METHODOLOGY IN THE SERVICE OF DELIGHT

Geoffrey Broadbent
Head of School of Architecture
Portsmouth Polytechnic
King Henry 1 Street
Portsmouth POI 2DY
Abstract
5.1
This paper discusses the flight from rationality, the social and political reasons
which prompted some of the more notable exponents of design method to withdraw from
the field. It then discusses the characteristics which all buildings will have in
terms of the Hillier, Musgrove, O'Sullivan "four function model", suggesting that
even where user-participation extends to eliminating the specialist designer alto-
gether, the creative mechanisms by which 3-dimensional form is generated will remain
what they have been throughout history: pragmatic, iconic, analogic, canonic. These
provide a basis for analysing the procedures adopted by a highly creative group of
building designers: the Taller de Arquitectura of Barcelona, whose working methods
enable many people, including non-architects, to participate in the design process.
Introduction
Asked some time ago to write a "state of the art" piece on design methods for Per-
specta 15, I was tempted to reply: "There is nothing to say; design method is dead".
(1) It certainly seemed so at the time, especially as some of its major exponents
had withdrawn from the field, stating fairly potent reasons for doing so.
These were rooted in that drift from rationality which seems to have permeated
Western cultural life in the last five years or so. With the vogue for "participa-
tion" the belief that any attempt by the "expert" - the artist designer - to foist
his views on the long-suffering public should be strenuously resisted, and the means
by which he does it suppressed. Design methods, in this view, formed part of that
foisting mechanism.
The Nature of Buildings
But whoever actually does the design, however democratic the procedures by which a
design is achieved, the finished building actually will display certain character-
istics which were outlined by Hillier, Musgrove and O'Sullivan at EDRA 3.(2) These
may be summarised as follows:-
Any building whether we like it or not, and whether the designer(s) intend(s) it to
or not, will:-
1. Enclose spaces for certain human purposes. The actual division of spaces may
facilitate or inhibit specific human activities, it may also provide security.
2. Modify the external climate thus providing conditions in which human beings may
be more or less comfortable. in visual, thermal and actual terms.
3. Act as a system of signs or symbols into which people may read meanings
4. Modify the values of the materials from which it is built, the land on which it
stands and possibly of the adjacent properties.
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5. DESIGN LANGUAGES AND METHODS / 315
At one level, these are mere truisms, yet they do provide a useful check list against
which the designers' ordering of priorities can be assessed, thus forming a basis for
the criticism of buildings in design and of completed buildings.
And even if this "four-function model" like most so-called theories of architecture,
is merely a polemic, it describes very effectively, the characteristics which some of
us think architecture ought to have.
Modes of Designing
It may be, however, that the nearest we shall ever get to a "theory" of architecture
will be a theory of design-behaviour which predicts - with probabilities - the ways
in which architects, or anyone else who tries to generate 3-dimensional built form
will act whilst they are actually trying to design. Certain mechanisms ~ to have
been used, in this context, by designers throughout history; stallting long before there
were any professional architects. I have described these elsewhere(3)(4) (5) and can
only summarise them here:
Pragmatic design - in which materials are used, by trial-and-error, until a form
emerges which seems to serve the designers' purpose. Most forms of building seem
to have started in this "JaY. Mongait (6) illustrates an early example; a mammoth
hunter's tent excavated at Pushkari near Novgorod-Seversk made from the available
building materials: some rather spindly trees, some small stones and after that the
bones, tusks and skins of the mammoths; all that was left after the meat had been
eaten. The site, as excavated, suggested that the mammoth hunters had built three
interlocking tepee-like frames from the available timbers and perhaps from the mammoth
tusks. They had then laid mammoth skins over this framework, weighting down the edges
with stones and the bones. So the most improbable of materials were used to form a
very effective shelter; the available resources were allowed to determine the form.
We still tend to use this mode of designing whenever we have to use new materials, as
in the case, say, of plastic air houses and suspension structures. It is only very
recently, after two decades of pragmatic design, that theoretical bases for the design
of such structures are beginning to emerge.
Iconic design - in which the members of a particular culture share a fixed mental
image of what the design should be "like". Often encouraged in "primitive" u l t u ~ e s
by legend, tradition, work-songs which describe the design process (7) by the mutual
adaption which has taken place between ways of life and building form - as with the
Eskimo's igloo - and by the conventions of craftsmanship which take a long time to
learn but, once learned, are difficult to abandon. We still set up icons - such as
Bunshaft's Lever House in New York (1952) which became the fixed mental image for a
generation of architects and clients as to what office buildings should be like.
User-participation is perhaps the most potent mechanism of all for the repetition of
design icons.
Analogical design - the drawing of analogies - usually visual - into the solution of
one's design problems. This seems to have started with Imhotep (c.2,800 Be) in
designing the Step Pyramid complex at Sakkara; given the problem of building, for the
first time, in large blocks of stone, he drew visual analogies with existing brick
tomb-forms, timber-framed and reed-mat houses, for the overall building forms, with
lotus buds or flowers and snakes heads for the decoration, and so on. Analogy still
seems to be the mechanism of "creative" archit ecture, as with Wright's use of water
lily forms in the Johnson Wax factory office (1936), his own hands at prayer in the
316 ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN RESEARCH, VOL. 2
Madison, Wisconsin Chapel (1950) not to mention Le Corbusier's crab-shell roof of
Ronchamp. These are direct analogies (8). Much 20th century architecture has drawn
on painting and sculpture as sources of analogies, (Constructivism, Purism, de Stijl);
but analogies can also be drawn with one's own body (personal analogy) and with
abstract, philosophical concepts (as in the present preoccupation with indeterminacy).
Analogical design requires the use of some medium such as a drawing, for translating
the original into its new form. The first Egyptian design drawings date from the same
period as Imhotep's pyramid complex and the drawing itself begins to suggest possib-
ilities to the designer. He sets up grids and/or axes to make sure that his drawing
will fit on to the available surface; these "suggest" regularities - symmetries and
rhythms - which had not appeared previously in architecture. Any design analogue -
a drawing, model, or even a computer program, will "take over" from the designers and
influence the way they design.
Canonic design - the grids and axes of these early design drawings took on a life of
their own; it became clear that the second-rate artists could emulate the work of a
master by abstracting from it the underlying systems of proportion. Once this view
had been formed - that art and design could be underpinned by abstract proportional
systems - it received a massive boost from the Greek geometers (Pythagoras) and
Classical philosophers (Plato, etc.) who believed that the universe itself was con-
structed of cubes, tetrahedra, icosahedra and dodecahedra and that these in turn were
made up of triangles. The Platonic triangles underlay medieval Gothic design (9).
Whilst much 20th century design has been based on similar precepts; it is the basis
of all modular systems, dimensional co-ordination, prefabricated systems building
and so on. New mathematical techniques and computer aids are likely to boost even
further this intereet in the abstract Geometry of Environment (see book of that title00\
Applications
I have shown elsewhere (11) that these four modes of designing; pragmatic, iconic,
ana logic and canonic, seem to underlie all the ways in which architectural form has
been, or can be generated. These may be used singly or in combination and, taking
Alexander's point that the most convincing demonstration of a design methodology is
its actual practice, I should like to demonstrate how - without being at all familiar
with the terms, a highly imaginative form of building designers - the Taller de
Arquitectura of Barcelona - have actually developed a methodology which combines them(12).
Only one of the Taller is fully qualified, with a Spanish Licence to practice. The
others include poets, writers, musicians, a sociologist, an economist and so on.
They seek to avoid the bleak sterility of most current mass housing and this has
involved them in a continuing reassessment, at many levels, of what it means to live
in cities, what it is that makes them attractive, how housing can be planned in such
a way that at any moment people can choose between privacy and participation in the
community. All this has been building up to the massive project for a Ciudad en el
Espacio for Madrid, a project which has yet to be realised, although in working
towards it, the Taller have produced some impressive enough results. These include
the Barrio Gaudi, a low cost, high density neighbourhood (1965 to date) at
birthplace, Reus, near Tarragona; Kafka's Castle an apartment hotel behind Sitges
(1966); and La Manzanera, a holiday village at Calpe near Benidorm (1965 to date).
Other projects include Le Cheval de Monaco, their entry for a competition won by
Archigram in 1969; La Petite for the new town of Cergy-Pontoise near
Paris and Walden 7 for the Taller's own site in Barcelona. The last two are in final
stages of planning and will be started on site during 1973.
318 / ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN RESEARCH, VOL. 2
these in various ways and eliminate those which can't be clustered; check the
clusters against certain environmental parameters and eliminate those which fail to
meet them. Determine an overall form with reference to local conditions, using
visual and other analogies. At La Manzanera, a "pop fantasy vd.llage" near Calpe,
one group of housing derives by analogy from the local vernacular and another,
Xanadu, from the Penon de Ifach, a Gibraltar-like rock standing out in the bay.
La Petite Cathedra Ie (for Cergy-Pontoise) looks exactly what the name implies - a
whole suburb with shops, schools, parking and housing draped over the form of a
Gothic Cathedral.
Conclusions
Before the Taller demonstrated otherwise, most of us had supposed that three factors
in particular inhibited the exercise of creativity in architectural design, namely
cost, planning, construction or other statutory constraints and - as Alexander would
have it - the exercise of systematised procedures in the management of design. Yet
the Taller use a highly developed methodology which seems to be the key to their
success in bringing non-architects into the building design process.
Some of their procedures are mathematically-based and these lead to the generation of
solutions in such variety that it hardly matters when some of them have to be elimin-
ated. That, of course, results from the checking against various constraints,
structural, environmental and so on, which form an essential part of the Taller's
systematic method. The crucial point is that instead of starting with the cons_
traints and then complaining that .they are hamstrung, the Taller start with possibil-
ities and then eliminate those which prove not to be possible. And finally - but
perhaps most convincing of all - the Taller's buildings are quite remarkably cheap.
So, far from inhibiting creativity, their procedures and methods actually encourage
it. Design method therefore is far from dead. It is alive, well, living in
Barcelona and providing some of the most beautiful, rabitable and economical
architecture to be had anywhere.
References
(1) Broadbent, G, "The Present S.tate of Design Method Studies" in PERSPECTA 15
(2) Hillier, W R G, Musgrove, J, & O'Sullivan, P., and Design" in
Hitchell, W .J EDRA 3, tos Angeles, 1972.
(3) Broadbent, G. "The Design Process", in Starling, J., urn REPORTING BACK
CONFERENCE, Attingham Park, 1967.
<.(+) Broadbent, G, "The Deep Structures of Architecture, paper for SYMFOSIUM ON
ARCHITECTURE, HISTORY AND THEORY OF SIGNS, Barcelona, 1972 (conference proceed-
ings to be published by o,ollegio de Arquitectura, Barcelona).
(5) Broadbent, G. DESIGN IN ARCHITECTURE, John Wiley & Sons, London & New York, 1973
(6) Mongait, A, L, ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE USSR (trans H W Thompson 1966), Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1955.
(7) Alexander, G, NOTES ON THE OF FORM, Harvard. University Press, Cambridge,
Hass, 1964.
(8) Gordon, W.J.J., SYNECTICES: THE DEVELOPMENT OF CREATIVE CAPACITY, Harper &
Brothers, New York, 1961.
(9) Frankl, P. "Secrets of the Hediaeval Hasons", ART BULLETIN XXVII Harch 1946
(lO)Harch, L. & Steadman, P. THE GEOMETRY OF ENVIRONMENT, RIBA Publications, London
1970
(ll)Broadbent, G. DESIGN IN ARCHITECTURE, oohn Wiley, London, New York, 1973
(12 )Broadbent, G. "The Road to Xanadu" article for ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW (forthcoming).