windows
1º2º3º4º
Frosted and transparent
Irwin's window arrangement at the Dia:Beacon.
In addition to managing the flow of people in the spaces of the museum in order to maximize freedom of movement and choice, Irwin also modified the industrial window grids to create perceptual ambiguity, placing transparent glass in the inner four panes while using frosted glass for the outer panes. With this, Irwin solved the problem of either having the windows become a wall of glaring light, if all transparent glass was used, or having them become a claustrophobic muffling of space, if all frosted glass was used. Irwin's windows catch the eye in a back and forth oscillation between distant and proximal focus.
Of the plainest variety
It is unusual to find such mismatched elements on a single facade as this fine stonework coexisting with these stained and rotting shutters, on a house in the fortified town of Feltre, in the northern Italian province of Belluno.
Where considerable labour lies behind the cutting and fitting of the stone, the timber planks have been left in their raw state, with no paint or carved decoration. Even the iron hinges are of the plainest variety.
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".
We have lost our sense of intimate life
A Quote by Luis BarragánTake the use of enormous plate windows...they deprive our buildings of intimacy, the effect of shadow and atmosphere. Architects all over the world have been mistaken in the proportions which they have assigned to large plate windows or spaces opening to the outside. We have lost our sense of intimate life, and have become forced to live public lives, essentially away from home.
What's Wrong With This Model?
What's wrong with the rational model
- We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start
- We Usually Don’t Know the Decision Tree – We Discover It as We Go
- The Nodes Are Really Not Design Decisions, but Tentative Complete Designs
- The Goodness Function Cannot be Evaluated Incrementally
- The Desiderata and Their Weightings Keep Changing
- The Constraints Keep Changing
Deciding what to design
We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start
The most serious model shortcoming is that the designer often has a vague, incompletely specified goal, or primary objective. In such cases, the hardest part of design is deciding what to design.
I came to realize that the most useful service I was performing for my client was helping him decide what he really wanted.
Today, we recognize that rapid prototyping is an essential tool for formulating precise requirements. Not only is the design process iterative; the design-goal-setting process is itself iterative. Knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm. Therefore, goal iteration must be considered an inherent part of the design process.
Evaluating goodness
The Goodness Function Cannot be Evaluated Incrementally
The Rational Model assumes that design involves a search of the decision tree, and that at every node, one can evaluate the goodness function of several downward branches. In fact, one cannot in general do this without exploring all the downward branches to all their leaves, which is possible in principle, but leads to a combinatorial explosion of alternatives in practice.
Changing constraints
The Constraints Keep Changing
The explicit listing of known constraints in the design program helps here. The designer can periodically scan the list, asking, “Can this constraint now be removed because the world has changed? Can it be entirely circumvented by working outside the design space?”
They just don't work that way
Perhaps the most devastating critique of the Rational Model, although perhaps the hardest to prove, is that most experienced designers just don’t work that way.
“Conventional wisdom about problem-solving seems often to be contradicted by the behavior of expert designers. Empirical studies of design activity have frequently found ‘intuitive’ features of design ability to be the most effective and relevant to the intrinsic nature of design. Some aspects of design theory, however, have tried to develop counter-intuitive models and prescriptions for design behavior.” — Nigel Cross
We must outgrow it
Why all this fuss about the process model? Does the model we and others use to think about our design process really affect our designing itself? I believe it does. I believe our inadequate model and following it slavishly lead to fat, cumbersome, over-features products and also to schedule, budget, and performance disasters.
The Rational Model, in any of its forms, leads us to demand up-front statements of design requirements. It leads us to believe that such can be formulated. It leads us to make contracts with one another on the basis of enshrined ignorance. A more realistic process model would make design work more efficient, obviating many arguments with clients and much rework.
The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.