A pattern language - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Christopher alexander (146 FLEXIBLE OFFICE SPACE) #30

146 FLEXIBLE OFFICE SPACE

. . . imagine that you have laid out the basic areas of a workshop or office—self governing workshops and offices (80), office connections (82). Once again, as in a house, the most basic layout of all is given by intimacy gradient (127) and common areas at the heart (129). Within their general framework, this pattern helps to define the working space in more detail, and so completes these larger patterns.

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Is it possible to create a kind of space which is specifically tuned to the needs of people working, and yet capable of an infinite number of various arrangements and combinations within it?

Every human organization goes through a series of changes. In offices, the clusters of work groups, their size and functions, are all subject to change—often unpredictably. How must office space be designed to cope with this situation?

The standard approaches to the problem of flexibility in office spaces are: (i) uninterrupted modular space with modular partitions (full height or half-height) and (2) entire floors of uninterrupted space with low ceilings and no partitions (known as “office landscape”).

But neither of these solutions really work. They are not genuinely flexible. Let us analyze them in turn.

We discuss the partition solution first. In a na'ive sense, it seems obvious that the problem can be solved by movable partitions. However, in practice there are a number of serious difficulties.

1. If partitions are made easy to move, they become lightweight and provide inadequate acoustic insulation.

2. If the partitions are both easy to move and acoustically insulated, they are usually very expensive.

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3. The actual cost of moving a partition is usually so high that even in highly “flexible” and “modular” systems, the partitions are in fact very rarely moved.

4. Most serious of all: it is usually not possible to make minor changes in a partition system. At the moment when one working group expands and needs more space, it is only by rare accident that the working group next door happens at this same moment to be contracting. In order to make room for the expanding group, a large part of the office must be reshuffled, but this causes so much disruption that many office managements adopt the simpler solutions—they leave the partitions as they are and move the people.

5. Finally, it is in the nature of office space that certain informal, semi-permanent arrangements grow more -permanent over time (for example, furnishing, filing systems, “ownership” of special spaces or windows). This makes the occupants resistant to change. Though they may be willing to move when the growth of their own working group is at stake, they will resist moving strongly, as part of any general office reshuffle, caused by the expansion or contraction of some other working group.

The modular partition system fails because the partitions become, in effect, ordinary walls; yet they are less useful than real walls for defining territory and for sound insulation; and what is more, the partitions do not necessarily satisfy the need for a semi-enclosed workspace, discussed in workspace enclosure (183). It is clear, then, that systems of movable partitions do not really solve the problem.

The office landscape solution, since it has no partitions, is more genuinely flexible. However, this system is only suitable for types of work which require neither a high degree of privacy nor much internal cohesion within individual working groups. Moreover, studies by Brian Wells have made it clear that office workers strongly prefer small work spaces to larger ones—see small work croups (148). Wells shows that, when given a choice among different sized offices, people choose desks in small offices rather than large ones. And he shows that working groups in small offices 'are much more cohesive (defined by a larger percentage of internal sociometric choices), than the working groups in large offices. (Pilkington Research Unit, Office Design: A

Study of Environment, Department of Building Science, University of Liverpool, 19655 pp. 113-21.)

It seems then, that neither flexible partitions nor office landscape, really works. Neither creates space that is both well-adapted to specific work arrangements and truly flexible. A clue to an altogether different approach to flexibility comes from the fact that organizations which use converted houses as office space have no difficulty with this problem at all. Indeed, it appears that these old buildings actually provide more real flexibility than the apparent flexibility of modular partitioned offices. The reason is simple. In these old houses, there are many small rooms, a few large rooms, and many partially defined spaces, usually interconnected in a variety of ways.

Though these spaces were designed to support family life, they turn out also to support the natural structure of work groups: there are small spaces for private and half-private offices, slightly larger spaces for work groups of two to six, usually one space where up to 12 people can gather, and a commons centered around the kitchen and dining room. Furthermore, within each space there are usually a variety of walls, half-walls, window seats, which allow for changes within the rooms.

Although the u'alls cannot be moved at a moment’s notice—the house is genuinely adaptable. Changes in work groups can be made in a few minutes, at no cost, just by opening and closing doors. And the acoustic characteristics are excellent—since most of the walls are solid, often load-bearing walls.

It is occasionally possible to build an office or a workspace like

146 FLEXIBLE OFFICE SPACE

a house—when you know enough about the working group ahead of time to base the mix of rooms and larger spaces on their specific nature. But, far more- often, tire work groups which will occupy the space are unknown at the time the space is built. In this case, no specific “house-like” design is possible. Instead, it is necessary to design and build a type of space which can gradually, and systematically, be turned into this needed house-like kind of space once it is occupied.

The kind of space which will create this possibility is not “warehouse” space or “office landscape” space but instead, a kind of space which contains the possibility that people need, in the form of columns and ceiling height variety, to encourage them to modify it as they use it. If there are columns, so placed, that a few partitions nailed to the columns will begin to form differentiations and rooms within rooms, then we can be sure that people will actually transform it to meet their needs once they begin to work there.

As far as the geometrical layout of the columns is concerned, we have found that it works best when there is essentially a central space—with aisles down the sides—and the possibility of forming the bays of the aisles into workspaces. The illustration below shows the general idea, together with the ways this pattern may be transformed after a few years.

• • • • • •		T~T1 :
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Adding -partitions.

Of course, you can add rooms of different sizes and combine spaces to follow this general outline in an almost endless variety of ways. In one case they may be rather simple, with bays laid out in rows. In another case, the bays may twist and turn, with odd sized rooms and spaces in between. The details are irrelevant. What matters is the general position of the columns and, of course, the guarantee that they are placed in such a way that

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there is plenty of natural light inside—light on two sides of EVERY ROOM (159).

Therefore:

Lay out the office space as wings of open space, with free standing columns around their edges, so they define halfprivate and common spaces opening into one another. Set down enough columns so that people can fill them in over the years, in many different ways—but always in a semipermanent fashion.

If you happen to know the working group before you build the space, then make it more like a house, more closely tailored to their needs. In either case, create a variety of space throughout the office—comparable in variety to the different sizes and kinds of space in a large old house.

possibility of many different sized rooms

Light is critical. The bays of this kind of workspace must either be free-standing (so that there is light behind the alcoves), or the entire bay must be short enough to bring enough light in from the two ends—light on two sides of every room (159). Use CEILING HEIGHT VARIETY ( I 90) and COLUMN PLACES (226) to define the proper mix of possible spaces. Above all, lay the

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146 FLEXIBLE OFFICE SPACE

workspace out in such a way to make it possible for people to work in twos and threes, always with partial contact and partial privacy—small work groups (148) and half-private office (152). Place a welcoming reception area at the front—reception welcomes you (149); and in the common areas at the heart arrange a place where people can eat together, everyday—communal EATING (147). . . .

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. . . according to the pattern city country fingers (3), there is a rather sharp division between city land and rural land. But at the ends of city fingers, where the country fingers open out, there is a need for an additional kind of structure. This structure has traditionally been the suburbs. But. . .

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The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement.

Many people want to live in the country; and they also want to be close to a large city. But it is geometrically impossible to have thousands of small farms, within a few minutes of a major city center.

To live well in the country, you must have a reasonable piece of land of your own—large enough for horses, cows, chickens, an orchard—and you must have immediate access to continuous open countryside, as far as the eye can see. To have quick access to the city, you must live on a road, within a few minutes’ drive from city centers, and with a bus line outside your door.

It is possible to have both, by arranging country roads around large open squares of countryside or farmland, with houses closely packed along the road, but only one house deep. Lionel March lends support to this pattern in his paper, “Homes beyond the Fringe” (Land Use and Built Form Studies, Cambridge, England, 1968). March shows that such a pattern, fully developed, could work for millions of people even in a country as small and densely populated as England.

A “lace of country streets” contains square miles of open countryside, fast roads from the city at the edge of these square miles, houses clustered along the roads, and footpaths stretching out from the city, crisscrossing the countryside.

I. Square miles of open countryside We believe that one square mile is the smallest piece of open land which still maintains the integrity of the countryside. This figure is derived from the requirements of small farms, presented in the argument for CITY COUNTRY FINGERS (3).

147 COMMUNAL EATING*

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. . . this pattern helps complete all those human groups and institutions which have common areas at the heart (129) in them, and most of all it helps to complete workshops and offices and extended families—the family (75), self-governing workshops and offices (80). In all of them, the common area will draw its strength from the sharing of food and drink. This pattern defines it in detail, and shows also how it helps to generate a larger social order.

Without communal eating, no human group can hold together.

The importance of communal eating is clear in all human societies. Holy communion, wedding feasts, birthday parties, Christmas dinner, an Irish wake, the family evening meal are Western and Christian examples, but every society has its equivalents. There are almost no important human events or institutions which are not given their power to bind, their sacral character, by food and drink. The anthropological literature is full of references. For example: “Food and Its Vicissitudes: A Cross-Cultural Study of Sharing and Nonsharing,” in Yehudi A. Cohen, Social Structure, and. Personality: A Casebook, New York: Holt, 1961. Audrey I, Richards, Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe: A Functional Study of Nutrition Among the Southern Bantu. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1932.

Thomas Merton summarizes the meaning of communal eating beautifully:

A feast is of such a nature that it draws people to itself, and makes them leave everything else in order to participate in its joys. To feast together is to bear witness to the joy one has at being with his friends. The mere act of eating together, quite apart from a banquet or some other festival occasion, is by its very nature a sign of friendship and of “communion.”

In modern times we have lost sight of the fact that even the most ordinary actions of our everyday life are invested, by their very nature, with a deep spiritual meaning. The table is in a

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certain sense the center of family life, the expression of family life. Here the children gather with their parents to eat the food which the love of their parents has provided. . . .

So, too, with a banquet. The Latin word convivium contains more of this mystery than our words “banquet” or “feast.” To call a feast a “convivium” is to call it a “mystery of the sharing of life”—a mystery in which guests partake of the good things prepared and given to them by the love of their host, and in which the atmosphere of friendship and gratitude expands into a sharing of thoughts and sentiments, and ends in common rejoicing. (Thomas Merton, The Living Bread, New York, 1956, pp. 126-27.)

It is clear, then, that communal eating plays a vital role in almost all human societies as a way of binding people together and increasing the extent to which they feel like “members” of a group.

But beyond this intrinsic importance of communal eating, as a way of binding the members of a group together, there is another important reason for maintaining the pattern, which applies especially to modern metropolitan society.

Metropolitan society creates the possibility of meeting a wonderful variety of people, a possibility almost entirely new in human history. In a traditional society, one learns to live with the people he knows, but the people he knows form a relatively closed group; there is little possibility of expanding it greatly. In a modern metropolitan society, each person has the possibility of finding those few other people in the city he really wants to be with. In theory, a man in a city of five million people has the possibility of meeting just those half dozen people who are the people he most wants to be with, in all of these five million.

But this is only theory. In practice it is very hard. Few people can feel confident that they have met their closest possible companions or found the informal groups they want to belong to in the cities they inhabit. In fact, on the contrary, people complain constantly that they cannot meet enough people, that there are too few opportunities for meeting people. Far from being free to explore the natures of all the people in society, and free to be together with those others who have the greatest natural and mutual affinities, instead people feel constrained to be with the few people they happen to have run into.

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How can the great potential of metropolitan society be realized? How can a person find the other people for whom he has the greatest possible affinity?

To answer this question, we must define the workings of the process by which people meet new people in society. The answer to this question hinges on the following three critical hypotheses:

1. The process hinges entirely on the overlap of the human groups in society, and the way a person can pass through these human groups, expanding his associations.

2. The process can only take place if the various human groups in society possess “group territories” where meeting can take place.

3. The process of meeting seems to depend especially on communal eating and drinking and therefore takes place especially well in those groups which have at least partly institutionalized common food and drink.

If these three hypotheses are correct, as we believe, then it is plain that the process by which people meet one another depends very largely on the extent to which people are able to pass from group to group, as visitors and guests, at communal meals. And this of course can happen only if each institution and each social group has its own common meals, regularly, and if its members are free to invite guests to their meals and in turn are free to be invited by the guests they meeeLto other meals at other gatherings.

Therefore:

Give every institution and social group a place where people can eat together. Make the common meal a regular event. In particular, start a common lunch in every work place, so that a genuine meal around a common table (not out of boxes, machines, or bags) becomes an important, comfortable, and daily event with room for invited guests. In our own work group at the Center, we found this worked most beautifully when we took it in turns to cook the lunch. The lunch became an event: a gathering: something that each of us put our love and energy into, on our day to cook.

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If the institution is large, find some way of breaking it down into smaller groups which eat together, so that no one group which eats together has more than about a dozen people in it— SMALL WORK GROUPS ( I 48) , SMALL MEETING ROOMS ( I 5 I ) .

Build the kitchen all around the eating place like a farmhouse kitchen (139) ; make the table itself a focus of great importance -EATING ATMOSPHERE ( I 82) . . . .

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148 SMALL WORK GROUPS**

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. . . within the workspace of an institution—self-governing

WORKSHOPS AND OFFICES (80), FLEXIBLE OFFICE SPACE ( 146) ,

there need to be still further subdivisions. Above all, as this pattern shows, it is essential that the smallest human working groups each have their own physical space.

When more than half a dozen people work in the same place, it is essential that they not be forced to work in one huge undifferentiated space, but that instead, they can divide their workspace up, and so form smaller groups.

In fact, people will feel oppressed, both when they are either working in an undifferentiated mass of workers and when they are forced to work in isolation. The small group achieves a nice balance between the one extreme in which there are so many people, that there is no opportunity for an intimate social structure to develop, and the other extreme in which there are so few, that the possibility of social groups does not occur at all.

This attitude toward the size of work groups is supported by the findings of the Pilkington Research Unit, in their investigations of office life (Office Design: A Study of Environment, ed. Peter Manning, Department of Building Science, University of Liverpool, 1965, pp. 104—28). In a very large study indeed, office workers were asked their opinions of large offices and small offices. The statements they chose most often to describe their opinions were: “The larger offices make one feel relatively unimportant” and “There is an uncomfortable feeling of being watched all the time in a large office.” And when asked to compare five different possible layouts for offices, workers consistently chose those layouts in which workgroups were smallest.

The five layouts in order of preference.

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I48 SMALL WORK GROUPS

Analysis of the results also showed that ‘‘the people who work in small office areas are more opposed to large office areas than those who actually work in them.” Apparently, once people have had the experience of working in small groups, they find it very uncomfortable to imagine going back to the larger office settings.

In our own survey of attitudes toward workspace—taken among workers at the Berkeley City Hall—we found that people prefer to be part of a group that ranges from two to eight. When there are more than eight, people lose touch with the group as a human gathering; and almost no one likes working alone.

A similar finding is reported by the Japanese architect, T. Takano, in his study of work groups in Japan. In the offices he studied, he found that five persons formed the most useful functional group. (Building Section, Building and Repairs Bureau, Ministry of Construction: The Design of Akita prefectural government office, Public Buildings, 1961.)

How should these small groups be related to each other? Brian Wells points out that while small offices support an intimate atmosphere, they do not support communications between groups. “The Psycho-Social Influence of Building Environment” (Building Science-, Vol. 1, Pergamon Press, 1965, p. 153). It would seem that this problem can be solved by arranging the small work groups so that several of them share common facilities: drinking fountains, toilets, office equipment, perhaps a common anteroom and garden.

Therefore:

Break institutions into small, spatially identifiable work groups, with less than half a dozen people in each. Arrange these work groups so that each person is in at least partial view of the other members of his own group; and arrange several groups in such a way that they share a common entrance, food, office equipment, drinking fountains, bathrooms.

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Lay the workgroups out with respect to each other so that the distances between groups is within the constraints of office connections (82), and give each group office space which leaves room to expand and to contract—flexible office space (14.6) ; provide a common area, either for the group itself or for several groups together or both—common area at the heart (129). Treat each small work group, in every kind of industry and office, as a place of learning—master and apprentices (83). Give it its own stair, directly to the street—open stairs (158). Arrange the individual workspaces within the small work group according to half-private office (152) and workspace enclosure (183). . . .

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149 reception