Museum Kaap Skil, Texel

Museum Kaap Skil

Texel has long been a popular tourist destination and it's bound to become even more popular now that international tourist guides seem to promote it. In many aspects, Texel is indeed a special place but in others it's just like the rest of the Netherlands. The village of Oudeschild must have been an interesting place in its heyday in the seventeenth century but today it's not the most attractive of places. It's just like any modern Dutch village, with a tiny centrum comprising the usual shops for the locals and, if there's a chance of tourists coming along, a couple of shops for them to buy souvenirs.

The surprise in the centrum of Oudeschild is the striking yet simultaneously discrete facade of Museum Kaap Skil. A few hundreds of wood slats placed vertically in front of a curtain wall, cut in an irregular shape that reminds of a roofline manage to attract attention without imposing the building on its immediate environment. The inside is similarly pleasant and quite understated, with lots of light coming in filtered by the slats. Nothing much happens in the building itself, although it's worth a visit, especially with children. Just don't get into details on the exhibits: the system of ledgers and drawers they use in the museum doesn't work well.

The open-air part of the museum, comprising a few cottages, workplaces and an interesting collection of flotsam and jetsam is a nice touch and contrasts with the rather cramped and chaotic interior of the museum but in all, the building itself is probably one of the better designs by Mecanoo.

Symbolic representation

Symbolic representation 

I've heard it more than once: "So, what's new about BIM? We've seen it all before, with CAD libraries and the like." People who say such things are not only old, usually in their sixties, but also typically people with little if any hands-on experience about what they're talking. They're not people who spend time drawing, modelling or designing with computers, otherwise they might have noticed a fundamental difference between CAD and BIM: the level of symbols used.

In CAD, the basic primitives one interacts with, the ones that carry the essential information for the representation are graphic elements: lines, shapes, surfaces etc. In that CAD follows established traditions in architectural drawings, which rely on convention to support recognition. For example, two parallel lines close to each other and with a certain length must be a wall. So, in CAD we draw these two lines with vector graphics rather than ink on paper and if we want be sure that there'll be no misinterpretations, we group them together and possibly also label them as a wall. This changes little to the basis of the representation: it's two lines.

In BIM, one may still draw lines but works directly with symbols for architectural entities: one draws a line to indicate the axis of the wall but only to enter certain geometric properties. The type of the wall, its width and layers, are defined by type and not by the other lines. The appearance of the wall may be two parallel lines but that's just one of the many possible ways the wall may be depicted. What the representation knows is that there is a wall, not two or more lines.

This doesn't make BIM better than CAD, it just brings architectural representation closer to the structure of other digital kinds. Texts, for example, have been symbolic at the level of characters from the beginning - not complex pen strokes like in joined-up writing. When I type a letter on the keyboard, what the computer retains is an ASCII code for that character, possibly dressed up with a font, size etc. Just like a wall in BIM, this dressing up determines the appearance of the character; the character is not recognised on the basis of  its appearance.

The difference between BIM and CAD is therefore one of symbol level: BIM uses symbols for architectural entities, while CAD uses general graphic symbols, those belonging to the implementation level rather than the representation proper. There may be many things wrong with BIM but that it finally gives us a symbolic digital representation for architecture is significant.

The dream house

The dream house 

One of the few architectural  subjects in comedy is the dream house: a pride and joy that turns into trouble. The Blandings family in Mr Blanding builds his dream house suffers from its naive attitude towards the tricky issues and devious people in the real estate and building trade. This does not apply to their architect, who is not coincidentally the only straight character in the film; he is just a helpless in-between. The Blandingses even come close to the brink of collapse but in the end they triumph and live happily ever after. That's sympathetic comedy for you: even if you feel superior to the naive heroes of the film, you want them to succeed and feel glad for them if they manage to do it, yet still have a laugh at their tribulations.

A different kind of sympathy is what they try to elicit from the viewer in comedies like HouseSitter and The frighteners. In both cases, the hero is an architect who started building a dream house for the love of their life: the dream house is not a goal but part of the background, something that gives their architect owners a tragic dimension and makes us wish them well. Especially in The frighteners, the ghostly half-finished dream house is a powerful setting that works well (HouseSitter fails in that respect, as it does in most respects - it feels strange to praise a film with Michael J. Fox and dismiss one by Frank Oz with Steve Martin). In fact, it works on two levels because it also becomes a goal in the end.

What makes the dream house interesting is that it's not just a possession: it's the container of a dream life with a dream companion. As a comedic setting it gives opportunities for physical comedy and provides rich metaphors. But it's the emotional power of a desired state for both the house and its occupants that plays in the sympathy of the viewers. We don't care if the Blandings home may prove a costly affair in maintenance the shoddy way it must have been built; we can share their relief and joy for the present and hope for the best in the future. After all, houses are always causes of trouble - we're used to that.

Solids & voids

Solids & voids 

It is unfortunate that many perceptions of architecture consider only its solids: the building elements that comprise a building. The voids, the spaces bounded by those elements, are at least as important. It's in these spaces that we deploy our activities; it's for the benefit of these spaces that we construct these building elements. Yet, I wouldn't consider the solids as just means for the voids. The relation of the two is more complex and interesting than that. Thankfully, a few researchers have realised that and worked on useful formalisms and produced some interesting insights.

There's a lot that we still haven't properly explored in the duality of solids and voids in architecture but what never ceases to surprise me in a most pleasant way is that once once acknowledges it, many problems can be easily resolved. Propagating properties, constraints, behaviour or performance from solids to voids and vice versa becomes a transparent, straightforward solution to all kinds of information and design issues - and the existing techniques help a lot. In fact, I would argue that this duality should be a foundation of architectural thinking; not something one just says and then forgets but an operational correlation that supports a complete toolkit of methods and techniques.

Orthodoxy and orthopraxy

Orthodoxy and orthopraxy

Design methods are split into two categories: proscriptive ones that tell you what is acceptable and prescriptive ones that tell you how to do it. This distinction between orthodoxy and orthopraxy is quite fundamental. One can fine it everywhere, including in religion: the ancient Greeks and Romans were arguably more into orthopraxy (making offers and following rituals) than orthodoxy (developing a dogma).

In archtiecture, proscriptive methods tell you that a classical or modernist building is what you should make. That's what matters and in order to do it, your building should include elements from the corresponding canon. It's not possible to make a classical building without elements from the classical orders.

Prescriptive methods can be seen as a reaction to proscriptive ones: it's not enough to know the final state of a design, we need to know the way to reach it. So, prescriptive methods love algorithms and sequences of well-defined steps. They tell you to do first this, then that and so on. If you're lucky, they also tell you when to stop.

One might be tempted to see proscriptive and prescriptive methods as complementary: by putting the two together, one would have a complete, strong method. However, I fear that any union would bring out the weaknesses of both. Proscriptive methods restrict designing to arbitrary systems and conventions leading to stagnation and frustration. From an intellectual viewpoint, it's interesting how they operate by excluding all other options but adopting them can be quite claustrophobic. Prescriptive methods, on the other hand, tell you too little to feel confident. They often amount to hill climbing: taking small steps towards some local optimum that may not be the best option or even good enough - but then you cannot know that as you move blindly around.

Walls

Walls 

There are some things that rarely escape the background. Walls fall under this category. They are important only when we build them. Afterwards they become just limits of spaces and surfaces that accommodate decorations and the like. We expect a lot of them, from supporting our own weight when we lean on them to grasping onto screws and nails that lift even more weight. Indoors they determine our horizons; outdoors they shape streets and squares. Still, they are largely treated as immaterial entities; only their surface textures are apparent to us.

One often reads of intelligent objects, e.g. intelligent behaviours of object symbols in digital representations. It's a fascinating subject and I firmly believe that we can do much with such intelligence. The only problem is that I don't see it as applicable to walls, not because walls require no intelligence but because they don't seem like objects to me. Especially when I look at them in floor plans, all I see is a complex, often ad hoc network with fuzzy subdivisions. More than an object it looks to me like an amorphous substance that fills in the gaps, covering and protecting the rest. Such as substance requires a different kind of intelligence to the anthropomorphic one we take for granted.

Big business, big data

Big business, big data 

The built environment is big business, yet we insist considering it from within the limitations of small and medium enterprises. According to all statistics I read (e.g. https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/rapporten/2013/10/15/rapport-woonuitgaven-van-huurders-en-eigenaren-bewoners), we spend at least one quarter of our income in order to have a home. If one adds to that the cost of workplaces, transportation from home to work, shops and entertainment etc., it becomes obvious that the built environment is where we invest the most. Yet I don't think we receive enough return for our investment because we don't acknowledge the scale of the problems and solutions involved. Everything is cut down to small pieces, not to be manageable but to suit existing, lately outdated practices.

Big problems require big data: we have to collect quite a lot to have a reliable picture of what happens, to identify patterns and develop adequate representations for realising the enormity of our tasks and thoroughly testing solutions. Big data in the built environment is not just a matter of clever, opportunistic demonstrations but a matter for sustained effort that leads to better awareness and insightful overview. It's strange that the average car has more sensors than the average home and that the car sensors and the automated behaviours that derive from them are considered much more important than knowing what happens at home, even though the car doesn't cost as much.

On the positive side, there's a lot that's really big in the built environment: the egos of all the mighty - architects, politicians, experts, property developers. Unfortunately, all these egos absorb rather than radiate and reduce everything that can grow around them.

A study in affordances

A study in affordances 

I say Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle as a young teenager and have since remained ecstatic about it. It's a masterpiece and a comedy - all I need to make me feel happy and full of admiration. Interestingly, much of the comedy is about human interaction with buildings. It bears many similarities with Gibson's theory of affordances and was made around the same time that Gibson was publishing his books on the subject. It might be a coincidence but I suspect that there are underlying reasons for the wider interest in human interaction with the world: the modernisation of the world and the emphasis on the individual following the Second World War. But even if it's a coincidence it's a film architects should study to understand how easily things can go wrong if one insists on one's one vision and forgets what the vision is about and for whom. In fact, I've been using extracts of the film to introduce affordances to designers. Comedy provides the best view to the human condition, a distorted and exaggerated one, but exactly for this reason the clearest I know of. Philosophers may give us transparent argumentation but comedy is so immediate that it can tell the same in a much shorter space. Thinking and discussing comedy, moreover, tends to be much more pleasant, too.

Yet another grant proposal

Yet another grant proposal

I've been preparing yet another grant proposal for a research programme new to me. So, I've spent days reading yet more bold pronouncements, learning new acronyms, adapting my intentional and ambitions to new Procrustean frameworks. Why should I do that instead of research, instead of reading something I could learn from, instead of working out a problem and exploring new approaches? Who thinks up all this triviality? It gives the impression of direction and accountability but all it does is encourage conformism: yes-men and sycophants who inflate every new vogue -sorry, societal or scientific challenge- with the samen enthusiasm and apparent loyalty before moving on to the next opportunity to get money for old rope. It's a waste of time, my tax euros, of everybody's time and money. Just imagine that fiction was written like that, that every short story and novel followed the same template, that authors spent their time writing proposals instead of books. It would have been a much poorer world, with very few books worth reading - which is arguably the case with most scientific publications today. The worst is that they're turning me into a grumpy old man, despite my intention to stay playful and happy. I need to find a real solution to such inevitably time-wasting activities before long.

New ways

New ways 

One of the things that keep puzzling me is how presumed revolutionary solutions like BIM are deployed: almost everything remains firmly entrenched is established conventions and practices. The same old parties -the architect, the contractor, the builder- keep on doing what they've been doing, only more and with the questionable benefit of new technologies (questionable because they don't seem to get the most out of them). This doesn't seem to agree with 21st century tendencies in market and labour models: where's the outsourcing, where are new kinds of services, where is the distribution and combination of expertise? In other areas we see things change drastically through new approaches that complement the new technologies. Don't we need such structural change in the production and operation of the built environment? I've grown old waiting for the change to come from either internal motivation or from external forces but it appears that such sensibilities are not shared with the majority. So, I'm watching how people preach revolution but don't even support evolution; they just promote stagnation.

Failure

Failure

We seem to measure failure in various ways. If a building fails to be comfortable or even safe (in minor ways, at least), we tolerate the discomfort or brave the danger of stairs with too shallow treads, even on a daily basis. We accept such things do happen with buildings and so also the exposure to some of their effects, just shrugging our shoulders stoically and going on with our lives. It's an attitude we adopt with quite a few artefacts, from shoes to computers. We may spend endless hours painfully breaking in shoes or trying all kinds of remedies for hardware or software problems - that's life.

On the other hand, failure in an airplane or a medical operation seems unacceptable. One would say that what matters is how critical a failure can be. That a train fails to appear, making the next one too crowded is different from a collision of the two trains. I accept that but also wander about the mathematics of it: is it more dangerous to descend a bad stairway a few times every day or to fly to a holiday destination once a year?

In the end, what concerns me is avoidable failure: like in team sports, I want to reduce the errors I make without external reasons. We have to be aware of why and how we may fail and take steps against it. There's no excuse for not doing so, even if others keep on failing.

Hypotheses and speculation

Hypotheses and speculation 

One of the constant irritations a researcher faces is the necessity to check what others are doing. The value of knowing what one's peers do and publish is undeniable. There's a lot to be learned from literature reviews in terms of broadening one's knowledge  (especially with complementary viewpoints) and deepening one's understanding about the potential of some approach and the nature of problems to be solved.

However, when I'm asked to see what people have been doing in practice, I worry that I'm just waisting my time. In areas like architectural computerisation we're not talking about industrial giants with tradition in and resources for R&D. In most cases, all I get to see is what one or another reseller or consultant makes on the basis of arbitrary opportunities and usually poor knowledge of theory. Rather that working hard to develop a plausible hypothesis, such people just form an opinion, assuming a lot they don't know and then embark on an adventure, convinced of the value of what they do even before they produce anything. They just speculate and claim.

I fear that this is the difference between science and architectural design, too: instead of hypotheses, architecture offers speculation; instead of validation and verification, artistic license and arrogance. Too many believe they can make something better than the other without any really valid reasons. This is often because they believe they have a better opinion but even more often because they are better - in their own opinion. They're so good, they have to brag about it.

Architects and journalists

Architects and journalists 

Architects believe that they shape the built environment, that they are responsible for the ways cities develop, how people live in their homes or work in their workplaces. Similarly, journalists appear to believe that they make the news. You see them present their exploits on television and you get the feeling it was they who liberated a city rather than (admittedly courageously) walking behind those who actually took it. With journalists, being close to the action, a real eyewitness, often counts more than being able to give a good overview of the facts or an insightful and informative explanation.

I wonder how much architects actually make in e.g. a city, how much of the built environment is down to their skills, sensibilities and decisions. Sometimes, when I see haphazard rainwater piping on a facade, I wonder how much architects fail to take into account. But even when it comes to the parts that are undeniably architecture, I wonder to what extent architects lead rather than follow, whether they are followers and eyewitnesses of change rather than its initiators and carriers.

One thing that makes things more difficult to read is the combination of prescriptiveness (sometimes moreover moralistic) and vogue: modernist interiors, for example, were sold to the public as the correct way to live, uncluttered and bare, free from the sins of decoration and worshipping the past - not as an aesthetic choice. Nowadays that these heavy associations have died down, people are once again allowed to be eclectic and ironically include modernism in their choices.

Expectation, prejudice and observation

Expectation, prejudice and observation 

Van Leeuwenhoek was no scientist; he was an amateur but apparently a highly skilled one in both modifying and using optical equipment. Through his skill and persistence he became a scientific celebrity. These facts are widely known. What many people may not know, through, is his initial goal in microscopic observation: to find the secret of pepper. At the time, spices were brought to Europe from Asia at great cost and with considerable trouble. If Europeans managed to unlock the secrets of spice flavours, they could reproduce them locally, without the expense and perils of foreign travel and commerce.

In accordance with the beliefs of the time, Van Leeuwenhoek expected to find the secret of pepper in the form of its microscopic structure. The taste was sharp, so he expected to see sharp edges and corners in the particles of the stuff. Instead, he was surprised by images of a wide variety of "little animals". The rest is history but what would have happened if he had ignored what he actually saw, if he dismissed the "little animals" as irrelevant noise and became fixated on sharp things, searching desperately for anything that could be presented as evidence? To his credit, he became fascinated by what he saw and did not try it to fit it to then fashionable notions.

The cool cats

The cool cats 

Some time ago I watched Melville's Le Samouraï again after a long time. I enjoyed as much as the first, second, third or ... time (how many, actually?) but probably with more detachment than when I was young. At that time, the atmosphere had a different meaning; the tragic heroism of the story permeated every aspect of the film. The magical, then unknown environment of Paris was as strong as the hero's character; it had a charm that attracted and inspired. Now I smile when I realise how Melville made everything look cool. The people are cool; their dress is cool; they listen to cool kaxx; they drove cool cars (Jeff only steals cools Citroën DSs - one of the reasons why I love the film); the criminals are not miserable low-lifes but cool, silent types; even Jeff's filthy apartment looks cool in the film's dark photography.

That was what they were selling to us back then: cool. Delon was cool, McQueen was cool, Newman was cool. That weren't the strongest or invincible or whatever they have been selling to us before or after. They were just cool - as detached, as ironic as I feel now watching them. Reality was a game to them but a game with principles - their own, eclectic and idiosyncratic principles, as Jeff's pointless death illustrates: what was he trying to achieve? And so we tried to be as cool as that by putting on similarly cool clothes, listening to cool music, watching these cool films, feeling cool by proxy. We didn't have to achieve much, be or become something. All we had to do was adopt the style. Easy.

Architecture and meaning

Architecture and meaning 

Is it so that architecture can express ideologies and cultural attitudes? They say that Le Corbusier's villa's encapsulated the attitudes of their early 20th century-urbanites that occupied them: their mechanised environment, their detachment, their god-like overview. They also say that the Renaissance villa was a connection between its agricultural setting and the urban culture of its occupants (retaining some form of ecological balance or "consensus" according to Back to the garden  - b.t.w. in both cases it's about villas: could it be that the type holds some special appeal?).

I find such claims hard to accept for two kinds of reasons. The first is that they are not inclusive. For example, despite their charm, modernist villas didn't become a huge success, even if one adds blocks of flats with similar morphology to the tally. Suburban semi-detached and row housing with more traditional forms and a closer contact to the ground have an enduring popularity that disproves many of the modernist arguments.

The second reason is that ascribing a particular meaning to an architectural form seems like a scholarly invention: isn't it possible to attach various meanings to them, e.g. link them to the aspirations of a social class? In the end, one could have any kind of connotations, as the frequent a-historical revivals suggest. Drawing from affordance theory, one might even claim that user activities can change the meaning of any environment.

Observation and theory

Observation and theory 

One reads mostly observations; theories are thin on the ground and often thin in content, too. Scientists appear rather reluctant to dare or to deviate from a grey average. They're even reluctant to write in the first person; it's always "one". Who's that one? Anyone? Everyone? I don't care. I should be able to voice my own opinion, to try and work out the significance of even small things I do and enrich the frameworks within which I'm working, not just apply, observe and report.

Interestingly, in design and the arts (and possibly also economics and politics), people are too quick to theorise and generalise. The tiniest hypothesis can be turned into an unassailable belief or even truth. In this respect, the sciences and the arts may be drifting even further apart. The former observe and the latter make, the former with little room to develop thoughts that appeal and inspire, the latter with little reflection in order to make their products truly relevant.

My own position is probably the trickiest.  need the validated theories of scientists to make sense of what happens in my own area but as soon as I apply them, I realise how partial or underdeveloped most are: laboratory results with many limitations and restrictions, sufficient for one or another aspect but not for all. At the same time, in my area people just want easy solutions, prescriptive or proscriptive ways to innovate and impress.

Popularisation

Popularisation

Not so long ago, when a particular founding father of my area was mentioned in a discussion (often unfavourably), someone would say it and the others would concur: yes, but he's doing a great job popularising design computing. It was a strange reaction: it combined negative undertones with a genuine pleasure that someone was trying to explain the value of the area to a wider audience. I must admit that I liked him; I wouldn't trust him (as most of the founding fathers) but I enjoyed his style.

Some time after his early death, I tried to re-read his books. I was rather disappointed. There was too much futurology for my taste but what made me really uneasy was the rhetoric: it was the usual architectural stuff, attempts to impress through references, clever observations and limitless, speculative theorising. It's forgettable stuff, after all. I'm not saying this just about this particular author. Many areas like design computing become too desperate to become accepted, to be admired by a target group - in this case, architects. On the one hand, it is only logical: this is the wider audience - schools of architecture and architects in practice. To succeed, design computing had to become accepted as a way of designing, appeal to architects who would then use it to compose. Only then would design computing achieve its true goals. The rest (visualisation, communication, information management) are mere efficiency improvements that have little to offer to the core of architecture.

Now that there's little resistance to computing in architecture, design computing still remains in the periphery. Eminent architects may use computers to design but most are just clever users. I guess that popularisation didn't work as expected, perhaps because the wrong target group was chosen: people who couldn't care less or who didn't have the power to change or interest in change. Another possibility, of course, is that popularisation mostly promotes the populariser, making him a known figure for what others have done. So, what do I do with his books? I gift them to colleagues who come late to matters digital and they are thoroughly impressed. He was really good at that, after all.

Superiority and inferiority

Superiority and inferiority

When people of our civilisation have encountered other human beings, they've treated them as inferiors. From Neanderthals to aboriginals, they've been at best noble savages. beautiful children too naive to take care of themselves, certainly in our advanced world. On the other hand, science fiction abounds with sentient extraterrestrials with superior intellectual or technology to ours. Such beings are in some if not all ways more advanced and often dangerous, as they are inclined to disregard us as we have disregarded and enslaved people in colonies or even annihilate us (and we've done that, too). Is this a mere reversal, putting the shoe on the other foot or do we actually see ourselves as an in-between species (or civilisation), halfway between the primitive and the truly dominant? Because one thing seems certain: even against superior aliens, our ultimate goal is to win and often conquer.

Premature satisfaction

Premature satisfaction 

One of the things that worry me in the current grants frenzy is the displacement of effort and satisfaction from actually doing the research to acquiring the funds for it. Especially with large sums and prestigious funding organisations, it seems that the main goal has become the getting of the grant itself. People work very hard to develop a convincing proposal, often anticipating too much, possibly already doing the research in their imagination, to convince everyone (and we are talking about various kinds of judges) that they are worth the chance. When the proposal is submitted, people may feel exhausted by the effort, even fed up with the subject. And if they're successful and manage to get the grant, the jubilation can be tremendous; it's as if the research is all done already and with resounding success. Actually doing the research and delivering the promise may become a secondary matter, an aftermath. After all, what most research organisations expect is results in practical, measurable terms: publications and money. The envisaged performance rarely ever counts. It's hard not to feel the anticlimax.

Fake

Fake 

I remember watching a documentary on the great Ealing comedy, The Ladykillers. It was some time ago and as usually I was more listening than watching, so many details escape me, but for the first time I realised that Mrs Wilberforce's lopsided house wasn't real. In fact, most locations were distorted to fit the story. This occurs in many films: we see some actor turn a corner, then there is a cut and we see the actor in another street. We naturally assume that it's the street around the corner but in reality it's a different street, one that's more suitable to the film. In The Ladykillers they did that  apparently a lot but they also actually built the lopsided house at the end of a street, using no right angles to achieve the desired comedic effects. I don't know how realistically they built it because there are scenes on the roof and several shots from a distance but the house appears quite real to me - exactly what one would expect from the home of the delightful Mrs Wilberforce. The combination of decay, disrepair, memories of a better life and proud acceptance of reduced circumstances makes the house and its owner quite believable in a comedy full of wonderful caricatures and lots of interaction with the environment. The Ladykillers has been one of my favourite films ever since I watched a rather poor copy on black-and-white television and every time I have the opportunity to watch it again my appreciation of it increases. It's also interesting from an architectural viewpoint, both for the way architecture contributes to the comedy and for the way they faked the built environment. In a sense, this is exactly what often happens in architectural design: what matters is the impression one gives to clients, users, juries etc. If the design can exist in reality, that's a different matter.

The recurring fascination with generative systems

The recurring fascination with generative systems 

Soon after I had entered the area that used to be called CAAD (Computer-Aided Architectural Design), I realised it was motivated by two quite distinct and actually conflicting ambitions: to computerise drawing and to automate design. The design automators were in power back then, leading the area with creeds like "intelligent design versus stupid drawing". I didn't agree; I have always been fond of drawing and fascinated by visual representations in general.

Still, when the democratisation of computing meant that computerised drawing became commonplace and hence dominant, I was less than pleased for the basic reason that much in computerised drawing was not about new, intelligent representations but about producing the same old stuff on paper, only seemingly more efficiently (people think that efficiency is merely the ability to change easily the content of digital documents). What followed is what one can see in architectural education and practice today: an overemphasis on visualisation, combining poorly readable line drawings with lavishly rendered perspectives, meaningless or jittery walkthroughs and often no time to study all those images for the benefit of the design.

The funny thing is that design automation persists and is resurrected by every other generation of students and your researchers, who somehow inherit or more frequently rediscover the appeal of the same techniques for generating patterns one can pass off as schematic designs. Among them, those relating to space allocation never fail to come up: one makes a list of rooms, determines some clustering of these rooms, uses some elementary way of arranging them in a floor plan, usually without the benefit of architectural knowledge (e.g. spatial typology), makes some manual adjustments to make the layout look less like the product of a child playing the architect, and calls it a design. It's amazing how easily people believe in the same old, tired techniques. It could make one believe that they have some inherent power but I suspect that they're simply easy enough to be rediscovered again and again. That they lead to nothing and are forgotten for a generation or so is a truer indication of their power.

Nature and architecture

Nature and architecture 

I write here about natural environments but not just as journal entries on tourist experiences. I consider experiences with nature an integral part of architecture. What gives an architect any particular right to have views on the natural environment?

One could argue that quite a lot of what we consider natural is actually designed; also that the current association of the natural with the virgin, the unmolested by humans is rather recent notion and a very biased one, too. Living in the dense, small-scale Dutch suburbs of the Randstad I'm constantly amazed by the resilience of the flora and fauna, and their ability to come back and occupy even more than what we make available to them, so I'm disinclined to view my environment from a god-like perspective of human supremacy or to adopt sharp distinctions between the built and the natural environment.

We're just part of the environment, admittedly a very influential species, yet often powerless against e.g. a swarm of insects or a river flood. So, even though I keep writing about "the built environment" I acknowledge the unity of the environment and our partial role in it. Nature is not an accessory of architecture but the wider framework within which architecture and the rest of our culture exists. To understand better human foibles and achievements one needs to see the environment as a whole.

Yet another reason is that our perceptual apparatus has been formed by millions of years of interaction with environments where out influence has been minimal. Over these years deeply ingrained prejudices have developed, which often remain unaccounted for in architecture. Just think of the many buildings with visual cliffs in them and how often some people refuse to walk there. There's a lot to be learned from a less architecture-oriented view of the environment.

Statte, Solwaster

Statte, Solwaster

There are lots of places for a walk in the Ardennes. One that remains memorable was the path along the Statte stream, near Solwaster. Solwaster is a good-looking Ardennes village but like many others in the area doesn't open itself to the visitor. I guess it might be different if you're local or know the locals; as it were I constantly felt that I was just a tourist, someone who should leave some money to the local economy and leave as soon and as unobtrusively as possible.

The woods around the stream were a different matter: everything was in its reddish autumn colours, the water was trickling down quietly between small waterfalls and the trail was inviting - not too easy, not too difficult. It was a perfect setting for a stroll, along the Rocher de Blisse, the cave of the trolls (Sotals), along the stream, past a dolmen and the waterfall of the trolls (Cascade des Nutons - are there many names for trolls in French or were the translations poor?). One can walk for hours here, hidden among the pine trees, trampling on pebbles and red or yellow leaves, skimming and crossing the streams, going from one insignificant landmark to another, trying to find the promised vantage points that afford views of the local hills and villages, without thinking 0 just walking and listening to the ever-present water.

The return from a great hike like the doesn't make the village seem any friendlier. It seems even less friendly and quite indifferent about all one has to tell about its magnificent environment. It's a pity but thankfully one can leave with little delay.

I don't walk like that

I don't walk like that 

Some time ago I was testing a fire egress calculation program and was quite shocked by the routes it calculated: the lines seemed to bounce from one wall to another, generally moving in the right direction but rather blindly or perhaps drunkenly. It was comical in its deviation from what we consider normal behaviour. My immediate reaction was to think: I don't walk like that, do I?

It's undeniable that our movement in space is not as smooth and purposeful as we want to imagine. One only needs to observe how people walk in a crowded public corridor, e.g. in a train station. It's a matter we should address in architecture and allow for more fuzziness and chaos in human interaction with buildings. Textbooks are full of certainties and crisp, tight values for everything. More room for error and uncertainty would arguably make the built environment more humane.

On the other hand, computer analyses and simulations have to become more meaningful and reliable. At the moment it seems that anything goes. Much from what I see is based not on scientific knowledge but derives from basic, often outdated textbooks and easy, unsupported assumptions. With simulations of natural phenomena (light, air, temperature etc.) one requires validation but with human interaction anything plausible is just accepted.

Transparency makes a difference

Transparency makes a difference 

It's fun going back to a building one used to know after a refurbishment; it's even more fun to visit during the refurbishment. It used to be an odd building, a contradictory combination of generous, sunny and light communal spaces and small, dark, almost claustrophobic office wings. Now the former VROM ministry building by Jan Hoogstad at Rijnstraat 8, The Hague, is about to begin its second lease of life, as the renovation on the basis of a design by OMA (in collaboration with Hoogstad) is almost complete. When the contractor organised a visiting day, I couldn't miss the opportunity.

Quite a lot has changed (including the vertical circulation cores) but nevertheless many features of the original design remain recognisable. There's lots of glass everywhere; almost all internal partitions are now transparent, affording some daylight even in deep in the building as well as nice views of the city centre around (not that everything you see is necessarily beautiful) but these will be probably reduced once people and their stuff clutter up the building (by the way, lots of furniture is already in the building, collecting dust from the building activities - some logistic cockup?).

Strangely, the new stairs have a rather shallow tread. I wonder if it's according to building regulations and even more when architects will learn to design stairs without blindly following established nonsense like Blondel's formula and use their own eyes and feet to measure things. My 46-size shoes don't fit on these treads.

One thing I don't miss is the old radiators, which used to hang at illogical positions behind the curtain walls (even at eye height or higher); everything is now hidden in the floor or the ceiling. Thankfully, the designers appear to have added a couple of other jokes.

Leaving the building I'm struck by the questionable entrance, especially the relative position of the two sets of revolving doors. I'll have to come back once the building is in operation to see how it goes.

Housing statistics

Housing statistics 

Early days of the new year, so it's time for the statistics of the previous year. Concerning the built environment, the Dutch news is that house sales have continued to increase but less spectacularly, so specialists expect that it will soon even out. There have been so many sales recently that in many municipalities there are few houses available for sale and mortgage rates are expected to increase. By the way, everyone seems happy that house prices have increased once again.

These subjects have been integral parts of the national psyche as long as I can remember. With the Dutch system of mortgaged house ownership, it's not surprising that mortgage rates and conditions are important. Mortgage debt levels determine quite a lot for both the individual and the whole society. On the other hand, people do not seem to realise what growing housing prices for the entire building stock mean. If they keep going up, it's good - that's the general tenet and it's worrying that nobody seems to challenge its sanity.

As for buying and selling houses, real estate agents used to say that the average Dutch person moves house every seven years, not always for practical reasons like family extensions or job changes. It seemed like a self-stimulating system: let's buy each other's houses, especially as soon as more houses come on the market. Aspiration, advancement and improvement are apparently much more important than the cost and trouble involved - or is it simply that people get bored with what they have and go shopping for houses like they do for clothes?

Parametric

Parametric 

I've just spent a couple of days checking out a leading parametric package for architectural design. It's not bad and I like the interaction with the design representation, although the so-called visual programming can result into rather cumbersome graphs - still, one (and especially beginner programmers) should appreciate the overview it offers.

My appreciation of the possibilities offered by the package are only tempered by the examples I've come across in the tutorials and even more by the code so generously made available on the Internet by so many users: it's mostly not about parametric applications; people use the package as a handy programming interface to do stuff one normally does with humble macros. It's not about parameters and constraints but about automating repetitive tasks, circumventing limitations in the editing software and the like.

One might say that this is legitimate use; if people are troubled by such issues, why not use a better programming environment to solve them? To this I can voice many objections. Firstly, editing software should be better equipped to solve all practical issues, including repetitive interactive manipulations. Secondly, using parametric software to do non-parametric stuff may create the wrong idea to many users, namely that this is all that parametric design is about. Thirdly, we are paying too much attention to trivial problems, often caused by convention and poor software design, rather than paying more attention to the relation between designing and the performance of what we design. Even if one doesn't believe in parametric design, the proposition of reducing design to the manipulation of a few parameters in a cleverly constructed network can be fascinating.

Jevons's paradox

Jevons's paradox

For some time I'd been worried that the extension of the recent extension of the A4 motorway next to my home in Delft would disprove Jevons's paradox but I can sleep easily now: increased capacity has led to more traffic jams. Initially, having the A4 next to the A13 on the other side of Delft seemed to work. Motorists on both motorways seemed delighted, as they had few problems with the traffic jams that used to plague the A13. Still, it didn't take long for probably worse jams to develop on the A4, which have now become an acknowledged problem. Some even suspect that the initial reduction had less to do with yet another motorway in the Netherlands and more with the effects of the credit crunch. So, once again, a new motorway and increased capacity mean increased affordances to create the same old problems.

One could view a different news item from today in a similar manner: hospitals appear to overspend on their accommodation. This conclusion is based on the ratio of production to square meters, so one should be cautious about it but I wonder if it's also related to Jevons's paradox. In recent years many hospitals had the opportunity to renovate or even make completely new buildings. It would be interesting to see if building activity created some capacity to spend more on accommodation. It often seems to be the case.

Voerendaalstraat, Tilburg

Voerendaalstraat, Tilburg

The train coming to Tilburg from the north passes along a street that has always attracted me: the Voerendaalstraat. The view of its modernist architecture from the train is appealing; it looks like one of the many residential developments that made good use of modernist morphology to lighten up the image of the Dutch housing and create streets that seem worth living in. The whole surrounding neighbourhood of Koolhoven, appears to be in the same style. It must have been one of the early Dutch suburbs and it's rather remarkable that it was designed by modernists. That's more or less all I can find on the architecture of Koolhoven and the Voerendaalstraat. The many architectural guides to Dutch architecture appear to contain nothing on either.

In the end it doesn't matter much. Is it that important to know who designed this or that - not only buildings but also industrial products, infrastructure etc.? It's nice to be able to find it if one is interested but it changes little in reality. In this case, it wouldn't alter the appeal of what I see from the train if I knew who the architects were. If anything, I might be more critical if they were among the prominent ones. One tends to be more lenient with the anonymous designers. As it is, the Voerendaalstraat is a delightful image and a promise of a pleasant environment. That's a compliment to any architect but more significantly to the country and city that contain these streets and neighbourhoods.

Suburb appeal

Suburb appeal

It was back in the early days of the century that quite a few of my neighbours abandoned our leafy late-1960s suburb to move to one of the large residential areas (VINEX) that were being developed at a grand scale at the time. They got brand new, larger homes but not always larger gardens, just like one exchanges an older model car with the latest thing. All claimed to be happy with the move. I did not consider it. The new suburbs didn't appeal to me for a number of practical reasons. Above all, O wasn't yet ready to leave my still current home (the first I have bought in my life) after just a few years.

These days I often cycle through VINEX suburbs (they have rather good cycle paths that serve as shortcuts between places worth visiting) and ten to fifteen years after their completion, I retrospectively start seeing their charm. Space there has a filmic quality: broad horizons, bare surfaces, little green yet and few people around. It feels like an environment for pioneers who came here to tame the polders. As so often one tends to forget that the scene is in the Randstad, one of the densest and busiest areas in the world. I'm still glad I haven't moved here and don't suppose I'll ever do so but I can imagine the thrill of children growing up here. Maybe we'll have a generation or two of brilliantly visual people out of the VINEX business.