188. Form, design and use

Architect John Habraken analysed the design of buildings in terms of the structured composition of components[i], in a hierarchy of levels (room in a house, house on a street, street in a neighbourhood, …).

This seems similar to the notion of a script that I use, as a structure of nodes. For a restaurant:  nodes of seating, ordering, eating, etc., while the restaurant is a node in a higher level script of location.

The nodes in a building script would be the different parts of the building (foundations, walls, staircase, roof), connecting to each other in an overall ‘carrying’ structure.

Habraken recognised that a type of building is connected also to the social practice in which it is used, the corresponding ‘language game’, one might say. Social practice is informed by the form and (re)constructs or transforms it. Much of the type and the practice is left unspecified because taken for granted, and is tacit, implicit.

In the restaurant it is taken for granted that food is to be eaten, not stuffed into one’s pockets. However, some places offer ‘doggy bags’ for taking leftovers home.

A system is ‘open’ when in a node there are alternative ‘substitutes’ that all satisfy standardised constraints on the node. Then one can delegate subsidiary actives, open them up to outside contributions.  

Openness increases when even the functionality of a node is not prescribed. Here, a space might be used for different functions, to be decided by the user: as an office, bedroom, bathroom or kitchen. But then one needs to build in redundancy: the possibility of inserting ducts for waste and supply of water when the space is used as a kitchen or bathroom.

Habraken distinguished between ‘machines’, where the user ‘stands outside’, seeing the machine (or device, …) as an instrument, with a certain functionality, and buildings, where the user is ‘inside’, and the structure offers a ‘capacity’ for activity. With machines ‘we are in its environment’ while with buildings ‘the thing is our environment’.

Some machines, however, such as boats and cars, form the environment for action. Note also that machines are embedded in user scripts. In their design, machine makers should position their machines in the ‘environment’ of their use.

I would say: from the perspective of the script a node is seen from the outside, instrumentally, while from the perspective of the node the script yields a capacity in which it can function, subject to constraints and enabling conditions.

In an organization, management may see a department or team instrumentally, from the outside, while from the inside its members see the wider organization as a frame for exercising some discretion in their activity.

This connects with the literature on ‘communities of practice’, where professional work is seen as incompletely specifiable, in contrast with the illusion of full outside control.

To function in a community, one must go through a period of ‘indwelling’ to develop the necessary tacit knowledge, absorbing and assimilating what is not and cannot be fully specified in a manual.

In architecture there is a sequence of design, making and using. In modern building and industry they are in different hands, with a division of labour between architect, builder and user. Then the question of control arises. Is use largely determined, and narrowly constrained, in rules, by design and making, or is the user involved in making, with an emergent design?

Habraken refers to bottom-up emergence of forms in traditional and some still existing Muslim cities. Instead of top-down injunctions, home owners negotiate their making with neighbours. The order is procedural and open rather than regulative and closed.

This leads up to Habraken’s effort to re-orient the design and making of buildings to allow inhabitants more scope for ‘filling in’ their idiosyncratic views and preferences into slots (nodes) left open in a basic ‘carrying’ structure (script).

Its organizational equivalent would be to allow workers to bring in their variety of skills, subject to minimal constraints.

That is another way of looking at ‘unity in diversity’.   

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[i] John Habraken, The appearance of form, Awater Press, Cambridge Mass, 1988.