Unified Architectural Theory, Lecture 1: The Structure of Architectural Theories

hello everyone this is the first lecture of a series of lectures that i'm giving this semester and the publisher suspecius press has agreed to host on their site this is the book i'm using i'm using my book unified architectural theory form language and complexity and it's a companion to christopher alexander's the nature of order volume 1 the phenomenon of life so we will use this book and of course alexander's book the nature of order one one the phenomenon of life my book uh extracts from the book are available free online hosted by arts daily and i will provide links to those uh every week that we have uh the readings and uh this series of lectures will just uh discuss some complimentary material and questions about the course so um uh i'm very happy this is january uh 2021 i'm very happy that uh this book um unified architectural theory was just chosen by uh art daily uh in the spanish version of arts daily which is platform architectura was chosen among the 28 most important books available in spanish and i'm honored because that list includes vitruvius palladio my book is not about classical and roman architecture okay we begin the course by asking what is architectural theory is the slogan form follows language architectural theory and the answer is no because it is not enough instructions to help somebody design a nice house or a nice kitchen or a nice restaurant okay it is just too brief that's not enough an architectural theory needs uh two three four pages okay you need to have some meat behind architectural theory just like a theory in physics and chemistry and biology a theory has to have some meat to it in order to help design and the criterion throughout the course and throughout alexander's work is that success depends upon the um the uh well-being of the user of the building nothing to do with flashiness or winning architecture prizes or becoming extremely rich a success will be judged strictly by uh the user does the user feel comfortable doing what they need to do performing the function inside the building uh uh do they feel um healthy in the short run does their health improve in the long run because short-term stress leads to uh illness physical illness in the long term so so these are very specific uh criteria for the success of a building and then these uh will judge the theory upon which that building is based so to begin with the slogan form follows function you know it's a cute slogan it may help a little bit but it's not enough just just the size of the instruction is not enough now um is post occupancy evaluation an architectural theory the answer is no but post occupancy evaluation is uh intimately related to what we're talking about because you uh you come up say with a theory or you you take a theory of architecture of design and you apply it and you design a building and then after the building is standing then you perform a post occupancy evaluation and you see do the users feel comfortable in it are they healthy using it do they get sick over the long term uh well at the moment post occupancy evaluation is not considered things of such depth but it could and i hope that we have a resurgence of post occupancy evaluation so so um this is a a an experimental method to gather data that then go back and tell you whether the theory you use to to produce this building is a good theory or not so already you see in the first five minutes of this course i'm leading towards criteria for judging theories because you can have different theories and some theories will be judged as good because they provide good human environments for living and working and other theories could be judged as bad if they uh give rise to anxiety or illness or a difficult uh difficult to use okay create a building is difficult to use so this is a very particular uh and precise criteria now uh post occupancy evaluation uh uh used to be very very strong 30 years ago and uh has not people don't use it very much nowadays nevertheless i want to let everyone know who is listening to this that today outside of architecture we have enormously powerful new techniques where you have psychological and medical sensors portable sensors that you can put and where and go and go through and get a a post-occupancy evaluation that is a thousand times more accurate than the old times when you you had three people go with with a checklist and a questionnaire and you asked them well here we we have these are medical sensors and you get millions of data that even give you uh the unconscious uh response of the body which is uh more truthful than uh than than the old type of a questionnaire so today we can perform a post-occupancy evaluation it is not done so far by the architecture profession which has gone on to investigate other things but it is a central concern of product development uh advertising uh the medical field uh environmental psychology as applied to to to business and commerce and advertising so uh we really have uh we're on the threshold of a revolution of of judging architecture uh because of these of these developments okay um our construction codes architectural theory no they're not construction codes don't tell you how to do things construction codes just impose some um measures or dimensions or or standards on what you build and those may be useful all those may stop your creativity or constrain you in some way we can um fix many codes that are simply wrong and misguided for example the euclidean zoning urban zoning goes back to euclid ohio not the euclid euclidean geometry or the mathematician euclid euclid ohio which was just outside of cleveland ohio and now it's part of cleveland since cleveland has grown since the 1920s and the euclidean zoning tells you you have to separate the the the functions you have to separate residential from commercial uh from uh from everything else uh that destroyed the city uh it gave rise to to sprawl terrible uh traffic problems etc etc so when when my friends want to build a new urbanist development which is a nice mixed use pedestrian friendly scale they cannot do so unless those uh zoning codes are waves so the the locality has to vote a variance otherwise you cannot build a living city with the present codes therefore the present codes uh many of the present codes are just false now plumbing codes are good electrical codes are good they they keep a check on on how thick a wire you put on the wall otherwise the whole thing can catch on fire but uh architectural urban codes need drastic revisions and uh if you are uh if you take this course seriously the course that i'm giving then then you will go and and try to find out where some of these design codes come from they come from some theory but the theory could be totally false or it could be somebody made it up and said well i think this is a good idea but there is no evidence base okay uh if there is an evidence base then we can check it scientifically if there's no evidence based then perhaps it was a crazy idea to begin with and uh should be revised okay a legal structure is there to be examined and revised in case a mistake was made so that's uh that's something that that of course has implications for uh now uh is is modernism an architectural theory is post-modernism an architectural theory well it's if it's a it's a big question and we are going to discuss that question uh later when we get down to actually constructing architectural theories and then we're going to compare how good um the architectural theories are for creating uh useful human environments this is our strict criterion i don't care about uh flashiness or about history or about any other philosophical questions i and alexander whom i follow uh care only about the health of the user and the well-being of the user in such a building or urban environment now a very useful tool for judging an architectural theory is the external validation through consilience consilience is a term that was used by edward wilson here is his book this is not a uh reading a requirement in the course uh i'm just using one a very brief article that he wrote and it's available openly and i will put a link on it so professor wilson said that a good test of whether a discipline is uh is correct or not does not suffer from fundamental internal flaws is its external consilience where it meets next to another discipline is that a nice join is that a logical join for example the join between chemistry and biology is a beautiful join okay you can cross over the border from chemistry of molecules to uh organic molecules and then to biological structure okay it's a nice transition those are the separate disciplines but there's a nice transition there's another transition between chemistry and physics okay chemistry is molecules and atoms combining together physics looks at the inside and the constituents of the atoms and how they uh they can form a solid state uh and and then the elementary particles they are that that uh that create the atom in the first place there's a very nice transition at the interface between chemistry and physics so we're going to ask is there conciliance between architecture and related fields for example education medicine um [Music] and other fields that uh that architecture adjoins uh and here is going to be the big surprise uh that is a very poor if non-existent consilience bad transition or no transition at all because we have many cases of hospitals design according to architectural principles where the architects say oh this is a great design for a hospital and the doctors say this is terrible design for a hospital and the patients [Music] do not get healed so so quickly as they could in a different type of hospital so do the architects know what they're doing when they design hospitals it's an open question okay but it's it's it's a revolutionary question let's go to education architects design a classroom different classrooms for different age students for different conditions the education people do they approve that this is a good classroom many cases no in many cases the education people say this is a terrible classroom it creates it has glare the students cannot cannot pay attention it creates anxiety in the students that's a bad transition between architecture and education uh it does not look good for for the profession if uh there's a lack of conciliance so we are going to address such problems head on and to ask why is there a lack of consilience and what can we do about it okay so these are some of the very very essential questions that uh i'm going to address in this series of lectures and i hope to see you about once a week so bye everyone

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Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021