tick off patterns in the list printed in the book, use paper clips to mark pages, write your own list, use paper markers— whatever you like. But just for now, to explain it clearly, we shall assume that you have a copy of the list in front of you.

2. Scan down the list, and find the pattern which best describes the overall scope of the project you have in mind. This is the starting pattern for your project. Tick it. (If there are two or three possible candidates, don’t worry: just pick the one which seems best: the others will fall in place as you move forward.)

3. Turn to the starting pattern itself, in the book, and read it through. Notice that the other patterns mentioned by name at the beginning and at the end, of the pattern you are reading, are also possible candidates for your language. The ones at the beginning will tend to be “larger” than your project. Don’t include them, unless

xxxvm

67 COMMON LAND**

336

. . . just as there is a need for public land at the neighborhood level—accessible green (60), so also, within the clusters and work communities from which the neighborhoods are made, there is a need for smaller and more private kinds of common land shared by a few work groups or a few families. This common land, in fact, forms the very heart and soul of any cluster. Once it is defined, the individual buildings of the cluster form around

it-HOUSE CLUSTER (37), ROW HOUSES (38), HOUSING HILL

(39), WORK COMMUNITY (41).

Without common land no social system can survive.

In pre-industrial societies, common land between houses and between workshops existed automatically—so it was never necessary to make a point of it. The paths and streets which gave access to buildings were safe, social spaces, and therefore functioned automatically as common land.

But in a society with cars and trucks, the common land which can play an effective social role in knitting people together no longer happens automatically. Those streets which carry cars and trucks at more than crawling speeds, definitely do not function as common land; .and many buildings find themselves entirely isolated from the social fabric because they are not joined to one another by land they hold in common. In such a situation common land must be provided, separately, and with deliberation, as a social necessity, as vital as the streets.

The common land has two specific social functions. First, the land makes it possible for people to feel comfortable outside their buildings and their private territory, and therefore allows them to feel connected to the larger social system—though not necessarily to any specific neighbor. And second, common land acts as a meeting place for people.

The first function is subtle. Certainly one’s immediate neighbors are less important in modern society than in traditional

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society. This is because people meet friends at work, at school, at meetings of interest groups and therefore no longer rely exclusively on neighbors for friendship. (See for instance, Melvin Webber, “Order in Diversity: Community Without Propinquity,” Cities and Space, ed. Lowdon Wingo, Baltimore: Resources for the Future, 19633 and Webber, “The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm,” in Webber et ah, Explorations into Urban Structure, Philadelphia, 1964, pp. 79—153.)

To the extent that this is true, the common land between houses might be less important than it used to be as a meeting ground for friendship. But the common land between buildings may have a deeper psychological function, which remains important, even when people have no relation to their neighbors. In order to portray this function, imagine that your house is separated from the city by a gaping chasm, and that you have to pass across this chasm every time you leave your house, or enter it. The house would be disturbingly isolated; and you, in the house, would be isolated from society, merely by this physical fact. In psychological terms, we believe that a building without common land in front of it is as isolated from society as if it had just such a chasm there.

There is a new emotional disorder—a type of agoraphobia— making its appearance in today’s cities. Victims of this disorder are afraid to go out of their houses for any reason—even to mail a letter or to go to the corner grocery store—literally, they are afraid of the marketplace—the agora. We speculate—entirely without evidence—that this disorder may be reinforced by the absence of common land, by an environment in which people feel they have no “right” to be outside their own front doors. If this is so, agoraphobia would be the most concrete manifestation of the breakdown of common land.

The second social function of common land is straightforward. Common land provides a meeting ground for the fluid, common activities that a house cluster shares. The larger pieces of public land which serve neighborhoods—the parks, the community facilities—do not fill the bill. They are fine for the neighborhood as a whole. But they do not provide a base for the functions that are common to a cluster of households.

Lewis Mumford:

Even in housing- estates that are laid out at twelve families to the acre—perhaps one should say especially there—there is often a lack of common meeting places for the mothers, where, on a good day, they might come together under a big tree, or a pergola, to sew or gossip, while their infants slept in a pram or their runabout children grubbed around in a play pit. Perhaps the best part of Sir Charles Reilly’s plans for village greens was that they provided for such common activities: as the planners of Sunnyside, Long Island, Messrs. Stein and Wright, had done as early as 1924. (The Urban Prospect, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968, p. 26.)

How much common land must there bei There must be enough to be useful, to contain children’s games and small gatherings. And enough land must be common so that private land doesn’t dominate it psychologically. We guess that the amount of common land needed in a neighborhood is on the order of 25 per cent of the land held privately. This is the figure that the greenbelt planners typically devoted to their commons and greens. (See Clarence Stein, Toward New Towns in America, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1966.)

With cooperation among the people, it is possible to build this pattern piecemeal, into our existing neighborhoods by closing streets.

Berkeley street transjormed to neighborhood commons. Therefore:

Give over 25 per cent of the land in house clusters to common land which touches, or is very very near, the

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homes which share it. Basic: be wary of the automobile; on no account let it dominate this land.

Shape the common land so it has some enclosure and good sunlight—south facing outdoors (105), positive outdoor space (106) ; and so that smaller and more private pieces of land and pockets always open onto it—hierarchy of open space (114); provide communal functions within the land—public OUTDOOR ROOM (69), LOCAL SPORTS (72), VEGETABLE GARDEN (177) ; and connect the different and adjacent pieces of common land to one another to form swaths of connected play space— connected play (68). Roads can be part of common land if they are treated as green streets (51). . . .

68 CONNECTED PLAY*

341

. . . suppose the common land that connects clusters to one another is being provided—common land (67). Within this common land, it is necessary to identify play space for children and, above all, to make sure that the relationship between adjacent pieces of common land allows this play space to form.

If children don’t play enough with other children during the first five years of life, there is a great chance that they will have some kind of mental illness later in their lives.

Children need other children. Some findings suggest that they need other children even more than they need their own mothers. And empirical evidence shows that if they are forced to spend their early years with too little contact with other children, they will be likely to suffer from psychosis and neurosis in their later years.

Alone . . .

Since the layout of the land between the houses in a neighborhood virtually controls the formation of play groups, it therefore has a critical effect on people’s mental health. A typical suburban subdivision with private lots opening off streets almost confines

34²

68 CONNECTED PLAY

children to their houses. Parents, afraid of traffic or of their neighbors, keep their small children indoors or in their own gardens: so the children never have enough chance meetings with other children of their own age to form the groups which are essential to a healthy emotional development.

We shall show that children will only be able to have the access to other children which they need, if each household opens onto some kind of safe, connected common land, which touches at least 64 other households.

First, let us review the evidence for the problem. The most dramatic evidence comes from the Harlows’ work on monkeys. The Harlows have shown that monkeys isolated from other infant monkeys during the first six months of life are incapable of normal social, sexual, or play relations with other monkeys in their later lives:

They exhibit abnormalities of behavior rarely seen in animals born in the wild. They sit in their cages and stare fixedly into space, circle their cages in a repetitively stereotyped manner, and clasp their heads in their hands or arms and rock for long periods of time . . . the animal may chew and tear at its body until it bleeds . . . similar symptoms of emotional pathology are observed in deprived children in orphanages and in withdrawn adolescents and adults in mental hospitals. (Henry F. Harlow and Margaret K. Harlow, “The Effect of Rearing Conditions on Behavior,” Bull. Menniger Clinic, 26, 1962, pp. 213-14.)

It is well known that infant monkeys—like infant human beings—have these defects if brought up without a mother or a mother surrogate. It is not well known that the effects of separation from other infant monkeys are even stronger than the effects of maternal deprivation. Indeed, the Harlows showed that although monkeys can be raised successfully without a mother, provided that they have other infant monkeys to play with, they cannot be raised successfully by a mother alone, without other infant monkeys, even if the mother is entirely normal. They conclude: “It seems possible that the infant-mother affectional system is dispensable, whereas the infant-infant system is a sine-qua-non for later adjustment in all spheres of monkey life.” (Harry F. Harlow and Margaret K. Harlow, “Social Deprivation in Monkeys,” Scientific American, 207, No. 5, 1962, pp. 136-46.)

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The first six months of a rhesus monkey’s life correspond to the first three years of a child’s life. Although there is no formal evidence to show that lack of contact during these first three years damages human children—and as far as we know, it has never been studied—there is very strong evidence for the effect of isolation between the ages of four to ten.

Herman Lantz questioned a random sample of 1,000 men in the United States Army, who had been referred to a mental hygiene clinic because of emotional difficulties. (Herman K. Lantz, “Number of Childhood Friends as Reported in the Life Histories of a Psychiatrically Diagnosed Group of 1,000,” Marriage and Family Life, May 1956, pp. 107-108.) Army psychiatrists classified each of the men as normal, suffering from mild psychoneurosis, severe psychoneurosis, or psychosis. Lantz then put each man into one of three categories: those who reported having five friends or more at any typical moment when they were between four and ten years old, those who reported an average of about two friends, and those who reported having no friends at that time. The following table shows the relative percentages in each of the three friendship categories separately. The results are astounding:

Among people who have five friends or more as children, 61.5 per cent have mild cases, while 27.8 per cent have severe cases. Among people who had no friends, only 5 per cent have mild cases, and 85 per cent have severe cases.

On the positive side, an informal account by Anna Freud shows how powerful the effect of contact among tiny children can be on the emotional development of the children. She describes five young German children who lost their parents during infancy

in a concentration camp, and then looked after one another inside the camp until the war ended, at which point they were brought to England. (Anna Freud and Sophie Dann, “An Experiment in Group Upbringing,” Reading in Child Behavior and Development, ed. Celia Stendler, New York, 1964, pp. 122-40.) She describes the beautiful social and emotional maturity of these tiny children. Reading the account, one feels that these children, at the age of three, were more aware of each other and more sensitive to each other’s needs than many people ever are.

It is almost certain, then, that contact is essential, and that lack of contact, when it is extreme, has extreme effects. A considerable body of literature beyond that which we have quoted, is given in Christopher Alexander, “The City as a Mechanism for Sustaining Human Contact,” Environment for Man, ed. W. R. Ewald, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1967, pp. 60-109.

If we assume that informal, neighborhood contact between children is a vital experience, we may then ask what kinds of neighborhoods support the formation of spontaneous play groups. The answer, we believe, is some form of safe common land, connected to a child’s home, and from which he can make contact with several other children. The critical question is: How many households need to share this connected play space?

The exact number of households that are required depends on the child population within the households. Let us assume that children represent about one-fourth of a given population (slightly less than the modal figure for suburban households), and that these children are evenly distributed in age from o to 18. Roughly speaking, a given pre-school child who is x years old will play with children who are a¹ — 1 or a^- or x -j- 1 years old. In order to have a reasonable amount of contact, and in order for playgroups to form, each child must be able to reach at least five children in his age range. Statistical analysis shows that for each child to have a 95 per cent chance of reaching five such potential playmates, each child must be in reach of 64 households.

The problem may be stated as follows: In an infinite population of children, one-sixth are the right age and five-sixths are the wrong age for any given child. A group of r children is

345

CHOOSING A LANGUAGE FOR YOUR SUBJECT

you have the power to help create these patterns, at least In a small way, in the world around your project. The ones at the end are “smaller.” Almost all of them will be important. Tick all of them, on your list, unless you have some special reason for not wanting to include them.

4. Now your list has some more ticks on it. Turn to the next highest pattern on the list which is ticked, and open the book to that pattern. Once again, it will lead you to other patterns. Once again, tick those which are relevant—especially the ones which are “smaller” that come at the end. As a general rule, do not tick the ones which are “larger” unless you can do something about them, concretely, in your own project.

5. When in doubt about a pattern, don’t include it. Your list can easily get too long: and if it does, it will become confusing. The list will be quite long enough, even if you only include the patterns you especially like.

6. Keep going like this, until you have ticked all the patterns you want for your project.

7. Now, adjust the sequence by adding your own material. If there are things you want to include in your project, but you have not been able to find patterns which correspond to them, then write them in, at an appropriate point in the sequence, near other patterns which are of about the same size and importance. For example, there is no pattern for a sauna. If you want to include one, write it in somewhere near bathing room (144) in your sequence.

8. And of course, if you want to change any patterns, change them. There are often cases where you may have a personal version of a pattern, which is more true, or

xxxix

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chosen at random. The probability that this group of r children

4

contains 5 or more right-age children in it is 1 — 2 P_r> u, where

lc = o

P_{r k} is the hypergeometric distribution. If we now ask what is the

4

least r which makes 1 — 2 P_r, _k > 0.95, r turns out to be 54.

k = o

If we need 54 children, we need a total population of 4(54) = 216, which at 3.4 persons per household, needs 64 households.

Sixty-four is a rather large number of households to share connected common land. In fact, in the face of this requirement, there is a strong temptation to try to solve the problem by grouping 10 or 12 homes in a cluster. But this will not work: while it is a useful configuration for other reasons—house cluster (37) and common land (67)—by itself it will not solve the problem of connected play space for children. There must also be safe paths to connect the bits of common land.

Connecting faths.

Therefore:

Lay out common land, paths, gardens, and bridges so that groups of at least 64 households are connected by a

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68 CONNECTED PLAY

swath of land that does not cross traffic. Establish this land as the connected play space for the children in these households.

safe connections
play space		fast traffic outside

.j. .$.

Do this by connecting several house clusters (37) with green streets (51) and safe paths. Place the local children’s home (86) in this play space. Within the play space, make sure the children have access to mud, and plants, and animals, and water—still water (71), animals (74); set aside one area where there is all kinds of junk that they can use to make things

-ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND (73). . . .

347

6g PUBLIC OUTDOOR ROOM**

348

. . . the common land in main gateways (53), accessible

GREEN (6o), SMALL PUBLIC SQUARES (6l), COMMON LAND (67), PEDESTRIAN STREET (lOO), PATHS AND GOALS ( I 20) needs at least some place where hanging out and being “out” in public become possible. For this purpose it is necessary to distinguish one part of the common land and to define it with a little more elaboration. Also, if none of the larger patterns exist yet, this pattern can act as a nucleus, and help them to crystallize around it.

❖ *$♦

There are very few spots along the streets of modern towns and neighborhoods where people can hang out, comfortably, for hours at a time.

Men seek corner beer shops, where they spend hours talking and drinking; teenagers, especially boys, choose special corners too, where they hang around, waiting for their friends. Old people like a special spot to go to, where they can expect to find others; small children need sand lots, mud, plants, and water to play with in the open; young mothers who go to watch then-children often use the children’s play as an opportunity to meet and talk with other mothers.

Because of the diverse and casual nature of these activities, they require a space which has a subtle balance of being defined and yet not too defined, so that any activity which is natural to the neighborhood at any given time can develop freely and yet has something to start from.

For example, it would be possible to leave an outdoor room unfinished, with the understanding it can be finished by people who Jive nearby, to fill whatever needs seem most pressing. It may need sand, or water faucets, or play equipment for small children—adventure playground (73); it may have steps and seats, where teenagers can meet—-teenage society (84) ; someone may build a small bar or coffee shop in a house that opens into the area, with an arcade, making the arcade a place to eat and

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drink—food stands (93); there may be games like chess and checkers for old people.

Modern housing projects especially suffer from the lack of this kind of space. When indoor community rooms are provided, they are rarely used. People don’t want to plunge into a situation which they don’t know; and the degree of involvement created in such an enclosed space is too intimate to allow a casual passing interest to build up gradually. On the other hand, vacant land is not enclosed enough. It takes years for anything to happen on vacant land; it provides too little shelter, and too little “reason to be there.”

What is needed is a framework which is just enough defined so that people naturally tend to stop there; and so that curiosity naturally takes people there, and invites them to stay. Then, once community groups begin to gravitate toward this framework, there is a good chance that they will themselves, if they are permitted, create an environment which is appropriate to their activities.

We conjecture that a small open space, roofed, with columns, but without walls at least in part, will just about provide the necessary balance of “openness” and “closedness.”

CJeiCrtf-(0 OHAif-S A?T
vywr MASSim^SS roin eur^sr

A beautiful example of the pattern was built by Dave Chapin and George Gordon with architecture students from Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, They built a sequence of public out-

*cc*wnvm^j 'pp^TEa^r yuv 70 £ern*JE> ays me

Public outdoor room built by Chafin and Gordon in

Cleveland, Ohio.

69 PUBLIC OUTDOOR ROOM

door rooms on the grounds and on the public land surrounding a local mental health clinic. According to staff reports, these places changed the life of the clinic dramatically: many more people than had been usual were drawn into the outdoors, public talk was more animated, outdoor space that had always been dominated by automobiles suddenly became human and the cars had to inch along.

In all, Chapin and Gordon and their crew built seven public outdoor rooms in the neighborhood. Each one was slightly different, varying according to views, orientation, size.

We have also discovered a version of this pattern from medieval society. Apparently, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there were many such public structures dotted through the towns. They were the scene of auctions, open-air meetings, and market fairs. They are very much in the spirit of the places we are proposing for neighborhoods and work communities.

Outdoor rooms in England and Peru.

Therefore:

In every neighborhood and work community, make a

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piece of the common land into an outdoor room—a partly enclosed place, with some roof, columns, without walls, perhaps with a trellis; place it beside an important path and within view of many homes and workshops.

♦£* •£•

Place the outdoor room where several paths are tangent to it, like any other common area—common areas at the heart (129); in the bulge of a path—path shape (121); or around a square—activity pockets (124); use surrounding building edges (160) to define part of it; build it like any smaller outdoor room, with columns, and half-trellised roofs—outdoor room (163); perhaps put an open courtyard next to it—courtyards which live (115), an arcade (119) around the edge, or other simple cover—canvas roofs (244), and seats for casual sitting—

STAIR SEATS ( I 25), SEAT SPOTS (241). . . .

70 GRAVE SITES*

353

. . . according to life cycle (26) the transitions of a person’s life must be available and visible in every community. Death is no exception. This pattern helps to integrate the fact of death with the public spaces of each neighborhood, and, by its very existence, helps to form identifiable neighborhoods (14), and HOLY GROUND (66) and COMMON LAND (67).

No people who turn their backs on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society which encourages its people to live.

Huge cemeteries on the outskirts of cities, or in places no one ever visits, impersonal funeral rites, taboos which hide the fact of death from children, all conspire to keep the fact of death away from us, the living. If you live in a modern suburb, ask yourself how comfortable you would be if your house were next to a graveyard. Very likely the thought frightens you. But this is only because we are no longer used to it. We shall be healthy, when graves of friends and family, and memorials to the people of the recent and the distant past, are intermingled with our houses, in small grave yards, as naturally as winter always comes before the spring.

In every culture there is some form of intense ceremony surrounding death, grieving for the dead, and disposal of the body. There are thousands of variations, but the point is always to give the community of friends left alive the chance to reconcile themselves to the facts of death: the emptiness, the loss; their own transience.

These ceremonies bring people into contact with the experience of mortality, and in this way, they bring us closer to the facts of life, as well as death. When these experiences are integrated with the environment and each person’s life, we are able to live through them fully and go on. But when circumstances or custom prevent us from making contact with the experience of mortality, and living with it, we are left depressed, diminished,

354

70 GRAVE SITES

less alive. There is a great deal of clinical evidence to support this notion.

In one documented case, a young boy lost his grandmother; the people around him told him that she had merely “gone away” to “protect his feelings.” The boy was uneasily aware that something had happened, but in this atmosphere of secrecy, could not know it for what it was and could not therefore experience it fully. Instead of being protected, he became a victim of a massive neurosis, which was only cured, many years later, when he finally recognized, and lived through the fact of his grandmother’s death.

This case, and others which make it abundantly clear that a person must live through the death of those he loves as fully as possible, in order to remain emotionally healthy, have been described by Eric Lindemann. We have lost the crucial reference for this work, but two other papers by Lindemann converge on the same point: “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 1944, 101, 141-48; and “A Study of Grief: Emotional Responses to Suicide,” Pastoral Psychology, 1953, 4(39), 9—13. We also recommend a recent paper by Robert Kastenbaum, on the ways in which children explore their mortality: “The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies,” Saturday Review, January 1973, pp. 33—38.

A concrete honeycomb graveyard in Colma, California.The suferintendant of the cemetery said, “Families will never see the sinking . . . which so distressed them in older farts of the cemetery. . . .”

In the big industrial cities, during the past 100 years, the ceremonies of death and their functional power for the living have

CHOOSING A LANGUAGE FOR YOUR SUBJECT

more relevant for you. In this case, you will get the most “power” over the language, and make it your own most effectively, if you write the changes in, at the appropriate places in the book. And, it will be most concrete of all, if you change the name of the pattern too—so that it captures your own changes clearly.

•J#

Suppose now that you have a language for your project. The way to use the language depends very much on its scale. Patterns dealing with towns can only be implemented gradually, by grass roots action- patterns for a building can be built up in your mind, and marked out on the ground; patterns for construction must be built physically, on the site. For this reason we have given three separate instructions, for these three different scales. For towns, see page 3; for buildings, see page 463; for construction, see page 935.

The procedures for each of these three scales are described in much more detail with extensive examples, in the appropriate chapters of The Timeless Way of Building. For the town—see chapters 24 and 25; for an individual building—see chapters 20, 21, and 22; and for the process of construction which describes the way a building is actually built see chapter 23.

xl

been completely undermined. What were once beautifully simple forms of mourning have been replaced by grotesque cemeteries, plastic flowers, everything but the reality of death. And above all, tile small graveyards which once put people into daily contact with the fact of death, have vanished—replaced by massive cemeteries, far away from people’s daily business.

What must be done to set things right? We can solve the problem by fusing some of the old ritual forms with the kinds of situations we face today.

1. Most important, it is essential to break down tire scale of modern cemeteries, and to reinstate the connection between burial grounds and local communities. Intense decentralization: a person can choose a spot for himself, in parks, common lands, on his land.

2. The right setting requires some enclosure; paths beside the gravesites; the graves visible, and protected by low walls, edges, trees.

3. Property rights. There must be some legal basis for hallowing small pieces of ground—to give a guarantee that the ground a person chooses will not be sold and developed.

4. With increasing population, it is obviously impossible to go on and on covering the land with graves or memorials. We suggest a process similar to the one followed in traditional Greek villages. The graveyards occupy a fixed area, enough to cope with the dead of 200 years. After 200 years, remains are put out to sea—except for those whose memory is still alive.

5. The ritual itself has to evolve from a group with some shared values, at least a family, perhaps a group that shares a religious view. Three of the basics: friends carrying the casket through the streets in procession; simple pine coffins or urns; gathering round the grave.

Therefore:

Never build massive cemeteries. Instead, allocate pieces of land throughout the community as grave sites—corners of parks, sections of paths, gardens, beside gateways—where memorials to people who have died can be ritually placed with inscriptions and mementos which celebrate their life.

70 GRAVE SITES

Give each grave site an edge, a path, and a quiet corner where people can sit. By custom, this is hallowed ground.

*$♦ v

If possible, keep them in places which are quiet—quiet backs (59) ; and provide a simple seat or a bench under a tree, where people can be alone with their memories—tree places (171), seat spots (241). . . .

71 STILL WATER*

358

. . . the patterns access to water (25) and tools and streams (64) provide a variety of kinds of water throughout the community. This pattern helps to embellish the still waters—the pools and ponds and swimming holes—and provide them with a safe edge for children. It also helps to differentiate the public space in house cluster (37), work community (41), health CENTER (47), COMMON LAND (67), LOCAL SPORTS (72) .

To be in touch with water, we must above all be able to swim; and to swim daily, the pools and ponds and holes for swimming must be so widely scattered through the city, that each person can reach one within minutes.

We have already explained, in pools and streams (64), how important it is to be in touch with water—and how the ordinary water of an area can, if left open, be a natural component of the everyday ecology of a community.

In this pattern we go a little further, and put the emphasis on swimming. On the one hand, adults cannot have any substantial contact with water unless they can swim in it, and for this purpose the body of water must be large enough and deep enough to swim in. On the other hand, the highly chlorinated, private, walled, and fenced off swimming pools, which have become common in rich people’s suburbs, work directly against the very forces we have described in pools and streams (64), and make the touch of water almost meaningless, because it is so private and so antiseptic.

We believe that the swimming cannot come into its proper place, unless everyone who wants to can swim every day: and this means, that, to all intents and purposes, there needs to be a swimming pool on every block, almost in every cluster, and at least in every neighborhood, within no more than about 100 yards of every house.

In this pattern, we shall therefore try to establish a model for a kind of “swimming hole”: public, so that it becomes a communal

function, not a wholly private one; and safe, so that this public water can be deep enough for swimming without being dangerous to tiny children playing at the edge.

For millions of years, children have grown up in perfect safety along the edge of oceans, rivers, and lakes. Why is a swimming pool so dangerous? The answer depends simply on the edge.

. . . the edge . . .

As a rule, the natural edges between water and shore are marked by a slow, rough transition. There is a certain well-marked sequence of changes in materials, texture, and ecology as one passes from land to water. The human consequences of this transition are important: it means that people can walk lazily along the edge, without concern for their safety; they can sit at the edge and have their feet in the water, or walk along with the water around their ankles.

Children can play in the water safely when the edge is gradual. A baby crawling into a lake comes to no abrupt surprises; he stops when the water gets too deep, and goes back out again. It has even been shown that children teach themselves to swim when they are free to play around a pool with an extremely gradual slope toward the deep. In such a pool, some children have even learned to swim before they can walk. Even the rocks at the steep edge of a rock-bound lake are not that surprising—because the sandy earth further from the edge gives way to rocks, which change their angle and their texture, as one comes to the sharp edge.

But a swimming pool, and any kind of water with a hard and artificial edge, has none of this gradualness. A child may be run-

360

ning along, at top speed, when splash, suddenly he finds himself in six feet of water.

The abrupt edge, most serious for children, has its effects in psychological terms for adults too. Although they are not literally endangered by the edge—since they can learn its dangers—the presence of an ecologically wrong kind of abruptness is disconcerting—and destroys the peace and calm which water often has.

It is therefore essential that every water’s edge, whether on a pond, or lake, or swimming pool, or river, or canal, be made so that it has a natural gradient, which changes as a person comes up to the edge, and goes on changing as the water is first very shallow, and then gradually gets deeper.

Of course, some deep water is essential for swimming; but the edge of the deep water must not be directly accessible. Instead, the edge around the deep end needs to be protected by a wall or a fence; and islands can be built there, for people to swim to, and to dive from.

There fore:

In every neighborhood, provide some still water—a pond, a pool—for swimming. Keep the pool open to the public at all times, but make the entrance to the pool only from the shallow side of the pool, and make the pool deepen gradually, starting from one or two inches deep.

	gradual edge
T

If possible, arrange the pool as part of a system of natural running water, so that it purifies itself, and does not have to be chlorinated—pools and streams (64). Make sure the pool has southern exposure—south facing outdoors (105). If possible, embellish the edge of the pool with a small outdoor room or trellis, where people can sit and watch—public outdoor room (69) , TRELLISED WALK ( I 74) , SITTING WALL (243) . . . .

72 LOCAL SPORTS*

. . . all the areas where people live and work—especially the work communities (41) and the areas looked after by the preventive programs of the health center (47)—need to be completed by provisions for sports and exercise. This pattern defines the nature and distribution of this exercise.

**•

The human body does not wear out with use. On the contrary, it wears down when it is not used.

In agricultural society, people use their bodies every day in many different ways. In urban society, most people use their minds, but not their bodies; or they use their bodies only in a routine way. This is devastating. There is ample empirical evidence that physical health depends on daily physical activity.

Perhaps the most striking evidence for the unbalance in our way of life comes from a comparison of the death rates between groups that have been able to live lives that include daily physical activity with those that have not. For example, in the age group 60 to 64, I per cent of the men in the heavy exercise category died during the follow-up year, whereas 5 per cent of those in the no-exercise group died. (See P. B. Johnson et al., Physical Education, A Problem Solving Aff roach to Health and Fitness_y University of Toledo, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.)

There are very few modern societies where these facts are taken seriously. China and Cuba come to mind. In these societies, people work both with their hands and with their minds. Workdays embrace both kinds of skills. Doctors are as apt to be building houses as practicing medicine; and builders are often sitting in administrative sessions.

In any society which has reached this stage, the gross physical atrophy of human bodies will not occur. But in any society which has not learned this wisdom, it is necessary, as a kind of interim solution, to scatter opportunities for physical activity, so that they are close at hand, indeed next door, to every house and place of work. Small fields, swimming pools, gyms, game courts, must be as frequent as corner groceries and restaurants. Ideally,

72 LOCAL SPORTS
age

You will probably live longer if you exercise regularly. (Graph adapted from E. G. Hammond,

"Some Preliminary Findings on Physical Complaints from a Prospective Study of /,064,004 Men and Women,’’ American journal of Public Health,

54:11, 1964).

local sports would form a natural part of every neighborhood and work community. We imagine these facilities as nonprofit centers, supported by the people who use them, perhaps coordinated with a program of health prevention like the swimming and dancing at the Pioneer Health Center in Peckham—see health center (47)*

Sports also have a special life of their own, which cannot be duplicated. Throwing the ball around, shouting out, winning a crushing victory, losing a long drawn out match, getting a wild ball back on the net somehow, anyhow—these arc moments that cannot be captured by a job of work. They are entirely different; perhaps they cater especially to what E. Hart calls the psycho-emotional component of muscular activity. (“The Need for Physical Activity,” in S. Maltz, ed., Health Readings, Wm. Brown Book Company, Iowa, 1968, p. 240.) In any case, it is a kind of vitality that cannot be replaced.

There fore:

Scatter places for team and individual sports through every work community and neighborhood: tennis, squash,

THE POETRY OF THE LANGUAGE

Finally, a note of caution. This language, like English, can be a medium for prose, or a medium for poetry. The difference between prose and poetry is not that different languages are used, but that the same language is used, differently. In an ordinary English sentence, each word has one meaning, and the sentence too, has one simple meaning. In a poem, the meaning is far more dense. Each word carries several meanings 3 and the sentence as a whole carries an enormous density of interlocking meanings, which together illuminate the whole.

The same is true for pattern languages. It is possible to make buildings by stringing together patterns, in a rather loose way. A building made like this, is an assembly of patterns. It is not dense. It is not profound. But it is also possible to put patterns together in such a way that many many patterns overlap in the same physical space: the building is very dense; it has many meanings captured in a small space; and through this density, it becomes profound.

In a poem, this kind of density, creates illumination, by making identities between words, and meanings, whose identity we have not understood before. In “O Rose thou art sick,” the rose is identified with many

xli

table tennis, swimming, billiards, basketball, dancing, gymnasium . . . and make the action visible to passers-by, as an invitation to participate.

scattered locations

Treat the sports places as a special class of recognizable simple buildings, which are open, easy to get into, with changing rooms and showers—building complex (95), bathing room (144); combine them with community swimming pools, where they exist —still water (71) ; keep them open to people passing—building THOROUGHFARE (iOl), OPENINC TO THE STREET ( I 6 5) , and provide places where people can stop and watch—seat spots (241), SITTING WALL (243) . . . .

366

73 ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND

367

. . . inside the local neighborhood, even if there is common land where children can meet and play—common land (67), connected play (68) ; it is essential that there be at least one smaller part, which is differentiated, where the play is wilder, and where the children have access to all kinds of junk.

•J* tj*

A castle, made of cartons, rocks, and old branches, by a group of children for themselves, is worth a thousand perfectly detailed, exactly finished castles, made for them in a factory.

Play has many functions: it gives children a chance to be together, a chance to use their bodies, to build muscles, and to test new skills. But above all, play is a function of the imagination. A child’s play is his way of dealing with the issues of his growth, of relieving tensions and exploring the future. It reflects directly the problems and joys of his social reality. Children come to terms with the world, wrestle with their pictures of it, and reform these pictures constantly, through those adventures of imagination we call play.

Any kind of playground which disturbs, or reduces, the role of imagination and makes the child more passive, more the recipient of someone else’s imagination, may look nice, may be clean, may be safe, may be healthy—but it just cannot satisfy the fundamental need which play is all about. And, to put it bluntly, it is a waste of time and money. Huge abstract sculptured play-lands are just as bad as asphalt playgrounds and jungle gyms. They are not just sterile; they are useless. The functions they perform have nothing to do with the child’s most basic needs.

This need for adventurous and imaginative play is taken care of handily in small towns and in the countryside, where children have access to raw materials, space, and a somewhat comprehensible environment. In cities, however, it has become a pressing concern. The world of private toys and asphalt playgrounds does not provide the proper settings for this kind of play.

The basic work on this problem has come from Lady Allen of

73 adventure playground
No 'flaying.

Hurtwood. In a series of projects and publications over the past twenty years, Lady Allen has developed the concept of the adventure playground for cities, and we refer the reader, above all, to her work. (See, for example, her book, Planning for Play> Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968.) We believe that her work is so substantial, that, by itself, it establishes the essential pattern for neighborhood playgrounds.

Colin Ward has also written an excellent review, “Adventure Playgrounds: A Parable of Anarchy,” Anarchy 7, September 1961. Here is a description of the Grimsby playground, from that review:

At the end of each summer the children saw up their shacks and shanties into firewood which they deliver in fantastic quantities to old age pensioners. When they begin building in the spring, “it’s just a hole in the ground—and they crawl into it.” Gradually the holes give way to two-storey huts. Similarly with the notices above their dens. It begins with nailing up “Keep Out” signs. After this come more personal names like “Bughold Cave” and “Dead Man’s Cave,” but by the end of the summer they have communal names like “Hospital” or “Estate Agent.” There is an everchanging range of activities due entirely to the imagination and enterprise of the children themselves. . . .

Therefore:

Set up a playground for the children in each neighborhood. Not a highly finished playground, with asphalt and

swings, but a place with raw materials of all kinds—nets, boxes, barrels, trees, ropes, simple tools, frames, grass, and water—where children can create and re-create playgrounds of their own.

Make sure that the adventure playground is in the sun— sunny place (161) ; make hard surfaces for bikes and carts and toy trucks and trolleys, and soft surfaces for mud and building

things-BIKE PATHS AND RACKS (56), GARDEN GROWING WILD

(172), CHILD CAVES (203); and make the boundary substantial with a GARDEN WALL ( I 73) or SITTING WALL (243) . . . .

74 ANIMALS

. . . even when there is public land and private land for individual buildings—common land (67), your own home (79), there is no guarantee that animals can flourish there. This pattern helps to form green streets (51) and common land (67) by giving them the qualities they need to sustain animal life.

Animals are as important a part of nature as the trees and grass and flowers. There is some evidence, in addition, which suggests that contact with animals may play a vital role in a child’s emotional development.

Yet while it is widely accepted that we need “parks”—at least access to some kind of open space where trees and grass and flowers grow—we do not yet have the same kind of wisdom where sheep, horses, cows, goats, birds, snakes, rabbits, deer, chickens, wildcats, gulls, otters, crabs, fish, frogs, beetles, butterflies, and ants are concerned.

Ann Dreyfus, a family therapist in California, has told us about the way that animals like goats and rabbits help children in their therapy. She finds that children who cannot make contact with people, are nevertheless able to establish contact with these animals. Once this has happened and feelings have started to flow again, the children’s capacity for making contact starts to grow again, and eventually spreads out to family and friends.

But animals are almost missing from cities. In a city there are, broadly speaking, only three kinds of animal: pets, vermin, and animals in the zoo. None of these three provides the emotional sustenance nor the ecological connections that are needed. Pets are pleasant, but so humanized that they have no wild free life of their own. And they give human beings little opportunity to experience the animalness of animals. Vermin—rats, cockroaches —are animals which are peculiar to cities and which depend ecologically on miserable and disorganized conditions, so they are naturally considered as enemies. Animals in the zoo are more or less inaccessible to most of the human population—except as

occasional curiosities. Besides, it has been said that animals living under the conditions which a zoo provides are essentially psychotic —that is, entirely disturbed from their usual mode of existence— so that it is probably wrong to keep them there—and certainly they can in no way re-create the missing web of animal life which cities need.

Looking in or looking out—what’s the difference?

It is perfectly possible to reintroduce animals into the natural ecology of cities in a useful and functioning sense, provided that arrangements are made which allow this and do not create a nuisance.

Examples of ecologically useful animals in a city: horses, ponies, donkeys—for local transportation and sport. Pigs—to recycle garbage and for meat. Ducks and chickens—as a source of eggs and meat. Cows—for milk. Goats—milk. Bees—honey and pollination of fruit trees. Birds—to maintain insect balance.

There are essentially two difficulties to overcome, (i) Many of these animals have been driven out of cities by law because they interrupt traffic, leave dung on the street, and carry disease. (2) Many of the animals cannot survive without protection under modern urban conditions. It is necessary to make specific provisions to overcome these difficulties.

Therefore:

Make legal provisions which allow people to keep any animals on their private lots or in private stables. Create a piece of fenced and protected common land, where animals

TOWNS

are free to graze, with grass, trees, and water in it. Make at least one system of movement in the neighborhood which is entirely asphalt-free—where dung can fall freely without needing to be cleaned up.

Make sure that the green areas—green streets (51), accessible green (60)—are all connected to one another to form a continuous swath throughout the city for domestic and wild animals. Place the animal commons near a children’s home and near the local schools, so children can take care of the animals —children’s home (86) ; if there is a lot of dung, make sure that it can be used as a fertilizer—compost (178). . . .

374

within the framework of the common land, the clusters and the work communities₎ encourage transformation of the smallest independent social institutions : the families_y workgroups, and gathering places.

Fir sty the family, in all its forms;

75. THE FAMILY

76. HOUSE FOR A SMALL FAMILY

77. HOUSE FOR A COUPLE

78. HOUSE FOR ONE PERSON

79. YOUR OWN HOME

THE POETRY OF THE LANGUAGE

greater, and more personal things than any rose—and the poem illuminates the person, and the rose, because of this connection. The connection not only illuminates the words, but also illuminates our actual lives.

O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

WILLIAM BLAKE

The same exactly, happens in a building. Consider, for example, the two patterns bathing room (144) and still water (71). One defines a part of a house where you can bathe yourself slowly, with pleasure, perhaps in company - a place to rest your limbs, and to relax. The other is a place in a neighborhood, where this is water to gaze into, perhaps to swim in, where children can sail boats, and splash about, which nourishes those parts of ourselves which rely on water as one of the great elements of the unconscious.

Suppose now, that we make a complex of buildings where individual bathing rooms are somehow connected to a common pond, or lake, or pool—where the bathing room merges with this common place; where there is no sharp distinction between the individual and family processes of the bathing room, and the common pleasure of the common pool. In this place, these two patterns

xlii

75 the family*

376

. . . assume now, that you have decided to build a house for yourself. If you place it properly, this house can help to form a cluster, or a row of houses, or a hill of houses—house cluster (37), row houses (38), housing hill (39)—or it can help to keep a working community alive—housinc in between (48). This next pattern now gives you some vital information about the social character of the household itself. If you succeed in following this pattern, it will help repair life cycle (26) and household mix (35) in your community.

The nuclear family is not by itself a viable social form.

Until a few years ago, human society was based on the extended family: a family of at least three generations, with parents, children, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, all living together in a single or loosely knit multiple household. But today people move hundreds of miles to marry, to find education, and to work. Under these circumstances the only family units which are left are those units called nuclear families: father, mother, and children. And many of these are broken down even further by divorce and separation.

Unfortunately, it seems very likely that the nuclear family is not a viable social form. It is too small. Each person in a nuclear family is too tightly linked to other members of the family; any one relationship which goes sour, even for a few hours, becomes critical; people cannot simply turn away toward uncles, aunts, grandchildren, cousins, brothers. Instead, each difficulty twists the family unit into ever tighter spirals of discomfort; the children become prey to all kinds of dependencies and oedipal neuroses; the parents are so dependent on each other that they are finally forced to separate.

Philip Slater describes this situation for American families and finds in the adults of the family, especially the women, a terrible, brooding sense of deprivation. There are simply not enough people around, not enough communal action, to give the ordinary

TOWNS

experience around the home any depth or richness. (Philip E. Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness, Boston: Beacon Press, 197O, p. 67, and throughout.)

It seems essential that the people in a household have at least a dozen people round them, so that they can find the comfort and relationships they need to sustain them during their ups and downs. Since the old extended family, based on blood ties, seems to be gone—at least for the moment—this can only happen if small families, couples, and single people join together in voluntary “families” of ten or so.

In his final book, Island, Aldous Huxley portrayed a lovely vision of such a development:

“How many homes does a Palanese child have?”

“About twenty on the average.”

“Twenty? My God!”

“We all belong,” Susila explained, “to a MAC—a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from fifteen to twenty-five assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old-timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents— everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we all have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teen-agers.”

Will shook his head. “Making twenty families grow where only one grew before.”

“But what grew before was your kind of family. . . .” As though reading instructions from a cookery book, “Take one sexually inept wage slave,” she went on, “one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice. Our recipe is rather different: Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection.”

“And what comes out of your open pan?” he asked.

“An entirely different kind of family. Not exclusive, like your families, and not predestined, not compulsory. An inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary family. Twenty pairs of fathers and mothers, eight or nine ex-fathers and ex-mothers, and forty or fifty assorted children of all ages.” (Aldous Huxley, Island, New York: Bantam, 1962, pp. 89-90.)

Physically, the setting for a large voluntary family must provide

75 the family

for a balance of privacy and communality. Each small family, each person, each couple, needs a private realm, almost a private household of their own, according to their territorial need. In the movement to build communes, it is our experience that groups have not taken this need for privacy seriously enough. It has been shrugged off, as something to overcome. But it is a deep and basic need; and if the setting does not let each person and each small household regulate itself on this dimension, it is sure to cause trouble. We propose, therefore, that individuals, couples, people young and old—each subgroup—have its own legally independent household—in some cases, physically separate households and cottages, at least separate rooms., suites, and floors.

The private realms are then set off against the common space and the common functions. The most vital commons are the kitchen, the place to sit down and eat, and a garden. Common meals, at least several nights a week, seem to play the biggest role in binding the group. The meals, and taking time at the cooking, provide the kind of casual meeting time when everything else can be comfortably discussed: the child care arrangements, maintenance, projects—see communal eating (147).

This would suggest, then, a large family room-farmhouse kitchen, right at the heart of the site—at the main crossroads, where everyone would tend to meet toward the end of the day. Again, according to the style of the family, this might be a separate building, with workshop and gardens, or one wing of a house, or the entire first floor of a two or three story building.

There is some evidence that processes which generate large voluntary group households are already working in the society. (Cf. Pamela Hollie, “More families share houses with others to enhance ‘life style,’ ” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 1972.)

One way to spur the growth of voluntary families: When someone turns over or sells their home or room or apartment, they first tell everyone living around them—their neighbors. These neighbors then have the right to find friends of theirs to take the place—and thus to extend their “family.” If friends are able to move in, then they can arrange for themselves how to create a functioning family, with commons, and so on. They might build a connection between the homes, knock out a wall, add a

TOWNS

room. If the people immediately around the place cannot make the sale in a few months, then it reverts to the normal marketplace.

Therefore:

Set up processes which encourage groups of 8 to 12 people to come together and establish communal households. Morphologically, the important things are:

1. Private realms for the groups and individuals that make up the extended family: couple’s realms, private rooms, sub-households for small families.

2. Common space for shared functions: cooking, working, gardening, child care.

3. At the important crossroads of the site, a place where the entire group can meet and sit together.

*£♦

Each individual household within the larger family must, at all costs, have a clearly defined territory of its own, which it controls—your own i-iome (79) ; treat the individual territories according to the nature of the individual households—house for A SMALL FAMILY (76), HOUSE FOR A COUPLE (77), HOUSE FOR one person (78); and build common space between them, where the members of the different smaller households can meet and eat together—common areas at the heart (129), communal eating (147). For the shape of the building, gardens, parking, and surroundings, begin with building complex (95)- • • •

380 76 HOUSE FOR A SMALL

FAMILY*

381

. . . according to the family (75), each nuclear family ought to be a member household of a larger group household. If this is not possible, do what you can, when building a house for a small family, to generate some larger, possible group household, by tying it together with the next door households; in any case, at the very least, form the beginning of a house cluster (37)-

In a house for a small family, it is the relationship between children and adults which is most critical.

Many small households, not large enough to have a full fledged nursery, not rich enough to have a nanny, find themselves swamped by the children. The children naturally want to be where the adults are; their parents don’t have the heart, or the energy, to keep them out of special areas; so finally the whole house has the character of a children’s room—children’s clothes, drawings, boots and shoes, tricycles, toy trucks, and disarray.

Yet, obviously few parents feel happy to give up the calm and cleanliness and quiet of the adult world in every square inch of their homes. To help achieve a balance, a house for a small family needs three distinct areas: a couple’s realm, reserved for the adults; a children’s realm, where children’s needs hold sway; and a common area, between the two, connected to them both.

The couple’s realm should be more than a room, although rooms are a part of it. It is territory which sustains them as two adults, a couple—not father and mother. Other parts of their lives are involved with children, friends, work; there must be a place which becomes naturally an expression of them as adults, alone. The children come in and out of this territory, but when they are there, they are clearly in the adults’ world. See couple’s realm (136).

The children’s world must also be looked upon as territory that they share, as children, children’s realm (137); here, it is important to establish that this is a part of the house, in balance with the others. Again, the critical feature is not that adults are

“excluded” but that, when they are in this world, they are in children’s territory.

The common area contains those functions that the children and the adults share: eating together, sitting together, games, perhaps bathing, gardening—again, whatever captures their needs for shared territory. Quite likely, the common territory will be larger than the two other parts of the house.

Finally, realize that this pattern is different from the way most small family homes are made today. For example, a popular current conception, comparable to this, but quite different, is a suburban two fart house: sleeping and commons.

A typical suburban t

Even though there is a “master bedroom” the sleeping part of the house is essentially one thing—the children are all around the master bedroom. This plan does not have the distinctions we are arguing for.

Here is a beautiful plan which does:

A three-fart house—the couple's realm upstairs.

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Therefore:

Give the house three distinct parts: a realm for parents, a realm for the children, and a common area. Conceive these three realms as roughly similar in size, with the commons the largest.

Treat the house, like every house, as a distinct piece of territory —your own home (79) j build the three main parts according to the specific patterns for those parts—common areas at the HEART (129), couple’s REALM ( I 36) , BED CLUSTER ( I 43) and connect the common areas, and the bed cluster according to the children’s REALM (137). . . .

384

77 HOUSE FOR A COUPLE*

385

THE POETRY OF THE LANGUAGE

exist in the same space; they are identified j there is a compression of the two, which requires less space, and which is more profound than in a place where they are merely side by side. The compression illuminates each of the patterns, sheds light on its meaning; and also illuminates our lives, as we understand a little more about the connections of our inner needs.

But this kind of compression is not only poetic and profound. It is not only the stuff of poems and exotic statements, but to some degree, the stuff of every English sentence. To some degree, there is compression in every single word we utter, just because each word carries the whisper of the meanings of the words it is connected to. Even “Please pass the butter, Fred” has some compression in it, because it carries overtones that lie in the connections of these words to all the words which came before it.

Each of us, talking to our friends, or to our families, makes use of these compressions, which are drawn out from the connections between words which are given by the language. The more we can feel all the connections in the language, the more rich and subtle are the things we say at the most ordinary times.

And once again, the same is true in building. The compression of patterns into a single space, is not a poetic and exotic thing, kept for special buildings which are works of art. It is the most ordinary economy of space. It is quite possible that all the patterns for a house might, in some form be present, and overlapping, in a simple one-room cabin. The patterns do not need to be strung out, and kept separate. Every building, every room,

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. . . again, ideally, every couple is a part of a larger group household—the family (75). If this can not be so, try to build the house for the couple in such a way as to tie it together with some other households, to form the beginnings of a group household, or, if this fails, at least to form the beginnings of a house cluster

(37) *

♦$. ♦<.

In a small household shared by two, the most important problem which arises is the possibility that each may have too little opportunity for solitude or privacy.

Consider these forces:

1. Of course, the couple need a shared realm, where they can function together, invite friends, be alone together. This realm needs to be made up of functions which they share.

2. But it is also true that each partner is trying to maintain an individuality, and not be submerged in the identity of the other, or the identity of the “couple.” Each partner needs sface to nourish this need.

It is essential, therefore, that a small house be conceived as a place where the two people may be together but where, from time to time, either one of them may also be alone, in comfort, in dignity, and in such a way that the other does not feel left out or isolated. To this end, there must be two small places— perhaps rooms, perhaps large alcoves, perhaps a corner, screened off by a half-wall-—places which are clearly understood as private territories, where each person can keep to himself, pursue his or her own activities.

Still, the problem of the balance of privacy in a couple’s lives is delicate. Even with a small place of one’s own, tenuously connected to the house, one partner may feel left out at various moments. While we believe that the solution proposed in this pattern helps, the problem will not be entirely settled until the couple itself is in some close, neighborly, and family-like rela-

77 HOUSE FOR A COUPLE

tionship to other adults. Then, when one needs privacy, the other has other possibilities for companionship at hand. This idea and its physical implications are discussed in the pattern, the family (75)-

Once the opportunity for withdrawal is satisfied, there is also a genuine opportunity for the couple to be together; and then the house can be a place where genuine intimacy, genuine connection can happen.

There is one other problem, unique to a house for a couple, that must be mentioned. In the first years of a couple’s life, as they learn more about each other, and find out if indeed they have a future together, the evolution of the house plays a vital role. Improving the house, fixing it up, enlarging it, provides a frame for learning about one another: it brings out conflict, and offers the chance, like almost no other activity, for concrete resolution and growth. This suggests that a couple find a place that they can change gradually over the years, and not build or buy for themselves a “dream” home from scratch. The experience of making simple changes in the house, and tuning it to their lives, provides some grist for their own growth. Therefore, it is best to start small, with plenty of room for growth and change.

Therefore:

Conceive a house for a couple as being made up of two kinds of places—a shared couple’s realm and individual private worlds. Imagine the shared realm as half-public and half-intimate; and the private worlds as entirely individual and private.

387

Again, treat the house as a distinct piece of territory, in some fashion owned by its users—your own home (79). Lay out the common part, according to the pattern couple’s realm (136), and give both persons an individual world of their own where they can be alone—a room of one’s own (141). . . .

78 HOUSE FOR ONE PERSON*

389

. . . the households with one person in them, more than any other, need to be a part of some kind of larger household—the family (75). Either build them to fit into some larger group household, or even attach them, as ancillary cottages to other, ordinary family households like house for a small family (76)

or HOUSE FOR A COUPLE (77) .

+-*-*

Once a household for one person is part of some larger group, the most critical problem which arises is the need for simplicity.

The housing market contains few houses or apartments specifically built for one person. Most often men and women who choose to live alone, live in larger houses and apartments, originally built for two people or families. And yet for one person these larger places are most often uncompact, unwieldy, hard to live in, hard to look after. Most important of all, they do not allow a person to develop a sense of self-sufficiency, simplicity, compactness, and economy in his or her own life.

The kind of place which is most closely suited to one person’s needs, and most nearly overcomes this problem, is a place of the utmost simplicity, in which only the bare bones of necessity are there: a place, built like a ploughshare, where every corner, every table, every shelf, each flower pot, each chair, each Jog, is placed according to the simplest necessity, and supports the person’s life directly, plainly, with the harmony of nothing that is not needed, and everything that is.

The plan of such a house will be characteristically different from other houses, primarily because it requires almost no differentiation of its spaces: it need only be one room. It can be a cottage or a studio, built on the ground or in a larger building, part of a group household or a detached structure. In essence, it is simply a central space, with nooks around it. The nooks replace the rooms in a larger house; they are for bed, bath, kitchen, workshop and entrance.

It is important to realize that very many of the patterns in this book can be built into a small house; small size does not pre-

78 HOUSE FOR ONE PERSON

elude richness of form. The trick is to intensify and to overlay; to compress the patterns; to reduce them to simple expressions; to make every inch count double. When it is well done, a small house feels wonderfully continuous—cooking a bowl of soup fills the house; there is no rattling around. This cannot happen if the place is divided into rooms.

We have found it necessary to call special attention to this pattern because it is nearly impossible to build a house this small in cities—there is no way to get hold of a very small lot. Zoning codes and banking practices prohibit such tiny lots; they prohibit “normal” lots from splitting down to the kind of scale that a house for one person requires. The correct development of this pattern will require a change in these ordinances.

Therefore:

Conceive a house for one person as a place of the utmost simplicity: essentially a one-room cottage or studio, with large and small alcoves around it. When it is most intense, the entire house may be no more than 300 to 400 square feet.

alcoves

4* 4* 4*

And again, make the house an individual piece of territory, with its own garden, no matter how small—your own home (79) ; make the main room essentially a kind of farmhouse kitchen —farmhouse kitchen (139)> with alcoves opening off it for sitting, working, bathing, sleeping, dressing—bathing room (144), window place (180), workspace enclosure (183), bed alcove (188), dressing room (i 89) ; if the house is meant for an old person, or for someone very young, shape it also according to the pattern for old age cottage (155) or teenager’s COTTAGE (I 54) . . . .

79 YOUR OWN HOME**

392

. . . according to the family (75), each individual household should be a part of a larger family group household. Whether this is so, or not, each individual household, must also have a territory of its own which it controls completely—house for a small FAMILY (76), HOUSE FOR A COUPLE (77), HOUSE FOR ONE person (78); this pattern, which simply sets down the need for such a territory, helps especially to form higher density house clusters like row houses (38), housing hill (39), which often do not have well-defined individual territories for the separate households.

•5* *S*

People cannot be genuinely comfortable and healthy in a house which is not theirs. All forms of rental—whether from private landlords or public housing agencies—work against the natural processes which allow people to form stable, self-healing communities.

. . . in the imperishable primal language of the human heart house means my house, your house, a man’s own house. The house is the winning throw of the dice which man has wrested from the uncanniness of universe; it is his defense against the chaos that threatens to invade him. Therefore his deeper wish is that it be his own house, that he not have to share with anyone other than his own family. (Martin Buber, A Believing Humanism: Gleanings, New York: Simon and Shuster, 1969, p. 93.)

This pattern is not intended as an argument in favor of “private

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property,” or the process of buying and selling land. Indeed, it is very clear that all those processes which encourage speculation in land, for the sake of profit, are unhealthy and destructive, because they invite people to treat houses as commodities, to build things for “resale,” and not in such a way as to fit their own needs.

And just as speculation and the profit motive make it impossible for people to adapt their houses to their own needs, so tenancy, rental, and landlords do the same. Rental areas are always the first to turn to slums. The mechanism is clear and well known. See, for example, George Sternlieb, The Tenement Landlord (Rutgers University Press, 1966). The landlord tries to keep his maintenance and repair costs as low as possible; the residents have no incentive to maintain and repair the homes—in fact, the opposite—since improvements add to the wealth of the landlord, and even justify higher rent. And so the typical piece of rental property degenerates over the years. Then landlords try to build new rental properties which are immune to neglect—gardens are replaced with concrete, carpets are replaced with lineoleum, and wooden surfaces by formica: it is an attempt to make the new units maintenance-free, and to stop the slums by force; but they turn out cold and sterile and again turn into slums, because nobody loves them.

People will only be able to feel comfortable in their houses, if they can change their houses to suit themselves, add on whatever they need, rearrange the garden as they like it; and, of course, they can only do this in circumstances where they are the legal owners of the house and land; and if, in high density multi-story housing, each apartment, like a house, has a well-defined volume, in which the owner can make changes as he likes.

This requires then, that every house is owned—in some fashion —by the people that live in it; it requires that every house, whether at ground level or in the air, has a well-defined volume within which the family is free to make whatever changes they want; and it requires a form of ownership which discourages speculation.

Several approaches have been put forward in recent years to solve the problem of providing each household with a “home.”

At one extreme there are ideas like Habraken’s high density “support” system, where families buy pads on publicly owned superstructures and gradually develop their own homes. And at the other extreme there are the rural communes, where people have forsaken the city to create their own homes in the country. Even modified forms of rental can help the situation if they allow people to change their houses according to their needs and give people some financial stake in the process of maintenance. This helps, because renting is often a step along the way to home ownership; but unless tenants can somehow recover their investments in money and labor, the hopeless cycle of degeneration of rental property and the degeneration of the tenants’ financial capability will continue. (Cf. Rolf Goetze, “Urban Housing Rehabilitation,” in Turner and Fichter, eds., The Freedom to Build, New York: Macmillan, 1972.)

A common element in all these cases is the understanding that the successful development of a household’s “home” depends upon these features: Each household must possess a clearly defined site for both a house and an outdoor space, and the household must own this site in the sense that they are in full control of its development.

Therefore:

Do everything possible to make the traditional forms of rental impossible, indeed, illegal. Give every household its own home, with space enough for a garden. Keep the emphasis in the definition of ownership on control, not on financial ownership. Indeed, where it is possible to construct forms of ownership which give people control over their houses and gardens, but make financial speculation impossible, choose these forms above all others. In all cases give people the legal power, and the physical opportunity to modify and repair their own places. Pay attention to this rule especially, in the case of high density apartments: build the apartments in such a way that every individual apartment has a garden, or a terrace where vegetables will grow, and that even in this situation, each family

every garden is better, when all the patterns which it needs are compressed as far as it is possible for them to be. The building will be cheaper; and the meanings in it will be denser.

It is essential then, once you have learned to use the language, that you pay attention to the possibility of compressing the many patterns which you put together, in the smallest possible space. You may think of this process of compressing patterns, as a way to make the cheapest possible building which has the necessary patterns in it. It is, also, the only way of using a pattern language to make buildings which are poems.

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can build, and change, and add on to their house as they wish.

For the shape of the house, begin with building complex (95). For the shape of the lot, do not accept the common notion of a lot which has a narrow frontage and a great deal of depth. Instead, try to make every house lot roughly square, or even long along the street and shallow. All this is necessary to create the right relation between house and garden—half-hidden garden (ill).

the workgroups, including all kinds of workshops and offices and even children’s learning groups;

80. SELF-GOVERNING WORKSHOPS AND OFFICES 8 I. SMALL SERVICES WITHOUT RED TAPE

82. OFFICE CONNECTIONS

83. MASTER AND APPRENTICES

84. TEENAGE SOCIETY

85. SHOPFRONT SCHOOLS

86. children’s home

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80 SELF-GOVERNING WORKSHOPS AND OFFICES**

398

. . . all kinds of work, office work and industrial work and agricultural work, are radically decentralized by scattered work (9), and industrial ribbons (42) and grouped in small communities—work community (41). This pattern helps to generate these larger patterns by giving the fundamental nature of all work organizations, no matter what their type.

❖ ❖ •!-

No one enjoys his work if he is a cog in a machine.

A man enjoys his work when he understands the whole and when he is responsible for the quality of the whole. He can only understand the whole and be responsible for the whole when the work which happens in society, all of it, is undertaken by small self-governing human groups; groups small enough to give people understanding through face-to-face contact, and autonomous enough to let the workers themselves govern their own affairs.

The evidence for this pattern is built upon a single, fundamental proposition: work is a form of living, with its own intrinsic rewards; any way of organizing work which is at odds with this idea, which treats work instrumentally, as a means only to other ends, is inhuman. Down through the ages people have described and proposed ways of working according to this proposition. Recently, E. F. Schumacher, the economist, has made a beautiful statement of this attitude (E. F. Schumacher, “Buddhist Economics,” Resurgence, 275 Kings Road, Kingston, Surrey, Volume I, Number 11, January, 1968).

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centcredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most

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primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely, that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.

From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of mechanization which must be clearly distinguished: one that enhances a man’s skill and power and one that turns the work of man over to a mechanical slave, leaving man in a position of having to serve the slave. How to tell the one from the other? “The craftsman himself,” says Ananda Coomaraswamy, a man equally competent to talk about the Modern West as the Ancient East, “the craftsman himself can always, if allowed to, draw the delicate distinction between the machine and the tool. The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsmen’s fingers; but the power loom is a machine, and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work.” It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man’s work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products. The Indian philosopher and economist J. C. Kumarappa sums the matter up as follows:

“If the nature of the work is properly appreciated and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to the physical body. It nourishes and enlivens the higher man and urges him to produce the best he is capable of. It directs his freewill along the proper course and disciplines the animal in him into progressive channels. It furnishes an excellent background for man to display his scale of values and develop his personality.”

In contrast to this form of work stands the style of work that has been created by the technological progress of the past two hundred years. In this style workers are made to operate like parts of a machine; they create parts of no consequence, and have no responsibility for the whole. We may fairly say that the alienation of workers from the intrinsic pleasures of their work has been a primary product of the industrial revolution. The alienation is particularly acute in large organizations, where faceless workers repeat endlessly menial tasks to create products and services with which they cannot identify.

400

In these organizations, with all the power and benefits that the unions have been able to wrest from the hands of the owners, there is still evidence that workers are fundamentally unhappy with their work. In the auto industry, for example, the absentee rate on Mondays and Fridays is staggering—15 to 20 per cent; and there is evidence of “massive alcoholism, similar to what the Russians are experiencing with their factory workers” (Nicholas von Hoffman, Washington Post). The fact is that people cannot find satisfaction in work unless it is performed at a human scale and in a setting where the worker has a say.

Job dissatisfaction in modern industry has also led to industrial sabotage and a faster turnover of workers in recent years. A new super-automated General Motors assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio, was sabotaged and shut down for several weeks. Absenteeism in the three largest automobile manufacturing companies has doubled in the past seven years. The turnover of workers has also doubled. Some industrial engineers believe that “American industry in some cases may have pushed technology too far by taking the last few bits of skill out of jobs, and that a point of human resistance has been reached” (Agis Salpukis, “Is the machine pushing man over the brink?San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, April 16, 1972).

Perhaps the most dramatic empirical evidence for the connection between work and life is that presented in the recent study, “Work in America,” commissioned by Elliot Richardson, as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Department, 1972. This study finds that the single best -predictor of long life is not whether a person smokes or hozv often he sees a doctor, but the extent to which he is satisfied with his job. The report identifies the two main elements of job dissatisfaction as the diminishing independence of workers, and the increasing simplification, fragmentation, and isolation of tasks—both of which are rampant in modern industrial and office work alike.

But for most of human history, the production of goods and services was for a far more personal, self-regulating affair; when each job of work was a matter of creative interest. And there is no reason why work can’t be like that again, today.

For instance, Seymour Melman, in Decision Making and Pro-ductivity, compares the manufacture of tractors in Detroit and in

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Coventry, England. He contrasts Detroit’s managerial rule with Coventry’s gang system and shows that the gang system produced high quality products and the highest wages in British industry. “The most characteristic feature of the decision-formulation process is that of mutuality in decision-making with final authority residing in the hands of the group workers themselves.”

Other projects and experiments and evidence which indicate that modern work can be organized in this manner and still be compatible with sophisticated technology, have been collected by H unnius, Garson, and Chase. See Worker? Control, New York: Vintage Books, 1973.

And another example comes from the reports by E. L. Trist, Organizational Choice and P. Herbst, Autonomous Grouf Functioning. These authors describe the organization of work in mining pits in Durham which was put into practice by groups of miners.

The composite work organization may be described as one in which the group takes over complete responsibility for the total cycle of operations involved in mining the coal-face. No member of the group has a fixed work-role. Instead, the men deploy themselves, depending on the requirements of the ongoing group task. Within the limits of technological and safety requirements they are free to evolve their way of organizing and carrying out their task.

[The experiment demonstrates] the ability of quite large primary work groups of 40-50 members to act as self-regulating, self-developing social organisms able to maintain .themselves in a steady state of high productivity. (Quoted in Colin Ward, “The organization of anarchy,” Patterns of Anarchy, Krimerman and Perry, eds., New York: Anchor Books, 1966, pp. 349-51.)

We believe that these small self-governing groups are not only most efficient, but also the only possible source of job satisfaction. They provide the only style of work that is nourishing and intrinsically satisfying.

Therefore:

Encourage the formation of self-governing workshops and offices of 5 to 20 workers. Make each group autonomous—with respect to organization, style, relation to other groups, hiring and firing, work schedule. Where the work

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80 SELF-GOVERNING WORKSHOPS AND OFFICES

is complicated and requires larger organizations, several of these work groups can federate and cooperate to produce complex artifacts and services.

self-governing workshops

•5* *5* •§»

House the workgroup in a building of its own—office connections (82), building complex (95); if the workgroup is large enough, and if it serves the public, break it down into autonomous departments, easily identifiable, with no more than a dozen people each—small services without red tape (8i); in any case, divide all work into small team work, either directly within the cooperative workgroup or under the departments, with the people of each team in common space—master and apprentices (83) and small work groups (148). . . .

81 SMALL SERVICES WITHOUT RED TAPE*

404

. . . all offices which provide service to the public—work community (41), UNIVERSITY AS A MARKETPLACE (43), LOCAL TOWN HALL (44), HEATH CENTER (47), TEENAGE SOCIETY (84) need subsidiary departments, where the members of the public go. And of course, piecemeal development of these small departments, one department at a time, can also help to generate these larger patterns gradually.

♦J*

Departments and public services don’t work if they are too large. When they are large, their human qualities vanish; they become bureaucratic; red tape takes over.

There is a great deal of literature on the way red tape and bureaucracy work against human needs. See, for example, Gideon Sjoberg, Richard Brymer, and Buford Farris, “Bureaucracy and the Lower Class,” Sociology and Social Research, 50, April, 1966, pp. 325—77; and Alvin W. Gouldner, “Red Tape as a Social Problem,” in Robert Mertin, Reader in Bureaucracy, Free Press, 195 2, pp. 410-18.

According to these authors, red tape can be overcome in two ways. First, it can be overcome by making each service program small and autonomous. A great deal of evidence shows that red tape occurs largely as a result of impersonal relationships in large institutions. When people can no longer communicate on a face-to-face basis, they need formal regulations, and in the lower echelons of the organization, these formal regulations are followed blindly and narrowly.

Second, red tape can be overcome by changing the passive nature of the clients’ relation to service programs. There is considerable evidence to show that when clients have an active relationship with a social institution, the institution loses its power to intimidate them.

We have therefore concluded that no service should have more than 12 persons total (all staff, including clerks). We base this figure on the fact that 12 seems to be the largest number of

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people that can sit down in a face-to-face discussion. It seems likely that a smaller staff size will work better still. Furthermore, each service should be relatively autonomous—subject only to a few simple, coordinative regulations from parent organizations— and that this should be emphasized by physical autonomy. In order to be physically autonomous, each service must have an area which is entirely under its own jurisdiction; with its own door on a public thoroughfare, and complete physical separation from other services.

This pattern applies equally to the departments of a city hall, a medical center, or to the local branches of a welfare agency. In most of these cases the pattern would require basic changes in administrative organization. However difficult they may be to implement, we believe these changes are required.

Therefore:

In any institution whose departments provide public service:

1. Make each service or department autonomous as far as possible.

2. Allow no one service more than 12 staff members total.

3. House each one in an identifiable piece of the building.

4. Give each one direct access to a public thoroughfare.

visible front
	public thoroughfare

406

8l SMALL SERVICES WITHOUT RED TAPE

♦£• ♦**

Arrange these departments in space, according to the prescription of OFFICE CONNECTIONS (82) and BUILDING COMPLEX (95) ; if the public thoroughfare is indoors, make it a building thoroughfare (lOl), and make the fronts of the services visible as a family of entrances (102) ; wherever the services are in any way connected to the political life of the community, mix them with ad hoc groups created by the citizens or users— necklace of community projects (45) ; arrange the inside space of the department according to flexible office space (146); and provide rooms where people can team up in two’s and three’s—small work groups (148) . . . .

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