Quantity and quality

In the news yesterday: the Dutch parliament wants to curb the influx of foreign (a.k.a. "international") students (Kamer wil stop werving internationale studenten, 'geen advertenties meer' (nos.nl) It is presented as a capacity problem, especially in housing, but anyone with an even passing familiarity with Dutch universities should have expected such problems from the very moment that apparently everyone became enthusiastic about internationalization in higher education. But the problem is not internationalization, it is too much attention to quantity: more students, more income, more return on investment, higher ratings ... And as we can see, quantity does influence quality: no one can claim that Dutch universities have become better under such pressure. Some may have become richer and quite a few careers have prospered but the core business of research and teaching suffers as quantitative indicators dominate.  

What makes the situation even worse is that looking at the situation beyond the narrow frames that have been imposed on it so far makes abundantly obvious that simple decisions and easy goals inevitably have far-reaching consequences. Any decision taker or policy maker worth their salt should take them into account and plan with foresight. Hindsight is eye-opening but generally not effective. I wonder how long it will take to correct the unnecessary problems in Dutch higher education. I also wonder when the Dutch parliament will realize that the current building boom, which it fervently supports and stimulates, has negative effects on living and environmental quality. In the meantime, I suggest that we replace the rampant lions that adorn so many Dutch emblems with a bolting horse and a stable door firmly shut behind it. 

 At last, a villain! 

In the run-up to Christmas 2021, in yet another lockdown turmoil, I'd been enjoying the new BBC series The girl before. As one would expect, it's well made. It's also rather superficial and full of slick characters with vague butt successful careers, in elegant clothes and attractive surroundings. Sometimes they don't talk but make short speeches consisting of pithy soundbites, perfect for social media. As a thriller, it should be taken with more than one pinch of salt. The plot is rather predictable, the motives transparent and the inanimate protagonist, an AI-based, smart building designed to subtly yet persistently modify the behaviours of the occupants less than believable. 

Still, I enjoyed watching it for two main reasons. The first was that the four episodes were broadcast on consecutive evenings (who has the memory or patience to wait for next week's installment in our binge-watching days). The second was that the series was a funny satire on architecture (probably unintended because not fully exploited). 

First of all, the AI housekeeper is funny. One can take it seriously and analyse what should have been different but my point is that is nearly fulfils its comedic performance. I couldn't help laughing at the dramatic moments (including two shower scenes) when the AI housekeeper refused to obey occupants any longer before they answered some questions. With its insistence on questionnaires, it falls quite short of the menacing threat we associate with intelligent machines. HAL 9000 is probably turning in his grave with impotent rage at this bureaucratic descendent. 

Even more than that, I enjoyed watching a villainous architect in the male lead. There have been enough incompetent, devious and sycophantic architects in cinema and on TV but I don't remember an evil genius before. Finally, here's one we can all appreciate as a pinnacle of the profession. 

Having been raised on a positive, even heroic image of the architect fighting for his art (always his) or society, I'd accepted that it's a professional responsibility to design for the good of users, society, the environment etc. This could escalate into Fountainheads, Corbusian propaganda and other extreme or arrogant forms, even caricatures, but somehow even hyperbole remained excusable. After all, we are generally eager to forgive mistakes in architecture. 

It didn't take long to realize that this wasn't always the case. One cannot just ignore all those architects who have been designing for evil: dictators, unjust regimes, corrupt organizations or oppressive ideals. Still, the dipole of good-intentioned visionaries versus amoral mercenaries worried me with its neatness. It suggested that more is missing. Now at last -joy of joys- we have a clearly psychopathic villain who mixes things and uses his craft for direct and personal evil. 

Our architect is enjoyable as an exaggerated version of all those architects who know better and forbid users this or that, actually just imposing arbitrary beliefs, usually on questionable aesthetic grounds, promoting random lifestyles as universal truths. He's actually more complex and cleverer than them. For example, he shrugs off criticism of his manipulative, high-tech design by correctly pointing out that any building modifies users' behaviours, intentionally or not. Having spent time and energy on the affordances of buildings, I nodded at the screen in appreciative agreement when I heard him say things to this effect. 

He's also insistent (with a nice bit of indignation) that his designs are not minimalist but decluttered and liberated from trivialities. That was a nice touch. I could see the architect's sensitive nerves being stricken: who wants to be pigeonholed in an old tendency that obscures their rationale nowadays? Everyone is a special individual, not a representative of some vague ideas. 

I'd been enjoying a good part of the spectrum of architectural foibles in the series, from unfounded intentions to naive belief in novel technologies, as well as the twist of an architect doing that for personal, evil gain, when the last episode went and ruined it. Yes, the architect is a psychopath but no more than other male characters in the series, and moreover not the villain. He even gets the opportunity of redemption in the open end. 

Inevitably I feel cheated. The series came close to giving us a true villain of an architect but in the end failed to deliver. Let's hope that someone else will take over the task and further the cause of architectural evil in popular culture. 

Giving up? No, broadening.

 Giving up? No, broadening 

There are many issues on which one should never give up, such as fundamental human rights. In these, every voice counts both for society and for the individual. Other matters are not so clear. Should one object to the intensifying of construction activity, especially of high-rise buildings, in the Randstad? Some people do put up a fight against this trend but the results are frankly disheartening: instead of 110, the height of towers is reduced to 75 metres (https://www.omroepwest.nl/nieuws/4477783/woontorens-op-plek-voormalig-ministerie-worden-lager-wil-haagse-gemeenteraad). Even worse, there are many more proponents of high-rise, intensive urbanization, often with arguments that seem rational. Any debate with them leads to an impasse and, as they represent considerable interests by a multitude of stakeholders, it's their views and plans that win the day. 

Should one give up objecting? Emphatically, no! Such developments can ruin the future of cities that have been quite liveable so far, so any objection that can tweak this future is worth making. What one should give up is debating in the narrow frame within which questionable tendencies are justified. The housing boom and high-rise building in the Randstad is justified by the housing demand but this is not the only relation that matters. One should also analyse what causes this demand. This might reveal factors that influence the location and form of desirable housing, for example that apartments in high-rise housing are often a temporary solution for young people. The appeal of low-rise terraced houses with private front and back yards, and easy access to the ground remains strong, especially to families with young children. Moreover, what makes people want to live in the Randstad rather than any other place in a tiny country like the Netherlands? There may be more room for development all over the country, not just in a few urban centres, if other aspects like employment and amenities become more widely spread. 

Further broadening of the frame for the housing debate concerns apparent inconsistencies between policies: stimulating fast building construction may be incompatible with the climate goals of the country, including nitrogen emissions (supposedly solved by lowering the highway speed limit) and the energy transition (do new urban developments comply with its long-term goals?). Will the new high-rise, dense housing lead to more urban heat islands? Will it make the traffic and transportation problems even worse? The thing with the built environment is that it underlies too many facets of daily life and therefore too many of our urgent problems. Letting cities grow willy-nilly inevitably exacerbates these problems. 

So, rather than giving up the debate one should put it in the broad frame it deserves. We've been talking about related problems separately for too long. It's time that we accepted that they are connected in a way that doesn't allow for piecemeal, simple solutions. 

The heuristics of architectural evaluation

 The heuristics of architectural evaluation 

I was talking to a fellow architect about a recently completed building by a well-known architect in The Hague and her first reaction was: "Oh, I like him!" That was also the end of the discussion. Her statement implied a lot: she liked him, so he was a good architect and his buildings were by definition good. What could I tell her? 

What I should have told her is that what she said was a typical example of the biased, ineffective heuristics that reveal the limitations of our cognition: when faced with a difficult question, we often substitute it with another that's easier to answer without even realizing it. An example of such failures in Kahneman's Thinking, fast and slow concerns an investment decision one made to buy stock of a motorcar manufacturer because he admired their cars, without pausing to examine if the stock was underpriced at the time. 

This may be irresponsible behaviour in finance but in architecture it's normal: evaluating a building or design is hard, so we go by the reputation of the architects, by how much we like them and the tendencies they represent, and take the claims they make about their designs and the principles of the tendencies at face value. It follows that a building by a well-known architect is by default good enough and certainly interesting. 

One could argue that we know what we like intuitively: it's enough to see something to know it, in the same way that we can know that a person is angry from the first word they utter on the telephone or from the first glimpse we catch of their face, even from a photograph. This is called type 1 or system 1 thinking. It's what we do daily in an automatic, apparently effortlessly and generally reliably. It also applies to design products: if we're shopping for chairs, it's enough to see a photograph on a web page or in a catalogue to know that it's good. 

However, no-one should buy a chair without first sitting on it or a car without a test drive. Similarly, even an expert cannot say that a design is good at the first glance of a floor plan. One needs to study the documents, make measurements and comparisons - in other words, engage in type 2 or system 2 thinking: effortful and analytical and so generally transparent and reliable. The problem is that this kind of thinking is expensive, so we try to avoid it, unless type 1 thinking fails to deliver. Even then, we usually do it within the constraints determined by type 1 thinking: we don't normally test-drive cars that don't appeal to us. 

It follows that experiencing architecture in the same way that one experiences chairs and cars could give us a better evaluation than type 1 opinions. Embodied cognition can be classed as type 1 by its immediacy but it returns judgements based on quite a lot of information: when seated on a chair, our body tells us all about its affordances, from ergonomics and stability to tactile and thermal appreciation. Looking at the chair from all sides and in detail also tests our willingness to have it in our personal environment and see it daily next to other things we have and probably like. 

So, the next time you visit a building, don't be an architectural tourist interested only in taking impressive photographs. Try to be more like a user: take your time to really experience the building in a practical sense, try to understand what the claims and principles of architects really mean - get out of your type 1 comfort zone and try to test your assumptions analytically. It can give you a different perspective to architecture that's truly good. 

Nothing wrong with the building industry

 Nothing wrong with the building industry

Yet another interview today: an earnest young researcher kept asking me what's wrong with the building industry. She seemed convinced of its ills and I don't blame her. We constantly talk about productivity issues, low building performance, housing scarcity, high costs, dangerous environmental impact and many other problems. And, naturally, we want to cure them all: remove the internal problems of the building industry and reduce its negative impact on the world. It appears to make sense but, seen from a different perspective, the building industry may actually work rather well as it is, perhaps not for itself as a discrete, isolated system but arguably for the wider economy and society. 

First of all, let's make clear that by "building industry" I refer to all economic activity concerning the built environment: design, construction, operation, maintenance, demolition, use, transport, networks, utilities and all related services - the lot. It's not synonymous to "construction industry", which covers only some parts of the above spectrum and, by the way, is not very industrialized. 

Secondly, let's examine what kind of improvements we aspire to. We establish goals like sustainability, which is self-evident and too broad or vague. Making it operational involves translation into simple constraints, such as the use of ethically sourced materials. These constraints tend to have a limited effect, especially when they do little to reduce overconsumption. The energy transition in the Netherlands is a good example: reducing the use of fossil fuel consumption and the need for fracking in Groningen are undeniably necessary but over-relying on an electricity grid already overburdened by agricultural, industrial, office and home demand is not wise. With renewable sources firmly in the area of 1-2%, who's going to object to nuclear power stations or energy supply (including fossil fuels) from abroad (including from unwanted bedfellows)? 

Other goals, such as circularity, seem more focused and feasible but suffer from a depressingly catholic interpretation and naïve indifference to the existing situation: everything has to be made circular and to the highest degree (i.e. reuse rather than recycling). That buildings prolong the in-use life of most materials and that old building components do not meet the requirements of today do not deter advocates of circularity, only side-track them from the huge existing building stock to the design and construction of new buildings. Even if we manage to stimulate a higher rate in the replacement of the existing stock, how can we guarantee circular flows for components that will exit the built environment in twenty, thirty or forty years from now? Or are we to promote faster cycles, as with electrical and electronic goods, clothes and furniture? This is already happening with kitchens and bathrooms; what is happening with the waste produced by these refurbishments? 

In addition to wider social and ethical goals, we also have goals pertaining to the current state of the construction industry. These are generally old and derive mostly from comparisons to other industries, as well as to industrialization in general. We can always learn from what the others claim to do well, so prefabrication, robotization, chain supply management, agility and various other solutions are been (re)introduced in the debate. The problems to be solved generally relate to cost and productivity. Admittedly, building construction is largely the same as one hundred years ago: slow, disorganized, inefficient, wasteful and too dependent on cheap labour, high demand, quick turnover and high mark-up for the end product. Production processes haven't changed but why should they, if people are satisfied with the same old results? The longevity and appeal of many old buildings also testifies to low consumer expectations. 

There's a lot to improve in the construction industry but how much does it matter to the whole building industry? From inside the construction industry improvement may be desirable but it can be argued that in fact the building industry works well, stimulating general growth and prosperity, thanks to a poorly performing construction industry. For example, it maters little if building prices go up and up, as it the current trend, or if they are delivered later and at a higher cost than promised. What matters is that they exist and enter use, so that consumption of resources and services can start. This also includes the constant adaptation of buildings to to changing requirements and fashions. In this context, it matters little if buildings have faults or underperform. If a builder makes a mess of a project, other builders will have work in the following decades. The shortcomings of the construction industry actually stimulate more economic activity, often connected to the goals mentioned above, such as energetic or circular retrofit. 

In the end, all's well with the building industry as a whole. Everybody profits from it, regardless of building state and performance. All that matters is that there is a large volume of activity - and if the low performance of the construction industry adds to that, then it's better for the economy. We can actually claim that, despite outdated production processes, the building industry conforms to wider current cultural and economic tendencies, including a superficial approach to quality: what matters in a bathroom refurbishment is that the visible objects, surfaces and interfaces agree with certain lifestyle choices, not how the underlying structures and networks operate. Is this any different to the choice of a smartphone or laptop? Only with respect to the lifespan of the whole building - but that's a fundamental misconception: a building isn't a thing but an assemblage of many, largely independent things, each subject to different conditions. The foundations of a building may not change over its lifetime but the roof may see a number of changes from maintenance and renovation (which may replace all original  components), extensions like loft conversions that change the shape and size of the roof, and the addition of new subsystems, such as solar panels. All those things coincide in the area of the roof and have some relation to each other but the overall picture is quite variable and opportunistic. Once we start seeing it like that, the building industry is not only very complex at both the physical and the economic level, but also doing quite well as a whole. 

Does being a philosopher mean that you are a better thinker?

Does being a philosopher mean that you are a better thinker? Does being an architect mean that you are a better designer of buildings? 

The position of authority many assume derives primarily from their educational and professional background: in matters historical we listen to historians, in matters of health to medical professionals. This seems only logical but the situation becomes more complicated when the subject under consideration involves a capacity we all should posses, such as reasoning. Does a philosopher perform better in reasoning than others? We should certainly expect that: a philosopher has learned what reasoning entails more explicitly and in more detail than others. A philosopher has studied the corpus of philosophical works, so has access to hundreds of relevant views and approaches that inform and structure their own reasoning. So far so good; we can learn a lot from a philosopher. 

The problems start when philosophy becomes self-referential: when it addresses issues and debates within that corpus, with little regard for what a wider audience might understand. It's one thing to explain that what one is saying draws from other sources for reasons of credit, justification, transparency etc., another to try to impress by endless name-dropping that can feel mind-numbing for an audience and yet another to withdraw to the fundamental issues or technicalities of one's own discipline with little regard for what takes place outside of it. Philosophical debates are fine in philosophical circles but out of place in analyses of non-philosophical subjects that could profit from the rigour of philosophical reasoning. 

Similarly, architects have been trained in how to design buildings and have studied what other architects have done in the history of architecture up to the present day. Therefore, they should be able to design much better than untrained people. This is quite frequently the case: architects have a better understanding of matters spatial, functional and structural, as well as a wide repertory of tried solutions at their disposal, so they tend to avoid common mistakes non-architects make. At the same time, however, many of their solutions merely follow established patterns and architectural vogues. A design often merely copies what other architects, especially prominent ones, have made, resulting into a mass production of the same instances, which are automatically elevated to the status of prototypes. 

Learning from each other is a common and valuable practice in many areas, professional or not. The problem is again that it may reflect a self-referential architectural culture: that the choice of the particular solution is made not to offer good performance to clients and users but to engage in architectural debates, illustrate adherence to a particular school or otherwise favourably impress peers. The results are even worse than with philosophy because the tenets of architectural debates are often promoted as the solution to wider problems, e.g. societal or environmental. Architecture may adopt goals like sustainability, circularity or inclusiveness but superficially so, insisting on belief in the architects' capacity to change the world and confusing belief and intention with evaluation and performance. The world may be overheating, making summers often unbearable, but clever solutions in passive cooling, many known for decades are seldom applied to new construction or to the existing building stock, while sales of air-conditioning devices (actually a source of overheating themselves) are soaring. It seems that architecture has learned little from the failures caused in the second half of the twentieth century by its combination of blindness and arrogance. 

New architecture for Leiden

 New architecture for Leiden 

Today, Good Friday, the main item on the news page of the regional broadcaster is a controversial plan for the redevelopment of an old part of the University in Leiden: Omstreden plan ter inzage: waarom wil Universiteit Leiden uitbreiden in binnenstad? - Omroep West. The controversy apparently concerns the demolition of a number of social housing units, so as to make space for a new humanities campus. The steady decline of social housing in the Netherlands is indeed a sign of our times, although it doesn't receive enough attention next to worries about the housing shortage and dangerous investors in the housing market. However, what caught my attention were the artist's impressions of the new buildings (Beelden - Humanities Campus - Projecten - KCAP). 

The design is by an established architectural firm and the images depict a morphology one should expect from them: flat façades dominated by glass and a paper-thin roof on top. For over a decade, the same architecture has been facing me from across the street at my office: the student housing complex at the corner of Michiel de Ruyterweg and Julianalaan, Delft (2 Michiel de Ruyterweg - Google Maps). With less glass on the façade but no sun shading, just like the Leiden design, this complex is also oriented to the south and the west. Whenever the sun shines, the student studios are notorious for becoming unbearably hot. 

Is there any reason to assume that the Leiden University complex will fare better? It is possible that it will use very advanced materials or that it will have heavy-duty services that could alleviate the thermal gains from the unfortunately oriented glass but such measures significantly raise construction and operation costs. This is obviously not desirable, although we seem to care less and less about such matters. Dutch buildings were already  overly and often unnecessarily reliant on mechanical ventilation; following the heatwaves of early years, air conditioning is presented as an unescapable necessity but there is significantly less interest in passive measures such as sun shading, clever orientation or natural ventilation. Moreover, when it comes to university buildings and student housing, thermal performance appears not to be a priority: in addition to the Delft housing complex mentioned above, there is another abominal case in Leiden (Bloedhete studentenflats in Leiden: 'Het kan wel 40 graden worden' | NOS) and probably many more elsewhere. 

Still, in the environmentally-conscious twenty-first century, with so much talk about sustainable, low-energy buildings, not trying to include passive solutions in a major public building is surely a lost opportunity. We need exemplary designs that demonstrate the possibilities of cleverer architecture. Adding a bit of green to the flat roofs of the new humanities campus in Leiden, as the artist's impressions suggest, is far from enough. 

Politics and research

 Politics and research

In the past few weeks I spent a couple of days attending meetings (online, of course) with a political agenda. I do not mean this dismissively. On the contrary, I'm happy to see politics meet research, in search of solutions to real problems in society. The problem is a gap between the different levels of thinking. Political thinking is often at a high level of accumulation that connects problems we encounter in daily life but, being focused solutions, these levels may underplay conflicts between the various problems, as well as subjugate them to principles. Abstract reasoning is one thing, the validity of principles another. Even great thinkers often fail to understand that they are talking about how people should behave in their view rather than the actual behaviours and their complex motivation. 

Similarly, from a research perspective political thinking tends to be abstract and geared towards quick fixes. This makes identification of the actual problems to be researched rather difficult and, from a political perspective, irritatingly slow and distracting. I know that there are many researchers who promise direct cures for social issues but more often successful research manages to elucidate what is hidden behind these issues and facilitate improvement only there. Of course, the effects can be far-reaching but it takes more than the research results to reach the political or societal goals. In other words, I feel quite capable of explaining the problems street pavements may cause to pedestrians and what a well designed pavement should do than of guaranteeing efficient and safe pedestrian circulation. The latter depends on many more factors and the pedestrians' choices. 

 Lockdowns and solutions 

Yesterday, on October 13, 2020, seven months after the first lockdown in the Netherlands, the Dutch government announced the second, this time partial lockdown. To my surprise, the news was received generally positively. I guess people under such conditions want clarity, not choice and the responsibility and uncertainty that go with it. This could be a reason why we accept draconian measures with gratitude. Rather than having to interpret the basic rules of social distancing and protection from infections in our daily lives, we appear to prefer general restrictions and the consequent elimination of many situations in daily life. Why worry how having a meal at a restaurant can be made safe is there are no restaurants to go to? Remove the opportunity or temptation and the problem is gone - no need to solve it. 

I do not share the apparently general acceptance and approval of how the corona pandemic is handled in the Netherlands. This does not imply I'm against anti-corona measures, that I find them unnecessary or contrary to my human or civic rights. On the contrary, I support the need for change and accept the principles underlying them, as well as the inevitable effects and the resulting necessity for social cohesion and solidarity. These are part of my human and civic responsibilities. In fact, I see the pandemic as an opportunity to improve our habits and environments, to make our lives healthier and happier. 

What I doubt is the sufficiency of general principles and total restrictions. A lockdown is a very temporary solution. We have experienced how tricky getting out of a lockdown can be, as well as how easily we can then end up in the same problematic situation that seems to call for another lockdown - a vicious circles of binary options. Imposing a second lockdown, even if it's a partial one, indicates a fundamental failure, not only of the people and their behaviours but also of the approach to solving the problems caused by the pandemic. Have we learned so little in these seven months? That seems inconceivable. Unfortunately, too much attention goes to new measures, such as the use of face protection, and too little to how different principles, measures and devices apply to different situations, how they are interpreted, related to each other and other factors, refined and improved thanks to knowledge generated by the applications. 

This is my main objection: general principles and measures are meaningful only in context. By working out what they do in different situations we can evaluate their effectivity and cost, appreciate the complexity of these situations before and after, and generally improve awareness and the ability to find practical solutions in daily life. 

This brings me to what I consider a major failure of the governmental approach: we have been hearing how this theatre or that restaurant have successfully implemented the general principles and so managed to adapt their operation and environment, making them safe and keeping them profitable. Have such best practices been analysed and evaluated? Have we learned from them, have we worked on templates and elements that can be adopted by others, too, have we developed platforms for sharing knowledge and solutions? Rather than indiscriminately closing all restaurants, we should have rewarded and showcased those that have achieved the goals we aspire to and used them to educate the rest and stimulate general improvement. This is something we have to do, an inevitable stage towards safer environments and activities, which is only delayed by the second lockdown. It is moreover something we need to do even if medicine manages to produce the cures for COVID 19, so that we can be same from future pandemics with different causes. 

In summary, we need to work out the necessary changes with more specificity and in more detail, so that they become applicable to any context and meaningful to all, learn from best practices and try to generalize them. 

One could say this is a design approach and I'd take that as a compliment. Design can actually contribute much to the solutions required because by changing the environments within which we operate, it can also change our behaviour. That's what affordances are about: you can demand that people observe social distancing but putting markers on the floor makes it not only easier to understand what one should do but actually part of our interaction with the environment: a constraints that's easy to observe. It's the same magic as with a flimsy piece of tape that cordons off an unsafe pavement or the foam lines football referees use to position the defensive wall at a free kick: physically they may be insignificant but culturally we tend to obey them. 

Of course, its is even better not to annotate but physically change the environment, taking into account the anti-corona principles. This is often seen as a long-term development because it may require wider or multiple entrances to rooms or buildings, wider corridors, better ventilation etc: costly and difficult modifications. This, however, should not stop us from starting already now. There are enough cases where adaptation is directly possible and we need to start producing the best practices from which we can learn. All we need is willingness to invest and to share. 

Human resources

 Human resources 

Yet another student of mine came to the same conclusion after studying a couple of cases at a construction enterprise: the main problem is the human resources, that the people working on a project have to perform well if projects are to be successful. To be fair, it wasn't purely her own conclusion, it was what she was told in the interviews she conducted with the middle managers - and she took it over, as many others before her had done when researching different aspects of design and construction projects. 

Putting the blame on your workers is always the easy way out. Yes, one should expect every professional to perform at least adequately but if it doesn't happen, what does this mean? Is it just a matter of personal failure or do the organization of the project and the enterprise play a role? People may perform well individually and still fail as a project team - something rather frequent in sport. There, it is usually followed by changes not only in personnel but also in approach, e.g. recruitment structure and game tactics. But even if failure is personal, how does it come? Poor education and poor training are often blamed, as are inadequate tools. Especially with computerization, it's increasingly evident that outdated, irrelevant or cumbersome tools can lower performance by adding an irrelevant burden to users. 

We should keep in mind that people are fallible, that even with the best of preparation and organization they may still fail. So, in addition to them, they should be given the right tools for the job: tools that prevent or correct their mistakes, that nudge them towards the right procedures and steps, that add to their capacities and increase their understanding and appreciation of what they are doing. We shouldn't blame them for struggling to perform with tools that don't meet these standards, just understand what their problems are and solve them at source. Yes, we still need to change the world: we've been saying for a long time but have yet to start doing it in earnest. 

 The changing bicycle landscape

Yet another large-scale facility for parking bicycles in a Dutch city: https://www.omroepwest.nl/nieuws/4112690/Verlengde-tunnel-Den-Haag-HS-geopend-perroningang-fietstunnel-gesloten. Everybody seems to want to declutter the streets from the untidiness of bicycles lying around. The picturesque anarchy of so many street photographs is apparently something of the past. 

Admittedly the situation in busy city parts, such as around railway stations, used to be frustrating. Leaving your bicycle there was an adventure, often without a happy ending. The new, covered and controlled facilities seem much better for finding a place for your bicycle, the chances of retrieving it from there, as well as for the health of your bicycle. 

Still, every time I have to be at such a facility, there are things that trouble me. First of all, their huge capacity often seems insufficient. This can be due to the Jevons paradox: the bigger the capacity of the new bicycle parking facilities, the larger the demand for parking places. People are certainly not just invited but obliged to put their bikes there. It can also be so that the previous, anarchic situation had a much bigger capacity than people think. Distributing bicycle parking to every nook and cranny of a neighbourhood does irritate but also creates many opportunities. 

Even worse is the feeling of regimentation I get from the prescription surrounding my actions: everything has to be done in a certain way and at a certain place, without exception or variation. And this is not just a matter of sentiment: concentrating actions and their effects has a practical impact, too. You can see it in the flows of people from and to the parking facilities in railway stations in peak times. Some parts of the environment are then overused, while others remain practically empty. So, I wonder if a distributed solution might be more efficient and cost-effective for bicycle parking. 

Technology adoption

 Technology adoption

I'm fed up with people asking the rhetorical question why this or that technology have a low rate of adoption in this or that area. What they imply is that we are fools not to acknowledge the potential of what they are propagating. Well, they may believe in the promise of blockchains, 3D printing or even BIM bit real evidence of performance improvement is often scarce. We are called to trust the prophets of innovation and adopt not just the technologies but also some prescriptive or proscriptive framework for their deployment and application. And if things don't work as expected, it's often the users' fault for not believing enough to apply the technologies as faithfully as required. 

This is irritating enough to throw the technologies back to their face but I actually think that the mediocre performance one achieves with many new technologies is actually what we should expect. The reason for that is that the technologies are deployed within contexts that define what can be achieved more that the technologies themselves. One can 3D-print a minimal shelter like a tent but cannot do the same with a conventional building of bricks, tiles, concrete, wood, steel, glass etc. 3D printing seems inevitably restricted to homogeneous subsystems of the whole. The way these subsystems come together to form the building has possible limitations and inefficiencies that remain largely unaffected. In fact, it may get even worse if 3D printing is overspecialized. 

Similarly, if BIM is used to produce the drawings, bills of materials etc. customary in conventional design and construction, then the performance of BIM is ultimately bounded by the limitations of such documents and the practices around them. Again, moreover, the new technology may reinforce the existing situation and make its limitations more pronounced. This, however, does not mean that the goals of the new technology have not been achieved: the documents may be produced faster, easier, more completely etc. The problem is that the goals are constrained in a timid or arbitrary way. 

Such constraints make it hard to understand the true potential of each technology because they define it relatively to others. Imagine, for example, that we are re-introducing the venerable dual technologies of pen and paper as an alternative to computing technologies (handwriting is actually one of the original digital technologies but not in the sense we use the term "digital" today - just think about it). We will have little difficulty exalting the relative promise of these technologies: low cost, wide availability, familiarity, no electricity requirements (hence good for the environment), effortless multimediality (at least concerning combining letters, numbers, drawings and various notations on the same page) - clear advantages over digital means. However, asking users to reproduce a laser-printed page with their handwriting would be unwise. It would introduce an arbitrary framework of adoption that could only lower performance. Asking users to write in a legible hand is not only more realistic but also meaningful and constructive. The real performance of pen and paper is unrelated to copying computer-produced text; it's all about the cognitive, psychological and other brain-related advantages of coordinated work with the eyes and the hands, especially concerning language, about which we have been hearing more and more in the last decade. Handwriting is making a comeback because we need it in ways that may be unrelated to computing technologies. 

Technology deployment and adoption should therefore connect to the real goals behind the technology and the real needs of the users, not the compromised first steps that are deemed safe in a fixed, conservative world. Such a world does not exist. 

Confusion and obfuscation

Confusion and obfuscation 

Back in March (https://alexanderkoutamanis.blogspot.com/2020/03/social-distancing-and-design.html) I was wandering what will come out of the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of both spatial design and human behaviour. The conclusion so far is that we've learned little and solved even less. To the disinterested observer our ongoing confusion must be quite amusing and educational. Every day in every medium some expert or inexpert has something to say. On the one hand, the media are to blame. They need to fill their time and space, so they invite opinions and discussions that have little point. Politicians join in, too, in vain attempts to seem in control. On the other hand, many people are unsurprisingly behaving as if the pandemic is over or trivial. It's very difficult to change our ways. 

However, what worries me most is the behaviour of scientists. I'm not talking about all those rushing to produce vaccines or other medicines but about the rest, who deal with subjects from the design and operation of the physical environment to the collection and analysis of data about human interaction. Regrettably most of them seem to be interested in easy successes, things that will support their careers and funding with little real impact. All they need is clients willing to listen to their claims. 

My hope is that the few who try to approach the problems in a comprehensive way will be able to describe and explain what's happening in a clear way that takes into account the complexity of both the infection patterns and the human-environment interactions within which they take place. Otherwise, we'll dwell in confusion and half measures. We'll insist on social distancing but when this affects major interests, we'll wear face protection. Politicians appear to be unwilling to put some pressure on airline or other public transport operators (after all, they're often effectively still state-owned) to improve their facilities. Ventilation in workplaces has often been deemed inadequate, e.g. in schools, so what can be done now that it is promoted from irritation to health hazard? Our lives and environments are confused and confusing, a mixture of unchallenged assumptions and fixated structures from a number of centuries. It's admittedly not easy to untangle them, even under pressure from a new threat. We've been negligent for a long time, preferring to focus on just a few issues, such as the availability and value of housing, at the cost of  overall performance. It's not just Covid-19, it's also the soaring temperatures of each summer that show how inadequate the energetic design of most Dutch buildings is. And I'm not referring to building stock from previous centuries; even recent housing can be grossly inadequate. 

Yes, we can wear face protection and fill every room or vehicle with transparent screens or fit air conditioning units to every building but that wouldn't resolve our fundamental problems; it would just displace attention and add to the complexity of real solutions. First and foremost we need to try to fully describe and understand what is happening, including every aspect and relation, however irritatingly complex. Instead, however, we are constantly in search of easy, piecemeal magic fixes and to sell them we obfuscate: we fail to mention things we already know because they undermine our assertions. We avoid explaining that the design of most environments we happily use today is inadequate - that it has been inadequate for some time now. Officials, either naively or stubbornly insist that adhering to existing building codes suffices. But as anyone with some experience of classrooms (which includes millions of pupils) knows that they easily get unbearably stuffy and warm. Moreover, anyone with some experience with the application of building codes knows how many exceptions and loopholes there are, even in apparently rigorous specifications. And, of course, if building codes sufficed for the problems we are facing, we wouldn't be erecting screens and placing arrows everywhere. 

So, we fail to acknowledge the inadequacy of what we have been making and the ways we have been making it. At the end, someone we'll claim it's too expensive to change everything so drastically and people will happily go on pushing short-term and partial fixes, which will cost our societies much more than a fresh start. As usually, most of us will buy it - and not always reluctantly. Even under these exceptional circumstances we desperately try to pretend that life can go on as usually, without taking the time and trouble to look around and try make sense of how changeable life actually is. It's therefore inevitable that we trivialize even the biggest problems and reduce them and infantilize them into individual nonsense, as a recent exchange between survivors of the Second World War and today's youth reveals. That's why the disinterested observer would find us an amusing example of what one shouldn't do. 

Pedantry or communication?

Pedantry or communication?

"Don't text and drive" shouts the advice from the billboards along the road. I'm in full agreement with the campaign and its goal but I object to the advice: I do nothing wrong if I text and then drive - or if I drive and then text, for that matter. The problem is with texting while driving. "Don't drink and drive" made sense because the sequence was right: if I drink and then drive, then I'm driving while drunk, which was the thing to avoid. "Don't drink and drive" has a better ring to it than "don't drive while drunk" but "don't text and drive" doesn't express the troublesome synchronicity of texting and driving.
If I voice such objections, they're in danger of being dismissed as mere pedantry. "You do know what we mean" people say dismissively. I do think that I understand what they want to say but why don't they say it more clearly? I also manage to guess what small children mean in their agrammatical utterances but society still insists on educating small children and teaching them to speak and right properly, i.e. utilize grammar to express what they want to say with more clarity and hence effectivity. If good communication is rejected as pedantry, then it's communication that suffers doubly: firstly because it's not effective and secondly because the discussion is sidetracked to pedantic issues.

The home as background to video conferencing

The home as background to video conferencing 

As most people, I've generally enjoyed the tasks of the interior design of my own home. Arranging activities relative to spaces, building elements and furniture is a recurring issue, even when nothing changes in the activities or the building. Sometimes it is because of new insights, either from personal experience or from what others have done, sometimes it reflects new opportunities for change and sometimes it's purely due to boredom with the existing situation. 

Designing my own home is obviously from my own perspective and that of those who share it with me. I consider everything with respect to my actions and their needs, my interactions with family members and guests, and imagine the situation as I (and they) would view it: from the inside out. The external viewer is sometimes also taken into account (after all, I live in a practically glass house in the Netherlands) but their perspective is limited to what they could see in the garden or through the windows. 

The Covid-19 measures have changed this. Most of my professional contacts have become virtual, including through video conferencing. This means that many people now see the interior of my home from a perspective opposite to mine. While previously I viewed the arrangement of my computers from my vantage point, now on the computer screens I also see what the others see behind me: the photographs on the shelves, the kitchen sink and many other details from an often unflattering perspective. 

Many have taken action to remedy that and not just by using virtual backgrounds. They chose their workplace at home with care, so as to show a safe, neutral or attractive part of their home life. Some have separate places for working and for video conferencing. Quite a few feel that their privacy is invaded, while others make use of the opportunity to impress. For me, the interesting part is how strange sometimes my own home appears from the perspective of the video conferencing camera. It is as if it reveals things that are relegated to a fuzzy background in my own perception, arguably because I move and sit differently oriented to the camera in a device I'm viewing. 

Architectural labelling

Architectural labelling

The joke works in Dutch: once, many years ago, I went to buy a pair of trousers. The one I selected and tried on was fine. As I was looking at the mirror, the salesman came along and nodded approvingly. "It seems alright" I confirmed. "Meneer, het is van Frans Molenaar" ("Sir, it is by FM") he said in a surprisingly touchy tone. I couldn't resist the joke: "Het spijt me, ik dacht dat het te koop was" ("Sorry, I thought it was for sale"). 

Potentially everything carries a label today. That's not the problem. The problem arises when labels become unquestioningly synonymous with high quality. We are into labels because we associate them with status, performance, exclusivity, belongingness - all kinds of aspirations and positive expectations. Our mobile phones are preferably iPhones, our clothes and shoes come from whichever brand is popular today (and may be bankrupt tomorrow). Labels are more than a name. They indicate something we routinely associate with high quality: design. Design goods cannot be produced anonymously, they have to carry a label. "Design" implies that the products are conceived, developed and manufactured with care and attention. They may be as mass produced as other goods, out of more or less the same parts and components, using the same techniques, but they are different. Design goods represent more than utility and performance, namely a desirable lifestyle. 

It's probably inevitable that architecture follows the same trend. Architecture is more and more about style than performance, functionality, social and environmental change, despite the causes that happen to be in vogue. As a consequence, it is often more important that a building carries a label, the name of a popular or respected architect, than it fulfils its goals and requirements. A good architect produces good buildings without any doubt. This means that architects produce design goods, that they are designers. 

This is "designers" in a different sense than the one Herbert Simon used to compare the activities and tasks of architects, lawyers and physicians. It refers to form and appearance rather than solution to a problem. So, I can say that my chair is a Stokke by Peter Opsvik, that in my neighbourhood there are buildings by Herman Hertzberger but I cannot say that my knee is by Jansen or that the crowns in my teeth are by Mulder, although the work done by both that orthopedic surgeon and that dentist are technically and artistically of the highest order. As a consumer, I'm keen to associate the thing with the designer; as a patient less so. 

Suffering in the building sector

Suffering in the building sector

Among the news of the day in the Netherlands: the building sector (I can't honestly call that shambles an industry) will suffer from the effects of the corona. Yawn: is there any crisis that doesn't affect the building sector in a profound way? How long will it take us (and especially the politicians) to realize that the building sector is unsound? One cannot rely on cheap labour and volume of activity for ever, and we shouldn't support them in prolonging the agony.

Buildings are a necessity, not a luxury. We'll always need them and hopefully always ask for improvements, either from an environmental or from an economic perspective. In other words, the built environment is full of promise and opportunity, and could become a stable sector that is not that sensitive to crises. You don't hear the super markets complain that much or that often because people need them daily. Are the buildings we use, also daily and moreover constantly, less important to our safety and wellbeing?

It's high time that the building sector accepts that it's in urgent need of reform; that they need new production methods and better organization. It is unacceptable that in the age of data and computation building projects cannot be completed within time and within budget. We're either failing to plan and organize them properly or producing in outdated, inadequate ways - most probably both. The main problem is that too many stakeholders and actors have to accept the need for change and do something about it. Given the complacency and conformism of most, I cannot help being pessimistic. Too much has to change and we haven't had the brain or the guts to start yet.

Dangerologists

Dangerologists

These are dangerous times, not just for the real dangers for health and the economy but also because of the numerous dangerologists that have been coming out of the woodwork and reminding the public that they had foreseen the disaster in this book, that interview, this blog or than vlog. Sometimes they merit a nod for their predictions but mostly they deserve to be dismissed without further discussion.

Predicting possible disasters and pointing out potential dangers is easy. Everything we do is precarious, from walking on the pavement to flying to another continent, from staying with what we have to radically changing lives and environments. The ant that escapes the soles of our feet knows all about the precarity of life. We know it, too, when we manage to listen to our bodies and their anxieties at the edge of a cliff or in uncomfortable temperatures. The smallest irregularity, the tiniest miscalculation may be enough to bring on disastrous results.

The only thing dangerologists can do for us is open our eyes to systematic errors of judgement, help us identify behavioural and cultural blind spots beyond the basic precarity of life. Walking on stairs is inherently dangerous but should we just be extra careful when doing so or do we need to improve stair design? Is our usual hygiene insufficient for preventing viral infections, is the high density of people in many places inherently dangerous, is the high mobility of our times to blame for the rapid worldwide spread of disease? Much of that seems so bleeding obvious that I don't care to listen any longer.

Why one shouldn't believe in BIM maturity levels

Why one shouldn't believe in BIM maturity levels

One of the holy cows of BIM theory is the notion of maturity levels. Inspired by them, I suggest that there are also car driving maturity levels:

1.  Sitting in the driver's seat in a stationary car with the engine turned off, not touching anything 
2.  Sitting in the driver's seat in a stationary car and operating the windshield wipers
3.  Driving a car in a straight line only 
4.  Driving a car safely under any circumstances 
5.  Driving a car in a way beneficial to society and the economy 

Ludicrous? Well, no less than some of the BIM maturity levels that are currently been taken for granted. 

On a more serious note, I'm not sure what to make of these levels. The appeal of levels and categorization in general is understandable. The problem with categories is that they should be meaningful, that they should make the world easier to describe in a truthful and reliable manner - not develop arbitrary, possibly distorting filters for reality. 

Do BIM maturity levels represent stages in the development of BIM skills and knowledge, similarly to the capability maturity model, where maturity refers to the degree of formalization and optimization in the processes of an organization, from ad hoc or even chaotic to repeatable and efficient? 

I don't think that the adoption of BIM is a similar progression. One doesn't have to start from 2D CAD before moving on to nD BIM. The setup of the BIM maturity levels actually reveals the limitations of the mainstream approach to BIM deployment, including fixations on analogue practices like the production of 2D drawings and the gathering of information around these drawings, which are actually harmful to understanding BIM, as they sidetrack learners to outdated means and workflows. 

BIM maturity levels make too much of the difference between 2D and 3D representations, as if 2D building drawings do not convey 3D information or as if one could make 2D models in BIM. That some of the views of a model are 2D projections should not matter, in the same way that it does not matter that other views are tables. I won't go any further into dimensions in BIM; that chapter has been closed for me with a recent paper in Automation in Construction (Dimensionality in BIM: Why BIM cannot have more than four dimensions? doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2020.103153).

What I miss is other indications of maturity and progress, such as the correct use of symbols, properties, parameters etc, the completeness and consistency of models and other syntactic, semantic and pragmatic measures. Surely these are the most significant for the successful use of BIM. The only positive aspect of BIM maturity levels is that they emphasize the significance of a shared, central model - and then spoil it by suggesting that one can do BIM without one. 

Social distancing and design

Social distancing and design

We are constantly reminded to keep others at a distance of 1.5 or 2 metres. Most people try to do so, some ignore the advice to the irritation of the rest and others behave as if everybody is a threat, even at a great distance. Beyond personal reactions, the overall effect is spectacular: in contrast to other times, public space is heavily underused, with lots of space for everyone. It's a joy to be out and about with such low densities of people and vehicles.
I wonder what will remain after the scare is over. Will we revert to the old habits and tolerances, squeezing into every bit of space available to go as fast as possible to our destination? It seems probable that we will forget. I remember cycling through the Dutch countryside during a previous epidemic and coming close to or under flocks of birds. Wondering if they were infected, I gave them a wide berth, trying to hold my breath as long as possible. I no longer do so.
Even more important than user behaviour is the design and management of the environment. We naturally try to keep an appropriate distance at all times, as Edward T. Hall and others have observed. Unfortunately, the affordances of many environments force us to come closer than desired to others. Sometimes a distance of a few centimetres from a stranger is all we achieve in a bus, train or metro, as well as in a air terminal, cinema theatre or classroom. When the pandemic is over and current measures are relaxed, we might be forced to accept the same congested situations once again. Will we react with the indignation such poorly designed and managed environments deserve? Will we demand safe and comfortable distances at all times? How will authorities and designers react? In many respects, such a pandemic is a wake-up call: to invest not only in adequate care when something goes wrong but also in designing environments that can prevent the worst. We deserve public transportation and public space that are generous, comfortable and safe. They come at a cost but that cost seems a wise investment.