Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Le Corbusier Redux

I got some great feedback on yesterday's post on Le Corb.  Perhaps the most interesting comment arrived by email late last night.  A friend said something that given my bleary-eyed post-putting-children-to-bed state, I hadn't been able to process properly until this morning.  I quote:

"The problem is when you put actual humans into a giant open space, they all
huddle at the edges.  I don't think they knew this is how people would
actually behave."

Spoken like a psychologist, and I think getting at a key part of what I was trying to say at the end of my post.  I'm still stumbling around in dangerous ignorance of Le Corbusier's project, but I think I'm in fairly firm grasp of two things:  1. the kind of planning in which we all live off the ground in massive high-rises full of a beehive of machine-like dwellings, while the ground plane is left completely open for us to wander, drive and all somehow share, doesn't work.  2. Le Corbusier's motivations for thinking that it would were not grounded in an understanding of human psychology, but in something else.

So what the kinds of approaches I've been trying to develop and those advocated by Le Corb share in common is that they both strive to find a way to design spaces in accord with the dimensions and functions of the human body.  But I argue (like many before me -- William Whyte, for example) that the way to do this is to measure behaviour -- to see what we do in real spaces (or virtual ones).  Le Corbusier's approach, as I understand it, was to try to approach the problem in a different way -- by theorizing about what people were and, in the tradition of French philosophers like Blaise Pascal, to build an image of humanity and then to design to it.  I think this is also the approach of at least a good handful of other very prominent architects -- you could probably name some of them yourselves.  The problem is, if you're wrong about the image, you can be dead wrong about the design.  You can be wrong about the measurements as well of course, but you're more likely to be wrong about the explanations for the measurements than the measurements themselves.  And even if you are wrong, the design principles that emerge still might not be completely doomed -- you just may be confused about why something actually works.  What's truly exciting about this to me is that we now have a great set of tools for making the right kinds of measurements.  I think at least we can now get that part right.

So now I'm thinking about that -- how we design for images of who and what we are, rather than the stubbly little biological critters that we may sometimes want to deny lie at our cores, but can never divorce ourselves from completely.  I've just written a little thing for another site in which I'm talking about how I think people should go about hunting for a home.  One of the pointers is to work hard to make the distinction between the image of yourself (sometimes a fantasy) that you'd like to project via your home, and the way that you actually live.  I think that the failure to make this distinction can cause great unhappiness.  I even think our inability to separate realistic insight into self from fantastic dreams of what we might turn into given a suitably palatial residence is one of the root causes of the US housing crisis.  Sure the bankers (with a huge assist from the federal government) let people buy beyond their means.  But it's the fact that they wanted to so badly that fascinates me more.

Re-thinking Le Corbusier

The great thing about multidisciplinary research is that it lets you dig into things that interest you without having to worry too much about what you don't know.  The worst of it is that you can dig into things that interest you without worrying enough about what you don't know -- sometimes to great detriment.  And so to Le Corbusier.

There's a chapter in my book -- and I think it's a pretty good one -- where I talk about how cities work, how their spatial organization and appearance can influence our behaviour and what all of that means.  There's no way to write about those ideas in a North American context without discussing the wisdom of people like Jane Jacobs and James Howard Kunstler.  And I do.  But what also happens in that chapter is that I talk a bit about the revolutionary ideas of early modernist architect Le Corbusier.  Le Corb had some deeply concerning ideas about how cities should be put together, and to my eye there is a fair consensus that he got some important things wrong -- that if the city of Paris had really allowed him to tear down a big swath of architecture and to replace it with Radiant City, the results would have been disastrous.  Some modern buildings that resonate with some of the Le Corbusian ideals (the infamous Pruitt-Igoe building, for example) have also suggested that Le Corbusier's notions about how cities should be put together were mistaken -- perhaps because of a wrong-headed view of what people actually were and how interactions between individuals could be promoted (or not) by the organization of spaces.  Mostly, modern planners suggest that Le Corb didn't fully understand the impact of the automobile in the evolution of cities -- but given the times -- early 20th century -- one can hardly blame him for this.

So this morning, and over much of the weekend, I've been very much back in the presence of a dear friend and collaborator who passed away last summer.  Thomas Seebohm read my chapter on cities.  The review was mostly good -- he told me that he thought every architecture student should read my book, which I took as lofty praise indeed coming from someone who took such pleasure in educating architects.  But he also warned me to re-think what I said about Le Corb.  Thomas was far too gentle and kind a man to have laid it out for me, but I now understand that he wanted me to avoid making a knee jerk condemnation of Corbusian ideals without fully understanding what the man was trying to do.  He suggested I think about colour.  He urged me to go take another look.

My memory is a bit fuzzy now about what happened next.  I know I toned things down a little bit, but I didn't really take the time to re-write my review of Le Corbusier.  It was time I didn't have, and I instead fell into the little trap of assuming that since others, whose opinions I valued very highly, had condemned Le Corb in much more damning language than I would ever use, I must not be completely on the wrong track.  Anyone who knows anything about Jane Jacobs will see much irony in this kind of blind trust in authority.

More irony:  I spent this weekend with a little book called "Experiencing Architecture" by Steen Rasmussen.  Thomas put this book in my hands.  When he and I were designing experiments together, we needed to come up with some recommended reading for our participants -- so that if the people who explored our virtual reality models were really fired up by what they were asked to think about we could send them off to learn more.  Thomas recommended the Rasmussen.  I bought it, but confess I didn't open it until very recently.  In the pages of this little gem of a book I found the clearest explication of Le Corbusier's ideas that I've ever encountered.  I still know very little, but now I understand a bit more of the program.  It may still be true that Le Corb's proposals for city plans would have been disastrous if enacted (and I suppose some might argue that in some ways they have been in certain quarters), but the core of his life's work was not so much to fill cities with anonymous and insular beehives of dwellings devoid of public space and choked with cars.  His motivation was to find a way to parlay what he saw as certain basic truths about how human beings engage with built structures -- having to do with the mathematics and scaling of the human body -- into a philosophy of architecture with human embodiment at its centre.  When I try to build a virtual model of a room or a building and then measure how people behave in that space, I'm really doing exactly the same kind of thing.  Le Corbusier's theoretical underpinnings might not have been the same as mine -- where he had golden ratios, mathematical measuring sticks of the proper heights and widths of things based on the form of the human body, I might substitute certain facts of the anatomy and physiology of the body and the operation of the human senses.  But there's definitely a connection.

So on this chilly Monday morning I'm feeling a bit chastised by my own ignorance but also heartened because it isn't too late for me to learn more about this fascinating figure, correct my errors in thinking, refine my arguments and now, with the help of one or two new friends in architecture, perhaps to embark on some new studies.

Cities, networks and information: The New York Talk Exchange

Sometimes I find these Seed Salons a tad contrived and unsatisfying, but this one, a conversation between urban visionary Carlo Ratti and mathematician Steve Strogatz works really well and captivated me completely.  The discussion of Ratti's New York Talk Exchange project connects with some other discussions I've been listening to.  What the project does is to track social networks by poring through A T & T records to see who is talking to whom.  It turns out that there's an interesting kind of power law so that as the size of your city increases, there's an exponential increase in the size of your network.  This may help to account for the fact that we're rushing to join together in gigantic urban environments like never before, even though one might argue that with the advent of modern technology for communication, we don't necessarily need to pile our bodies together in huge cities.

It's a fascinating conundrum.  As viral carriers of information, we seem to be following certain kinds of rules that maximize the power of our social networks -- which is a perfectly adaptive thing for us to be doing -- big groups offer certain survival advantages.  Ratti thinks it may be possible to characterize these rules using  a kind of network theory -- a reasonably well-developed field of mathematics -- applied to real geographic spaces.  But on the other hand, as flesh and blood biological critters, the urban environment is not necessarily very good for us.  So our post-human existence as nodes in a network pulls us together, to the detriment of our physiology.

Light, rapid, and grassy

When I read Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language", one idea that seemed to me impractical in my part of the world but lovely nevertheless was to replace residential streets with what amounted to grassy cart tracks that could reduce and slow traffic and greenify a neighbourhood.  Kind of a bio-Woonerf.  Something like this might not work in a typical wet and muddy Ontario November, but it's an incredible idea for a green context for an LRT.  What's wrong with us in North America?  Why aren't we doing this kind of thing here?

Architecture with a point

It used to be, when I saw dramatic plans to entirely re-make a city according to some sweeping, futuristic vision, I'd raise a "never happen" eyebrow and move on.  But with some of the incredible  developments over the last few years (Beijing Olympics, Dubai, Shanghai), all bets are off.  Here's a description of such a proposal for Ansan City in South Korea.  Two things intrigue me greatly.  First, the proposal from the firm INABA for the building as wayfinding beacon shown below:

In case it isn't obvious, the idea here is that the lines of the building serve as a gigantic compass to define the cardinal directions of the landscape.  Big buildings often serve as convenient landmarks (CN Tower, Empire State Building) but introducing this kind of asymmetry takes things one step beyond.

Another part of the proposal, which perhaps makes such wayfinding aids more important, is a kind modular design (BIG and mass studies), that allows units to wax and wane in size and to change in organization according to need.
As a scientist interested in how the shape of space influences behaviour and feeling, the proposal fascinates me.  But if I were a potential resident, I wonder how this kind of fluid organization might unsettle me.  Also, in the image just above I wonder how the Corbusian combination of high density, wide roadways, and the underbuilding green space might work out in practice.  The pictured low density of cars and the heavily used green walkway: is that a pipedream?  How much of a difference does culture make?  In North America, I'd wonder if this is another Pruitt-Igoe in the making.  Would South Korea be different?

Wayfinding in Toronto's PATH system.

Residents of Toronto know about the rich system of underground pedestrian thoroughfares known as the PATH system, and given the frigid forecast for the week ahead, many will be glad to use it.  Even seasoned veterans know how difficult it can be to keep one's bearings in the PATH, though, because there's no correlation between the layout of the subterranean network and what lies above.  That's why this proposal to connect the great outdoors with the tunnel system is such a clever idea.  The large convex glass "oculi" will afford pedestrians with almost panoramic views of the sights above ground, and should be an effective wayfinding aid.  The windows will have the added advantage of throwing a lot of natural light into the PATH.  As an experimentalist, I can think of all kinds of nefarious ways to mess with these oculi to test various theories of wayfinding, but I think that would be, um, somewhat counter to the objectives.  If these portals to the sky come into existence, it would even be great to do a simple pre-post study to see what effect they have on how well people can find their way.  Hmmm.  If only there were a psychologist in the building.

participatory design

In one of the grant applications that we've been bandying about, one theme has had to do with participatory design.  The idea is not particularly new.  When a new building or infrastructure is being contemplated, receiving input from the citizens who will be affected by the structure is a critical thing.  My colleague, Thomas Seebohm and I had had many discussions about the novel ways in which computer technology could be used to collect information for participatory design.  One particularly lovely idea that we discussed involved mounting a website where interested parties could log in to view renderings of a proposed new development.  Not only could viewers sound off about it, but we might also be able to provide small virtual models of the structures that could be 'flown' through by observers.  We could not only listen to what they said but also watch where they went.  Collecting this kind of data made the psychologist in me a happy man.

There's a nice piece of participatory design going on in my neighbourhood.  In my backyard, in fact.  The picture shows one of my children looking over a small model of a play structure that we've been thinking about for our backyard.  The novel feature of the structure is that it overlaps two adjacent backyards (the greenish fence now separates one yard from the other).   Our neighbourhood is teeming with children who play games that involve multiple yards and multiple routes of access from one to the other.  We encourage this, not only to make outdoor play more attractive but to provide interesting complexes of space for them -- I believe this is a key feature of healthy young development and that it helps children to understand geographic space.  My book has more details about all of this.  In this effort, we are being aided by Ian, our amazing neighbourhood handyman, who is these days carrying such a shine in his eyes that I'm slightly afraid of what he might want to do after the play structure pictured above is complete.  Ian built the model, mocked up some renderings using photoshop, and is poised now to begin to put the whole thing together.  We've spent the past few nights getting input from the children who will use the structure and from the parents who will have to live with the consequences.  Me, I can't wait to see how our kids use this thing and what they teach us about the world.  Stay tuned.

China risen

   On my first trip to  China in 2001, there was one small area of Beijing that drew me back into its clutches time and time again.  No matter where I began my day, it was a near certainty that around sunset I would find myself just below the south gate into Tiananmen Square wandering the tiny back alleys of Qianmen. Back then, I didn't know much at all about psychogeography or space syntax theory or isovists or any of the amazing ideas of planners and architects regarding the manner in which the organization of a space can have  such a profound impact on how one feels in it. All I knew was that once I was past Qianmen Gate and immersed shoulder to shoulder in the teeming masses, listening to screeching street hawkers trying to outdo the verbal advertising blasting out of shop fronts on loudspeakers, wandering tiny alleyways of hutong neighbourhoods with their incredible contrasts of light, colour, sound and aroma, I felt somehow as if I was at home but also in the heart of Asia.  It was here that I found a tiny restaurant where the staff seemed so fascinated by the chutzpah of a sole white face willing to sit and point at a menu of unknowns, to eat falteringly with slippery plastic chopsticks, and to drink seemingly endless large bottles of icy Chinese beer on those hot August nights that they would hover over me in clouds of three or four, offering giggling tutorials in Chinese table manners and what I at least interpreted as some admiring and sympathetic glances.  It was in this same neighbourhood where, tottering out of the restaurant on unsteady legs, I found a man standing with a small telescope pointed toward the full moon and a little sign that offered glimpses for a small handful of change.  And it was here that I was propositioned for the first and only time by a Chinese prostitute--in my naivete I wondered how it was that this woman was willing to risk the automatic death sentence for prostitution.   I loved the vibrant heart of this neighbourhood and always felt as though, if I were to live in Beijing, I would want to live here.

Now, seven years later, I read that the Qianmen streets I knew are no more.  The blazing shopping avenue that used to ring my ears and fascinate my eyes is to be replaced by some kind of faux-Chinese SoHo, replete with Starbucks, Adidas, Apple, and many of the other brand names of the West.  The hutongs in this area, like many others in Beijing, have been flattened to make way for the Olympic games, many of the residents driven to the outer suburbs.  It's all very sad that in the name of showing a "world class" face, China is destroying some of its jewels--lovely neighbourhoods filled with overflowing courtyard houses, street life, mixed use like those of us in the sterile and sprawling west can only imagine.  These parts of Beijing were for me the ones that really worked in a way that most of us living in North American cities  should only envy.

And what when the Games are done?  Will Qianmen slowly creep back towards the old ways?  Will there be enough ghostly resonance of old Beijing in the new concrete escarpments to bring  back any semblance of authentic life?   Or will the streets remain empty, like a sad facsimile of a North American power centre in the off-season, only with a few carved dragons on the building facades to remind us that we're in China and not in Tucson or Edmonton?   

Invisible integration in Dubai

I'm having all kinds of different reactions to this video, discovered via one of my new favourite blogs.

It seems that Dubai, a city teeming with migrant workers from nearby developing countries who fill low-paying service and construction jobs, has a problem.  How to house those workers in affordable dwellings without using exurban migrant worker camps?  The solution proposed here is to build invisible skyscrapers inside luxury high rises in which such workers can be housed in internal tubes filled with modest Ikea furnished suites with shared kitchen and living areas.  The entryways are even cleverly arranged so that those living in the lap of luxury on the outside rind of these big tubes would never even have to see the workers who toil for them.  Even though I know this arrangement is much better than the current conditions of the migrant work camps, this just rubs me the wrong way.  It's the idea that these big shiny buildings might be designed in such a way as to pretend that the worker termites who actually keep the whole city running don't really exist.  It's exactly this type of subterfuge, the pretense that we  can spread ourselves out in gigantic residential palaces while hiding their real costs behind a clever smokescreen of occluding walls that has gotten us to our present precarious state.  Lots of times, we make these kinds of cleavages between the real and the fantasy purely by accident.  It's the cold deliberation that in this case makes it seem so odious.

Sensing the city

I wrote recently about the interesting new findings, reported in Nature, in which movement patterns of large numbers of urban dwellers were logged using GPS enabled cell phones.  These findings, modest in some ways compared to what's coming, represent the thin edge of the wedge as we try to find ways to make use of the masses of location-based data that will soon come online.

Now, a New York based startup  named Sense Networks is one of the first to jump into an area that could not only provide useful information for commercial ventures, but, if it was widely adopted, could revolutionize the ways we make decisions about where to go.  Sense Networks has just launched a free service called CitySense, designed for Blackberry and iPhone users which can give an online display of where the action is in a city (at the moment, just San Francisco, but soon other major cities in the US).  Beyond the undeniable coolness of a multicoloured display showing where everybody is, CitySense can also learn the preferences of the user, so the display will only show hotspots filtered according to the observer's personal definitions of "heat". 

I like all kinds of things about this.  Perhaps most of all, the fact that this kind of mind candy will help sensitize users to the warp and woof of social space.  The red hot areas (and the cold black ones) will be telling us something tangible about what's going on, and they will invite us to think about why.  As a researcher, I'm all over the idea of getting access to this kind of information.  What I want to do is to understand how to design spaces in accord with individual psychologies and collective consciousness so that they work well.  For my purposes, this is the killer app.

I can also see how a tool like this might change the game for those trying to understand and model the decision-making of large collections of beings (in this case, human ones).  In the field generally referred to as complex adaptive system research, one of the modal systems is one in which a large collection of actors are trying to decide where to go based on predictions about where everyone else will be.  In his nice readable book on the subject, "Two's Company, Three is Compexity" Neil Johnson invites us to imagine that we're trying to decide whether to go to a popular bar on a Friday night.  We might or might not be able to get through the door, depending on what everyone else decides.  In the classic case, we make predictions based on past experience.  But what if we didn't have to guess?  The game changes in all kinds of interesting ways.