Making & Creating
Its place in the web of nature
Entropy
The way it has been made
Follow the brush
v0.crap
The discoveries you make in the making
Expressing ideas helps to form them
Between the two spaces
The game discovering itself
The act of creation
No more than a sketch
I'm reminded of their faces
The patience of a craftsman
So that its destruction cannot begin
Some secret stirring in the world
Embracing the mess
Less, but better
Tracing paper into palimpsest
Blueprints
Blueprints lead to the making of things that are abstract, not always based on reality. Once something becomes abstract, it breeds disconnectedness — separation and the inability to connect with our surroundings. People buy houses from blueprints, but then don't like the actual house: "What on earth is this? I had no idea it was going to be like this...etc."
Freedomless freedom
The beauty of kasuri is received as a gift. As long as the laws of nature are upheld, the beauty of kasuri remains intact. This demonstrates the curious principle that the artisan is deprived of technical freedom but works in the freedom of nature.
In this sense, kasuri can be said to be created in a state of freedomless freedom.
From body to body
During the design process, the architect gradually internalizes the landscape, the entire context, and the functional requirements as well as his/her conceived building: movement, balance and scale are felt unconsciously through the body of the observer, the experience mirrors the bodily sensations of the maker. Consequently, architecture is communication from the body of the architect directly to the body of the person who encounters the work, perhaps centuries later.
Modularity
One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are “modular.” They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, identical houses, identical apartments in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can - and ought - to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth-century architecture.
Nature is never modular. Nature is full of almost similar units (waves, raindrops, blades of grass) - but though the units of one kind are all alike in their broad structure, no two are ever alike in detail.
The same broad features keep recurring over and over again. And yet, in their detailed appearance these broad features are never twice the same.
Holistic and prescriptive technologies
Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal-smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to finish. Using holistic technologies does not mean that people do not work together, but the way in which they work together leaves the individual worker in control of a particular process of creating or doing something.
The opposite is specialization by process; this I call prescriptive technology. Here, the making or doing of something is broken down into clearly identifiable steps. Each step is carried out by a separate worker, or group or workers, who need to be familiar only with the skills of performing that one step. This is what is normally meant by "division of labor".
Skill vs. knowledge
We should say that anybody has skill enough to build a good dry-stone wall but that few know how to design one, for the placing of the stones is a matter of knowledge and judgment, not of dexterity.
More real than living man
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom
Nor heed, nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man.The Idea
The design is thus the mental formulation, which Sayers calls “the Idea,” and it can be complete before any realization is begun. Mozart’s response to his father’s inquiry about an opera due to the duke in three weeks both stuns us and clarifies the concept.
For most human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation. Thus it is that writing, experimentation, “working out,” are essential disciplines for the theoretician.
Needs more love
He held the phone to his chest, looked at me, and simply said, “Needs more love.” He pushed the portfolio back across his desk, smiled warmly, and shooed me out of his office.
I still think about this advice, and what exactly he might have meant when he said my work needed more love. At the time, I took it to mean that I should improve my craft, but I’ve come to realize that he was speaking of something more fundamental and vital. My work was flat, because it was missing the spark that comes from creating something you believe in for someone you care about. This is the source of the highest craft, because an affection for the audience produces the care necessary to make the work well.
We have been given a standard
We have been given a standard to use. It is there, handy daily: things as they are, or Nature itself. This makes good sense, the only sense really—Nature should be our model.
Process vs. product
...more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression.
The categories of good
We need to turn to a fresh page. We can do so simply by asking—though the answers are anything but simple—what the process of making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves. Learning from things requires us to care about the qualities of cloth or the right way to poach fish; fine cloth or food cooked well enables us to imagine larger categories of 'good'.
The narrative of its making
Getting things in perfect shape can mean removing the traces, erasing the evidence, of a work in progress. Once this evidence is eliminated, the object appears pristine. Perfection of this cleaned-up sort is a static condition; the object does not hint at the narrative of its making.
A pattern of understandings
The clock has no finished design and it has been made without any careful drawings or mathematical calculations. The pieces are only made if I can hold their details in my head as I make them, without reference to any set of external measures. I do make rough sketches of some parts as a path to understanding them, but never use these during the making of the parts. The clock gradually grows through trial and error and lots of physical work with metal, but out of this has come a set of principles of making that were not clear to me before doing the clock. I have finally realized that what I am actually making is a pattern of understandings of the process of making rather than the things that are actually being made. — Richard Benson
What's the difference?
I well remember an occasion in 1962 when in a remote Iranian village I asked a blacksmith famous for his superior penknives to tell me the difference between iron and steel. “What’s the difference?” he replied. “What’s the difference between an oak tree and a willow — they have different natures and one must adapt to them.” He did not accept the suggestion that some material absorbed from the fire’s charcoal might have something to do with it, and he would not have understood a word of any lecture I could have given him on diffusion, crystal structure, and phase transformations; yet he could make a good knife and I could not.
Reproduction
The success of a mechanic’s, or a machine’s, reproduction of a thing depends on his, or its, sensitivity to whatever qualities are important, just as the skill of the designer lies in the proper appreciation of surface qualities in terms of structure and shape variation that come from the intended means of production.
Flurry and lapse
"The process in creating that kind of canvas was like—what?—10 percent action and 90 percent ass scratching. First you prepared yourself, cleaning up and arranging your palette and tools, sweeping the floors, and then finally, when you were ready, you faced the empty white expanse of white canvas and made your first stroke."
Oil
Irwin even disdained artificial products when polishing the wood frame, confining himself solely to the natural oils of his hands, his forehead, the sides of his nose, and so forth.
Perfection
It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.
The center of the way
The advice I’ve received from those who are close to the center of this timeless way of building is to start small. Like with a piece of tile, or a tea tray. And to then imagine along with Christopher Alexander:
What it would be like
to live in a mental world
where one’s reasons
for making something
functionally
and one’s reasons
for making something
a certain shape,
or in a certain
ornamental way
are coming
from precisely
the same place
in you
.Asking yourself some questions
All of the moves that we make in space will tend toward being in accord with this phenomenon of wholeness / beauty / life if we’re willing to bring the requisite level of care to the doing of our work.
Alexander says that each of us possess the means for accessing this order within ourselves and — here’s where he loses most other architects and many in the so-called sciences in academia — he contends that what we’re connecting with inside of ourselves is an objective criterion for what good means.
Applying the criterion is easy: you ask yourself some questions:
With any action you might take with regard to placement, and with regard to the situatedness of things in space you ask yourself: does this move increase wholeness / beauty / life?
Does the intervention you’re taking intensify the feelings of wholeness in you as the maker when you are performing the work?
How does your work on this one part enhance what’s going on among wholes at the system level?
A Search for Structure
A Book by Cyril Stanley SmithThe Timeless Way of Building
A Book by Christopher Alexander- Mind of no mind
- The quality without a name
- An objective matter
- Bitterness
- The most precious thing we ever have
The Design of Design
A Book by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.The Nature and Art of Workmanship
A Book by David PyeThe Craftsman
A Book by Richard SennettInventing on Principle
A Talk by Bret VictorIn Praise of Shadows
A Book by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki & Thomas J. Harper- Things that shine and glitter
- A naked bulb
- The Japanese toilet
- Empty dreams
- Most important of all are the pauses
A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams
A Book by Michael PollanThe Nature and Aesthetics of Design
A Book by David PyeEinmal Ist Keinmal
An Article by Dan KlynWrite the books you want to read
An Article by Austin KleonA few nights ago, I was looking at the moon and I thought, “I’d like to read a cultural history of the moon.” I googled, and there it was. My friend Matt said, “Ideally, that is exactly how one should find everything they read…and write.”
It’s really that simple. You find the books you want to read… and if you can’t find them, you write them.
Stop Drawing Dead Fish
A Talk by Bret VictorBackground textures of work
An Article by Lucy KeerOne thing I've been enjoying about working as a technical writer is that the minute-by-minute texture of the work feels right. Something about formatting text, faffing about with SVGs, trying to rewrite a sentence more clearly... it's just enjoyable in itself, and I feel at home with it.
...Working as a programmer was very much not like that. There's something in the rough vicinity of professional dev work that I do like, which I could probably label as 'iterative hobbyist tinkering with websites'. I like working on something with a strong visual component, and I like to be inside of a fast feedback loop, and I'm mostly interested in just somehow bodging through until it works. I'm not very interested in either the computer-sciencey side of programming — data structures, algorithms — or the software-engineerey side of making things run reliably at scale in a maintainable way. So maybe it's not surprising that the minute-by-minute texture of professional programming was just... kind of bad. Occasional fun bits when I got into something, but the background experience was not fun.
Say yes and never do it
A Quote by Mel BrooksYou have some wonderful stories of basically getting away with stuff at the studios.
I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes…You say yes, and you never do it.
That’s great advice for life.
It is. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.
Make Free Stuff
At its very core, the rules of the web are different than those of “real” markets. The idea that ownership fundamentally means that nobody else can have the same thing you have just doesn’t apply here. This is a world where anything can easily be copied a million times and distributed around the globe in a second. If that were possible in the real world, we’d call it Utopia.
…Resource Scarcity doesn’t make sense on the web. Artificially creating it here serves no other purpose than to charge money for things that could easily have been free for all. Why anyone would consider that better is beyond me.
Makers and Making
An Article by Alan JacobsThe [Silmarils] are good; their making was at least potentially innocent; but afterward arose a lust for owning and controlling that led to great tragedy… The aspect of humanity which the elves represent most fully – both for good and ill – is the creative one.”
And this is why “making” in and of itself is not the answer to our decadent moment. “Love of things, especially artificial things, could be seen as the besetting sin of modern civilisation, and in a way a new one, not quite Avarice and not quite Pride, but somehow attached to both” – and this is the Fëanor Temptation. It is in light of this temptation that I advocate repair, which is a mode of caring for what we have not made, but rather what we have inherited. We will not be saved by the making of artifacts — or from the repair of them, either; but the imperative of repair has these salutary effects: it reminds us of our debt to those who came before us and of the fragility of human constructs.
How I Build
An Article by Pirijan KetheswaranIn 2014, I wrote about my belief that design and engineering are best when tightly woven together. That’s truer now than ever.
If I’m feeling confident, I’ll jump right into my text editor…From here, more functionality is added and the code is tweaked until the feature looks and feels right to me. Whether it’s something simple like this, or prototyping a new interaction like multi-connect, there’s no substitute for designing with real code.
In rare cases when I have ideas or plans that I’m less confident about, it’s time to break out the paper, pens, and markers,
Because the Kinopio interface elements and aesthetic are full-grown, I almost never use traditional design software anymore.
Primitive design
An Article by Matt Webb- I want it to feel intuitive
- I want any new features to be platform features, not one-offs.
And the second of those is weird, right? It’s like sketching out a toy spaceship, having a list of rules about play, and attempting to simultaneously invent the shape of the Lego brick.
That’s platform design I suppose. Redesigning a newspaper will mean bouncing between comps and style guides, designing both. Inventing the iPhone user interface will have seen apps and app paradigm evolving together.
Weinberg's Law
A Quote by Gerald WeinbergIf builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
A Research Paper by Andy Matuschak & Michael NielsenConventional tech industry product practice will not produce deep enough subject matter insights to create transformative tools for thought.
...The aspiration is for any team serious about making transformative tools for thought. It’s to create a culture that combines the best parts of modern product practice with the best parts of the (very different) modern research culture. You need the insight-through-making loop to operate, whereby deep, original insights about the subject feed back to change and improve the system, and changes to the system result in deep, original insights about the subject.
When I was 22
A Quote by Nicholas Ashe BatemanWhat's really challenging for me working on something on an idea level for close to 8 years, it's really hard to not look at yourself. The decision-making process includes a conversation with myself: sometimes I'm going to side with 2015 version of Nick, sometimes the 2017 Nick isn't the right guy for this, etc... So much of the process of making the movie has changed the movie. I really just tried to make the movie I wanted to make when I was 22. When I serviced that, it worked really well.
Everything has been composed
A Quote by Wolfgang Amadeus MozartEverything has been composed, just not yet written down.
Game feel
An Article by Dave RupertHow do you make a game that’s fun? ...You have to focus on gameplay. In order for the final product to be fun and exciting, the core game play needs to be fun and exciting. The creator of Mario calls this 手応え (tegotae), which is often translated as “game feel”. To find this game feel, you need to build small prototypes around a single idea, play test them, and then follow the fun. Nintendo does this, indie game devs do this; this is the not-so-secret of the gaming industry.
The tools matter and the tools don't matter - Austin Kleon
An Article by Austin KleonThough you might not think it from the comic, I’m actually sympathetic to questions about tools and process, as I myself am a kind of process junky. I love hearing about how other writers work.
I’m also not someone who dismisses questions about tools with the line “the tools don’t matter.” In fact, I think tools matter so much that if you don’t talk about them correctly you can do some damage.
...What I love about John Gardner and Lynda Barry is that they believe that the tools you use do matter, but the point, for them, is finding the proper tools that get you to a certain way of working in which you can get your conscious, mechanical mind out of the way so that your dreaming can go on, undeterred.
You have to find the right tools to help your voice sing.
Designer, implementor, user, writer
A Fragment by Donald KnuthThus, I came to the conclusion that the designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. The separation of any of these four components would have hurt TeX significantly. If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.
Jacob Leech, Digital Craftsman
A Profile by Jacob LeechI'm Jacob — a designer and coder who creates things with computers (Fig 1) 'Digital Craftsman' best describes my skill set.
Digital projects thrive when designers understand how they will be built. Just as an architect understands how a structure is created, the same should be true on the web.
Designer + Developer Workflow
An Article by Dan MallThe way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy.
The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this:
“Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.”
Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us?
The saddest designer
An Essay by Chia AmisolaI am tired of the premise that creation means productivity––especially in the laborious sense...Creation has become mangled with labor in a world that demands man to monetize all of their hobbies and pursuits. In return, it seems empty, almost sad, really––to be the designer spending weekends again on the screen.
To tell you what I like to do in the weekends, I like to do the sad thing...The ‘good’ people tell you to detach your life from your workspace, but this summer, I think I’ve just realized how much I adore what I have the luxury of working on everyday.
In the weekend, I make. I make not because it’s the only thing I have ever known, but because it’s the most certain way forward.
Enjoying the garden together
A Quote by Brian EnoAnd essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life.
What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.
Two types of work
An Article by Jorge ArangoThere are two types of work: growth work and maintenance work.
Growth work involves making new things. It can be something big or small. In either case, growth work often follows a loose process.
Maintenance work is different. Maintenance work involves caring for the resources and instruments that make growth work possible. This includes tools, but also body and mind.
Maintenance is ultimately in service to growth. But effective growth can’t happen without maintenance. As with so many things, the ideal is a healthy balance — and it doesn’t come without struggle.
1,000 True Fans
An Essay by Kevin KellyTo be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.
A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.
When we were all together in-person
A Quote“We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future,” said Deirdre O’Brien, senior vice president of retail and people, in a video recording viewed by The Verge. “If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.”
Poioumenon
A DefinitionA specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation (sometimes the creation of the story itself).
How am I doing, wonder?
A Quote by Louis KahnForm comes from wonder. Wonder stems from our 'in touchness' with how we were made. One senses that nature records the process of what it makes, so that in what it makes there is also the records of how it was made. In touch with this record we are in wonder. This wonder gives rise to knowledge. But knowledge is related to other knowledge and this relation gives a sense of order, a sense of how they inter-relate in a harmony that makes all things exist. From knowledge to sense of order we then wink at wonder and say How am I doing, wonder?
The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy)
An Article by Nicholas ZakasWe do say “no” very quickly, not just to designs, but to everything. That led me into thinking about the psychology of software engineers and what makes us the way we are.
Are We Really Engineers?
An Essay by Hillel WayneWhat the prototype tells you
A Fragment by Matt WebbAs soon as I make something, I think of the 100 things I want to have next. That’s why prototyping is good. You don’t need to have much imagination, you just listen to what the prototype tells you.
A Pattern Language
- Its place in the web of nature
- 9. Scattered Work
- 21. Four-Story Limit
- 51. Green Streets
- 53. Main Gateways
Its place in the web of nature
This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.
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.
21. Four-Story Limit
Problem
There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy.
Solution
In any urban area, no matter how dense, keep the majority of buildings four stories high or less. It is possible that certain buildings should exceed this limit, but they should never be buildings for human habitation.
51. Green Streets
Problem
There is too much hot hard asphalt in the world. A local road, which only gives access to buildings, needs a few stones for the wheels of the cars; nothing more. Most of it can still be green.
Solution
On local roads, closed to through traffic, plant grass all over the road and set occasional paving stones into the grass to form a surface for the wheels of those cars that need access to the street. Make no distinction between street and sidewalk. Where houses open off the street, put in more paving stones or gravel to let cars turn onto their own land.
53. Main Gateways
Problem: Any part of town—large or small—which is to be identified by its inhabitants as a precinct of some kind, will be reinforced, helped in its distinctness, marked, and made more vivid, if the paths which enter it are marked by gateways where they cross the boundary.
Solution: Mark every boundary in the city which has important human meaning—the boundary of a building cluster, a neighborhood, a precinct—by great gateways where the major entering paths cross the boundary.
66. Holy Ground
Problem
What is a church or temple? It is a place of worship, spirit, contemplation, of course. But above all, from a human point of view, it is a gateway. A person comes into the world through the church. They leave it through the church. And, at each of the important thresholds of their life, they once again step through the church.
Solution
In each community and neighborhood, identify some sacred site as consecrated ground, and form a series of nested precincts, each marked by a gateway, each one progressively more private, and more sacred than the last, the innermost a final sanctum that can only be reached by passing through all of the outer ones.
70. Grave Sites
Problem
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.
Solution
Never build massive cemeteries. Instead, allocate pieces of land throughout the community as grave sites—corners of parks, sections of paths, gardens, beside gateways—where memorials to people who have died can be ritually placed with inscriptions and mementos which celebrate their live. Give each grave site an edge, a path, and a quiet corner where people can sit. By custom, this is hallowed ground.
80. Self-Governing Workshops and Offices
Problem
No one enjoys their work if they are a cog in a machine.
Solution
Encourage the formation of self-governing workshops and offices of 5 to 20 workers. Make each group autonomous—with respect to organization, style, relation to other groups, hiring and firing, work schedule. Where the work is complicated and requires larger organizations, several of these work groups can federate and cooperate to produce complex artifacts and services.
104. Site Repair
Problem
Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best.
Solution
On no account place buildings in the places which are more beautiful. In fact, do the opposite. Consider the site and its buildings as a single living ecosystem. Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, comfortable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.
106. Positive Outdoor Space
Problem
Outdoor spaces which are merely “left over” between buildings will, in general, not be used.
Solution
Make all 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.
109. Long Thin House
Problem
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.
Solution
In small buildings, don’t cluster all the rooms together around each other; instead string out the rooms one after another, so that distance between each room is as great as it can be. You can do this horizontally—so that the plan becomes a thin, long rectangle; or you can do it vertically—so that the building becomes a tall narrow tower. In either case, the building can be surprisingly narrow and still work—8, 10, and 12 feet are all quite possible.
112. Entrance Transition
Problem: 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.
Solution: Make a transition space between the street and the front door. Bring the path which connects street and entrance through this transition space, and mark it with a change of light, a change of sound, a change of direction, a change of surface, a change of level, perhaps by gateways which make a change of enclosure, and above all with a change of view.
126. Something Roughly in the Middle
Problem
A public space without a middle is quite likely to stay empty.
Solution
Between the natural paths which cross a public square or courtyard or a piece of common land, choose something to stand roughly in the middle: a fountain, a tree, a statue, a clock-tower with seats, a windmill, a bandstand. Make it something which gives a strong and steady pulse to the square, drawing people in toward the center. Leave it exactly where it falls between the paths; resist the impulse to put it exactly in the middle.
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.
134. Zen View
If there is a beautiful view, don’t spoil it by building huge windows that gape incessantly at it. Instead, put the windows which look onto the view at places of transition—along paths, in hallways, in entry ways, on stairs, between rooms.
If the view window is correctly placed, people will see a glimpse of the distant view as they come up to the window or pass it: but the view is never visible from the places where people stay.
135. Tapestry of Light and Dark
Problem
In a building with uniform light level, there are few “places” which function as effective settings for human events. This happens because, to a large extent, the places which make effective settings are defined by light.
Solution
Create alternating areas of light and dark throughout the building, in such a way that people naturally walk toward the light, whenever they are going to important places: seats, entrances, stairs, passages, places of special beauty, and make other areas darker, to increase the contrast.
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.
168. Connection to the Earth
Problem
A house feels isolated from the nature around it, unless its floors are interleaved directly with the earth that is around the house.
Solution
Connect the building to the earth around it by building a series of paths and terraces and steps around the edge. Place them deliberately to make the boundary ambiguous—so that it is impossible to say exactly where the building stops and earth begins.
172. Garden Growing Wild
Problem
A garden which grows true to its own laws is not a wilderness, yet not entirely artificial either.
Solution
Grow grasses, mosses, bushes, flowers, and trees in a way which comes close to the way that they occur in nature: intermingled, without barriers between them, without bare earth, without formal flower beds, and with all the boundaries and edges made in rough stone and brick and wood which become a part of the natural growth.
179. Alcoves
Problem
No homogeneous room, of homogeneous height, can serve a group of people well. To give a group a chance to be together, as a group, a room must also give them the chance to be alone, in one’s and two’s in the same space.
Solution
Make small places at the edge of any common room, usually no more than 6 feet wide and 3 to 6 feet deep and possibly much smaller. These alcoves should be large enough for two people to sit, chat, or play and sometimes large enough to contain a desk or a table.
180. Window Place
Problem
Everybody loves window seats, bay windows, and big windows with low sills and comfortable chairs drawn up to them.
Solution
In every room where you spend any length of time during the day, make at least one window into a "window place".
190. Ceiling Height Variety
Problem
A building in which ceiling heights are all the same is virtually incapable of making people feel comfortable.
Solution
Vary the ceiling heights continuously throughout the building, especially between rooms which open into each other, so that the relative intimacy of different spaces can be felt. In particular, make ceilings high in rooms which are public or meant for large gatherings (10 to 12 feet), lower in rooms for smaller gatherings (7 to 9 feet), and very low in rooms for one or two people (6 to 7 feet).
197. Thick Walls
Problem
Houses with smooth hard walls made of prefabricated panels, concrete, gypsum, steel, aluminum, or glass always stay impersonal and dead.
Solution
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.
205. Structure Follows Social Spaces
Problem
No building ever feels right to the people in it unless the physical spaces (defined by columns, walls, and ceilings) are congruent with the social spaces (defined by activities and human groups).
Solution
A first principle of construction: on no account allow the engineering to dictate the building’s form. Place the load bearing elements—the columns and the walls and floors—according to the social space of the building; never modify the social spaces to conform to the engineering structure of the building.
207. Good Materials
Problem
There is a fundamental conflict in the nature of materials for building in industrial society.
Solution
Use only biodegradable, low-energy-consuming materials, which are easy to cut and modify on site. For bulk materials we suggest ultra-lightweight 40–60 lbs. concrete and earth-based materials like tamped earth, brick, and tile. For secondary materials, use wood planks, gypsum, plywood, cloth, chickenwire, paper, cardboard, particle board, corrugated iron, lime plasters, bamboo, rope, and tile.
239. Small Panes
Problem
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.
Solution
Divide each window into small panes. These panes can be very small indeed, and should hardly ever be more than a foot square. To get the exact size of the panes, divide the width and height of the window by the number of panes. Then each window will have different sized panes according to its height and width.
247. Paving With Cracks Between the Stones
Problem
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.
Solution
On paths and terraces, lay paving stones with a 1 inch crack between the stones, so that grass and mosses and small flowers can grow between the stones. Lay the stones directly into the earth, not into mortar, and, of course, use no cement or mortar in between the stones.
249. Ornament
Problem
All people have the instinct to decorate their surroundings.
Solution
Search around the building, and find those edges and transitions which need emphasis or extra binding energy. Corners, places where materials meet, door frames, windows, main entrances, the place where one wall meets another, the garden gate, a fence—all these are natural places which call out for ornament.
Now find simple themes and apply the elements of the theme over and over again to the edges and boundaries which you decide to mark. Make the ornaments work as seams along the boundaries and edges so that they knit the two sides together and make them one.
250. Warm Colors
Problem
The greens and grays of hospitals and office corridors are depressing and cold. Natural wood, sunlight, bright colors are warm. In some way, the warmth of the colors in a room makes a great deal of difference between comfort and discomfort.
Solution
Choose surface colors which, together with the color of the natural light, reflected light, and artificial lights, create a warm light in the rooms.
251. Different Chairs
Problem
People are different sizes; they sit in different ways. And yet there is a tendency in modern times to make all chairs alike.
Solution
Never furnish any place with chairs that are identically the same. Choose a variety of different chairs, some big, some small, some softer than others, some rockers, some very old, some new, with arms, without arms, some wicker, some wood, some cloth.
252. Pools of Light
Problem
Uniform illumination—the sweetheart of the lighting engineers—serves no useful purpose whatsoever. In fact, it destroys the social nature of space, and makes people feel disoriented and unbounded.
Solution
Place the lights low, and apart, to form individual pools of light which encompass chairs and tables like bubbles to reinforce the social character of the spaces which they form. Remember that you can’t have pools of light without the darker places in between.
253. Things From Your Life
Problem
“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.
Solution
Do not be tricked into believing that modern decor must be slick or psychedelic, or “natural” or "modern art", or “plants” or anything else that current taste-makers claim. It is most beautiful when it comes straight from your life—the things you care for, the things that tell your story.