Work & Labor
Begin with your work
Your life adds up
So much knowledge not being applied
To form an integrated human milieu
Baumol’s cost disease
The aspiration for quality
Intrapreneurship
On Criticism
From the desk of: Austin Kleon
Violence to the very structure of our being
Shortlist of interesting spaces
The right kind of building can do great things for a culture
Values vs. strengths
To improve the way you perform
Parkinson's Law
When you're interested in what you're working on
The dual ladder
Dad's study
All-use environments
Until the nineteenth century, virtually all cities were “all use” environments. Craft-scale production was typically carried out in a workshop below the home of the craftsperson, which often also served as the site of exchange.
Roman empire military
Rome military diagram.
Most company structures are based on the Roman empire military. CEO Caesar says he wants something, and the lieutenant managers below him on the org chart break it down into smaller tasks for the soldiers to accomplish.
On a development team, programmers are the soldiers of these shitty new armies. They open their Jira issues and add whatever feature it says to add, or fix what it says to fix. If I can save time by adding another dependency, or skip a meeting by implementing a mockup exactly as designed, why should I care?
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.
Men are not an abstraction
Placing work and commerce near residences, but buffering it off, in the tradition set by Garden City theory, is fully as matriarchal an arrangement as if the residences were miles away from work and from men. Men are not an abstraction. They are either around, in person, or they are not. Working places and commerce must be mingled right in with residences if men, like the men who work on or near Hudson Street, for example, are to be around city children in daily life—men who are part of normal daily life, as opposed to men who put in an occasional playground appearance while they substitute for women or imitate the occupations of women.
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.
Manual labor
Artisanal craftsmen have proved particularly promising subjects for job retraining. The discipline required for good manual labor serves them, as does their focus on concrete problems rather than on the flux of process-based, human relations work. For this very reason it has proved easier to train a plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers don't often see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor.
A dry, husky business
Despite the furor over their aggressive unmanliness, clerks, and with them the office, crept silently into the world of nineteenth-century America. Moral philosophers were mostly preoccupied with the clang of industrialization and its satanic mills, and most regarded as negligible the barely audible scratch of pens across ledgers and receipts that characterized the new world of clerical work. It was only a “dry, husky business,” as the narrator of Bartleby had it.
Each fascinating crisis
The problems themselves, though they once obsessed you, and kept you working late night after night, and made you talk in your sleep, turn out to have been hollow: two weeks after your last day they already have contracted into inert pellets one-fiftieth of their former size; you find yourself unable to recreate the sense of what was really at stake, for it seems to have been the Hungarian 5/2 rhythm of the lived workweek alone that kept each fascinating crisis inflated to its full interdepartmental complexity.
An extremely closed structure
Nearly all housing in Japan today consists of exclusively residential units for salaried workers and their nuclear families. Such residences have, by definition, no reason to interface with their surroundings.
Salaried workers commute to workplaces outside, and often a considerable distance from, their homes. Residences built for these workers do not contain a place of livelihood—in the broader sense, a place for exchange. This "residence-only housing" is only a place for the nuclear family to eat and sleep, with no occasions for interaction with the outside world, and no need to foster a sense of belonging to the community at large. Thus the only organizational principle is the maintenance of privacy. Both in external appearance and in lifestyle, it is an extremely closed structure.
The cubicle
The cubicle had the effect of putting people close enough to each other to create serious social annoyances, but dividing them so that they didn’t actually feel that they were working together. It had all the hazards of privacy and sociability but the benefits of neither. It got so bad that nobody wanted them taken away; even those three walls offered some kind of psychological home, a place one could call one’s own. All these factors could deepen the frenzied solitude of an office worker.
Taylorism in software
Interestingly, just as software people were talking about how we need to kind of follow this very Taylorist notion as the future of software development, the manufacturing world was moving away from it. The whole notion of what was going on in a lot in manufacturing places was the people doing the work need to have much more of a say in this because they actually see what's happening.
Freedom
Thus freedom brings not stagnation, but rather the danger of overwork.
The gathering darkness of a Sunday evening
Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
Long-term
"Apart from his own design work, this is the second greatest achievement of Dieter Rams: establishing a design department within a company, which succeeded for decades in preserving its own individual approach and rigorously advancing it, without really being influenced by changing market interests." — Klaus Kemp
He is right; it was a remarkable feat. It takes a considerable degree of doggedness and conviction to follow the ungratifying and difficult path of insisting on a consistently long-term view in a corporate world that is constantly shifting and full of short-term decisions.
Shorten the wings
The labile tastes of certain decision-makers in a company are often a great burden for designers. Too many feel themselves qualified to pass judgment. And how insensitive, how superficial these judgments often are.
Taste, believes Rams, is something that needs to be trained, since the aesthetic decisions at this level in product design are intrinsically bound to the entire form and function of the object. It would be unimaginable, for example, that the management of an aerospace company would ask the designers of a new plane to shorten the wings because they think it would make it look prettier.
Selling your own ignorance
When you sell your expertise - and what I mean by sell is to move ahead in a corporation, or sell an idea to a publisher, or sell an ability to a client - by definition, you’re selling from a limited repertoire.
However, when you sell your ignorance to move ahead, when you sell your desire to create and explore and navigate paths to knowledge, when you sell your curiosity - you sell from a bucket with an infinitely deep bottom that represents an unlimited repertoire. And, you sell in a way that’s not intimidating, in a way that joins the explanation to the fascination that comes with understanding.
Defining craftsmanship
By craftsmanship I refer to a style of work and a way of life having the following characteristics:
- In craftsmanship there is no ulterior motive for work other than the product being made and the processes of its creation.
- In craftsmanship, plan and performance are unified, and in both, the craftsman is master of the activity and of himself in the process. The craftsman is free to begin his working according to his own plan, and during the work he is free to modify its shape and the manner of its shaping.
- Since he works freely, the craftsman is able to learn from his work, to develop as well as use his capacities.
- The craftsman’s way of livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living. For him there is no split of work and play, of work and culture. His work is the mainspring of his life; he does not flee from work into a separate sphere of leisure; he brings to his non-working hours the values and qualities developed and employed in his working time.
The star system
The distributor is ascendant over many producers who become the rank-and-file workmen of the commercially established cultural apparatus.
The star system of American culture – along with the commercial hacks – tend to kill off the chance of the cultural workman to be a worthy craftsman.
Office survival
“The caveman was undoubtedly very pleased to find a good cave but he also undoubtedly positioned himself at the entrance looking out. Protect your back but know what is going on outside is a very good rule for survival. It is also a good survival rule for life in offices.” — Robert Propst, The Office: A Facility Based on Chicago
Instruments of cooperation
When work isn't shared, the instruments of cooperation – listening, taking note, adjusting – atrophy like muscles that are no longer in use.
An unfolding network of associations
We know strategy is an unfolding network of associations:
The evidence from the case suggests that the concept of strategy can be reappraised. From strategy as a static set of choices made at a specific point in time to strategy as an unfolding network of people, shared experiences and artifacts that is constantly being remade.
And we know that only 30% of employees can articulate a company’s strategy.
And I believe in the hyper-connected age we live in both of these things are becoming more true - that strategy is increasingly “in motion” and that most organizations are realizing their OODA loops are too slow for the modern world.
This causes the articulation of strategy to stall and get left behind - how do you articulate something in motion? It’s easier to write strategy down when it doesn’t change right?
As a result - there’s a widening gap between the perspective on strategy that the executive team has and the received ideas of the company’s direction that teams and employees have.
Displacement
...the man fitted to his job like a man to the exact pocket of space he displaces.
Strings and clots
The walls' texture was mostly smooth, but if you really focused your attention there were also a lot of the little embedded strings and clots which painters tend to leave when they're paid by the job and not the hour and thus have no motivation to hurry. If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on.
The Real World of Technology
A Lecture by Ursula M. FranklinManaging Oneself
A Book by Peter F. DruckerCubed
A Book by Nikil SavalI've designed it that way
A Quote by Townes Van ZandtI don't envision a very long life for myself.
Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?
I've designed it that way.What Le Corbusier got right about office space
An Article by Tim HarfordIn the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.
Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.
...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.
Background 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.
I don’t believe in Zoom fatigue
An Article by Matt WebbIt’s not Zoom fatigue, it’s Zoom whiplash.
It’s a hunch. I can’t prove this.
The trick to get around this is to move smoothly up and down the gradient of social interaction intensity, never dropping below a basic floor of presence: the sense that there are other people in the same place as you.
Instead of having two modes, “in a call” and “on my own,” we need to think about multiple ways of being together which, minimally, could be:
- In a video call
- In an anteroom to a video call, hearing the sound of others
- In a doc together
- On my desktop but with the sense that colleagues are around
And the job of the designer is to ensure that their software ensures the existence of these different contexts, instead of having the binary on-a-call/not-on-a-call, and to design the transitions between them.
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.
Thanks Doc
An Article by Robin Rendle & Craig ModA couple of months back, Craig mentioned in a video that he has a doc filled to the brim with snippets of text—nice words, compliments, and thanks that had been sent his way for his work. Whenever someone says something nice he just copy/pastes it into that doc.
It sounds silly at first and perhaps a little egotistical. Behold! I have a document that proves how great I am!
But I started doing it just to see what it feels like and…hey…actually? It’s so great! When I’m feeling low (often) or whenever the world feels unstable (extremely often) it’s so very nice to return to a few kind words about my work. It reminds me just how much these words of praise mean, it reminds me that I ought to pass that favor along.
Efficiency is the Enemy
An ArticleMany of us have come to expect work to involve no slack time because of the negative way we perceive it. In a world of manic efficiency, slack often comes across as laziness or a lack of initiative. Without slack time, however, we know we won’t be able to get through new tasks straight away, and if someone insists we should, we have to drop whatever we were previously doing. One way or another, something gets delayed. The increase in busyness may well be futile.
Spreadsheet Portfolios for UX Designers
An Article by Erica HeinzThe “case study?” column was the whole point of the spreadsheet — identifying which projects I still needed to write up for my portfolio — but at this point I looked at the sheet, and thought “This is honestly a better overview of the work I do than any ‘portfolio’ I’ve seen”.
So I tweeted a screenshot, joking/trolling that it WAS my portfolio (I didn’t include any winks or notes that I was still planning a “real” portfolio), but people didn’t respond with the lulz I expected — they got the idea, or took it at face value and said they were going to do their portfolio this way too!
My Anti-Resumé
An Article by Monica ByrneA couple years ago I was having dinner with a playwright, Bekah Brunstetter, and her director David Shmidt Chapman. We talked about how rejection is just part of the landscape for all beginning artists, no matter how talented or hardworking they might be or how successful they might appear. David said he’d love to publish his “anti-résumé” someday—a list of all the things he didn’t get.
The Third Way
An Article by Kevin KellyBut all the civilized cities of the world were also filled with third places that people loved. Not quite private, not quite public, these third places were intimate but open to anyone. Like settling down at a table at a cafe. It felt like your space, but you were not the landlord. They were public, open spaces that you could “own” for a while.
…We need a new third category of work — something between “employee” and “not an employee”—that encompasses digital gig laborers. AirBnB is neither a hotel, nor a private resident. It is a third thing, and we need to create a new category to deal with it…This is the era of the third way.
Individuals matter
An Article by Dan LuuOne of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't matter.
Individuals matter.
Deadlines are bullshit
An ArticleIn software development deadlines are a necessary evil. It is important to understand when they are necessary, and it is important to understand why they are evil.
- External vs. internal deadlines
- Why are internal deadlines evil?
- Engineers who love their work
When their salary depends on not understanding it
A Quote by Upton SinclairIt is difficult to get people to understand something, when their salary depends on not understanding it.
Touch the keys
An Article by Rach SmithIn his course Being Productive: Simple Steps to Calm Focus, Kourosh Dini emphasises the importance of taking a moment to “be with” the work every day (or however frequently you need to tackle a project). “Being with” your work is to be fully present and intentional about that activity and doing nothing else.
This idea was inspired by Dini’s piano teacher, who encouraged him to sit at his piano and touch the keys every day. Even on the days that he felt he had no time or inclination to practice. Sometimes touching the keys would lead to a good practice session, even when he didn’t feel like it would before he actually gave it a go.
Just like Dini, I find that once I give the task my full attention and be present, the actual doing of it turns out to be much easier and more enjoyable than my mind had been expecting. As usual, the resistance to getting started is far more uncomfortable than actually doing the thing.
I haven't experienced imposter syndrome, and maybe you haven't either
An Article by Rach SmithI have never felt like an “imposter”.
I have always deserved to be here, I’ve worked hard.
I don’t suffer from a “syndrome”.
Identifying the gaps in my knowledge and being aware of what I don’t know is part of my vocation.In recent years it’s become trendy to discuss how we all apparently suffer from this imposter syndrome - an inability to internalize one's accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. I take two issues with this:
- it minimizes the impact that this experience has on people that really do suffer from it.
- we’re labelling what should be considered positive personality traits - humility, an acceptance that we can’t be right all the time, a desire to know more, as a “syndrome” that we need to “deal with”, “get over” or “get past”.
Learning About Work Ethic From My High School Driving Instructor
An Essay by James SomersShould we really demand that the guy who checks ticket stubs at the movie theater hones his craft?
Well, yes. No job is too low to not warrant care, because no job exists in isolation. Carelessness ripples. It adds friction to the working of the world. To phone it in or run out the clock, regardless of how alone and impotent you might feel in your work, is to commit an especially tragic—for being so preventable—brand of public sin.
Bob [the driving instructor] oozes concern; he wants to infect the state of New Jersey with good driving habits. He respects his public role, the fact that the minute he's done with these kids they head straight for their parents' car keys and out onto the roads we share. When I asked him what he likes to do outside of work, he laughed: "This is my life."
His reward is the pleasure of depth itself.
If we didn’t live to work
A Fragment by Charlie WarzelWhen you talk to people who reject the modern notion of a career, many of them say the same thing: They crave more balance, less precarity, and better pay. They also, crucially, want to work.
What’s profound about the career rejectionists is that their guiding questions are simple. What if work didn’t make you feel awful? What would life be like if we didn’t live to work? What do workers and employers actually owe each other? What if we structured our work lives around a different idea of success?
136 things every web developer should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling
An Article by Baldur Bjarnason- The best way to improve software UX is regular direct observation, by everybody on the team, of the work done.
- Have some personality.
- Minimalism is garbage.
- Metaphors are fantastic.
- Naming things is fantastic.
- Try to write HTML that would make sense and be usable without the CSS.
- The buyer is quite often wrong. That fact never changes their mind.
- Working on a functioning app’s codebase does more to increase its quality than adding features.
- A good manager will debate you, and that’s awesome.
- The term ‘project’ is a poor metaphor for the horticultural activity that is software development.
The brag document
An Article by Julia EvansIt’s frustrating to have done something really important and later realize that you didn’t get rewarded for it just because the people making the decision didn’t understand or remember what you did.
The tactic is pretty simple! Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season!
Why We Build the Wall
A Song by Anaïs MitchellWhat do we have that they should want?
We have a wall to work upon
We have work and they have none
And our work is never done
And the war is never won
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us freeFrom the desk of
A Blog by Kate DonnellyA site dedicated solely to canvas of the Desk.
A Desk is where we work. Symbolic. Physical. Present. A second and third home. A Desk is a platform. A hearth. Roots are planted. It’s a place, a sanctuary, where hours upon hours pass.
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.
Contrafreeloading
A DefinitionContrafreeloading is an observed behavior in which an organism, when offered a choice between provided food or food that requires effort to obtain, prefers the food that requires effort.
In defense of disorder: on career, creativity, and professionalism
An Essay by Chia AmisolaProfessionalism is a lie, build what you love, explore everything. In today’s age of creation, anyone who attempts to tell you otherwise is lying. You’ll end up seeking what you traded for the rest of your life.
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.
At least everything was important
A Quote by Mads MikkelsenMy approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.
Apprenticeship: An Internship Replacement
An Essay by Ivana McConnellUniversities are often too large, dulling the student-educator relationship. Internships are often transitory and involve large volumes of work without context or learning: building web pages or presentations from pre-built components to meet a deadline, for example. It’s work that people need to do, but it doesn’t require learning or understanding the client or the project. Thankfully, there is a middle ground that we seem to have forgotten about in tech: the apprenticeship.
Senior craftsperson
A Fragment by Wilson MinerThe thing that you’re talking about though, which I’ve never seen a mature company really have a sustainable space for, is the “senior craftsperson.” They’re not pivoting at some point in their career to saying “I’m going to take what I know and leverage it through other people.” They’re saying “I want to get better infinitely at the thing that I do.” I believe that that’s possible.
You see it more in pure-art kind of careers. Like “I’m an illustrator” or “I’m a concept artist” or something, and there’s a need for that person being really fucking good at that one thing, and continuing to do that one thing. I think a lot of people can intuitively understand why that would be really satisfying for someone as a career path.
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.”
Building Momentum
An Article by Dan MallFight the Waterfall
Start all of the pieces of work a little bit earlier. The key to starting work early is not succumbing to the pressure of having to finish the work. Don’t worry about finishing. If you’re a developer, you can start doing things while your design or information architect are working because a lot of your work actually isn’t dependent on their work. Some of it is, so you probably won’t be able to finish, but that shouldn’t stop you from starting.
Share Work-in-Progress Early and Often
When you share work-in-progress, share it with the caveat that no feedback is needed at this point. You’re simply sharing it to let people know where you are. For example, if you have to make 12 wireframes, share it when you finish 2 or 3. Rather than spending a whole week to drop 12 wireframes, share 2 – 3 wireframes every 2 days. The more often you do this, you start to build rhythm, and rhythm builds momentum.
Life as Protest
A Fragment by Craig ModI’ve written this before but I constantly need to remind myself of it, so, once again: A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit. That to be committed to this work or life of rigor (be it rigor focused on “art” or, as they say in Japanese, sakuhin, or family or athleticism or whatever), and to share it with the world is to opt-out of being paralyzed by idiocy, and help others who may be paralyzed find a path back to whatever fecundity of life it is that they deserve.
What doesn't seem like work?
An Essay by Paul GrahamThe stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do.
So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?
How to do what you love
An Essay by Paul GrahamQuestions to ask on a new job search
An Article by Sally LaitThe role and expectations
- What does this job entail?
- What's driving the hire?
- What are the biggest challenges?
- What scope is there to do x, y, z?
- How/when/why would you consider hiring me to be successful?
- What does progression from here look like?
- What's the biggest mistake I could make?
The wider business
- Can you tell me a bit about the company?
- What about the culture?
- How does diversity, equity, and inclusion play into this?
- What's the most exciting thing on the company horizon?
- What's been the impact of COVID-19 on company finances/strategy?
- What are the best and worst things about working here?
Day to day
- What's the size/structure of the team I'd be around/have reporting to me?
- Which other people would I work most closely with?
- What technologies/tools would I work with?
- What could I do that would make your life easier?
The practical bits
- What salary are you offering for this role?
- Additional package/benefits
- How do you approach distributed working, and is there scope for this?
- What timescales are you hoping for?
- Holiday
- Job title
Give yourself an extra shot: Is there anything I've said today that makes you hesitate?
Dolor
A Poem by Theodore RoethkeI have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.
Difficult to work with
A Tweet"Someone recently told me that 'difficult to work with' often really means 'difficult to take advantage of' in creative industries, and I haven’t stopped thinking about that for weeks" — @AdalynGrace_
The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
- Two generating systems
- Two types of building production
- System A
- System B
- This has harmed modern society greatly
Two generating systems
Imagine a town of type "A" — a neighborhood, if you like, and allow yourself to consider that it has the quality of birds, moss-grown stones, waves breaking on a small shore, pools in which crabs and shells present themselves. Because of the depth and scope of its structure, this world is almost infinite in its richness.
Compare this imagined town with a more usual neighborhood of type "B", typical of modern property development, where there is a stale and ugly air of repetition. Even when variation is attempted, this variation does not flow from the reality of living. Rather it is manufactured variety — an attempt to create something interesting. But what we feel instead is something flat, without excitement, without the urgent joy of life.
These two kinds of places, then, A and B, are typically generated in two different ways. We may therefore call these two different generating systems A and B.
Two types of building production
There are, loosely speaking, two types of building production. Type A is a type of production which relies on feedback and correction, so that every step allows the elements to be perfected while they are being made. This is not unlike the way a good cook tastes a soup while cooking it, checking it, modifying it, until it tastes just right. Type B is a type of production that is organized by a fixed system of rigidly prefabricated elements, and the sequence of assembly is much more rigidly preprogrammed. This type became commonplace in the 20th century, and is still widely used.
System A
System A is concerned with the well-being of the land, its integrity, the well-being of the people and plants and animals who inhabit the land. This has very much to do with the integral nature of plants, animals, and water resources, and with the tailoring of each part of every part to its immediate context, with the result that the larger wholes, also, become harmonious and integral in their nature.
System B
System B is concerned with efficiency, with money, with power and control. Although these qualities are less attractive, and less noble than the concerns of System A, they are nevertheless important. They cannot be ignored. If we are traveling in an airplane, or a high-speed train, we shall often be very glad that this system is constructed under the guidance of some version of system B.
This has harmed modern society greatly
System A places emphasis on subtleties, finesse, on the structure of adaptation that makes each tiny part fit into the larger context. System B places emphasis on more gross aspects of size, speed, profit, efficiency, and numerical productivity.
However, during the last hundred and fifty years, because of choices that nations and states have made in modern times, System B has become the dominant production system for the environment (for land and towns and regions), largely to the exclusion of System A. This has harmed modern society greatly.
Arcade
Here is an interior street on the Eishin campus, with an arcade opening from the back of the classroom buildings. The arcade steps up as the street goes along the slope. Because the natural contours of the land are preserved, the arcade jumps up, in small increments, as it goes along. Steps are inserted where needed; and in plan, too, the arcade follows a gentle series of curves and bends, following the natural character of the land.
This aspect of a street is not usually present in large construction projects, which typically destroy the natural character of the land, and tend to start with a blank "page" that has been created by perfect grading and flattening.
Transmitted through drawings
Architecture is now only transmitted through drawings. The typical architect does not personally know how to make anything — not buildings, not windows, not floors or ceilings. He or she draws drawings. Some other organization then produces buildings from these drawings. We are, by now, so deeply enmeshed in this way of thinking, that it doesn't sound like idiocy.
The life-giving continuum
In System A, creation and production are organic in character, and are governed by human judgments that emanate from the underlying wholeness of situations, conditions, and surroundings.
In System B, the production process is thought of as mechanical. What matters are regulations, procedures, categories, money, efficiency, and profit: all the machinery designed to make society run smoothly, as if society was working as a great machine. The production process is rarely context-sensitive. Wholeness is left out.
Identifying these two categories helps us sharpen and clarify the range of differences among ways of creating the environment that exist in different societies. And the two categories serve to identify a dimension of great importance: the dimension that runs from more life-giving to less life-giving.
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."
Hopes and dreams
The very first thing we did was spend two weeks just talking to different teachers and students, to get a feeling for their hopes and dreams. These talks were one-on-one and often lasted about an hour, for any one interview, during which we asked questions, talked, probed, explored dreams of an ideal campus, and tried to understand each person's deepest visions as a teacher, or as a student. We asked people about their longings, and their practical needs. We asked them to close their eyes and imagine themselves walking about in the most wonderful campus they could imagine.
Mixed use
Pattern 5.5 – Every sports field is always attached to some building which has nothing to do with the particular sports function. Thus, for instance, the tennis courts may be next to the art studio, and placed so that people entering the art studio are just at that place where the tennis court is most enjoyable to watch.
Secret garden
Pattern 7.7 – There is also one garden, so secret, that it does not appear on any map. The importance of the pattern is that it must never be publicly announced, and must not be in site plan. Except for a few, nobody should be able to find it.
In the mind's eye
In System A, it is always the wholeness of the place that matters. To intensify the wholeness of any place — whether it consists of existing buildings in a town, or of virgin land that is largely unbuilt — proposed construction and buildings must be decided, and that means "felt" and thought through on the site itself. It is really not possible to do it any other way, since the relationships which exist between the buildings and the world around them are complex and subtle.
On a drawing or a plan, one simply does not see enough. The drawn plan does not give enough information. So trying to make decisions by drawing on a plan is doomed to failure. To produce a plan that has reality, and to bring the actual place itself to life, decisions are made gradually, on the site itself, under circumstances where one visualizes the situation as the whole it really is. Step by step, this brings building positions to life in the mind's eye — and so, in imagination, one conceives the buildings literally, in their full size and volume as they are really going to be.
Simulacra and simulation
The situation of contemporary construction is more likely to be that a building still gets its character first as an image, drawn on paper, by an architect's fantasy, a simulacrum which is then physically built in cheap and flimsy studs and sheetrock, concrete panels, cardboard — or in whatever conventional system of construction the contractor has on hand.
Sadly, this is where the dull, lifeless, and stereotyped character of buildings in the 20th century mainly came from. It is also, at the same time, where the wild and fantastic egotistical shapes of the present era come from. They are conceived and carried out as images, or part-images, not as built, solid, made works. These papery, System B things are not conceived and made for the sake of their material reality. The feeling one gets in the presence of these buildings does not fill the onlooker with the beauty or the presence of the material substance.
Power law
Buildings which most profoundly communicate subtle harmony are composed of a complex mixture of materials, with the overall amounts of different materials jumping in a calibrated cascade — typically according to a power law. The relative proportions — the statistical distribution of materials by quantity of total visible area — is critical. It is this specific distribution, not just the mixture, which creates depth of feeling.
Elements of Eishin
Each of the elements in the following list were essential to the creation of every space and every building at Eishin:
- The way each building relates to its surroundings, as well as the ground on which it stands.
- The geometry directed by its position in the whole and its function.
- Working with people who will inhabit the spaces.
- The immensely detailed use of models and experiments.
- The search for beautiful materials and ways of making the buildings that should stand there.
- The careful use of money in a manner that reflects the values of the endeavor.
- Creation of positive space, at every turn, and every scale.
- Placing materials between other nearby materials that are similar, and wedging harmonious materials in-between.
- Interlocking spatial links forming a two-dimensional sheet of courtyards, buildings, and openings.
Our responsibility
As makers of buildings, we architects must start now,
with a fundamental change of direction.
For the last hundred years or so, we have understood
building to be an art in which an architect draws a building,
and a contractor then builds that building from the
architect's plans.
But a living environment cannot be built
successfully this way.To achieve a successful building — one that has life — we
must focus our attention on all the crafts and processes,
and then, as architects, ourselves take direct charge
of the making.
We must take full responsibility
for the entire building process, ourselves.
Unfolding
In short, the architect is responsible for building construction, is watching the building unfold continuously, and is making ongoing modifications as it becomes clear from each given stage, what modifications and changes should be made at each moment. And this is all to be done within a management framework that controls budget and cost very tightly.
Direct management
Direct Management does not include or permit the concept of profit to occur. The management is fee-based, or based as a fixed salary, and all construction costs are fixed ahead of time, and the building design is modified during construction, to make up any over-runs. The manager is not able to move money around at will, or put it in their pocket. At the same time, the design is approximately fixed, but with the understanding that it may be changed, during the evolution of the building, so that subtle adaptations can be included in the emerging building. In the Direct Management method it is the architect themselves and the direct manager who together manage the building works and all on-site construction for the owner.
The problem of schedule
We have emphasized, from the beginning, that in order to achieve really profound quality in this project, it is necessary to be able to modify it continuously, during the process of construction. This in turn requires that the Manager is alive to the fact that important decisions are being faced at every stage, and is aware that one of the most important things that is happening, is the evolution of the building designs, while they are being built.
We have a strong intuition that a general contractor will interfere with this process, no matter what is said in advance. The reason is this: All the large general contractors we have interviewed are strongly oriented to the problem of schedule. Of course, this is one of their strengths. However, we are convinced that they are so strongly oriented to this problem, that they will ultimately kill the life of the project, in order to achieve enough management control to be able to guarantee schedule.
We must get our hands dirty!
We must get our hands dirty!In every work of architecture, the construction details are the heart of the project, and the true makers of the project are the ones who make the details, who make the materials directly, and who are not afraid to get dirt
under their fingernails.
We feel it in our fingers
In System A, there is no architect separate from the contractor. We are builders, simply. As builders, we have a direct feeling about construction. We feel it in our fingers, so it is down to earth. One result of this down-to-earth quality is that everything is somewhat experimental. We make experiments all the time. Sometimes we place a piece of wood this way. Another time, we may like to try it that way. Any time something new comes up in the design of a building, we are very likely to try and invent the best way of building it. This is not a great big invention. Just a simple invention, the way we might invent a way of tying a piece of string, to hold a broken toy together. It is just practical.
Four principles
The essential purpose of Direct Management, as we understand the term, is to create buildings which are whole. This means that each part of the building is right in relation to the other parts, and to the part of the land that makes the buildings and the land more beautiful.
I will try to summarize the real meaning of Direct Management.
- The design evolves during construction. This means that the form of control over designs does not stop when drawings are finished, but goes on, continuously, before, during, and after construction. This cannot be done if architect and contractor are separate, or consider their jobs separately. It will only happen if the person who controls the design at the beginning actually controls the construction, too.
- Flexible cost control. Cost control requires continuous changing of ideas about what is built, in relation to money that is available, and in relation to what has been done already.
- Experience with one's hands. It is also impossible for an architect to have enough knowledge to control the process successfully, unless they have experienced almost every phase of construction with their own hands.
- Love of craft and the joy in the physical process of making. In the old days, making a building was clearly understood as a work of making. In this word, designing and physically building are inseparable. However, in the modern world, design has become separated from construction. Architects think of their work as designing, on paper, with the idea that the building process is a separate process. This is not what I call making at all. A good building can only be created, when it is deeply understood as something which is made, by a direct connection of the act of making, and the act of feeling, with your hands.
Guided by image
In our minds, the drawings we had originally made for the columns and capitals were no more than first approximations of the final shapes. We assumed that we would work out the real shapes during construction, and left the inaccurate approximations on our drawings, just for the sake of the building permit. Fujita, used to working with architects in System B, assumed that whatever was on our drawings must be what we wanted, and must be implemented as drawn.
Anybody who was making those column capitals, if they had seen this "double" capital, and had been free to make something harmonious, would have done it differently. But Fujita's people, in System B, did not know how to be guided by reality. They were guided by "image".
So Fujita, in this situation, was not free to respond in a natural way to what they saw. They were trapped by the image-making process they were used to. But because of this, they doomed their own carpenters to a pretentious kind of slavery, producing whatever silly images they were told to do, without being able to ask themselves whether they were beautiful, and unable to use their own sense of reality to make them better.
Invisible substance
We wanted wood, not only in many visible places, but also in the roof trusses of the homeroom buildings, where they are invisible. Fujita wanted to replace the invisible trusses with steel trusses. They could not understand the idea that it was the actual substance — even though not visible — which would control the feeling of the thing.
A practical and sacred act
The emotional energy of a building can be achieved, only if the artists who make and shape the building are genuinely responsible for the way the building gets its shape. To put this another way around, it means that if we fail to take the practical responsibility for the acts of shaping, the emotional energy of the building will almost certainly be false. If the emotional quality of the building is to be alive, and is to be seen, understood, and felt by the people who live there or work there, then this task must not be handed on to someone else. The life and magnificence of the buildings will come to fruition only if we architects, or master builders, or artists — or for that matter, lay people — any of us — take on the task of shaping as a practical and sacred act.
In the walls and mosses
If we reach such a very ordinary state of daily life, and then back it up with building and construction that comes from the depths in us, then that gradually accumulates our value in the world, all of us together as a whole. Later, then, perhaps hundreds of years later, people will look back at our stones and say to themselves, "My word, those people way back then — they certainly knew how to live," and they would say this because they could see the lingering whispers in the walls and mosses, and could read them, and could treasure them, and would learn from these traces how to live like that again.
Melt
In many late 20th century buildings, the architect focused attention on a few strongly defined elements. Usually, the way the building stood out in its surroundings was very sharp, and intentionally separated from the buildings that surround it.
Real architecture comes about in a different way. If the architecture is real, there will be thousands of living centers; many of them modest, all of them having direct impact on human beings. In this condition, there is an overall wholeness in the building and the zones nearby, but this quality is not aggressive nor too sharp. It rather creates a condition where the building melts into the town, or street, or garden where it is placed.
Umbrella
From the curator's visit to a place that captures all the beauty, depth, and wholeness it attempts.