9. While you are imagining how to establish one pattern, consider the other patterns listed with it. Some are larger. Some are smaller. For the larger ones, try to see how they can one day be present in the areas you are working on, and ask yourself how the pattern you are now building can contribute to the repair or formation of these larger patterns.
10. For the smaller ones, make sure that your conception of the main pattern will allow you to make these smaller patterns within it later. It will probably be helpful if you try to decide roughly how you are going to build these smaller patterns in, when you come to them.
11. Keep track of the area from the very beginning so that you are always reasonably close to something you can actually afford. We have had many experiences in which people try to design their own houses, or other buildings, and then get discouraged because the final cost
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the traffic department based on the arguments presented in the pattern, and on an analysis of the existing street pattern.
Another group wanting to build a small communal workshop, in a neighborhood currently zoned for residential use only, can argue their case based on scattered work, settled work, etc., and possibly get the city or zoning department to change the zoning regulation on this matter, and thereby slowly work toward introducing patterns, one at a time within the current framework of codes and zoning.
We have worked out a partial version of this process at the Eugene campus of the University of Oregon. That work is described in Volume 3, The Oregon Experiment. But a university is quite different from a town, because it has a single centralized owner, and a single source of funds. It is inevitable, therefore, that the process by which individual acts can work together to form larger wholes without restrictive planning from above, can only partly be put into practice there.
The theory which explains how large patterns can be built piecemeal from smaller ones, is given in Chapters 24 and 25 of The Timeless Way of Building.
At some time in the future, we hope to write another volume, which explains the political and economic processes needed to implement this process fully, in a town.
7
BUILDINGS
is too high, and they have to go back and change it.
To do this, decide on a budget, and use a reasonable average square foot cost, to translate this budget into square feet of construction. Say for the sake of argument, that you have a budget of $30,000 for construction. With help from builders, find out what kind of square foot cost is reasonable for the kind of building you are making. For example, in 1976, in California, a reasonable house, compatible with the patterns in the last part of the language, can be built for some $28/ square foot. If you want expensive finishes, it will be more. With $36,000 for construction, this will give you some 1300 square feet.
12. Now, throughout the design process, keep this 1300-square-foot figure in mind. If you go to two stories, keep the ground area to 650 square feet. If you use only part of the upstairs volume, the ground floor can go as high as 800 or 900 square feet. If you decide to build rather elaborate outdoor rooms, walls, trellises, reduce the indoor area to make up for these outdoor costs— perhaps down to 1100 or 1200. And, each time you use a pattern to differentiate the layout of your building further, keep this total area in mind, so that you do not, ever, allow yourself to go beyond your budget.
13. Finally, make the essential points and lines which are needed to fix the pattern, on the site with bricks, or sticks or stakes. Try not to design on paper; even in the case of complicated buildings find a way to make your marks on the site.
More detailed instructions, and detailed examples of the design process in action, are given in chapters 20, 21, and 22 of The Timeless Way of Building.
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The first group of patterns helps to lay out the overall arrangement of a group of buildings: the height and number of these buddings, the entrances to the sitCy main parking areas y and lines of movement through the complex;
| 95- | BUILDING COMPLEX |
| 96. | NUMBER OF STORIES |
| 97* | SHIELDED PARKING |
| 98. | CIRCULATION REALMS |
| 99. | MAIN BUILDING |
| 100. PEDESTRIAN STREET | |
| IOI. | BUILDING THOROUGHFARE |
| 102. | FAMILY OF ENTRANCES |
| IO3. | SMALL PARKING LOTS |
| 95 BUILDING COMPLEX** |
|---|
 |
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. . . this pattern, the first of the 130 patterns which deal specifically with buildings, is the bottleneck through which all languages pass from the social layouts of the earlier patterns to the smaller ones wdiich define individual spaces.
Assume that you have decided to build a certain building. The social groups or institutions which the building is meant to house are given—partly by the facts peculiar to your own case, and partly, perhaps, by earlier patterns. Now this pattern and the next one—number of stories (96), give you the basis of the building’s layout on the site. This pattern show's you roughly how to break the building into parts, number of stories helps you decide how high to make each part. Obviously, the two patterns must be used together.
A building cannot be a human building unless it is a complex of still smaller buildings or smaller parts which manifest its own internal social facts.
A building is a visible, concrete manifestation of a social group or social institution. And since every social institution has smaller groups and institutions within it, a human building will always reveal itself, not as a monolith, but as a complex of these smaller institutions, made manifest and concrete too.
A family has couples and groups within it; a factory has teams of workers; a town hall has divisions, departments within the large divisions, and working groups within these departments. A building which shows these subdivisions and articulations in its fabric is a human building—because it lets us live according to the way that people group themselves. By contrast, any monolithic building is denying the facts of its own social structure, and in denying these facts it is asserting other facts of a less human kind and forcing people to adapt their lives to them instead.
We have tried to make this feeling more precise by means of the following conjecture: the more monolithic a building is, and the less differentiated, the more it presents itself as an in-
BUILDINGS
human, mechanical factory. And when human organizations are housed in enormous, undifferentiated buildings, people stop identifying with the staff who work there as personalities and think only of the institution as an impersonal monolith, staffed by personnel. In short, the more monolithic the building is, the more it prevents people from being personal, and from making human contact with the other people in the building.
The strongest evidence for this conjecture that we have found to date comes from a survey of visitors to public service buildings in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Preliminary Program for Massing Studies, Document 5: Visitor Survey, Environmental Analysis Group, Vancouver, B.C., August 1970.) Two kinds of public service buildings were studied—old, three story buildings and huge modern office buildings. The reactions of visitors to the small building differed from the reactions of visitors to the large buildings in an extraordinary way. The people going to the small buildings most often mentioned friendly and competent staff as the important factor in their satisfaction with the service. In many cases the visitors were able to give names and describe the people with whom they had done business. Visitors to the huge office buildings, on the other hand, mentioned friendliness and staff competence rather infrequently. The great majority of these visitors found their satisfaction in “good physical appearance, and equipment.”