In the monoliths, the visitors’ experience is depersonalized. They stop thinking primarily of the people they are going to see and the quality of the relationship and focus instead on the building itself and its features. The staff becomes “personnel,” interchangeable, and indifferent, and the visitors pay little attention to them as people—friendly or unfriendly, competent or incompetent.
We learn also from this study that in the large buildings visitors complained frequently about the “general atmosphere” of the building, without naming specific problems. There were no such complaints among the visitors to the smaller buildings. It is as if the monoliths induce a kind of free-floating anxiety in people: the environment “feels wrong,” but it is hard to give a reason. It may be that the cause of the uneasiness is so simple— the place is too big, it is difficult to grasp, the people are like bees in a hive—that people are embarrassed to say it outright.
95 BUILDING COMPLEX
(“If it is as simple as that, I must be wrong—after all, there are so many of these buildings.”)
However it is, we take this evidence to indicate deep disaffection from the human environment in the huge, undifferentiated office buildings. The buildings impress themselves upon us as things: objects, commodities; they make us forget the people inside, as people; yet when we use these buildings we complain vaguely about the “general atmosphere.”
It seems then that the degree to which a building is broken into visible parts does affect the human relations among people in the building. And if a building must, for psychological reasons, be broken into parts, it seems impossible to find any rr ore natural way of breaking it down, than the one we have suggested. Namely, that the various institutions, groups, subgroups, activities, are visible in the concrete articulation of the physical building, on the grounds that people will only be fully able to identify with people in the building, when the building is a building complex.
A gothic cathedral—though an immense building—is an example of a building complex. Its various parts, the spire, the aisle, the nave, the chancel, the west gate, are a precise reflection of the social groups—the congregation, the choir, the special mass, and so forth.
And, of course, a group of huts in Africa, is human too, because it too is a complex of buildings, not one huge building by itself.
For a complex of buildings at high density, the easiest way of all, of making its human parts identifiable, is to build it up from narrow fronted buildings, each with its own internal stair. This is the basic structure of a Georgian terrace, or the brownstones of New York.
Therefore:
Never build large monolithic buildings. Whenever possible translate your building program into a building complex, whose parts manifest the actual social facts of the situation. At low densities, a building complex may take the form of a collection of small buildings connected by arcades, paths, bridges, shared gardens, and walls.
At higher densities, a single building can be treated as a
47i
building complex, if its important parts are picked out and made identifiable while still part of one three-dimensional fabric.
Even a small building, a house for example, can be conceived as a “building complex”—perhaps part of it is higher than the rest with wings and an adjoining cottage.
| , .... collection of small buildingsone building |
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 |
❖ *5*
At the highest densities, 3 or 4 stories, and along pedestrian streets, break the buildings into narrow, tall separate buildings, side by side, with common walls, each with its own internal or external stair. As far as possible insist that they be built piecemeal, one at a time, so that each one has time to be adapted to its neighbor. Keep the frontage as low as 25 or 30 feet, long thin
HOUSE (1O9), BUILDING FRONTS (l22); MAIN ENTRANCE (iio)
and perhaps a part of an arcade ( i i 9) which connects to next door buildings.
Arrange the buildings in the complex to form realms of movement—circulation realms (98) ; build one building from the collection as a main building—the natural center of the site— main building (99) ; place individual buildings where the land is least beautiful, least healthy—site repair (104); and put them to the north of their respective open space to keep the gardens sunny—south-facing outdoors (105); subdivide them further, into narrow wings, no more than 25 or 30 feet across— wings of light (107). For details of construction, start with STRUCTURE FOLLOWS SOCIAL SPACES (205). . . .
| 96 NUMBER OF STORIES* |
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 |
473
. . . assume now, that you know roughly how the parts of the building complex are to be articulated—building complex (95), and how large they are. Assume, also, that you have a site. In order to be sure that your building complex is workable within the limits of the site, you must decide how many stories its different parts will have. The height of each part must be constrained by the four-story limit (21). Beyond that, it depends on the area of your site, and the floor area which each part needs.
4*
Within the four-story height limit, just exactly how high should your buildings be?
To keep them small in scale, for human reasons, and to keep the costs down, they should be as low as possible. But to make the best use of land and to form a continuous fabric with surrounding buildings, they should perhaps be two or three or four stories instead of one. In this pattern we give rules for striking the balance.
Rule i: Set a four-story height limit on the site. This rule comes directly from four-story limit (21) and the reasons for establishing this limit are described there.
Rule 2: For any given site, do not let the ground area covered by buildings exceed 50 fer cent of the site. This rule requires that for any given site, where it belongs to a single household or a corporation, or whether it is a part of a larger site which contains several buildings, at least half of the site is left as open space. This is the limit of ground coverage within which reasonable site planning can take place. The rule therefore determines the maximum floor area that can be built with any given number of stories on a given site. The ratio of indoor area to site area (far—for floor area ratio) cannot thus exceed 0.5 in a single story building, i.O in a two story, 1.5 in a three story and 2.0 in a four story building.
If the total floor area you intend to build plus the built floor area that exists on the site is more than twice the area of the