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.