This is perhaps the most important single fact about a building. If the building is placed right, the building and its gardens will be happy places full of activity and laughter. If it is done wrong, then all the attention in the world, and the most beautiful details, will not prevent it from being a silent gloomy place. Thousands of acres of open space in every city are wasted because they are north of buildings and never get the sun. This is true for public buildings, and it is true for private houses. The recently built Bank of America building in San Francisco—a giant building built by a major firm of architects—has its plaza on the north side. At lunchtime, the plaza is empty, and people eat their sandwiches in the street, on the south side where the sun is.
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| North facing outdoors. |
Just so for small private houses. The shape and orientation of lots common in most developments force houses to be surrounded by open space which no one will ever use because it isn’t in the sun.
A survey of a residential block in Berkeley, California, confirms this problem dramatically. Along Webster Street—an east-west street—I 8 of 20 persons interviewed said they used only the sunny part of their yards. Half of these were people living on
the north side of the street—these -people did not use their backyards at all, but would sit in the front yard, beside the sidewalk, to be in the south sun. The north-facing back yards were used primarily for storing junk. Not one of the persons interviewed indicated preference for a shady yard.
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| Favorite outdoor places to the south. |
The survey also gave credence to the idea that sunny areas won’t be used if there is a deep band of shade up against the house, through which you must pass to get to the sun. Four north facing backyards were large enough to be sunny toward the rear. In only one of these yards was the sunny area reported as being used—in just the one where it was possible to get to the sun without passing through a deep band of shade.
Although the idea of south-facing open space is simple, it has great consequences, and there will have to be major changes in land use to make it come right. For example, residential neighborhoods would have to be organized quite differently from the way they are laid out today. Private lots would have to be longer north to south, with the houses on the north side.
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| Blocks reorganized to catch the sun. |
5 * 5
TOWNS
They cannot claim to have struck the balance between the needs of towns and communities, and the needs of the world community as a whole. Indeed, their tendency has been to override local needs and repress local culture, and at the same time aggrandize themselves to the point where they are out of reach, their power barely conceivable to the average citizen.
2. Unless a region has at least several million people in it, it will not be large enough to have a seat in a world government, and will therefore not be able to supplant the power and authority of present nation-states.
We found this point expressed by Lord Weymouth of Warminster, England, in a letter to the New York Times, March 15, 1973-
world FEDERATION: A THOUSAND STATES
. . . the essential foundation stone for world federation on a democratic basis consists of regionalization within centralized government. . . . This argument rests on the idea that world government is lacking in moral authority unless each delegate represents an approximately equal portion of the world’s population. Working backward from an estimate of the global population in the year 2000, which is anticipated to rise to the 10,000 million mark, I suggest that we should be thinking in terms of an ideal regional state at something around ten million, or between five and fifteen million, to give greater flexibility. This would furnish the U.N. with an assembly of equals of 1000 regional representatives: a body that would be justified in claiming to be truly representative of the world’s population.
Weymouth believes that Western Europe could take some of the initiative for triggering this conception of world government. He looks for the movement for regional autonomy to take hold in the European Parliament at Strasbourg; and hopes that power can gradually be transferred from Westminister, Paris, Bonn, etc., to regional councils, federated in Strasbourg.
I am suggesting that in the Europe of the future we shall see England split down into Kent, Wessex, Mercia, Anglia and Northumbria, with an independent Scotland, Wales and Ireland, of course. Other European examples will include Brittany, Bavaria and Calabria. The national identities of our contemporary Europe will have lost their political significance.
3. Unless the regions have the power to be self-governing, they
I 2
BUILDINGS
Note that this pattern was developed in the San Francisco Bay Area. Of course, its significance varies as latitude and climate change. In Eugene, Oregon, for example, with a rather rainy climate, at about $0° latitude, the pattern is even more essentiaclass="underline" the south faces of the buildings are the most valuable outdoor spaces on sunny days. In desert climates, the pattern is less important; people will want to stay in outdoor spaces that have a balance of sun and shade. But remember that in one way or another, this pattern is absolutely fundamental.
Therefore:
Always place buildings to the north of the outdoor spaces that go with them, and keep the outdoor spaces to the south. Never leave a deep band of shade between the building and the sunny part of the outdoors.
building to the north
 | outdoors south |
A *% • •
Let half-hidden garden (ill) influence the position of the outdoors too. Make the outdoor spaces positive—positive outdoor space (106)—and break the building into narrow wings —wings of light (107). Keep the most important rooms to the south of these wings—indoor sunlight (128) ; and keep storage, parking, etc, to the north—north face (162). When the building is more developed, you can concentrate on the special sunny areas where the outdoors and building meet, and make definite places there, where people can sit in the sun—sunny place (161). . . .
516
106 POSITIVE OUTDOOR SPACE**
. . . in making south facing outdoors (105) you must both choose the place to build, and also choose the place for the outdoors. You cannot shape the one without the other. This pattern gives you the geometric character of the outdoors; the next one— wings of light (107)—gives you the complementary shape of the indoors.
Outdoor spaces which are merely “left over” between buildings will, in general, not be used.
There are two fundamentally different kinds of outdoor space: negative space and positive space. Outdoor space is negative when it is shapeless, the residue left behind when buildings— which are generally viewed as positive—are placed on the land. An outdoor space is positive when it has a distinct and definite shape, as definite as the shape of a room, and w'hen its shape is as important as the shapes of the buildings w;hich surround it. These two kinds of space have entirely different plan geometries, w'hich may be most easily distinguished by their figure-ground reversal.
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| Buildings that create negative, leftover space . . . buildings that create positive outdoor space. |