A pattern language

I conceive that land belongs for use to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless members are still unborn.

—a Nigerian tribesman

Parks are dead and artificial. Farms, when treated as private property, rob the people of their natural biological heritage—the countryside from which they came.

In Norway, England, Austria, it is commonly understood that people have a right to picnic in farmland, and walk and play— provided they respect the animals and crops. And the reverse is also true—there is no wilderness which is abandoned to its own processes—even the mountainsides are terraced, mown, and grazed and cared for.

We may summarize these ideas by saying that there is only one kind of nonurban land—the countryside. There are no parks;

parties. Indeed, when he talks about the outdoors, he seldom means his garden. He does not think of gardens as potential living space. . . . Like the parlor of our grandmothers, the garden is an object of excessive care. Like the parlor, it is not meant to be lived in. In an age that puts a premium on usefulness this is most irregular. Paradoxical though it may sound, the use of glass walls in recent years alienated the garden. Even the “picture window,” as the domestic version of the show-window is called, has contributed to the estrangement between indoors and outdoors; the garden has become a spectator garden.

The historical concept of the house-garden is entirely different. Domestic gardens as we have known them through the centuries were valued mostly for their habitableness and privacy, two qualities that are conspicuously absent in contemporary gardens. Privacy, so little in demand these days, was indispensable to people with a taste for dignified living. The house-gardens of antiquity furnish us, even in their fragmentary and dilapidated state, perfect examples of how a diminutive and apparently negligible quantity of land can, with some ingenuity, be transformed into an oasis of delight. Miniature gardens though they were, they had all the ingredients of a happy environment.

These gardens were an essential part of the house; they were, mind you, contained 'within the house. One can best describe them as rooms without ceilings. They were true outdoor living rooms, and invariably regarded as such by their inhabitants. The wall- and floor-materials of Roman gardens, for example, were no less lavish than those used in the interior part of the house. The combined use of stone mosaic, marble slabs, stucco reliefs, mural decorations from the simplest geometric patterns to the most elaborate murals established a mood particularly favorable to spiritual composure. As for the ceiling, there was always the sky in its hundred moods. (PP- ¹57-59)

An outdoor space becomes a special outdoor room when it is well enclosed with walls of the building, walls of foliage, columns, trellis, and sky; and when the outdoor room, together with an indoor space, forms a virtually continuous living area.

Here are several examples of outdoor rooms. Each one uses a different combination of elements to establish its enclosure; each one is related to its building in a slightly different way. Ru-dofsky gives many other examples in the book we have cited. For instance, he describes how a front lawn can be rebuilt to become an outdoor room.

. . . every building has rooms where people stay and live and talk together—common areas at the heart (129), farmhouse kitchen (139), sequence of sitting spaces (142). Whenever possible, these rooms need to be embellished by a further “room” outdoors. This kind of outdoor room also helps to form a part of any public outdoor room (69), half-hidden garden (111), private terrace on the steet (140), or sunny place (161).

A garden is the place for lying in the grass, swinging, croquet, growing flowers, throwing a ball for the dog. But there is another way of being outdoors: and its needs are not met by the garden at all.

For some moods, some times of day, some kinds of friendship, people need a place to eat, to sit in formal clothes, to drink, to talk together, to be still, and yet outdoors.

They need an outdoor room, a literal outdoor room—a partly enclosed space, outdoors, but enough like a room so that people behave there as they do in rooms, but with the added beauties of the sun, and wind, and smells, and rustling leaves, and crickets.

This need occurs everywhere. It is hardly too much to say that every building needs an outdoor room attached to it, between it and the garden; and more, that many of the special places in a garden—sunny places, terraces, gazebos—need to be made as outdoor rooms, as well.

The inspiration for this pattern comes from Bernard Ru-dofsky’s chapter, “The Conditioned Outdoor Room,” in Behind the Picture Window (New York: Oxford Press, 1955).

In a superbly layed out house-garden, one ought to be able to work and sleep, cook and eat, play and loaf. No doubt, this sounds specious to the confirmed indoor dweller and needs elaboration.

As a rule, the inhabitant of our climate makes no sallies into his immediate surroundings. His farthest outpost is the screened porch. The garden—if there is one—remains unoccupied between garden

This outdoor room is formed, most often, by free standing columns—column place (226), walls—garden wall (173), low sitting walls (243), perhaps a trellis overhead—trel-lised walk (174), or a translucent canvas awning—canvas roofs (244), and a ground surface which helps to provide connection to the earth (168). Like any other room, for its construction start with the shape of indoor space ( i 91) and structure FOLLOW SOCIAL SPACES (205) . . . .

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. . . wherever there are green streets (51), small public SQUARES (61), PEDESTRIAN STREETS (lOO), BUILDING THOROUGHFARES (101)—in short, any streets with people in them, these streets will only come to life if they are helped to do so by the people looking out on them, hanging out of windows, laughing, shouting, whistling.

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A street without windows is blind and frightening. And it is equally uncomfortable to be in a house which bounds a public street with no window at all on the street.

The street window provides a unique kind of connection between the life inside buildings and the street. Franz Kafka wrote a short commentary entitled “The Street Window,” which expresses beautifully the power of this relationship.

Whoever leads a solitary life and yet now and then wants to attach himself somewhere, whoever, according to changes in the time of day, the weather, the state of his business, and the like, suddenly wishes to see any arm at all to which he might cling—he will not be able to manage for long without a window looking onto the street. And if he is in the mood of not desiring anything and only goes to his window sill a tired man, with eyes turning from his public to heaven and back again, not wanting to look out and having thrown his head up a little, even then the horses below will draw him down into their train of wagons and tumult, and so at last into the human harmony. (Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, New York: Schocken Books, 1972, p. 384).

The process of watching the street from upper story windows is strongly embedded in traditional Peruvian culture in the form of the mirador, the beautiful ornamented gallery which sticks out over the street from many of the colonial buildings in Lima. Peruvian girls especially love to watch the street, but only if they are not too visible. They can watch the street from the mirador without any impropriety, something they cannot do so easily from the front door. If anyone looks at them too hard, they can pull back into the window.

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Street windows are most successful on the second and third floors. Anything higher, and the street becomes a “view”—the vitality of the connection is destroyed. From the second and third floors people can shout down to the street, throw down a jacket or a ball; people in the street can whistle for a person to come to the window, and even glimpse the expressions on a person’s face inside.

At ground level, street windows are less likely to work. If they are too far back from the street, they don’t really give a view onto the street—though of course they still give light. If they are too close to the street, they don’t work at all, because they get boarded up or curtained to protect the privacy of the rooms inside —see the empirical findings presented in Houses Generated by Patterns, Center for Environmental Structure, 1969, pp. 179—80.

One possible way of making a street window at ground level might be to build an alcove, two or three steps up, with a window on the street, its window-sill five feet above the street. People in the alcove, can lean on the window sill, and watch the street; people in the street can see them, without being able to see into the room behind them. It is even easier, of course, if the

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ground floor of the house is two or three feet above the street, as many ground floors are.

Finally, on whatever floor it is, a street window must be placed in a position which the people inside pass often, a place where they are likely to pause and stand beside the window: the head of a stair, the bay window of a favorite room, a kitchen, bedroom, or window in a passage.

Therefore:

Where buildings run alongside busy streets, build windows with window seats, looking out onto the street. Place them in bedrooms or at some point on a passage or stair, where people keep passing by. On the first floor, keep these windows high enough to be private.

On the inside, give each of these windows a substantial place, so that a person feels encouraged to sit there or stand and watch the street—window place (180); make the windows open outward—windows which open wide (236) ; enrich the outside of the window with flower boxes and climbing plants—then people, in the course of caring for the flowers, will have the opportunity for hanging out—filtered light (238), climbing PLANTS (24.6) ....

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. . . many places in a town depend for their success on complete exposure to the people passing by—far more exposure than a street window (164) can provide, university as a marketplace (43), LOCAL TOWN HALL (44), NECKLACE OF COMMUNITY PROJECTS (45), MARKET OF MANY SHOPS (46), HEALTH CENTER (47), STREET CAFE (88), BUILDING THOROUGHFARE (iOl) are

all examples. This pattern defines the form of the exposure.

The sight of action is an incentive for action. When people can see into spaces from the street their world is enlarged and made richer, there is more understanding; and there is the possibility for communication, learning.

The service center is a storefront, with the windows all along- the front. A man walks past the door. As he does so, he looks into the center, but only turns his head for a second—apparently unwilling to show too great a curiosity. He then sees a notice on the window, stops to read the notice. As he stands reading it, he looks past the notice to see what is going on inside. After a few seconds he retraces his steps, and comes into the center. (A Pattern Language Which Generates Multi-Service Centers, C.E.S., 1968, p. 251.)

There are many ways of establishing connection with the street.

1. First, the obvious case: the wall along the street is made essentially of glass, and the view in is of some inviting activity. A community center in Berkeley moved from a rennovated house which was away from the street, to a rennovated furniture showroom which was completely transparent to the street. The number of people dropping in soared after the move. It was partly because the new location was on a much busier pedestrian street. But transparency also played a role in bringing people in: of the people walking past the center about 66 per cent turned and looked in, and about 7 per cent stopped—either to read a notice or to look into the interior more carefully.

2. However, a glass connection creates relatively passive involvement. By comparison, a wall which is actually open—with a sliding wall or shutter—creates a far more valuable and involving

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I 65 OPENING TO THE STREET

connection. When the wall is open it is possible to hear what is going on inside, to smell the inside, to exchange words, and even to step in all along the opening. Street cafes, open food stalls, workshops with garage door openings are examples.

We passed the workshop every day on our way home from school. It was a furniture shop, and we would stand at the opening and watch men building chairs and tables, sawdust dying, forming legs on the lathe. There was a low wall, and the foreman told us to stay outside it> but he let us sit there, and we did, sometimes for hours.

3. The most involving case of all: activity is not only open to sight and sound on one side of the path, but some part of the activity actually crosses the path, so that people who walk down the sidewalk find themselves walking through the activity. The extreme version is the one where a shop is set up to straddle the path, with goods displayed on either side. A more modest version is the one where the roof of the space covers the path, the wall is entirely open, and the paving of the path is continuous with the “interior” of the space.

No matter how the opening is formed, it is essential that it expose the ordinary activity inside in a way that invites people passing to take it in and have some relationship, however modest, to it. The doctors of the Pioneer Health Center in Peckham believed this principle to be so essential that they deliberately built the center’s gymnasium, swimming pool, dance floor, cafeteria, and theater in such a way that people passing could not help but see others, often people they knew, inside:

. . . dancing goes on there and moving figures can be seen on the floor of the main building at night when the whole building is lit up attracting the attention of the passers by. . . .

... it must be remembered that it is not the action of the skilled alone that is to be seen in the Centre, but every degree of proficiency in all that is going on. This point is crucial to an understanding of how vision can work as a stimulus engendering action in the company gathering there. In ordinary life the spectator of any activity is apt to be presented only with the exhibition of the specialist; and this trend has been gathering impetus year by year with alarming progression. Audiences swell in their thousands to watch the expert game, but as the “stars” grow in brilliance, the conviction of an in-

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no farms; no uncharted wilderness. Every piece of countryside has keepers who have the right to farm it, if it is arable; or the obligation to look after it, if it is wild; and every piece of land is open to the people at large, provided they respect the organic processes which are going on there.

The central conception behind this view of the land is given by Aldo Leopold in his essay, “The Land Ethic” (A Sand County Almanac, New York: Oxford University Press, 1949); Leopold believes that our relationship to the land will provide the framework for the next great ethical transformation in the human community:

This extension of ethics, so far studied only by philosophers, is actually a process in ecological evolution. Its sequences may be described in ecological as well as in philosophical terms. An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content. . . .

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate. . . .

The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. . . .

Within the framework of this ethic, parks and campgrounds conceived as “pieces of nature” for people’s recreation, without regard for the intrinsic value of the land itself, are dead things and immoral. So also are farms conceived as areas “owned” by the farmers for their own exclusive profit. If we continue to treat the land as an instrument for our enjoyment, and as a source of economic profit, our parks and camps will become more artificial, more plastic, more like Disneyland. And our farms will become more and more like factories. The land ethic replaces the idea of public parks and public campgrounds with the concept of a single countryside.

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eptitude that makes trying- not worth while, increasingly confirms the inactivity of the crowd. It is not then all forms of action that invite the attempt to action: it is the sight of action that is within the possible scope of the spectator that affords a temptation eventually irresistible to him. Short though the time of our experiment has been, this fact has been amply substantiated, as the growth of activities in the Centre demonstrates. (The Peckham Experiment, I. Pearse and L. Crocker, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947, pp. 67—72.)

Therefore:

In any public space which depends for its success on its exposure to the street, open it up, with a fully opening wall which can be thrown wide open, and if it is possible, include some part of the activity on the far side of the pedestrian path, so that it actually straddles the path, and people walk through it as they walk along the path.

There are dozens of ways to build such an opening. For example, a wall can be made very cheaply with a simple plywood hanging shutter sliding on an overhead rail, which can be removed to open up completely, and locked in place at night.

Give the opening a boundary, when it is entirely open, with a low solid wall which people can sit on—-sitting wall (243); and make an outdoor room out of the part of the path which runs past it-PATH SHAPE ( I 21), OUTDOOR ROOM (163) . . . .

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. . . we continue to fill out the building edge (160). Assume that arcades have been built wherever they make sense—arcades (119) ; there are still large areas within the building edge where building edce tells you to make something positive—but so far no patterns have explained how this can be done physically. This pattern shows you how you can complete the edge. It complements roof carden (11 8) and arcades (119) and helps to enliven the pedestrian street (ioo).

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If people cannot walk out from the building onto balconies and terraces which look toward the outdoor space around the building, then neither they themselves nor the people outside have any medium which helps them feel the building and the larger public world are intertwined.

We have discussed the importance of the building edge in two other patterns: building edge (160) itself, and arcades (119). In both cases, we explained how the arcades and the edge help to create space which people who are outside the building can use to help them feel more intimately connected with the building. These patterns, in short, look at the problem of connection from the point of view of the people outside the building.

In this pattern we discuss the same problem—but from the point of view of the people inside the building. We believe, simply, that every building needs at least one place, and preferably a whole range of places, where people can be still within the building, but in touch with the people and the scene outside. This problem has also been discussed in private terrace on the street (140). But that pattern deals only with one very important and highly specific occurrence of this need. The present pattern suggests that the need is completely general: very plainly, it is fundamental, an all-embracing necessity which applies to all buildings over and again.

I 66 GALLERY SURROUND

The need has been documented extensively. (See, for example, Anthony Wallace, Housing and Social Structure, Philadelphia Housing Authority, 1952; Federal Housing Authority, The Livability Problem of 1,000 Families, Washington, D. C., 1945.)

Windows on the street, while they have their own virtues, are simply not enough to satisfy this need. They usually occupy a very small part of the wall, and can only be used if a person stands at the edge of the room. The kinds of situations that are needed are far more rich and engrossing. We need places along the upper stories of the building’s edge where we can live comfortably, for hours, in touch with the street—playing cards, bringing work out on the terrace on a hot day, eating, scrambling with children or setting up an electric train, drying and folding the wash, sculpting with clay, paying the bills.

In short, almost all the basic human situations can be enriched by the qualities of the gallery surround. This is why we specify that each building should have as many versions of it as possible along its edge—porches, arcades, balconies, awnings, terraces, and galleries.

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Therefore:

Whenever possible, and at every story, build porches, galleries, arcades, balconies, niches, outdoor seats, awnings, trellised rooms, and the like at the edges of buildings— especially where they open off public spaces and streets, and connect them by doors, directly to the rooms inside.

A warning: take care that such places are not stuck artificially onto the building. Keep them real; find the places along the building edge that offer a direct and useful connection with the life indoors—the space outside the stair landing, the space to one side of the bedroom alcove, and so on.

These places should be an integral part of the building territory, and contain seats, tables, furniture, places to stand and talk, places to work outside—all in the public view—private terrace on the street (140), outdoor room (163); make the spaces deep enough to be really useful—six-foot balcony (167)—with columns heavy enough to provide at least partial enclosure—halfopen wall (193), column places (226). . . .