A Pattern Language
The phrase, A Pattern Language was first proposed by architect, Christopher Alexander in his book A Pattern Language (link to official online version). What is meant by ‘A pattern language’ is a network of multiple patterns, with links between related patterns. This post looks at the book, and it’s pattern language principles, and relates them to my workplace.
In my workplace and its surrounding areas I quite often feel that something very subtly is wrong. Going through this book, I’ve found 23 violations. Out of 250 book entries, I estimate 50% apply to the work place; 125, almost 20% violation. Some are violated greater then others. Some are impossible to fix. Some are council issues. Regardless of the cause, it’s nice to finally be able to put terms on what I’m actually feeling, but have lacked expression for. Below are the violations.
9.SCATTERED WORK
Problem
The artificial separation of houses and work creates intolerable rifts in people’s inner lives.
Solution
Use zoning laws, neighborhood planning, tax incentives, and any other means available to scatter workplaces throughout the city. Prohibit large concentrations of work, without family life around them. Prohibit large concentrations of family life, without workplaces around them.
16.WEB OF PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
Problem
The system of public transportation - the entire web of airplanes, helicopters, hovercraft, trains, boats, ferries, buses, taxis, mini-trains, carts, ski-lifts, moving sidewalks - can only work if all the parts are well connected. But they usually aren’t, because the different agencies in charge of various forms of public transportation have no incentives to connect to one another.
Solution
Treat interchanges as primary and transportation lines as secondary. Create incentives so that all the different modes of public transportation - airplanes, helicopters, ferries, boats, trains, rapid transit, buses, mini-buses, ski-lifts, escalators, travelators, elevators - plan their lines to connect the interchanges, with the hope that gradually many different lines, of many different types, will meet at every interchange.
Give the local communities control over their interchanges so that they can implement the pattern by giving contracts only to those transportation companies which are willing to serve these interchanges.
41.WORK COMMUNITY
Problem
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.
Solution
Build or encourage the formation of work communities - each one a collection of smaller clusters of workplaces which have their own courtyards, gathered round a larger common square or common courtyard which contains shops and lunch counters. The total work community should have no more than 10 or 20 workplaces in it.
82.OFFICE CONNECTIONS
Problem
If two parts of an office are too far apart, people will not move between them as often as they need to; and if they are more than one floor apart, there will be almost no communication between the two.
Solution
To establish distances between departments, calculate the number of trips per day made between each two departments; get the “nuisance distance” from the graph above; then make sure that the physical distance between the two departments is less than the nuisance distance. Reckon one flight of stairs as about 100 feet, and two flights of stairs as about 300 feet.
88.STREET CAFE
Problem
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.
Solution
Encourage local cafes to spring up in each neighborhood. Make them intimate places, with several rooms, open to a busy path, where people can sit with coffee or a drink and watch the world go by. Build the front of the cafe so that a set of tables stretch out of the cafe, right into the street.
94.SLEEPING IN PUBLIC
Problem
It is a mark of success in a park, public lobby or a porch, when people can come there and fall asleep.
Solution
Keep the environment filled with ample benches, comfortable places, corners to sit on the ground, or lie in comfort in the sand. Make these places relatively sheltered, protected from circulation, perhaps up a step, with seats and grass to slump down upon, read the paper and doze off.
97.SHIELDED PARKING
Problem
Large parking structures full of cars are inhuman and dead buildings - no one wants to see them or walk by them, At the same time, if you are driving, the entrance to a parking structure is essentially the main entrance to the building - and it needs to be visible.
Solution
Put all large parking lots, or parking garages, behind some kind of natural wall, so that the cars and parking structures cannot be seen from outside. The wall which surrounds the cars may be a building, connected houses, or housing hills, earth berms, or shops.
Make the entrance to the parking lot a natural gateway to the buildings which it serves, and place it so that you can easily see the main entrance to the building from the entrance to the parking.
98.CIRCULATION REALMS
Problem
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.
Solution
Lay out very large buildings and collections of small buildings so that one reaches a given point inside by passing through a sequence of realms, each marked by a gateway and becoming smaller and smaller, as one passes from each one, through a gateway, to the next. Choose the realms so that each one can be easily named, so that you can tell a person where to go, simply by telling him which realms to go through.
99.MAIN BUILDING
Problem
A complex of buildings with no center is like man without a head.
Solution
For any collection of buildings, decide which building in the group houses the most essential function - which building is the soul of the group, as a human institution. Then form this building as the main building, with a central position, higher roof.
Even if the building complex is so dense that it is a single building, build the main part of it higher and more prominent than the rest, so that the eye goes immediately to the part which is the most important.
105.NORTH FACING OUTDOORS
Problem
People use open space if it is sunny, and do not use it if it isn’t, in all but desert climates.
Solution
Always place buildings to the north of the outdoor spaces that go with them, and keep the outdoor spaces to the north. Never leave a deep band of shade between the building and the sunny part of the outdoors.
106.POSITIVE OUTDOOR SPACE
Problem
Outdoor spaces which are merely “left over” between buildings will, in general, not be used.
Solution
Make all the outdoor spaces which surround and lie between your buildings positive. Give each one some degree of enclosure; surround each space with wings of buildings, trees, hedges, fences, arcades, and trellised walks, until it becomes an entity with a positive quality and does not spill out indefinitely around corners.
107.WINGS OF LIGHT
Problem
Modern buildings are often shaped with no concern for natural light - they depend almost entirely on artificial light. But buildings which displace natural light as the major source of illumination are not fit places to spend the day.
Solution
Arrange each building so that it breaks down into wings which correspond, approximately, to the most important natural social groups within the building. Make each wing long and as narrow as you can - never more than 25 feet wide.
108.CONNECTED BUILDINGS
Problem
Isolated buildings are symptoms of a disconnected sick society.
Solution
Connect your building up, wherever possible, to the existing buildings round about. Do not keep set backs between buildings; instead, try to form new buildings as continuations of the older buildings.
121.PATH SHAPE
Problem
Streets should be for staying in, and not just for moving through, the way they are today.
Solution
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.
127.INTIMACY GRADIENT
Problem
Unless the spaces in a building are arranged in a sequence which corresponds to their degrees of privateness, the visits made by strangers, friends, guests, clients, family, will always be a little awkward.
Solution
Lay out the spaces of a building so that they create a sequence which begins with the entrance and the most public parts of the building, then leads into the slightly more private areas, and finally to the most private domains.
131.THE FLOW THROUGH ROOMS
Problem
The movement between rooms is as important as the rooms themselves; and its arrangement has as much effect on social interaction in the rooms, as the interiors of the rooms.
Solution
As far as possible, avoid the use of corridors and passages. Instead, use public rooms and common rooms as rooms for movement and for gathering. To do this, place the common rooms to form a chain, or loop, so that it becomes possible to walk from room to room - and so that private rooms open directly off these public rooms. In every 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.
132.SHORT PASSAGES
Problem
“… long sterile corridors set the scene for everything bad about modern architecture.”
Solution
Keep passages short. Make them as much like rooms as possible, with carpets or wood on the floor, furniture, bookshelves, beautiful windows. Make them generous in shape, and always give them plenty of light; the best corridors and passages of all are those which have windows along an entire wall.
146.FLEXIBLE OFFICE SPACE
Problem
Is it possible to create a kind of space which is specifically tuned to the needs of people working, and yet capable of an infinite number of various arrangements and combinations within it?
Solution
Lay out the office space as wings of open space, with free standing columns around their edges, so they define half private and common spaces opening into one another. Set down enough columns so that people can fill them in over the years, in many different ways - but always in a semi-permanent fashion.
If you happen to know the working group before you build the space, then make it more like a house, more closely tailored to their needs. In either case, create a variety of space throughout the office - comparable in variety to the different sizes and kinds of space in a large old house.
150.A PLACE TO WAIT
Problem
The process of waiting has inherent conflicts in it.
Solution
In places where people end up waiting (for a bus, for an appointment, for a plane), create a situation which makes the waiting positive. Fuse the waiting with some other activity - newspaper, coffee, pool tables, horseshoes; something which draws people in who are not simply waiting. And also the opposite: make a place which can draw a person waiting into a reverie; quiet; a positive silence.
159.LIGHT ON TWO SIDES OF EVERY ROOM
Problem
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.
Solution
Locate each room so that it has outdoor space outside it on at least two sides, and then place windows in these outdoor walls so that natural light falls into every room from more than one direction.
166.GALLERY SURROUND
Problem
If people cannot walk out from the building onto balconies and terraces which look toward the outdoor space around the building, then neither they themselves nor the people outside have any medium which helps them feel the building and the larger public world are intertwined.
Solution
Whenever possible, and at every story, build porches, galleries, arcades, balconies, niches, outdoor seats, awnings, trellised rooms, and the like at the edges of buildings - especially where they open off public spaces and streets, and connect them by doors, directly to the rooms inside.
182.EATING ATMOSPHERE
Problem
When people eat together, they may actually be together in spirit - or they may be far apart. Some rooms invite people to eat leisurely and comfortably and feel together, while others force people to eat as quickly as possible so they can go somewhere else to relax.
Solution
Put a heavy table in the center of the eating space - large enough for the whole family or the group of people using it. Put a light over the table to create a pool of light over the group, and enclose the space with walls or with contrasting darkness. Make the space large enough so the chairs can be pulled back comfortably, and provide shelves and counters close at hand for things related to the meal.
183.WORKSPACE ENCLOSURE
Problem
People cannot work effectively if their workspace is too enclosed or too exposed. A good workspace strikes the balance.
Solution
Give each workspace an area of at least 60 square feet. Build walls and windows round each workspace to such an extent that their total area (counting windows at one-half) is 50 to 75 per cent of the full enclosure that would be there if all four walls around the 60 square feet were solid. Let the front of the workspace be open for at least s feet in front, always into a larger space. Place the desk so that the person working at it has a view out, either to the front or to the side. If there are other people working nearby, arrange the enclosure so that the person has a sense of connection to two or three others; but never put more than eight workspaces within view or earshot of one another.
This is by no means a criticism of the company I work for, or their building selection. It is instead, me discovering the world of design and applying it’s principles in a place where I spend a lot of my time.
EDIT: There’s some dobuts about the validity of the non-verbal study cited above.
SOME of them are Council issues, some are architect/building desinger.
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