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There is a fundamental conflict in the nature of materials for building in industrial society.
What kind of roof plan is organically related to the nature of your building?
210 FLOOR AND CEILING
LAYOUT
Again, the basic problem is to maintain the integrity of the social spaces in the plan.
We have already established the idea that the structural components of a building should be congruent with its social spaces.
994
How should the spacing of the secondary columns which stiffen the walls, vary with ceiling height, number of stories and the size of rooms?
2''5'
214 ROOT FOUNDATIONS
215 GROUND FLOOR SLAB
The slab is the easiest, cheapest, and most natural way to lay a ground floor.
ion
Cars give people wonderful freedom and increase their opportunities. But they also destroy the environment, to an extent so drastic that they kill all social life.
•5* *5* *5*
What is the best shape for a roof?
(219)0
Finding the right position for a window or a door is a subtle matter. But there are very few ways of building which take this into consideration.
On no account use standard doors or windows. Make each window a different size, according to its place.
Do not fix the exact position or size of the door and win-
One of a window’s most important functions is to put you in touch with the outdoors. If the sill is too high, it cuts you off.
Windows with a sharp edge where the frame meets the wall create harsh, blinding glare, and make the rooms they serve uncomfortable.
from one place to another. Especially at the entrance to a house, at the entrance to a private room, or a fire corner— make the doorway lower than usual, perhaps even as low as
•5* *5* *5*
Any homogeneous membrane which has holes in it will tend to rupture at the holes, unless the edges of the holes are reinforced by thickening.
Thin columns, spindly columns, columns which take their shape from structural arguments alone, will never make a comfortable environment.
Build connections where the columns meet the beams. Any distribution of material which fills the corner up will do: fillets, gussets, column capitals, mushroom column, and
most general of all, the arch, which connects column and beam in a continuous curve.
build your floor-ceiling vaults (219). Once the vault hardens, cover it with steps of lightweight concrete, trowel-formed into position.
2 29 DUCT SPACE
You never know where pipes and conduits are; they are buried somewhere in the walls; but where exactly are they?
23O RADIANT HEAT*
This pattern is a biologically precise formulation of the intuition that sunlight and a hot blazing fire are the best kinds of heat.
We know from our discussion of sheltering roof (117) that the top story of the building should be right inside the roof, surrounded by it.
Wherever you have windows in the roof, make dormer windows which are high enough to stand in, and frame them like any other alcoves in the building.
There are few cases in traditional architecture where builders have not used some roof detail to cap the building with an ornament.
We want the floor to be comfortable, warm to the touch, inviting. But we also want it to be hard enough to resist wear, and easy to clean.
A wall which is too hard or too cold or too solid is unpleasant to touch; it makes decoration impossible, and creates hollow echoes.
Many buildings nowadays have no opening windows at all; and many of the opening windows that people do build, don’t do the job that opening windows ought to do.
2 37 SOLID DOORS WITH GLASS
that they give acoustic isolation and make a comfortable “thunk” when they are closed.
Individuals have no effective voice in any community of more than 5000-10,000 persons.
Light filtered through leaves, or tracery, is wonderjful. But why?
When plate glass windows became possible, people thought that they would put us more directly in touch with nature. In fact, they do the opposite.
Where outdoor seats are set down without regard for view and climate, they will almost certainly be useless.
Choosing good spots for outdoor seats is far more important than building fancy benches. Indeed, if the spot is right, the most simple kind of seat is perfect.
In cool climates, choose them to face the sun, and to be
protected from the wind; in hot climates, put them in shade
and open to summer breezes. In both cases, place them to
face activities. . „
People like to watch the street.
In many places walls and fences between outdoor spaces are too high; but no boundary at all does injustice to the subtlety of the divisions between the spaces.
Build canvas roofs and walls and awnings wherever there are spaces which need softer light or partial shade in sum-
mer, or partial protection from mist and dew in autumn and winter. Build them to fold away, with ropes or wires to pull them, so that they can easily be opened.
cern it closely: land use, housing, maintenance, streets, parks, police, schooling, welfare, neighborhood services.
A building finally becomes a part of its surroundings when the plants grow over parts of it as freely as they grow along the ground.
On sunny walls, train climbing plants to grow up round the openings in the wall—the windows, doors, porches, arcades, and trellises.
Asphalt and concrete surfaces outdoors are easy to wash down, but they do nothing for us, nothing for the paths, and nothing for the rainwater and plants.
On paths and terraces, lay paving stones with a i inch crack between the stones, so that grass and mosses and
small flowers can grow between the stones. Lay the stones directly into earth, not into mortar, and, of course, use no cement or mortar in between the stones.
248 SOFT TILE AND BRICK
All people have the instinct to decorate their surroundings.
Search around the building, and find those edges and transitions which need emphasis or extra binding energy.
250 WARM COLORS**
Choose surface colors which, together with the color of the natural light, reflected light, and artificial lights, create a warm light in the rooms.
People are different sizes; they sit in different ways. And yet there is a tendency in modern times to make all chairs alike.
252 POOLS OF LIGHT**
“Decor” and the conception of “interior design” have spread so widely, that very often people forget their instinct for the things they really want to keep around them.
tween two subcultures, build meeting places, shared functions, touching each community.
People need an identifiable spatial unit to belong to.
The strength of the boundary is essential to a neighborhood. If the boundary is too weak the neighborhood will not be able to maintain its own identifiable character.
16 WEB OF PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION*
contracts only to those transportation companies which are willing to serve these interchanges.
19 WEB OF SHOPPING*
Shops rarely place themselves in those positions which best serve the people’s needs, and also guarantee their own stability.
gap
20 MINI-BUSES*
Public transportation must be able to take people from any point to any other point within the metropolitan area.
There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy.
Very simply—when the area devoted to parking is too great, it destroys the land.
People cannot maintain their spiritual roots and their connections to the past if the physical world they live in does not also sustain these roots.
*33
People have a fundamental yearning for great bodies of water. But the very movement of the people toward the water can also destroy the water.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
144
*47
28 ECCENTRIC NUCLEUS*
The random character of local densities confuses the identity of our communities, and also creates a chaos in the pattern of land use.
*55
29 DENSITY RINGS*
*57
Community facilities scattered individually through the city do nothing for the life of the city.
Each subculture needs a center for its public life: a place where you can go to see people, and to be seen.
Most of the city’s activities close down at night; those which stay open won’t do much for the night life of the city unless they are together.
Interchanges play a central role in public transportation. Unless the interchanges are working properly, the public transportation system will not be able to sustain itself.
No one stage in the life cycle is self-sufficient.
People are different, and the way they want to place their houses in a neighborhood is one of the most basic kinds of difference.
People will not feel comfortable in their houses unless a group of houses forms a cluster, with the public land between them jointly owned by all the householders.
At densities of 15 to 30 houses per acre, row houses are essential. But typical row houses are dark inside, and stamped from an identical mould.
For row houses, place houses along pedestrian paths that run at right angles to local roads and parking lots, and give each house a long frontage and a shallow depth.
To build more than 30 dwellings per net acre, or to
Old people need old people, but they also need the young, and young people need contact with the old.
If you spend eight hours of your day at work, and eight hours at home, there is no reason why your workplace should be any less of a community than your home.
Exaggerated zoning laws separate industry from the rest of urban life completely, and contribute to the plastic unreality of sheltered residential neighborhoods.
Concentrated, cloistered universities, with closed admission policies and rigid procedures which dictate who may teach a course, kill opportunities for learning.
233
go back to the inside of the building and attach the necessary minor rooms and alcoves to complete the main rooms j
fine tune the shape and size of rooms and alcoves to make them precise and buildable;
Wherever there is a sharp separation between residential and nonresidential parts of town, the nonresidential areas will quickly turn to slums.
Nobody wants fast through traffic going by their homes.
50 T JUNCTIONS*
Traffic accidents are far more frequent where two roads cross than at T junctions.
give all the walls some depth, wherever there are to be alcoves, windows, shelves, closets, or seats;
Cars are dangerous to pedestrians; yet activities occur just where cars and pedestrians meet.
Where paths cross roads, the cars have power to frighten and subdue the people walking, even when the people walking have the legal right-of-way.
At any point where a pedestrian path crosses a road that has enough traffic to create more than a two second delay to people crossing, make a “knuckle” at the crossing:
within the main frame of the building, fix the exact positions for openings—the doors and windows—and frame these openingsj
as you build the main frame and its openings, put in the following subsidiary patterns where they are appropriate;
put in the surfaces and indoor details;
Where fast moving cars and pedestrians meet in cities, the cars overwhelm the pedestrians. The car is king, and people are made to feel small.
within ioo feet of every building, and give every building a bike rack near its main entrance.
As part of the network of bike paths, develop one system of paths that is extra safe—entirely separate from automo-
build outdoor details to finish the outdoors as fully as the indoor spaces;
complete the building with ornament and light and color and your own things;
Just as an individual person dreams fantastic happenings to release the inner forces which cannot be encompassed by ordinary events, so too a city needs its dreams.
Any one who has to work in noise, in offices with people all around, needs to be able to pause and refresh himself with quiet in a more natural situation.
(59)-
People need green open places to go to; when they are close they use them. But if the greens are more than three minutes away, the distance overwhelms the need.
CHOOSING A LANGUAGE FOR YOUR PROJECT
Build one open public green within three minutes’ walk —about 750 feet—of every house and workplace. This
A town needs public squares; they are the largest, most public rooms, that the town has. But when they are too large, they look and feel deserted.
a porch onto the front of his house. This is the way the language, and its patterns, helped to generate this porch.
The instinct to climb up to some high place, from which you can look down and survey your world, seems to be a fundamental human instinct.
Why is it that people don’t dance in the streets today?
65 BIRTH PLACES
It seems unlikely that any process which treats childbirth as a sickness could possibly be a healthy part of a healthy society.
333
Without common land no social system can survive.
Give over 25 per cent of the land in house clusters to common land which touches, or is very very near, the
homes which share it. Basic: be wary of the automobile; on no account let it dominate this land.
If children don’t play enough with other children during the first five years of life, there is a great chance that they will have some kind of mental illness later in their lives.
343
345
Lay out common land, paths, gardens, and bridges so that groups of at least 64 households are connected by a
346
swath of land that does not cross traffic. Establish this land as the connected play space for the children in these households.
347
There are very few spots along the streets of modern towns and neighborhoods where people can hang out, comfortably, for hours at a time.
In every neighborhood and work community, make a
No people who turn their backs on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society which encourages its people to live.
354
Give each grave site an edge, a path, and a quiet corner where people can sit. By custom, this is hallowed ground.
The human body does not wear out with use. On the contrary, it wears down when it is not used.
Scatter places for team and individual sports through every work community and neighborhood: tennis, squash,
table tennis, swimming, billiards, basketball, dancing, gymnasium . . . and make the action visible to passers-by, as an invitation to participate.
Set up a playground for the children in each neighborhood. Not a highly finished playground, with asphalt and
Make legal provisions which allow people to keep any animals on their private lots or in private stables. Create a piece of fenced and protected common land, where animals
374
The nuclear family is not by itself a viable social form.
In a house for a small family, it is the relationship between children and adults which is most critical.
383
384
(37) *
♦$. ♦<.
In a small household shared by two, the most important problem which arises is the possibility that each may have too little opportunity for solitude or privacy.
387
Once a household for one person is part of some larger group, the most critical problem which arises is the need for simplicity.
can build, and change, and add on to their house as they wish.
397
No one enjoys his work if he is a cog in a machine.
is complicated and requires larger organizations, several of these work groups can federate and cooperate to produce complex artifacts and services.
Departments and public services don’t work if they are too large. When they are large, their human qualities vanish; they become bureaucratic; red tape takes over.
In any institution whose departments provide public service:
1. Make each service or department autonomous as far as possible.
2. Allow no one service more than 12 staff members total.
3. House each one in an identifiable piece of the building.
4. Give each one direct access to a public thoroughfare.
82 OFFICE CONNECTIONS *
The fundamental learning situation is one in which a person learns by helping someone who really knows what he is doing.
social organization with a division of the workspace into spatial clusters—one for each master and his apprentices— where they can work and meet together.
84 TEEN-AGE SOCIETY
Instead of building large public schools for children 7 to 12, set up tiny independent schools, one school at a time. Keep the school small, so that its overheads are low and
a teacher-student ratio of 1:10 can be maintained. Locate it in the public part of the community, with a shopfront and three or four rooms.
The task of looking after little children is a much deeper and more fundamental social issue than the phrases “babysitting” and “child care” suggest.
When shops are too large, or controlled by absentee owners, they become plastic, bland, and abstract.
434
435
The street cafe provides a unique setting, special to cities: a place where people can sit lazily, legitimately, be on view, and watch the world go by.
It has lately been assumed that people no longer want to walk to local stores. This assumption is mistaken.
large numbers of people are going past. And combine them with houses, so that the people who run them can live over them or next to them.
Where can people sing, and drink, and shout and drink, and let go of their sorrows?
Bus stops must be easy to recognize, and pleasant, with enough activity around them to make people comfortable and safe.
Many of our habits and institutions are bolstered by the fact that we can get simple, inexpensive food on the street, on the way to shopping, work, and friends.
455
Concentrate food stands where cars and paths meet— either portable stands or small huts, or built into the fronts of buildings, half-open to the street.
It is a mark of success in a park, public lobby or a porch, when people can come there and fall asleep.
A building cannot be a human building unless it is a complex of still smaller buildings or smaller parts which manifest its own internal social facts.
Within the four-story height limit, just exactly how high should your buildings be?
474 9 6 NUMBER OF STORIES
97 SHIELDED PARKING*
In many modern building complexes the problem of disorientation is acute. People have no idea where they are, and they experience considerable mental stress as a result.
A complex of buildings with no center is like a man without a head.
The simple social intercourse created when people rub shoulders in public is one of the most essential kinds of social “glue” in society.
493
494
495
Lay out the entrances to form a family. This means:
1. They form a group, are visible together, and each is visible from all the others.
2. They are all broadly similar, for instance all porches, or all gates in a wall, or all marked by a similar kind of doorway.
Vast parking lots wreck the land for people.
Metropolitan regions will not come to balance until each one is small and autonomous enough to be an independent sphere of culture.
Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best.
510 104 SITE repair
People use open space if it is sunny, and do not use it if it isn’t, in all but desert climates.
building to the north
Outdoor spaces which are merely “left over” between buildings will, in general, not be used.
Isolated buildings are symptoms of a disconnected sick society.
109 LONG THIN HOUSE*
The shape of a building has a great effect on the relative degrees of privacy and overcrowding in it, and this in turn has a critical effect on people’s comfort and well being.
535
Placing the main entrance (or main entrances) is perhaps the single most important step you take during the evolution of a building plan.
I I I HALF-HIDDEN GARDEN*
If a garden is too close to the street, people won’t use it because it isn’t private enough. But if it is too far from the street, then it won’t be used either, because it is too isolated.
546
Buildings, and especially houses, with a graceful transition between the street and the inside, are more tranquil than those which open directly off the street.
559
a natural “back”; and every person who takes up the natural position, with his back to this “back,” will be looking out toward some larger distant view.
Few buildings will be structurally and socially intact, unless the floors step down toward the ends of wings, and unless the roof, accordingly, forms a cascade.
567
Arcades—covered walkways at the edge of buildings, which are partly inside, partly outside—play a vital role in the way that people interact with buildings.
4* 4*
To lay out paths, first place goals at natural points of interest. Then connect the goals to one another to form the
Streets should be for staying in, and not just for moving through, the way they are today.
Make a bulge in the middle of a public path, and make the ends narrower, so that the path forms an enclosure which is a place to stay, not just a place to pass through.
59i
122 BUILDING FRONTS*
Many of our modern public squares, though intended as lively plazas, are in fact deserted and dead.
The life of a public square forms naturally around its edge. If the edge fails, then the space never becomes lively.
Surround public gathering places with pockets of activity —small, partly enclosed areas at the edges, which jut for-
601
ward into the open space between the paths, and contain activities which make it natural for people to pause and get involved.
Wherever there is action in a place, the spots which are the most inviting, are those high enough to give people a vantage point, and low enough to put them in action.
126 SOMETHING ROUGHLY IN THE MIDDLE
A public space without a middle is quite likely to stay empty.
127 INTIMACY gradient**
If the right rooms are facing south, a house is bright and sunny and cheerful; if the wrong rooms are facing south, the house is dark and gloomy.
Continuous sprawling urbanization destroys life, and makes cities unbearable. But the sheer size of cities is also valuable and potent.
129 COMMON AREAS AT THE HEART**
No social group—whether a family, a work group, or a school group—can survive without constant informal contact among its members.
Arriving in a building, or leaving it, you need a room to pass through, both inside the building and outside it. This is the entrance room.
case, give this indoor circulation from room to room a feeling of great generosity, passing in a wide and ample loop around the house, with views of fires and great windows.
. . long, sterile corridors set the scene for everything bad about modern architecture.”
Place the main stair in a key position, central and vis-
142 SEQUENCE OF SITTING SPACES*
674
are not cultivated now, protect them: keep them for farms and parks and wilds.
Concentrate the bathing room, toilets, showers, and basins of the house in a single tiled area. Locate this bathing
145 BULK STORAGE
146 FLEXIBLE OFFICE SPACE
The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement.
Without communal eating, no human group can hold together.
WELCOMES YOU
Have you ever walked into a public building and been processed by the receptionist as if you were a package?
The process of waiting has inherent conflicts in it.
The larger meetings are, the less people get out of them. But institutions often put their money and attention into large meeting rooms and lecture halls.
Make at least 70 per cent of all meeting rooms really small—for 12 people or less. Locate them in the most public parts of the building, evenly scattered among the workplaces.
152 HALF-PRIVATE OFFICE
What is the right balance between privacy and connection in office work?
If a teenager’s place in the home does not reflect his need for a measure of independence, he will be locked in conflict with his family.
The big city is a magnet. It is terribly hard for small towns to stay alive and healthy in the face of central urban growth.
As the decentralization of work becomes more and more effective, the workshop in the home grows and grows in importance.
Internal staircases reduce the connection between upper stories and the life of the street to such an extent that they can do enormous social damage.
When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.
sunny place in a position where it is sheltered from the wind. A steady wind will prevent you from using the most beautiful place.
162 NORTH FACE
I conceive that land belongs for use to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless members are still unborn.
—a Nigerian tribesman
A street without windows is blind and frightening. And it is equally uncomfortable to be in a house which bounds a public street with no window at all on the street.
774
I Oy SIX-FOOT BALCONY**
Balconies and porches which are less than six feet deep are hardly ever used.
(*93)-
A house feels isolated from the nature around it, unless its floors are interleaved directly with the earth that is around the house.
When trees are planted or pruned without regard for the special places they can create, they are as good as dead for the people who need them.
A garden which grows true to its own laws is not a wilderness, yet not entirely artificial either.
Gardens and small public parks don’t give enough relief from noise unless they are well protected.
Form some kind of enclosure to protect the interior of a quiet garden from the sights and sounds of passing traffic. If it is a large garden or a park, the enclosure can
Trellised walks have their own special beauty. They are so unique, so different from other ways of shaping a path, that they are almost archetypal.
In a healthy town every family can grow vegetables for itself. The time is past to think of this as a hobby for enthusiasts; it is a fundamental part of human life.
Set aside one piece of land either in the private garden or on common land as a vegetable garden. About one-tenth of
178 COMPOST*
Our current ways of getting rid of sewage poison the great bodies of natural water, and rob the land around our buildings of the nutrients they need.
Arrange all toilets over a dry composting chamber. Lead
The homogeneous and undifferentiated character of modern cities kills all variety of life styles and arrests the growth of individual character.
organic garbage chutes to the same chamber, and use the combined products for fertilizer.
Everybody loves window seats, bay windows, and big windows with low sills and comfortable chairs drawn up to them.
I.
In every room where you spend any length of time during the day, make at least one window into a “window place.”
There is no substitute for fire.
I 82 EATING ATMOSPHERE
People cannot work effectively if their workspace is too enclosed or too exposed. A good workspace strikes the balance.
Cooking is uncomfortable if the kitchen counter is too short and also if it is too long.
I 86 COMMUNAL SLEEPING
Bedrooms make no sense.
A building in which the ceiling heights are all the same is virtually incapable of making people comfortable.
191 THE shape of
INDOOR SPACE**
Rooms without a view are prisons for the people who have to stay in them.
tend to be dead because they have too little action in them or where inside rooms are unusually dark.
(237)- • • •
196 CORNER DOORS*
Houses with smooth hard walls made of prefabricated panels, concrete, gypsum, steel, aluminum, or glass always stay impersonal and dead.
Open your mind to the possibility that the walls of your building can be thick, can occupy a substantial volume— even actual usable space—and need not be merely thin
membranes which have no depth. Decide where these thick walls ought to be.
The provision of storage and closets usually comes as an afterthought.
9*4
The artificial separation of houses and work creates intolerable rifts in people’s inner lives.
Dark gloomy kitchens are depressing. The kitchen needs the sun more than the other rooms, not less.
Cupboards that are too deep waste valuable space, and it always seems that what you want is behind something else.
Cover the walls with narrow shelves of varying depth but always shallow enough so that things can be placed on them one deep—nothing hiding behind anything else.
20 1 WAIST-HIGH SHELF
main rooms where people live and work. Make them long, 9 to 15 inches deep, with shelves or cupboard underneath. Interrupt the shelf for seats, windows, and doors.
Children love to be in tiny, cave-like places.
204 SECRET PLACE
Where can the need for concealment be expressed; the need to hide; the need for something precious to be lost, and then revealed ?
954
