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
Two types of building production
System A
System B
This has harmed modern society greatly
Arcade
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.