A talk, given by me for Pecha Kucha #3 at Harvard Graduate School of Design on Feburary 22nd.
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Last summer, I attended a conference on global competition hosted by IBM. About 10 years ago, IBM was in trouble. They had been a powerhouse in the technology industry, but were finding that it was increasingly competitive to turn a profit in manufacturing. Everyone could make computer hardware, as it is based on standardized production using modular components. The only place to compete was price. Every year, the price kept going down and they were expected to innovate with each round of machines.
IBM realized that they were competing at just one end of the scale – that it was difficult to add value and were not able to make their product special.
When the world is standardized and those standards are institutionalized, we loose the freedom to innovate. This lack of innovation will ultimately ruin you. Innovation is the way to adapt and grow to changing conditions over time.
About 50 years ago, the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa started developing an idea that was a reaction to modern design, the machine age of architecture. Corb gave us a machine for living. Ford gave us the Model T. The idea was that if we could simply perfect something, it could be useful for everyone. To them, there was an ultimate and absolute Good, and thus universal.
Kurokawa developed the concept of Symbiosis, as a move away from the age of the machine to the age of life. The underlying thought here is that in all things there are multiple possibilities, that the world is not static perfections but is composed of unlimited and sometimes opposing value systems constantly in flux, like an ecosystem. There isn’t a universal good.
Kurokawa’s ideas influenced a generation of architects, including Moshe Safdie. Safdie’s first acclaimed work, Habitat 67 in Montreal is a good example of Symbiosis in that rather than being a regular apartment building with a long double loaded corridor with some fancy façade, he added value by throwing out baseline design standards. He made it buildable by using modular blocks, so that there is repeat, but it isn’t as inhumane as the average building.
IBM is now a very healthy company. They don’t sell computers anymore. In fact, they’re trying hard not to sell much of anything that physically exists. IBM sells concepts and methods. They don’t compete in a world of institutionalized standards anymore. They come into a project to learn from the client and innovate, keeping things exciting and full of passion.
We all like the passion.
As designers, we have a passion to fix things. Architects are hired to fix the client’s design problems. Industrial designers fix products. James Dyson was famously frustrated with vaccum cleaners and decided to fix them. That’s what we do. And we’re so passionate about fixing things, we’ll go to school for years, work for little or no pay, late into the night. Just so we can say “I fixed that.”
We always create finished products, be they buildings, master plans or shoes. We always want to figure out everything, fixing them in time.
Designing a new city, a neighborhood or a building and we emphasize some values over others, but it is nearly impossible to design an large urban environment that functions past the return on investment. Maybe that’s why we don’t do it.
Of all the new developments that seek to stitch the city back together or even the creation of new cities in Dubai, what is really being created are billboards proclaiming “Welcome Back City Life”
Urbanity isn’t necessarily about density, but rather diversity and scale. Diversity of owners, uses and age combined with scale of structures. But we create today bound by standardization.
In architecture and urban design, these standards are concerned with three things: the perception of life safety; institutionalized ideas of accessibility; and lastly profitable space. Everything else is just window treatments.
The first two are required by law and to keep from being sued, and greatly influence the third. Profitable space is determined by spreadsheets, which try to factor what any renovation or new construction will offer a return on investment. If your client’s spreadsheet doesn’t put out the right numbers, you will be changing your design.
But spreadsheets don’t take into consideration the hidden and intangible profits, because they are hard to quantify. Spreadsheets are a relic of the machine age, a supposed absolute truth good for every instance.
This drives urban designers to keep building up in scale until that magic number is reached in the spreadsheet. These spreadsheets gave us suburban sprawl and now give us megablock developments in our cities, wiping away the intricate urban fabrics that existed before. They create dense single-use spaces that cater to only one socioeconomic value.
Many ideas to counter this are centered on some modular form that can grow as needed. But that method still has limitations though because it based on systematic understanding of growth. What if growth occurs outside of this developed system? Kawneer has developed a large system of modular storefronts, but end up looking the same.
I think we fail to see value in mishmashs, the beauty of time and decay. We tend to think that broken buildings need to be replacement or renovated and that the downtrodden areas of our city need to be revitalized in order to have value.
We fail to see the dynamic interaction between new and old, fixed and broken, things that don’t work and things that do. Not just their intrinsic value, but how the urban matrix support each other with thousands of unquantified connections. Making a city requires a passion for the random and an allegiance to time.
It is improbable and unwise to create Rich Urban Fabrics. We should be more like the new IBM, selling concepts and ideas, focusing on creating urban threads that can be woven by thousands of people without our input.
Within our current value system, if we want to create true urbanity we have to create new spreadsheets. We cannot continue to develop our cities on cost alone. As has happened in the manufacturing industry, we will reach a point where we cannot add value to our product and will be forced to exit the industry, leaving us with passionless and commoditized collections of New Luxury Condos Coming Soon.
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