PATH Project — Prologue
Surely there’s got to be an easier way to get buildings designed and built?
She looked truly exasperated, her words polite but firm, her frown accompanied by a hesitant half-raised hand to offset the aggressive tone. Others paused in their note taking. Thirty-five intern architects looked to me, their teacher for a full day course required for professional registration.
It was early in the day, first coffee ingested, reference materials and a chaos of sketch and word notebooks sprawled over tables organized according to someone’s theory about interpersonal communication, writing implements (architects use a wide assortment) in hand. Like writers, architects are seldom without the means to capture ideas.
We were considering the construction side of architecture, the second half of the 300-step design and construction process for most building types that architects design. I had just explained my cleverness in boiling down the many construction phase architectural requirements to “just” fifteen concepts that they needed to master. And we had a full day of face time to consider them. The raised-hand intern was reacting to the quantity and implied complexity behind these numbers—architects hate numbers, preferring the intuition of their design processes.
I need less than the full day to explain the essence of these ideas and to table some of my techniques for coping, so encourage interruptions, questions and comments. I sensed an opening.
“So how do you think this complexity came about?” I responded Socratically, hoping for some thoughts I could build on.
My reluctant inquisitor continued: “I work for an older architect,” (like you, she had the courtesy NOT to say), “and he’s always going on about the good old days when everything was hand drawn, the fees were good and there was more time for both design and construction.” She emphasized construction to keep within the bounds of the course content, I guess. “He’s a good mentor about the essentials of practice, but when it comes to technology and the details, he literally rolls his eyes and walks away. What’s that about?”
“We’ll need to start with a bit of history,” I responded. There were a few grimaces and several pens went down, but as many other faces looked attentive.
“Does Henry David Thoreau mean anything to you?” I asked. Several heads responded, generally with that subtleness of not wanting to be called upon. “Why?” I asked, gesturing to a fellow towards the back who had taken the back of his pen from his mouth as he nodded with apparent enthusiasm.
“He was one of the first “back to the land” folks and built himself a cabin on a pond in the States.”
“Correct,” I picked up the thread. “He designed and built himself a 10’ x 15’ cabin on Walden Pond in 1854, using only eleven materials. When it was done, he concluded: With this more substantial shelter about me, I had made some progress toward settling in the world. Isn’t it interesting that he considered a small one-room cabin to be substantial.”
“Let’s fast forward 150 years,” I continued, “same location, New England, same program, a simple home. Has anyone read Tracy Kidder’s book, House?” This question was met with silence, a few pens making note of book name, or author.
“Kidder is a journalist who wrote about the process of working with an architect and builder to create a compact but custom home.” Pens remained at the ready for useful information. It was time to begin connecting the complexity dots.
“It’s a great read,” I pressed on. “But for our purposes, know that this simple house built around the year 2000 required 66 different types of materials, six times as many as Thoreau’s cabin.” I let that sink in. A few pens transcribed, presumably “66.”
“To close the circle,” I continued, “I looked at a recent straightforward project of mine and counted more than 130 types of materials in it.” I paused for effect. “So it took 150 years to get from 11 to 66 materials, then only one generation to double that again.”
I was about to launch into what that means for complexity, but was interrupted by the fellow who had given the nod to Thoreau. “Surely,” he said, “it’s still possible to build simply?”
“Certainly,” I answered. “Some 160 years after Thoreau, the food author, Michael Pollan, chronicled in A Place of My Own how he designed and built a simple structure. Pollan’s writing hut was 8’ x 13’, not much smaller than Thoreau’s cabin, but his purpose was similar: So this was the house for the self…the self that thought a good place to spend the day was between two walls of books in front of a big window overlooking life.”
“So how do we bring some of that simplicity into projects with twelve times as many materials as Thoreau or Pollan?” I added for currency: “And those numbers all predate the green building movement, which has dramatically increased the number and complexity of materials.”
My original questioner looked disconsolate. I continued, moving into full professorial mode.
“There’s another aspect to our romantic attachment to architecture as described by Thoreau and Pollan,” I continued, “And it’s psychological, not practical.” Pens hovered. I had their full attention now.
“In 2008 psychologists in a University of Oregon study found the human brain has a built-in limit on the number of discrete thoughts it can entertain at one time. The limit for most individuals is four.” I paused for effect. “This may explain why your older mentor rolls his eyes and walks away when you ask technical questions. Perhaps his four-thought brain simply has no more capacity.”
“We know the design process is complex,” several interns nodded, “and each specialized designer will likely have more than four thoughts in play at any time with the design team’s integrator, the architect. Maybe that’s why architects favour apparently simple design concepts like the Sydney Opera House’s scalloped shells?”
Competition Winning Sketch for the Sydney Opera House
I summarized: “The roles and performance expected of designers and builders have changed very little in the two generations of my career. But we are now in what I call the age of immediacy, which may overwhelm our four-thought brains without the immediacy tools I use to take control.” I had their attention.
“Let me explain what I mean by the age of immediacy. Ray, an architect friend and contemporary of mine, perhaps explains it best: When we started our careers, when there was a construction issue we got a phone call. If that didn’t resolve the issue, we would receive a written request by mail a few days later. That would have given us a few days to think about our response, sketch it if necessary and reply, also by mail. Construction worked at that pace. Now when I get a phone call, it’s from some breathless superintendent who asks, “Have you got the email?” (Here Ray grabbed and shook his smartphone with considerable passion).
“A moment later, he will ask, “So have you found it?” and not awaiting my response, will conclude the conversation, decreeing, “I need the answer in the next half hour,” ending the call before I can respond in any way.
What’s most upsetting, Ray continued, is that this person who has no idea what’s involved in design, will have copied the client on the original email, including the later-today deadline, and the client will blame me if the response is either late, or imperfect! How did we get to this sorry state?”
Now many heads in the room nodded—they had experienced this in person.
“I can’t magically compress 150 construction phase tasks into fewer than the fifteen concepts I mentioned a few minutes ago. And fifteen concepts is way more than four thoughts—I think that it’s only because construction is a continuous flow of work, never involving more than a subset of those fifteen concepts or 150 tasks that enables us to cope. Immediacy technology can help us cope.”
Time to wrap this question up and move on. “This age of immediacy started with the smartphone’s launch in 2007, the year before the four-thought brain study. Between the World Wide Web’s launch in 1985 and the iPhone’s launch in 2007, 95% of the world’s stored data moved from analog servers to the web’s cloud. This means that increasingly, project design and construction can be managed from our mobile devices, including laptops, tablets and smartphones. The continually increasing power of these devices allows for dramatically increased interaction while our brains continue to struggle with more than four thoughts at a time. Later in the day I will show you some tools and techniques I use to manage immediacy.”
At the next break I continued to muse to myself about what the age of immediacy means for our brains.
I believe writing is one antidote to the overwhelming of our four-thought brains. Perhaps this explains why the arrival of the digital age has not spelled the end of writing and its physical expression, the book. Whether in the form of a blog, an essay, a short story or a book, the general structure of successful writing is usually simple and linear, for example, the classic fiction plot diagram: Exposition > Rising Action > Climax > Falling Action > Denouement.
So, what does writing tell us about creatively designing and building in this age of immediacy? I suggest we can learn at least three lessons from writing:
Firstly, the traditional path through design and construction is linear and we mess with it at our peril—design concepts evolve through increasingly detailed revisions until ready to be built. As an example, in “fast track” construction work foundation construction starts before the superimposed design is complete. This often leads to the design equivalent of Anne Lamott’s “shitty first draft,” which we hope will improve as we revise. I once had a wood-frame residential client who was used to having the builder move entire walls within low-rise wooden structures after the first units were framed up, like editing a draft. He became most incensed when told, on the occasion of his first high-rise, that he could not move by several feet a ground floor concrete column already aligned with parkade columns below and with several floors already poured above. The “shitty first draft” approach did not work in concrete!
Secondly, it is essential to allow time for revisions to the “shitty first draft” of a building. The traditional design process allows this—the architectural equivalent of the novel’s plot diagram is: Concepts > Schematic Design > Design Development > Construction Documents > Bidding > Construction. Unfortunately, most builders and many clients are only involved in the last two of these six phases and do not understand the importance of this workflow to the quality of the finished product. Any activity that interrupts, shortens or supplants this flow imperils the design and usually lengthens the overall project duration and cost while diluting the building’s success.
Finally, as a building emerges from an accepted design, changes will be identified and must be accommodated, just as an author and their editors may continue to refine the original manuscript right up until the printing presses are turned on. A plot line may be identified as needing changes (Can we just move that column two feet to the left?); a character may need refinements in how they act and what they say (We need to change the carpet colour in the foyer); it may even be deemed necessary to add or eliminate a character or scene (I’d like to add a powder room off the entry).
I continued after the break: “How many of you have read Les Misérables? What tools do you think a novel might offer to construction in the age of immediacy?” This was going to be fun.
Five-phase plot line for a 400-page manuscript. Six-phase workflow with 300+ tasks. Four-thought brain to manage it all. I’ve started thinking seriously about that cabin in the woods.