1.2.2 transactions in architectural design.pdf

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Transactions in Architectural DesignAuthor(s): James S. AckermanSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Dec., 1974), pp. 229-243Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342784Accessed: 01/09/2008 16:40

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Transactions in Architectural Design

James S. Ackerman

Vitruvius, writing in the first century, B.C., set out three essential components of architectural design: firmitas, commoditas, and venustas (which his Elizabethan translator rendered as Firmness, Commodity, and Delight), and ever since they have remained the cornerstones of design and criticism.1 But the forces at work in the design process seem to me to be too complex to be so neatly categorized, and I propose in the following the image of an open field system in which architectural decisions are made through an unlimited number of transactions among a variety of people who are or should be interested in the making of particular buildings.

The most obvious way in which a work of architecture differs from other works of art is that it is always made to order. It has a client who asks the architect to design something to fit a stated need. That need is defined-sometimes clearly, sometimes vaguely-by the social organization of the moment and by the client's particular concerns, and is articulated in a program which is a definition of the anticipated functions of the desired building. It is a basic precept of the relationship between the client and the architect that the latter's primary obligation is to provide forms and spaces that best accommodate the letter and the spirit of the program. And much historical and critical writing evaluates works of architecture according to this precept: the fulfillment of the client's needs is as much a criterion of success as the proper calculation of stresses that keeps a building from collapsing.

It may seem reasonable, even inevitable, that architectural practice should be based on an understanding that architects, like lawyers and doctors, should discover their clients' needs and accommodate them to

Author's concept of transactions is indebted to that of John B. Spiegel, Transactions: The Interplay between Individual, Family, and Society (New York, 1972).

1. In today's terminology they appear as the technological, the utilitarian or functional, and the aesthetic components of architecture.

229


the best of their abilities. But current discussion within the legal and medical professions of the conflict between service to private individuals who can pay, and to the public who cannot, suggest an expanded or altered definition of professional responsibility. Actually, the conflict between public and private interest may be more acute in architecture than in other professions: the kind of buildings architects design are costly and are made possible only by the wealth of a small segment of the population or the state, yet every one raised affects the lives of people other than the one who makes the program and pays the architect for his services. Furthermore, the decisions of architects are embodied in buildings that last for generations, even for millennia, so that the overwhelm- ing majority of people in our culture live and work in places designed not only for other people but for other times and conditions. For this reason, even the "private" practice of architecture involves respon- sibilities to a widespread constituency.

The complexity of the client-architect relationship and of the transactions involved in defining a program can be illustrated by a hypothetical example: let us imagine that the members of the Board of Education of a certain town have voted to build a new school.2 They select a particular site, and an individual or a group designated by them gathers data and defines the nature of the facilities needed-a certain number of class- rooms, a library, washrooms, athletic and recreational areas, offices for administration, a teachers' room, and so on, with estimates of the amount of space required by each and of the desirable interrelationship of one with another. A separate set of more general directives is embodied in local law, with its zoning and planning regulations and its standards for the minimal amount of space, light, air, insulation, sanita- tion facilities, fire protection, and the like for the several components of the project. Finally, on the most general and least negotiable level, there is the character and position of the site-on one hand its natural topog- raphy, soil conditions, exposure to sun and wind, etc., and on the other its man-made environment, particularly access to communication, transportation, and public services; both require particular design re- sponses. These constitute the core of the quantifiable factors in the program, some of which the architect may help to clarify or modify, but which for purposes of discussion may be accepted as the givens of a project.

2. The choice of a public administrative body as the client in this illustration does not mean that decisions will be in the public interest.

James S. Ackerman is the author of The Architecture of Michelangelo, Art and Archaeology, The Cortile del Belvedere, Palladio, and Palladio's Villas and is professor of fine arts at Harvard University. He is currently at the American Academy of Rome working on a film on urban design in Renaissance Rome.

230 James S. Ackerman

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Criteria for the selection of an architect usually harmonize with the cultural-social-aesthetic aspects of the program. In the public school system, the selection is ordinarily made, however, at a level higher than that of the programming committee for a particular school (by the board, the superintendent, or even the mayor or city council): in one case because officials take seriously the duty to provide safe, economical, and pleasing public edifices; in another because they seek to control the assignment of lucrative commissions. In any event, the choice of the architect has as great an influence on the ultimate character of the school as the choices made by the architect, because professionals well enough established to be contenders for a public commission usually have a reputation for a certain style of design and/or for certain administrative or technological skills.

To whom is the architect responsible? Each constituency within the school system has different interests at stake. A program for the school as written by a group of administrators would be wholly different from one prepared by teachers, pupils, maintenance staff, or by parents (e.g., the administrators and maintenance staff might choose concrete floors as being inexpensive and easy to maintain, while the teachers would seek a material that would be easier on the feet and would reduce noise). The architect in our society usually feels a moral responsibility to accommodate the needs of each of these groups, but in the many instances where they are incompatible the decision and the program will reflect the balance and imbalance of power within the system. Decision-making power is always in the hands of those that control the money; in public schools they are the administrators, watched over by higher public officials and by the taxpayers; in private schools, the more committed members of the Board of Trustees, usually parents. In addition, banks and other mortgage-granting institutions influence design decisions because of their concern that the proposed structure satisfy not only the needs and taste of the borrower but of potential purchasers in the event that the borrower should default. This predisposes them toward conservative designs and against experiment.

The architect produces, first for the client and ultimately for the builder, projects in the form of drawings and models representing the translation of the program into physical spaces and masses. This takes time: the client is not usually experienced enough to conceive a usable or complete program without extensive help and persuasion from the architect, and physical planning cannot begin until the program is mi- nutely articulated. According to their respective principles and per- sonalities, architects may involve the client in every step of this process, urging him to define his needs and intuiting his unexpressed desires, or the architect may impose his own conception on the client. There are no


Critical Inquiry December 1974

clear rules to guide the relationship. Conflict between the client's and the architect's vision of what a building ought to be is inevitable. It can arise from the latter's commitment to personal interest and career (style of design, desire to produce a prize-winning building) or from his orien- tation to conflicts of interest between the client and the intended users, neighbors, etc. (E.g., an architect who wished to maximize the well-being of inmates in designing a prison might be opposed by the warden, the Department of Correction and its officers, and even a majority of taxpayers.) Such conflict can be minimized only when the architect seeks to represent exclusively the interests of the client who pays the bills and to ignore any incompatible interests of those who are to use or to be affected by the building.

In determining their responsibility toward society as distinct from the demands of their clients, the architects may not be concerned only with the interests of the actual users of projected buildings. A building alters the natural and man-made environment physically, socially, and economically, and can have an impact on the lives of people who never have cause to enter it: it may increase traffic congestion by bringing more people into the neighborhood, require a change in the public service systems such as water supply and sewage, lower or raise property values in the surrounding area, increase or decrease the city's tax rev- enues, affect neighbors' access to light or a view, accelerate or retard a large-scale movement of population, and so on. But the attitudes of interested nonusers may not always be in harmony; for example, an improvement leading to increased rents is likely to be favored by land- lords, financers, and city officials, and opposed by tenants; architects may find themselves in the position of arbitrating such conflicts.

As the program matures, design decisions begin to be accommodated to another body of participants, the manufacturers and building trades. In electing particular methods of construction and specific architectural elements, the designer and client have to consider first the availability of the products, the materials and the labor skills required, and second the cost of available options in relation to the benefits promised. Decisions of this kind cannot, however, be made simply with the catalog and slide rule because the easiest and most economic solution may be unsatisfac- tory for a variety of other reaons. Conflicts between aesthetic and economic considerations are among the most frequent; the designer may elect brick exterior walls rather than exposed concrete because he thinks they look better and harmonize with surrounding buildings, but he may be unable to justify the high cost of the hand labor involved in masonry work as against formwork for concrete. Or practical and community considerations may generate the conflict: medieval architects and communities had to decide whether the economy of roofing their

233


Photographs on these two pages by the author.

churches in wood as against the far more costly cut-stone vaulting justified the greater risk of fire. Decisions of this kind do not, however, always involve simply the balance of cost against benefit, because the range of choice offered by a given market and labor force is restricted. In our time, the number of elements that can be made to order is steadily decreasing; the execution, for example, of hand-carved orna- ment is virtually a lost art; increasingly the choice of architectural detail is limited to what is offered in manufacturers' catalogs. Finally, the relationship of the designer to the contractors and building craftsmen is a transaction involving as much diplomacy and negotiation as his relationship to the client. He must adjust his conceptions to their way and rate of work, often including guild rules that inhibit innovation.

Finally, in addition to the legitimate interests of those nonusers affected by the building at the time it is completed, the interests of unborn generations warrant an advocate, since buildings last longer than people and frequently longer than the institutions they are designed to serve. A building program sensitive to future users would provide an equilibrium between the potential life span of the design solution and the life span of the social functions to be accommodated. There is a disequilibrium when a function that may be short-lived is housed in a specialized building permanently fixed in indestructible steel and reinforced concrete construction (such as elementary schoolrooms being built today of uniform size with permanent interior walls and fixed rows of seats facing the teacher at a time when the institution of the "open classroom" requiring flexible space may be widely adopted), and conversely when a relatively

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flexible space may be widely adopted), and conversely when a relatively


December 1974 235

unchanging function is accommodated by tacky, impermanent struc- tures. Many of the earliest Christian churches still serve as well after 1,600 years, partly because they were designed as simple and well-built meeting halls without integral accommodation to the liturgical practice of the moment of construction, and partly because, unlike most other institutions, the Church-particularly the Catholic church-has resisted drastic change in its functions.

Few institutions in our culture will enjoy the long-range perma- nence of the church. Modern institutions not only change rapidly in nature and function but in location as well: office buildings and stores located in the center of great cities have been made obsolete by the migration of the commercial market and rapid deterioration of their environment. Even without such unfavorable conditions, the structure of financing and taxation (e.g., short-term tax shields extended by city governments to attract and hold business) has encouraged the construction of new commercial buildings and the destruction of others only one generation old. Architects and planners have not adjusted to the mobil- ity of modern life to the extent of offering acceptable alternatives to fixed and permanent building: the mobile home, an imaginative response both to the migratory character of a large segment of our population and to the demand for inexpensive mass-produced single-family shelter, is scorned by the architectural profession and its design left to the market-research process that determines the style of automobiles. The result is that the environment is marred rather than enhanced by a type of structure destined to cover the land.

Critical Inquiry


(Top) Etching of Temple of Hadrian by J. B. Piranesi. Courtesy of Fototeca Unione. (Bottom) Temple of Hadrian (Roman Stock Exchange). Courtesy of Fototeca Unione.


Critical Inquiry December 1974

Many buildings have survived millennia after being abandoned by the institution for which they were first designed. This testifies in some cases to their flexibility (as the second-century Temple of Hadrian, which serves as the Rome Stock Exchange), but more often to the values embodied in their design-typically aesthetic (the Parthenon, the Alhambra) but also historical and associational (Independence Hall, the House of Seven Gables). Although the latter values cannot be anticipated in a design, they can enter the planning process indirectly, as when a program requiring the destruction of old buildings puts aesthetic-historic values against the validity for modern functions of the intended replacement. And it occurs whenever the decision to preserve an old building involves remodeling it to serve functions that may be inimical to integral features of the original design: the issue has been raised by a project to put a new west front on the U.S. Capitol. In resolving these conflicts, the interest of future generations is again relevant; values change, and the old eyesore we might want to demolish today could become tomorrow's paragon of beauty; respect for the past and for the future go hand in hand.

These instances illustrate the relevance of aesthetic and associational values in coming to what in traditional design and criticism are regarded as utilitarian decisions. In some cases these values prove to be even more "functional" than so-called practical considerations in design: many modern public housing projects embodying a high standard of conve- nience and space have produced overall a lower quality of life for the tenants than the old and decayed dwellings they replaced that may have had such unquantifiable amenities as humane scale, continuity with a tradition, and a neighborhood with variety and unique character. The distinction between "use" values and "surplus" values, to interpolate the Marxian terms, may be dependent on cultural conditioning and economic status: the urban middle class (which provides the decision makers in public housing enterprises) tends to regard a fully equipped and private bathroom, hot running water, and elevators as being more essential than intercourse with neighbors and apartment blocks of limited height.

The poor, who have to sacrifice physical safety and a sense of belong- ing somewhere for these amenities, are less likely to perceive them as basic (though in our society the attitudes of all economic strata are be- coming homogenized into the bourgeois mould of the mass media). In fact, a high-rise federal housing project (Pruitt-Igoe),3 well-equipped, of good construction, and conveniently sited in central Saint Louis was completely evacuated less than twenty years after its completion because

3. See Lee Rainwater, "The Lessons of Pruitt-Igoe," in Housing in Urban America, ed. J. Pynoos, R. Schafer, C. Hartman (Cambridge, Mass., 1973).

237


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Pruitt-lgoe Building. Courtesy of Pulitzer Publishing Co. Pruitt-Igoe Building. Courtesy of Pulitzer Publishing Co.

it had been made uninhabitable by the vandalism of its own tenants apparently in response to its impact on their lives. Decision making in such situations involves weighing the cost of remodeling a restricted number of units in old neighborhoods, which is almost always higher than building new mass housing, against providing a greater amount of shelter for people in need. A decision between quality of environment and quantity plus efficiency is hard to make on behalf of a nonhomogeneous and usually unidentified body of other people.

The difficulties arising from the different values of designers and users in public housing have led to much discussion and experiment over the last decade of strategies for giving the prospective tenants a voice in design decisions. The results have been poor, first because those whose opinions are sought have no conception of the possible options and are forced to formulate their expectations within the mould of the inadequate housing they have seen around them, and second because the major decisions are ultimately made on the administrative level without consultation. These efforts, which, incidentally, have not been made in planning places of work or other public facilities, have served only to demonstrate that the environment is shaped by those who pos-


December 1974 239

Roehampton Housing Estate. Photograph courtesy of Greater London Council Photo Unit.

sess or are invested with wealth and power, whether or not they wish to be responsive to the desires of those whom their projects are intended to serve.

To some extent they show also that the problem is not that the architect fails to give people what they want but that people don't know how to want-that is, how to formulate their real needs and to distin- guish what they perceive as needs from mere habits of behavior and cliches of expression. The architect cannot compensate for this failure because both he and his clients are moulded by the existing social and ideological structure; the building they seek to realize is the shell of some social institution and cannot relevantly be more successful in design than the institution can be in function. Truly imaginative architecture that has worked has usually been built for vigorous, confident, and creative institutions. The uncertainties of our present institutions are revealed by the meaningless formalism of their new buildings, and the fault does not lie more with the designers than with the clients and users.

A work of architecture is a social artifact arising from a great number of transactions in which conflicts are resolved. The architect stands near

Critical Inquiry


Pavilion No. VII, by Thomas Jefferson, University of Virginia campus. Photograph by Wayne Andrews.

the center of a network of interactions that initially involves the client or his representatives but also, and not less significantly, others who will be users of the building, who may fall into a number of different groups with different and at times opposed interests, others who will not use the building but whose lives will be affected by it (or by the loss of what it replaces)-officers of the law or of government, building contractors and the building trades and manufacturers, funding agencies, and, finally, on a different plane, and as if by proxy, those in the near and far future who will use and be affected by his decisions. Although the architect is a key figure in many of these transactions, many other transactions affecting the nature of the building take place among the other participants-as when the client negotiates with the contractor and the banker, the contractor with the trades and the public works department, and so on.

Still, the architect has a wide latitude of choice, particularly in our time, when the institutions that build are too insecure and uncertain about the future to define precisely what they want their buildings to do or to express. Left without guidance, the architect is forced to choose between (1) trying to imagine what the client needs, (2) making a striking


December 1974 241

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U.S. Air Force Academy. Photograph courtesy of U.S. Air Force.

building that will call attention to himself, and (3) attending to needs of others than his client, or some mixture of the three. This choice is moral (assuming that those others are less powerful than the client): it involves the option of acting on a sense of responsibility to society with the conse- quent risks incurred by departing from a pragmatic position of self- interests. And it makes moral criteria become relevant for the critic or historian assessing his achievement. When the architect takes a position on a conflict between the interests of the client and of those of the prospective user or banker in favor of one or the other party, we must judge whether the decision was right or wrong. Although Ruskin found no obstacle to this conclusion, in our times historians and critics have claimed to make judgments on "purely" aesthetic grounds, uncontami- nated by moral commitments. (The claim is hypocritical: International Style architecture was praised by critics as being pure, clean, honest, etc., etc.)

The root of the resistance to moral criteria in the criticism of architecture is the fear that they are so easily subsumed into social-political commitments, with the result that the criticism of architecture becomes a tool of political propaganda. I believe that the risk is inescapable but that intelligent criticism will not be trapped by it; we are better off confront-

Critical Inquiry


ing it consciously than being unconscious pawns of a traditional moral- ity. A criticism that avoids the issue of moral options simply fails to account for the actual nature of the transactions involved in designing buildings. The historian faces the additional difficulty of having to assess the moral options in past choices in the light of the value system within which they were made: to represent the Egyptian pyramids as unsuc- cessful because they glorified despotism would be to impose our (irrele- vant) value on the assessment of a choice made on quite other criteria.

I do not underestimate the difficulties involved in applying moral criteria: they are illustrated in the incapacity of Marxist theory to deal with architecture. Because capital and a position of privilege are pre- requisites for building, existing architecture can be seen as an instru- ment and a symbol of repression. Consequently, criticism is pointless until social change gives to the "people," the users, the decision-making power. But whether or not this view of society is valid, it is possible to consider how in imperfect or even deplorable social conditions there may be ways of making better rather than worse architectural decisions.

The better decisions have been made in situations where parties to the transactions involved were in harmony, where individual interests were subsumed into a communal interest. They emerged not because power shifted from one group to another but because it became relatively dif- fused. The most obvious instances are cases of communal building in which there is no identifiable architect, and exceptional designing and building skills are scattered among the participants-the pre- cincts of the Dogon people, the Greek settlements of the Aegean Islands, the Italian communes of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- turies, or some New England towns of the post-Revolutionary period. Harmony of that degree is harder to achieve when an architect is involved because his presence injects into the group a figure who must to some extent remain distinct. He is called upon because distinctiveness or distinction is expected: the anonymity of the communal settings I have cited may be good and the totality pleasing but, like all results achieved by consensus, it works precisely because of the lack of focus, contrast, and other charcteristics of designs conceived by the individual imagination. Moreover, even the best vernacular expressions are conservative and unlikely to adjust to changing culture. The individual is needed to invent new contexts for the expression of the communal spirit; without him the vernacular would lack even a vocabulary.

The architect's power to formulate has caused him at times in the past to be deified as was Imhotep, the designer of the first surviving pyramid, and Michelangelo, who was called "divino." The very term "creativity" was first applied to artistic conception in the Renaissance to suggest a


Critical Inquiry December 1974 243

parallel to God's creation. Since the Renaissance, the architect often has been celebrated not as the member of the community charged with providing a shape to serve its needs and to convey its message but rather as an aesthetic shaman whose inventions might be visited upon a populace grateful for his fortuitous concessions to its wishes and hopes. My aim in this essay has been to suggest a framework within which the autonomy and authority given to the designer by the tradition of Euro- pean aesthetics might be restrained in the interests of the community. This has involved both the pragmatic formulation of the design process as a transactional field and the moral formulation of a complementarity between the designer's power of free imagination and his responsibility toward the whole company of those affected by his invention.

Article Contentsp. 229p. 230p. [231]p. 232p. 233p. 234p. 235p. 236p. 237p. 238p. 239p. 240p. 241p. 242p. 243

Issue Table of ContentsCritical Inquiry, Vol. 1, No. 2, Dec., 1974Front MatterTransactions in Architectural Design [pp. 229 - 243]Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation [pp. 245 - 272]"Examples Are Best Precepts": Readers and Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Poetry [pp. 273 - 290]Verdi, Ghislanzoni, and "Aida": The Uses of Convention [pp. 291 - 334]Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality [pp. 335 - 360]Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface [pp. 361 - 371]What Isn't Cinema? [pp. 373 - 393]Ortega y Gasset, Literary Critic [pp. 395 - 414]Thoughts on Po Baroja [pp. 415 - 446]Critical ResponseA Reply to Frank Kermode [pp. 447 - 452]

Pandora's Box Revisited: A Review Article [pp. 453 - 478]Back Matter

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