A pattern language

What is the right balance between privacy and connection in office work?

The totally private office has a devastating effect on the flow of human relationships within a work group, and entrenches the ugly quality of office hierarchies. At the same time, there are moments when privacy is essential; and to some extent nearly every job of work needs to be free from random interruption.

Everyone who has experienced office work reports some version of this problem. In our own experience—as members of a working team of architects—we have faced the problem in hundreds of ways. The best evidence we have to report is our own experience as a work group.

Over tite last seven years we moved our offices on several occasions. At one point we moved to a large old house: large enough for some of us to have private rooms and others to share rooms. In a matter of months our social coherence as a group was on the point of breakdown. The workings of the group became formalized; easy-going communication vanished; the entire atmosphere changed from a setting which sustained our growth as a group to an office bureaucracy, where people made appointments with each other, left notes in special boxes, and nervously knocked on each other’s doors.

For a while we were virtually unable to produce any interesting work.

It gradually dawned on us that the environment of the house was playing a powerful role in the breakdown. As we started to pay attention to it, we noticed that those rooms which were still functioning—the places where we would all gather to talk

over the work—had a special characteristic: they were only half-private, even though the workspaces within them were strongly marked.

As we thought it out, it seemed that almost every place where we had found ourselves working well together had these characteristics: no office was entirely private; most offices were for more than one person; but even when an office was only for one, it had a kind of simple common area at its front and everyone felt free to drop in and stay for a moment. And the desks themselves were always built up as private domains within and toward the edges of these offices, so that doors could always be left wide open. Eventually we rearranged ourselves until each person had some version of this pattern.

The pattern works so well, that we recommend it to everyone in similar circumstances.

Therefore:

Avoid closed off, separate, or private offices. Make every workroom, whether it is for a group of two or three people or for one person, half-open to the other workgroups and the world immediately beyond it. At the front, just inside the door, make comfortable sitting space, with the actual workspace(s) away from the door, and further back.

wide doorway ^

sitting area

*£♦

workspaces

Shape each office in detail, according to the shape of indoor space (191); give it windows on at least two sides—light on two sides of every room (159) ; make individual workspaces in the corners—workspace enclosure (183), looking out of windows—windows overlooking life (192); make the sitting area toward the door as comfortable as possible—sitting circle

(185)----

add those small outbuildings which must be slightly independent from the main structure_} and put in the access prom the upper stories to the street and gardens;

153. ROOMS TO RENT

154. teenager’s COTTAGE

155. OLD AGE COTTAGE

156. SETTLED WORK

157. HOME WORKSHOP

158. OPEN STAIRS

153 ^{ROOMS TO} rent

. . . this pattern is the first which sets the framework for the outbuildings. Used properly, it can help to create necklace of COMMUNITY PROJECTS (45), THE FAMILY (75), SELF-COVERN-ING WORKSHOPS AND OFFICES (80), SMALL SERVICES WITHOUT RED TAPE (8l), FLEXIBLE OFFICE SPACE (146), TEENAGER’S COTTAGE (154), OLD AGE COTTAGE ( I 5 5), HOME WORKSHOP

(¹57) : in general it makes any building flexible, useful in a greater variety of circumstances.

As the life in a building changes, the need for space shrinks and swells cyclically. The building must be able to adapt to this irregular increase and decrease in the need for space.

Very simply, when a family or a workgroup shrinks because one or two people leave, the space which becomes empty should be able to find a use. Otherwise, the people who stay behind will rattle around in a hollow shell which is too big for them. They may even be forced to sell their property and move because they cannot afford the upkeep of so big a place.

And by the same token, since swelling and shrinking is almost always unpredictable, this splitting off of space should be reversible. The rooms which are given to outside use or let out when they are not used, may one day be needed again when circumstances change and the workgroup or family swells in size again.

To give buildings this flexibility, it is essential that parts of them be relatively independent. In effect, some rooms should be conceived in advance as potential rooms to let if the size of the group should change. These rooms need a kind of connection to the rest of the house, which allows them to be closed off and separated, and then, just as easily, joined up again. Generally,

720

r53 rooms to rent

this means a private entrance from the outside, either a private bath or direct access to a bathroom, and perhaps access to the kitchen.

In Denmark, Ole Dybbroe has developed a scheme for housing that takes this pattern as a crucial generator of the form of the house. The houses he shows in Enjamiliehuset 1970 (Lands-bankernes Reallanefond, stiftedes den 9. maj 1959) grow slowly, and each part of them can either be united with the larger household or inhabited as an independent unit. Here is his plan for a “four part” house.

Dybbroe's jour-fart house.

Though renting in general has a devastating impact on the environment—see your own home (79) our experience has been that face-to-face rental, with the owners occupying the main structure, is the one kind of rental relationship that is reasonably healthy. The landlord is actually there, so he is directly concerned with the well-being of the life around him and with the environment, unlike the absentee landlords, who own property only for the money which it makes. And the tenants are usually short-term tenants, who prefer to rent a room rather than take on burdens of ownership. Even here a more ideal situation would be for the owner to share out ownership over some part of the building, with certain options for taking back the space. However, in the absence of such subtle forms of legal ownership, face to face renting is, we believe, the only form of renting that is not socially and physically destructive.

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BUILDINGS

Therefore:

Make at least some part of the building rentable: give it a private entrance over and above its regular connection to the rest of the house. Make sure that the regular entrance can be easily closed off without destroying the circulation in the house, and make sure that a bathroom can be directly reached from this room without having to go through the main house.

❖ ❖ 4*

Place the rooms to rent in such a way that they can double as a teenager’s cottage (154), or an old age cottage (155), or a home workshop (157); give the private entrance an entrance transition (112), and if the space is on an upper floor, give it direct access to the street by means of open stairs (158). And give the rooms themselves light on two sides (159) and the shape of indoor space (191). . . .

722

izL

*30V3JL00 S(330VN33JL f S' I

. . . in any house which has teenagers in it—the family (75), house for a small family (76)—it is necessary to give special consideration to their rooms—a room of one’s own (14.1). If possible, these rooms should be attached but separate, and made to help create the possibility of later being rooms to rent (153).

•b v

If a teenager’s place in the home does not reflect his need for a measure of independence, he will be locked in conflict with his family.

In most family homes the rooms for children and adolescents are essentially the same. But when children become adolescents, their relationship to the family changes considerably. They become less and less dependent on the family; they take on greater responsibilities; their life outside the home becomes richer, more absorbing. Most of the time they want more independence; occasionally they really need the family to fall back on; sometimes they are terrified by the confusion within and around them. All of this places new demands on the organization of the family and, accordingly, on the organization of the house.

To really help a young person go through this time, home life must strike a subtle balance. It must offer tremendous opportunities for initiative and independence, as well as a constant sense of support, no matter what happens. But American family life never seems to strike this balance. The studies of adolescent family life depict a time of endless petty conflict, tyranny, delinquency, and acquiescence. As a social process, adolescence, it seems, is geared more to breaking the spirit of young boys and girls, than to helping them find themselves in the world. (See, for example, Jules Henry, Culture Against Man, New York: Random House, 1 963.)

In physical terms these problems boil down to this. A teenager needs a place in the house that has more autonomy and character and is more a base for independent action than a child’s bedroom or bed alcove. He needs a place from which he can come

and go as he pleases, a place within which his privacy is respected. At the same time he needs the chance to establish a closeness with his family that is more mutual and less strictly dependent than ever before. What seems to be required is a cottage which, in its organization and location, strikes the balance between a new independence and new ties to the family.

The teenager’s cottage might be made from the child’s old bedroom, the boy and his father knocking a door through the wall and enlarging the room. It might be built from scratch, with the intention that it later serve as a workshop, or a place for grandfather to live out his life, or a room to rent. The cottage might even be an entirely detached structure in the garden, but in this case, a very strong connection to the main house is essential: perhaps a short covered path from the cottage into the main kitchen. Even in row housing, or apartments, it is possible to give teenagers rooms with private entry.

Is the idea of the teenage cottage acceptable to parents!¹ Silver-stein interviewed 12 mothers living in Foster City, a suburb of San Francisco, and asked them whether they would like a teenage cottage in their family. Their resistance to the idea revolved around three objections:

1. The cottage would be useful for only a few years, and would then stand empty.

2. The cottage would break up the family; it isolates the teenager.

3. It gives the teenager too much freedom in his comings and goings.

Silverstein then suggested three modifications, to meet these objections:

To meet the first objection, make the space double as a workshop, guest room, studio, place for grandmother; and build it with wood, so it can be modified easily with hand tools.

To meet the second objection, attach the cottage to the house, but with its own entrance; attach the cottage to the house via a short hall or vestibule or keep the cottage to the back of the lot, behind the house.

To meet the third objection, place the cottage so that the path from the room to the street passes through an important communal part of the house—the kitchen, a courtyard.

6 COUNTRY TOWNS*

33

He discussed these modifications with the same twelve mothers. Eleven of the twelve now felt that the modified version had some merit, and was worth trying. This material is reported by Murray Silverstein, in “The Boy’s Room: Twelve Mothers Respond to an Architectural Pattern,” University of California, Department of Architecture, December 1967.

Here are some possible variants containing these modifications.

Variations of teenager's cottage.

Among the Comanches, “. . . the boy after puberty was given a separate tepee in which he slept, entertained his friends, and spent most of his time.” (Abram Kardiner, Psychological Frontiers of Society, New York: Columbia University Press, 1945,

P- 75-)

Plan of a Yungur Comfound, Africa; 7 is the master bedroom; 5 is the daughter's hut; 4 is the son's hut.

And finally, from Simone De Beauvoir:

When I was twelve I had suffered through not having a private retreat of my own at home. Leafing through Mon Journal I had found a story about an English schoolgirl, and gazed enviously at

154 teenager’s cottage

the colored illustration portraying her room. There was a desk, and a divan, and shelves filled with books. Here, within these gaily painted walls, she read and worked and drank tea, with no one watching her—how envious 1 felt! For the first time ever I had glimpsed a more fortunate way of life than my own. And now, at long last, I too had a room to myself. My grandmother had stripped her drawing room of all its armchairs, occasional tables, and knick-knacks. I had bought some unpainted furniture, and my sister had helped me to give it a coat of brown varnish. I had a table, two chairs, a large chest which served both as a seat and as a hold-all, shelves for my books. I papered the walls orange, and got a divan to match. From my fifth-floor balcony I looked out over the Lion of Belfort and the plane trees on the Rue Denfert-Rochereau. I kept myself warm with an evil-smelling kerosene stove. Somehow its stink seemed to protect my solitude, and I loved it. It was wonderful to be able to shut my door and keep my daily life free of other people’s inquisitiveness. For a long time I remained indifferent to the decor of my surroundings. Possibly because of that picture in Mon-Journal I preferred rooms that offered me a divan and bookshelves, but I was prepared to put up with any sort of retreat in a pinch. To have a door that I could shut was still the height of bliss for me ... I was free to come and go as I pleased. I could get home with the milk, read in bed all night, sleep till midday, shut myself up for forty-eight hours at a stretch, or go out on the spur of the moment . . , my chief delight was in doing as I pleased. (Simone De Beauvoir, The Prime of Life_} New York: Lancer Books, 1966, pp. 9-10.)

Therefore:

To mark a child’s coming of age, transform his place in the home into a kind of cottage that expresses in a physical way the beginnings of independence. Keep the cottage attached to the home, but make it a distinctly visible bulge, far away from the master bedroom, with its own private entrance, perhaps its own roof.

cottage

%

separate entrance

**• •$.

Arrange the cottage to contain a sitting circle (185) and a bed alcove (188) but not a private bath and kitchen—sharing these is essential: it allows the boy or girl to keep enough connection with the family. Make it a place that can eventually become a guest room, room to rent, workshop, and so on—rooms to rent (153), home workshop (157). If it is on an upper story, give it a separate private open stair (158). And for the shape of the cottage and its construction, start with the shape of indoor space (191) and structure follows social spaces (205). . . .

155 OLD AGE COTTAGE**

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. . . we have explained, in oi.d people everywhere (40), that it is essential to have a balanced number of old people in every neighborhood, partly centered around a communal place, but largely strung out among the other houses of the neighborhood. This pattern now defines the nature of the houses for old people in more detail: both those which are a part of clusters and those which are tucked, autonomously, between the larger houses. As we shall see, it seems desirable that every family should have a cottage like this, attached to it—the family (75). Like rooms to rent (153) and teenager’s cottage (154), this cottage can be rented out or used for other purposes in time of trouble.

Old people, especially when they are alone, face a terrible dilemma. On the one hand, there are inescapable forces pushing them toward independence: their children move away; the neighborhood changes; their friends and wives and husbands die. On the other hand, by the very nature of aging, old people become dependent on simple conveniences, simple connections to the society about them.

This conflict is reflected often in their children’s conflict. On the one hand, children feel responsible for their parents, because, of course, they sense their growing need for care and comfort. On the other hand, as families are whittled down, parent-child conflicts become more acute, and few people can imagine actually being able or willing to take care of their parents in their dotage.

The conflict can be partly resolved, if each house which houses a nuclear family has, somewhere near it, a small cottage where a grandparent can live, far enough away to be independent, and yet close enough to feel some tie and to be cared for in a time of trouble or approaching death.

But the conflict is more general. Even if we ignore, altogether, the complexities of parent-child relationships, the fact is that most old people face enormous difficulties as they grow older. The wel-

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155 ^{OLD AGE} COTTAGE

fare state tries to replace the comfort of the extended family with payments—social security or pensions. This income is always tiny; and inflation makes it worse. In the United States, one-quarter of the population over 65 lives on less than $4000 a year. Many of the old people in our society are forced to live in miserable tiny rooms, way in the back of some run-down old folks hotel. They cannnot have a decent house, because there are no decent tiny houses compatible with a small income and reduced activity.

This second conflict, between the need for someplace really small and modest and the need for social contact, a view of passing people, someone to nod to, a place in the sun, can also be resolved, like the first conflict, by cottages. It can be resolved, if there are many tiny cottages, dotted among the houses of communities and always strung along pedestrian paths—tiny enough to be really cheap.

Therefore:

cottages
	seat
street

Build small cottages specifically for old people. Build some of them on the land of larger houses, for a grandparent; build others on individual lots, much smaller than ordinary lots. In all cases, place these cottages at ground level, right on the street, where people are walking by, and close to neighborhood services and common land.

BUILDINGS

Perhaps the most important part of an old age cottage is the front porch and front door bench outside the door, right on the street—private terrace on the street (140), front door bench (242) ; for the rest, arrange the cottage pretty much according to the layout of any house for one person (78) ; make provisions for settled work (156); and give the cottage a street window (164). And for the shape of the cottage start with the shape of indoor space (191) and structure follows social spaces (205). . . .

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156 SETTLED WORK*

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. . . as people grow older, simple satisfying work which nourishes, becomes more and more important. This pattern specifies the need for this development to be a part of every family. It helps to form the family (75), it helps form old age cottage (155), and it is a natural embellishment of a room of one’s own (141).

The experience of settled work is a prerequisite for peace of mind in old age. Yet our society undermines this experience by making a rift between working life and retirement, and between workplace and home.

First of all, what do we mean by “settled work”? It is the work which unites all the threads of a person’s life into one activity: the activity becomes a complete and wholehearted extension of the person behind it. It is a kind of work that one cannot come to overnight; but only by gradual development. And it is a kind of work that is so thoroughly a part of one’s way of life that it most naturally occurs within or very near the home: when it is free to develop, the workplace and the home gradually fuse and become one thing.

It may be the same kind of work that a man has been doing all his life—but as settled work it becomes more profound, more concrete, and more unique. For example, there is the bureaucrat who finally breaks through all the paper work and finds the underlying organic function in his work. Then he begins to let this function into the world. This is the theme of Kurosawa’s most beautiful film, Ikiru: To Live. Or it may be work that a person begins in his spare time, away from his occupation, and it gradually expands and becomes more involving, until it replaces his old occupation altogether.

The problem is that very many people never achieve the experience of settled work. This is essentially because a person,

156 SETTLED WORK

during his working life, has neither the time nor the space to develop it. In today’s marketplace most people are forced to adapt their work to the rules of the office, the factory, or the institution. And generally this work is all-consuming—when the weekends come people do not have the energy to start a new, demanding kind of work. Even in the self-governing workshops and offices, where working procedures are created ad hoc by the workers as they go, the work itself is generally geared to the demands of the marketplace. It does not allow time for the slow growth of “settled work”—which comes from within and may not always carry its weight in the marketplace.

To solve the problem, we must first of all create a working environment, where a person, from say middle age, Iras the opportunity of slowly developing a kind of settled work that is right for him. For instance, if people were able to take off one day a week, with half-time pay, beginning at the age of 40, they could gradually set up for themselves a workshop in their home or in their neighborhood. If the time is increased gradually over the years, a person can explore various kinds of work; and, then, gradually let the settled work replace his working life.

We make special mention of settled work as the work of old age, because, even though it must begin early on in a person’s life, it is in old age that having such work becomes a necessity. The crisis of old age, life integrity versus despair and cynicism, can only be solved by a person engaged in some form of settled work —see life cycle (26). People who have the opportunity to develop such work and to relate it in some appropriate way to the world about them, will find their way to a successful resolution of this crisis as they grow old; others will sink into despair.

Therefore:

Give each person, especially as he grows old, the chance to set up a workplace of his own, within or very near his home. Make it a place that can grow slowly, perhaps in the beginning sustaining a weekend hobby and gradually becoming a complete, productive, and comfortable workshop.

. . . this pattern forms the backbone of the distribution of towns (2), which requires that scores of smaller country towns support the larger towns and cities of the region.

❖ ❖ *J*

The big city is a magnet. It is terribly hard for small towns to stay alive and healthy in the face of central urban growth.

During the last 30 years, 30 million rural Americans have been forced to leave their farms and small towns and migrate to crowded cities. This forced migration continues at the rate of 800,000 people a year. The families that are left behind are not able to count on a future living in the country: about half of them live on less than $3000 a year.

And it is not purely the search for jobs that has led people away from small towns to the cities. It is also a search for information, for connection to the popular culture. In Ireland and India, for example, lively people leave the villages where there is some work, and some little food, and they go to the city, looking for action, for better work, for a better life.

Unless steps are taken to recharge the life of country towns, the cities will swamp those towns which lie the nearest to them; and will rob those which lie furthest out of their most vigorous inhabitants. What are the possibilities?

1. Economic reconstruction. Incentives to business and industry to decentralize and locate in small towns. Incentives to the inhabitants of small towns to begin grassroots business and production ventures. (See, for example, the bill introduced by Joe Evins in the House of Representatives, Congressional Record —House, October 3, 1967, 27687.)

2. Zoning. Zoning policy to protect small towns and the countryside around them. Greenbelt zoning was defined by Ebenezer Howard at the turn of the century and has yet to be taken seriously by American governments.

3. Social services. There are connections between small towns

BUILDINGS

Arrange the workshop, physically, along the lines defined by home workshop (157), and make the workshop open to the street, a part of local street life—private terrace on the STREET (140), OPENINC TO THE STREET (165). . . .

157 HOME WORKSHOP

737

. . . at the center of each house cluser (37) and in your own home (79) there needs to be one room or outbuilding, which is freely attached and accessible from the outside. This is the workshop. The following pattern tells us how important workshops are, how widely they ought to be scattered, how omnipresent, and when they are built, how easy to reach, and how public they should always be. It helps to reinforce the patterns of SCATTERED WORK (9), NETWORK OF LEARNING (18), and MEN AND WOMEN (27).

As the decentralization of work becomes more and more effective, the workshop in the home grows and grows in importance.

We have explained in scattered work (9), network of LEARNING (l8), MEN AND WOMEN (27), SELF-GOVERNING workshops and offices (80), and other patterns that we imagine a society in which work and family are far more intermingled than today; a society in which people—businessmen, artists, craftsmen, shopkeepers, professionals—work for themselves, alone and in small groups, with much more relation to their immediate surroundings than they have today.

In such a society, the home workshop becomes far more than a basement or a garage hobby shop. It becomes an integral part of every house; as central to the house’s function as the kitchen or the bedrooms. And we believe its most important characteristic is its relationship to the public street. For most of us, work life is relatively public. Certainly, compared to the privacy of the hearth, it is a public affair. Even where the public relationship is slight, there is something to be gained, both for the worker and the community, by enlarging the connection between the two.

In the case of the home workshop, the public nature of the work is especially valuable. It brings the workshop out of the realm of backyard hobbies and into the public domain. The people working there have a view of the street; they are exposed

to the people passing by. And the people passing learn something about the nature of the community. The children especially are enlivened by this contact. And according to the nature of the work, the public connection takes the form of a shopfront, a driveway for loading and unloading materials, a work bench in the open, a small meeting room . . .

We therefore advocate provision for a substantial workshop with all the character of a real workplace and some degree of connection to the public street: at least a glancing connection so that people can see in and out; and perhaps a full connection, like an open shop front.

Therefore:

Make a place in the home, where substantial work can be done; not just a hobby, but a job. Change the zoning laws to encourage modest, quiet work operations to locate in neighborhoods. Give the workshop perhaps a few hundred square feet; and locate it so it can be seen from the street and the owner can hang out a shingle.

Give the workshop a corner where it is especially nice to work

-LIGHT ON TWO SIDES (159), WORKSPACE ENCLOSURE ( I 8 3) ; a

strong connection to the street—opening to the street (165), windows overlooking life (192); perhaps a place to work in the sun on warm days—sunny place ( i 61). For the shape of the workshop and its construction, start with the shape of indoor space (191). . . .

158 OPEN STAIRS*

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. . . most of the last patterns—rooms to rent (153), teenager’s COTTAGE (154), SETTLED WORK (156), HOME WORKSHOP (157)—can be upstairs, provided that they have direct connections to the street. Far more generally, it is true that many of the households, public services, and workgroups given by earlier patterns can be successful when they lie upstairs, only if they are given direct connections to the street. For instance, in a work community self-governing workshops and offices (8o),

SMALL SERVICES WITHOUT RED TAPE (8 I ) , SMALL WORK GROUPS

(148) all require direct access to the public street when they are on the upper storys of a building. And in the individual households-HOUSE FOR A SMALL FAMILY (76), HOUSE FOR A COUPLE

(77), house for one person (78) also need direct connections to the street, so people do not need to go through lower floors to get to them. This pattern describes the open stairs which may be used to form these many individual connections to the street. They play a major role in helping to create pedestrian streets (lOO).

Internal staircases reduce the connection between upper stories and the life of the street to such an extent that they can do enormous social damage.

The simple fact of the matter is that an apartment on the second floor of a building is wonderful when it has a direct stair to the street, and much less wonderful when it is merely one of several apartments served by an internal stair. The following, perhaps rather laborious discussion, is our effort to explain this vital and commonplace intuition.

In a traditional culture where buildings are built incrementally, outdoor stairs leading to upper stories are common. And half “outdoor” stairs—protected by walls and roofs, but nonetheless open to the street—are also common.

The beauty of open stairs.

By contrast, in industrialized, authoritarian societies most stairs are indoor stairs. The access to these stairs is from internal lobbies and corridors; the upper stories are cut off from direct access to the life of the street.

This is not an open stair—don't be fooled.

This difference is not an incidental by-product of fire laws or construction techniques. It is fundamental to the difference between a free anarchical society, in which there is a voluntary exchange of ideas between equals, and a highly centralized authoritarian society, in which most individuals are subservient to large government and business organizations.

In effect we are saying that a centralized entrance, which funnels everyone in a building through it, has in its nature the trappings of control; while the pattern of many open stairs, leading off the public streets, direct to private doors, has in its nature the fact of independence, free comings and goings.

We can see this most easily in the cases where the centralized door is, without question, a source of social control. In workplaces witli a central entrance and a time-clock, workers punch in and out, and they have to make excuses when they are leaving at a time that is not normal. In some kinds of student housing, people are asked to sign in and out; and if they are not back by “lock-out” time, they are in trouble.

Then there are cases where the control is more subtle. In an apartment house or a workplace where everyone is free to come or go as he pleases it is not uncommon for the main door to be kept locked. Of course the residents have a key to the building; but their friends do not. When the front door is locked—after normal hours, say—they are effectively cut off from the spontaneous “dropping in” that can occur freely only where all paths arc public right up to the thresholds of private territory.

Then there is the still more subtle fact that, even where the centralized entrance carries with it no explicit policy of social control—let us say that it is a door that is always open—it still has an uneasy feeling about it for people who cherish basic liberties. The single, centralized entrance is the precise pattern that a tyrant would propose who wanted to control people’s comings and goings. It makes one uneasy to live with such a form, even where the social policy is relatively free.

This may very easily sound paranoid. But the point is this: socially, a libertarian society tries to build for itself structures which cannot easily be controlled by one person or one group “at the helm.” It tries to decentralize social structures so that there are many centers, and no one group can come to have excessive control.

A physical environment which supports the same libertarian ideal will certainly put a premium on structures that allow people freedom to come and go as they please. And it will try to protect this right by building it into the very ground plan of buildings and cities. When we feel uneasy in a building that is spatially over-centralized and authoritarian, it is because we feel unprotected in this way; we feel that one of our basic rights is potentially vulnerable and is not being fully affirmed by the physical structure of the environment.

Open stairs which act as extensions of the public world and which reach up to the very threshold of each household’s and each

workgroup’s own space solve this problem. These spaces are then connected directly to the world at large. People on the street recognize each entry as the domain of real people—not the domain of corporations and institutions, which have the actual or potential power to tyrannize.

Therefore:

Do away, as far as possible, with internal staircases in institutions. Connect all autonomous households, public services, and workgroups on the upper floors of buildings directly to the ground. Do this by creating open stairs which are approached directly from the street. Keep the stair roofed or unroofed, according to climate, but at all events leave the stair open at ground level, without a door, so that the stair is functionally a continuation of the street. And build no upstairs corridors. Instead, make open landings or an open arcade where upstairs units share a single stair.

ic open stairs

“TVfFSr

«£»

Where the stair comes down to the ground, make an entrance which helps to repair the family of entrances that exist already on the street—family of entrances (102); make the landings and the top of the stair, where it reaches the roof, into gardens where things can grow and where people can sit in the sun— roof garden (i 18), sonny place (161). Remember stair seats (125), and build the stair according to staircase volume (195)- • • •

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6 COUNTRY TOWNS

and cities that take the form of social services, that are irreplaceable: small town visits, farm weekends and vacations for city dwellers, schools and camps in the countryside for city children, small town retirement for old people who do not like the pace of city life. Let the city invite small towns to provide these services, as grassroots ventures, and the city, or private groups, will pay for the cost of the service.

Therefore:

Preserve country towns where they exist; and encourage the growth of new self-contained towns, with populations between 500 and 10,000, entirely surrounded by open countryside and at least 10 miles from neighboring towns. Make it the region’s collective concern to give each town the wherewithal it needs to build a base of local industry, so that these towns are not dormitories for people who work in other places, but real towns—able to sustain the whole of life.

Treat each of these small towns as a political community, with full provision for all the stages of human life—community of 7000 (12), life cycle (26). Treat the belt of open country which surrounds the town as farm land which belongs to the people and can be freely used by them—the countryside

159 ^{LIGHT ON} TWO SIDES OF EVERY ROOM**

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. . . once the building’s major rooms are in position, we have to fix its actual shape: and this we do essentially with the position of the edge. The edge has got its rough position already from the overall form of the building—wings of light (107), positive OUTDOOR SPACE (l06), LONG THIN HOUSE (1O9), CASCADE of roofs (116). This pattern now completes the work of wings of light (107), by placing each individual room exactly where it needs to be to get the light. It forms the exact line of the building edge, according to the position of these individual rooms. The next pattern starts to shape the edge.

When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.

This pattern, perhaps more than any other single pattern, determines the success or failure of a room. The arrangement of daylight in a room, and the presence of windows on two sides, is fundamental. If you build a room with light on one side only, you can be almost certain that you are wasting your money. People will stay out of that room if they can possibly avoid it. Of course, if all the rooms are lit from one side only, people will have to use them. But we can be fairly sure that they are subtly uncomfortable there, always wishing they weren’t there, wanting to leave—just because we are so sure of what people do when they do have the choice.

Our experiments on this matter have been rather informal and drawn out over several years. We have been aware of the idea for some time—as have many builders. (We have even heard that “light on two sides” was a tenet of the old Beaux Arts design tradition.) In any case, our experiments were simple: over and over again, in one building after another, wherever we happened to find ourselves, we would check to see if the pattern held. Were people in fact avoiding rooms lit only on one side, preferring the two-sided rooms—what did they think about it?

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We have gone through this with our friends, in offices, in many homes—and overwhelmingly the two-sided pattern seems significant. People are aware, or half-aware of the pattern—they understand exactly what we mean.

With light, on two sides .... and without

If this evidence seems too haphazard, please try these observations yourself. Bear the pattern in mind, and examine all the buildings you come across in your daily life. We believe that you will find, as we have done, that those rooms you intuitively recognize as pleasant, friendly rooms have the pattern; and those you intuitively reject as unfriendly, unpleasant, are the ones which do not have the pattern. In short, this one pattern alone, is able to distinguish good rooms from unpleasant ones.

The importance of this pattern lies partly in the social atmosphere it creates in the room. Rooms lit on two sides, with natural light, create less glare around people and objects; this lets us see things more intricately; and most important, it allows us to read in detail the minute expressions that flash across people’s faces, the motion of their hands . . . and thereby understand, more clearly, the meaning they are after. The light on two sides allows feofle to understand each other.

In a room lit on only one side, the light gradient on the walls and floors inside the room is very steep, so that the part furthest from the window is uncomfortably dark, compared with the part near the window. Even worse, since there is little reflected light on the room’s inner surfaces, the interior wall immediately next to the window is usually dark, creating discomfort and glare against this light. In rooms lit on one side₎ the glare which sur-

159 LIGHT on two sides of every room

rounds -people's faces prevents people from understanding one another.

Although this glare may be somewhat reduced by supplementary artificial lighting, and by well-designed window reveals, the most simple and most basic way of overcoming glare, is to give every room two windows. The light from each window illuminates the wall surfaces just inside the other window, thus reducing the contrast between those walls and the sky outside. For details and illustrations, see R. G. Hopkinson, Architectural Physics: Lighting, London: Building Research Station, 1963, pp. 29, 103.

A supreme example of the complete neglect of this pattern is Le Corbusier’s Marseilles Block apartments. Each apartment unit is very long and relatively narrow, and gets all its light from one end, the narrow end. The rooms are very bright just at the windows and dark everywhere else. And, as a result, the glare created by the light-dark contrast around the windows is very disturbing.

In a small building, it is easy to give every room light on two sides: one room in each of the four corners of a house does it automatically.

In a slightly larger building, it is necessary to wrinkle the edge, turn corners, to get the same effect. Juxtaposition of large rooms and small, helps also.

Wrinkle the edge.

In an even larger building, it may be necessary to build in some sort of systematic widening¹ in the plan or to convolute the edge still further, to get light on two sides for every room.

But of course, no matter how clever we are with the plan, no matter how carefully we convolute the building edge, sometimes it is just impossible. In these cases, the rooms can get the effect of light on two sides under two conditions. They can get it, if the room is very shallow—not more than about eight feet deep —with at least two windows side by side. The light bounces off the back wall, and bounces sideways between the two windows, so that the light still has the glare-free character of light on two sides.

And finally, if a room simply has to be more than eight feet deep, but cannot have light from two sides—then the problem can be solved by making the ceiling very high, by painting the walls very white, and by putting great high windows in the wall, set into very deep reveals, deep enough to offset the glare. Elizabethan dining halls and living rooms in Georgian mansions were often built like this. Remember, though, that it is very hard to make it work.

Therefore:

Locate each room so that it has outdoor space outside it on at least two sides, and then place windows in these outdoor walls so that natural light falls into every room from more than one direction.

each room has light on two sides

I 1/

Don’t let this pattern make your plans too wild—otherwise you will destroy the simplicity of positive outdoor space (106), and you will have a terrible time roofing the building—roof

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layout (209). Remember that it is possible to keep the essence of the pattern with windows on one side, if the room is unusually high, if it is shallow compared with the length of the window wall, the windows large, the walls of the room white, and massive deep reveals on the window's to make quite certain that the big window's, bright against the sky, do not create glare.

Place the individual windows to look onto something beautiful-WINDOWS OVERLOOKING LIFE (192), NATURAL DOORS AND

windows (221); and make one of the windows in the room a special one, so that a place gathers itself around it—window PLACE (180). Use DEEP REVEALS (223) and FILTERED LIGHT

(238). • • •

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l6o BUILDING EDGE**

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. . . assume that the position of the building edge is fixed—most recently by light on two sides of every room (159)—and before that by the position of the building wings and their interior spaces and by the courts and gardens and streets between the buildings—wings of light (107), positive outdoor space (106). This pattern now sets the stage for the development of the zone between the indoors and the outdoors. Often this “zone” is thought of as an edge, a line on paper without thickness, a wall. But this is altogether wrong . . .

A building is most often thought of as something which turns inward—toward its rooms. People do not often think of a building as something which must also be oriented toward the outside.

But unless the building is oriented toward the outside, which surrounds it, as carefully and positively as toward its inside, the space around, the building will be useless and blank—with the direct effect, in the long run, that the building will be socially isolated, because you have to cross a no-man’s land to get to it.

Look, for example, at this machine age slab of steel and glass. You cannot approach it anywhere except at its entrance— because the space around it is not made for people.

The edge cannot support any life.

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And compare it with this older, warmer building, which has a continuous surrounding of benches, galleries, balconies, flowers, corners to sit, places to stop. This building edge is alive. It is connected to the world around it by the simple fact that it is made into a positive place where people can enjoy themselves.

An edge that, can be used . . .

Think of the effect of this small difference. Tire machine-like building is cut off from its surroundings, isolated, an island. The building with a lively building edge, is connected, part of the social fabric, part of the town, part of the lives of all the people who live and move around it.

We get empirical support for this contrast from the following: apparently people prefer being at the edges of open spaces—and when these edges are made human, people cling to them tenaciously. In observing people’s behavior in outdoor spaces, for example, Jan Gehl discovered that “there is a marked tendency for both standing and sitting persons to place themselves near something—a facade, pillar, furniture, etc.” [“Mennesker til Fods (Pedestrians),” Arkitekten, No. 20, 1968.] This tendency for people to stay at the edges of spaces, is also discussed in the pattern activity pockets (124).

If this propensity were taken as seriously outdoors as it is indoors, then the exterior walls of buildings would look very different indeed from the way they look today. They would be

I 60 BUILDING EDGE

more like places—walls would weave in and out, and the roof would extend over them to create little places for benches, posters, and notices for people to look at. For the niches to have the right depth, they would have to be occasionally as much as 6 feet deep—see the arguments for six-foot balcony (167).

When it is properly made, such an edge is a realm between realms: it increases the connection between inside and outside, encourages the formation of groups which cross the boundary, encourages movement which starts on one side and ends on the other, and allows activity to be either on, or in the boundary itself. A very fundamental notion.

Therefore:

Make sure that you treat the edge of the building as a “thing,” a “place,” a zone with volume to it, not a line or interface which has no thickness. Crenelate the edge of buildings with places that invite people to stop. Make places that have depth and a covering, places to sit, lean, and walk, especially at those points along the perimeter which look onto interesting outdoor life.

(

crenelation

7 THE COUNTRYSIDE*

36

❖ v

Do it with arcades, galleries, porches, and terraces—arcades

( I 19), OUTDOOR ROOM ( 16 3), GALLERY SURROUND (l66), SIX-FOOT BALCONY ( 167) , CONNECTION TO THE EARTH (l68);

take special account of the sun—sunny place ( i 61), north face (162); and put in seats and windows which complete the feeling of connection—stair seats (125), street windows (164), SEAT SPOTS (241), FRONT DOOR BENCH (242). . . .

I 6 I SUNNY PLACE**

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. . . this pattern helps to embellish and give life to any south facing outdoors (105); and, in a situation where the outdoors is not to the south, but east or west, it can help to modify the building so that the effective part of the outdoors moves towards the south. It also helps to complete building edge (160), and to place outdoor room (163).

The area immediately outside the building, to the south —that angle between its walls and the earth where the sun falls—must be developed and made into a place which lets people bask in it.

We have already made the point that important outdoor areas should be to the south of buildings which they serve, and we presented the empirical evidence for this idea in south facing outdoors (105). But even if the outdoor areas around a building are toward the south, this still won’t guarantee that people actually will use them.

In this pattern, we shall now discuss the subtler fact that a south-facing court or garden will still not work, unless there is a functionally important sunny place within it, intently and specifically placed for sun, at a central juncture between indoors and outdoors and immediately next to the indoor rooms which it serves.

We have some evidence-—presented in south-facing outdoors (105)—that a deep band of shade between a building and a sunny area can act as a barrier and keep the area from being well used. It is this evidence which makes us believe that the most important sunny places occur up against the exterior walls of buildings, where people can see into them from inside and step directly out into the light, leaning in the doorway of the building. Furthermore, we have observed that these places are more inviting if they are placed in the crook of a building or wall, where there is just enough enclosure from a hedge, a low wall, a column, to provide a backdrop, a place to sit up against and take in the sun.

And finally, of course, if the place is really to work, there must be a good reason for going there: something special which draws a person there—a swing, a potting table for plants, a special view, a brick step to sit upon and look into a pool—whatever, so long as it has the power to bring a person there almost without thinking about it.

Here is an example—a sunny place at the edge of a building, directly related to the inside, and set in a nook of the building. Someone comes there every day to sit for a moment, water the hanging plants, see how they are doing, and take in some sun.

Sunny flace . . .

A particularly beautiful version of this pattern can be made when several sunny places are placed together—perhaps for a house cluster (37) or a work community (4.1). If the places can be set down so that they form a south-facing half-necklace of sunny spots, each within hailing distance of all the others, it makes the act of coming out into the sun a communal affair.

Therefore:

Inside a south-facing court, or garden, or yard, find the spot between the building and the outdoors which gets the best sun. Develop this spot as a special sunny place— make it the important outdoor room, a place to work in the sun, or a place for a swing and some special plants, a place to sunbathe. Be very careful indeed to place the

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sunny place in a position where it is sheltered from the wind. A steady wind will prevent you from using the most beautiful place.

•{• v

Make the place itself as much as possible like a room—private TERRACE ON THE STREET (140) > OUTDOOR ROOM (163)5 always at least six feet deep, no less—six-foot balcony (167) 5 perhaps with foliage or a canvas to filter the light on hot days—filtered LIGHT (238), TRELLISED WALK (174), CANVAS ROOF (244). Put in seats according to seat spots (241). . . .

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