Listening

How do we practice something we think we already do well? Most of us assume we are communicating clearly all the time. The problem with our communication is that we are fulfilling only half of the bargain; we have so much to say that we forget to listen (or we’re listening to ourselves). Yet, listening may be the most important element of collaboration. We credit ourselves with being attentive, but we recognize the real thing when we note: “She’s a good listener,” we inadvertently make an implicit confession; to listen well is rare.

The first step in listening well is simply to hear what someone is saying. The next step is to acknowledge what you “think” you’ve heard, and not simply by nodding in agreement – that is diplomacy. Echoing back to the speaker what you have understood reinforces the authenticity of the interaction and may clarify the message for others in the room. To listen effectively is to reflect just enough comprehension back to the speaker while devoting your attention to what is being said.

From the other side, to be listened to, fully and earnestly, is to be accepted. Real listening encourages and supports a deeper, mutual exchange. Of course, being heard is so unusual and so unexpected that it can also be uncomfortable. As mild panic settles in, we admonish ourselves: ‘Best say something useful!’

Opening the Door

Collaboration opens the door for more to enter. Inviting collaboration starts with the basics—hearing everyone introduce him- or herself. Further devices can be used to open things up. For example each participant might pin a thought, concern, or revelation anonymously to the wall. Barriers break down and people get more comfortable with one another. Later, each participant might put forward an alternative to the plan being discussed, or suggest three good reasons why a popular idea is mistaken.

Finding strengths and weaknesses becomes the shared work. Issuing an invitation to participate fully makes it possible to explore, weigh, and compare without injuring anyone’s self-esteem. The discussion becomes livelier, the results richer. Read more…

On one of those luminous days, with mounds of snow melting in recently blizzard-ravaged Connecticut, I went to visit with Niels Diffrient in his studio. He asked me to try out a working model of a lounge chair, his current project. Not your father’s lounge chair, this one is designed to accommodate the analog and digital media we use every day. As I stretched out and felt the comfort and support of the chair, I recalled that Niels had designed a similar chaise at the beginning of the digital revolution when we predicted that work would change dramatically, but had no idea what that change would look and feel like.

It was 1987 and I was working on a Metropolis article, “Chaises Longues,” writing, “For most people, working and relaxing suggest different body positions but the two can be reconciled by the long chair.” As one of our illustrations we showed Niels sitting, feet up with his bulky desktop computer raised to the ergonomically correct height and placed on the swiveling tablet attached to his then new Jefferson chair.

Niels Diffrient is a tinkerer, a fixer, an ever-restless experimenter, and an industrial designer who is not afraid to go back to his old ideas and make them better, more appropriate, more useful. His approach is aided and abetted by his constant search for new information and ideas, gleaned from the great big world of human knowledge we all have access to, but few bother to dive into as Niels does. He is truly a practicing generalist.

So when his new book, Confessions of a Generalist, a self-published and self-marketed biography designed by Brian Sisco, appeared on my desk, I was eager to dip into the details of a life that I knew only through anecdotes. To give you a shorthand idea of Niels’s thought pattern, I decided to excerpt a portion of the book, a section entitled “The Foundation of Generalism.” It’s a start. —SSS

The first thing to understand is that design is not art. As Oscar Wilde is purported to have said “Art is absolutely useless.” In spite of some topical conceits such as “Functional Art” or “Art Design” and other such oxymorons, art remains without utility; design is integral with utility and usefulness. This means fulfilling the needs of people which includes aesthetic considerations, separating it from engineering design and other technical, specialized pursuits.

The next thing to understand is that design, as currently practiced, is an activity not a profession. Whether one is a fashion designer, graphic designer, product designer or interior designer, one is still pursuing an activity or applied practice. Design, as a word, is a verb, not a noun, and as such is not a suitable identifier for a practice that has not yet reached the standards of a profession. Read more…

Imagine you are sitting in the top-floor boardroom of a major United States consumer products company and you are meeting one-on-one with the company’s executive in charge of sustainability. You have been to this facility many, many times before. Over seven years, you have met with executives in charge of finance, supply chains, manufacturing, product design, research and development, and marketing. Hundreds of meetings to listen, to learn, and to explore your new concepts for sustainable growth and beneficial innovation.

Together, you and the executive have shared data—lots of data. You know big-picture business issues facing this company and detailed chemistries of the products. You even know how many light bulbs are used to illuminate the enterprise worldwide, how much energy that consumes, how many light bulbs contain mercury, and how many people it takes to change a light bulb and what that costs….

Outside the giant plate-glass windows, tall granite-clad skyscrapers stand proudly in the sunshine. The Brazilian mahogany table is polished to a shine, and the high-backed leather chairs remind you of the important executive decisions made in this room, which can affect the lives of millions of people—for better or for worse. One might say you are here chasing the butterfly effect. Given the scale of this company, one small decision has the power to make a real difference for the economy, for people, and for the planet.

That is one reason you are here—scale. But you are also here for another reason—velocity. Many of the largest corporate enterprises in the world have come to realize the downside of the butterfly effect, the repercussions of modern business that are obviously damaging and too often unaccounted for—famously called externalities, such as carbon in the atmosphere, toxic materials, poisoned rivers, lost rain forests, and so on, with no end of this decline in sight. Many businesspeople realize this is not good business. They like to know what they are doing and to be able to account for it, but they feel like they are driving a car without a gas gauge or even, shall we say, a battery charge indicator? It makes them nervous. They also are like Olympic athletes who want to be on a safe, level playing field and who do not want to be left behind. They want to lead. Read more…

Sport is among the most insistent reasons for large-scale architecture. Think of the Colosseum or Fenway Park, not to mention a new crop of Olympic venues every two years. Every society builds large-scale venues for sporting entertainment; only the purpose varies. While we’ve forsaken such diversions as public executions and mock sea battles we continue to build for baseball, football, soccer, or basketball using new specifications. Amidst this larger shift, from the trident and the net to the diamond and the catch, there are occasional continuities. Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of horseracing and the structures erected for its viewing. This specialty is finally given due attention by Paul Roberts and Isabelle Taylor in their intriguing new book, Racecourse Architecture.

The Hippodrome is one of the oldest of sporting forms. And while the Roman-built Leptis Magna may not be hosting the Libyan Triple Crown today, a number of racecourses can boast traditions of continuous use that put any other sport to shame. Chester Racecourse, which operates to this day, held its first races in 1539; the Grand Écuries at Chantilly were completed in 1736; the original York Racecourse Grandstand (they naturally have a larger one now) dates from 1756. Even comparatively youthful racecourses frequently boast architecture older than any extant American sporting venue, not to mention any worldwide soccer venue.

Racecourses continue to exercise a grip on the public imagination. This image might have drifted more in the direction of the corporate and the raffish in recent years but still manages to accommodate both staggering seediness and considerable gentility. HBO’s short-lived Luck featured a standard cast of racing degenerates. Joseph Bruno until recently held court over his seeming lifelong fiefdom of the New York Senate from the Saratoga Racecourse. Cary Grant met Ingrid Bergman at the racecourse in Notorious, seeking news of Nazi Claude Rains’ doings; Christopher Walken’s Max Zorin raced horses at Chantilly in A View to A Kill, which naturally Roger Moore had to investigate. My Fair Lady featured the “Ascot Gavotte”:

Every duke and peer is here

Everyone who should be here is here

What a smashing, positively dashing spectacle

The Ascot opening day

While today’s Alan J. Lerner would be unlikely to choose such a topic, Ascot continues to possess a distinct grandeur. And just as unglamorous racing events have not swept away swank ones, undistinguished racing architecture has happily failed to carry away many glorious examples of the form. Horseracing in the contemporary sense began to take form, unsurprisingly, under the aegis of those Stuart monarchs, who tended to possess enthusiasms for the divine right of kings and for fun in equal measure. Enthusiasm may have outstripped talent. James I was described by one historian as “the worst rider in the world” and it is rumored that Parliament once dispatched a group to request his return to government from racing. No wonder his grandson should want to rule without them. Read more…

In her new book, The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science, Akiko Busch discusses how a thoughtful citizenry can learn, understand, and act upon their findings as they observe, closely, the rapidly changing natural world around them.  In reading her introductory remarks, in which she gives the pride of place to a quote from Edward O. Wilson—“We do not understand ourselves yet and descend further from heaven’s air if we forget how much the natural world means to us”— an overwhelming truth hit me square in the eye. As a long-time resident of the big city, I have forgotten my innate connections with the natural world. As I went deeper into Busch’s text, I came to a painful realization of what this careless disconnection has done to me. I now know that the further I have turned away from that natural world, the more impoverished I became, both intellectually and emotionally.

Busch’s examples of citizen scientists, those who regularly observe, record, and act upon the wrongs visited on the natural world in their own back yards, seem to have a deeper sense of place than those of us who stopped paying attention. In addition to using their keen powers of observation, these alert citizens take it upon themselves to share their findings with others through all kinds of social networking, thus adding to the sum total of human knowledge of our world.  They also get their hands dirty, like Busch and her cohorts have done in the Hudson Valley, where she made these observations about nature, human nature, and the nature of deep connections to place. Here, as she talks about her encounter with water chestnuts, she got me intrigued about Bats in the Locust Tree, Coyotes Across the Clear-Cut, Eels in the Stream, just a few of her evocative chapter headings I’ll be getting involved with next.—-SSS

Weeding water chestnuts (trapa natans) from the river is an exercise in which leisure and industry easily coincide; it’s a brand of gardening in which a sense of purpose can intersect with being languid. From time to time, I saw an elver, a juvenile American eel, winding around a stem or root like some weird extra plant appendage. Although the fish diversity is lower here than elsewhere on the river, eels can withstand the low oxygen levels of the water chestnut bed, all the while snacking on its assorted invertebrates. Yet if the eels swim off quickly, everything else seems to take its own time. Like anything else that is done in water, weeding is done slowly, as though it is possible to take on the liquid motion of what is around you. The stems can be pulled out with the gentlest tug; their attachment to the riverbed seems slight, their resistance imperceptible. Yet there is the smallest bit of spring to them, as though some bit of elastic thread has woven its way through the watery pink tendrils, and they have that sense of give that the most tenacious opponents sometimes seem to have. With a bit of stretch, these interlopers seem to be hanging on, though without much faith. And the mud on the bed of the river has a give, too; at each step, we sink in a bit. Perhaps this is why I am so drawn to the waterworld of rivers: nothing here stays the same for too long; things are always shifting, drifting, gently giving way. Read more…

In his introduction to Design Education for a Sustainable Future, published recently by Routledge/earthscan, Rob Fleming says his premise “is remarkably simple. It is based on a series of straightforward questions that seek to uncover the context, values, and behaviors necessary for effective twenty-first century design education. Is society moving towards a new sustainable or integral worldview, a new set of cultural values that are reshaping the very fabric of human existence? If so, how are such profound shifts in consciousness impacting the design and construction industries? And how can design educators better reflect the zeitgeist of the new century by moving from well-intentioned but lightweight ‘greening’ to the deeper and more impactful ideals of sustainability and resilience?

“The process of answering these questions begins with the requisite historical narrative which explores cultural evolution not as a slow and gradual rise to new levels of complexity but rather through a series of hyper-accelerated jumps in human consciousness. The jump from dispersed Hunter Gatherer cultures to centralized agrarian societies and then to industrialized nations correlates well to the convergence of new energy sources and the invention of new communication technologies.” What follows is Fleming’s opening salvo to a much talked about, much-overdue shift that needs to take place in design education:

Jeremy Rifkin argues in his book The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis that “The convergence of energy and communications revolutions not only reconfigures society and social roles and relationships but also human consciousness itself.”¹ The early twenty-first century, as characterized by unprecedented sharing of information via wireless networks and by the emergence of renewable energy technologies, demarcates a threshold from one world view to another, a jump from an industrialized conception of nature as immutable and infinite to a Gaia inspired view of nature as alive, intelligent and, most of all, fragile in the hands of man.

The principles of sustainability, which emphasize ecological regeneration and co-creative processes, comprise a new and powerful ideal that is reshaping technologically driven initiatives, especially those associated with the design and construction of the built environment. Societal conceptions of money and profit, consumerism, design and technology are radically shifting to address the superficial but useful demands of “greening,” and are leading to finding deeper and more impactful processes to meet the much higher bar of sustainability. Read more…

The author and urbanist Daniel Brook has a fascinating new book out entitled A History of Future Cities. In it he examines three historic “instant” cities—Mumbai (Bombay), Shanghai, and St. Petersburg—along with that over-the-top 21^st century newcomer, Dubai. He looks at the economics, culture, architecture, and political forces that formed these cities; all of them grew rapidly, exploding, seemingly overnight.  Brook’s smart take works on two levels—as a kind of cautionary tale for today’s world and a helpful reminder that this phenomenon is not entirely new. The author will speak at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. on April 15 and at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn on April 18^th.  Recently I traded email questions with the New Orleans-based writer. An edited version of our conversation follows.

Martin C. Pedersen: How did the idea for the book evolve?

Daniel Brook: The spark for the book came when I went to Mumbai for the first time, in 2005. It immediately reminded me of St. Petersburg, where I’d been previously, both in its architectural mimicry of Western Europe and in the overt attempt of its people to be Western-oriented cosmopolitans. The Shanghai piece came to me after a fortuitous conversation with the translator who guided me around a Southern California-themed gated community on the outskirts of Beijing, called Orange County. She told me she couldn’t understand why American readers would be interested in something as mundane as this suburban subdivision, so I told her, deadpan, that I thought American readers would be quite surprised to learn there’s a Southern California-themed gated community near the Beijing airport. “Yeah, that’s more of a Shanghai thing,” she replied. “They’ve been doing this down there for a hundred years.” Sure enough, when I read up on Shanghai, she was right. And when I got there, in 2009, I ended up visiting a subdivision called Columbia Circle that was built by an American real estate developer in the 1920s. It looked a lot like where I grew up on Long Island, which makes sense since that too was built by American real estate developers in the 1920s. I also wanted a new global city just beginning this process today, so I added Dubai, which is the most famous and dramatic of them. Read more…

The need for collaboration is everywhere. We often don’t see how it shapes our lives, on a global scale and in our most intimate interactions. But the challenges we face today and tomorrow demand that more people work together more effectively than ever before. We are guests on a vast interconnected world spinning through space. One small change at the everyday level can resonate across the entire planet. We are confronted by the need to engage our most vexing challenges and sparking opportunities the best way possible – together.

Not surprisingly, the concept of collaboration has a troubled past. Let’s start with definitions:

The English word collaborate comes from the Latin collaborare, meaning, simply enough, to work together. But during World War II, in Vichy France, collaboration became a euphemism for traitorous cooperation with an occupying enemy. Consider The Times of London, 5 June 1943:“Not all have a record as black as Laval’s … There were some who collaborated with a sick heart.”

Collaboration’s cousin, conspire, stems from the French conspirer – to breathe in unison – and means to harmonize, agree, or unite for a purpose. But since the late 14th century, the notion of working together has been overshadowed by dark speculations. To conspire was often “to agree to do something criminal, illegal, or reprehensible together.” These connotations have been commonly invoked up to the present day in the term ‘conspiracy theory’, with its nefarious undertones.

We even have laws prohibiting collaboration. The legal definition of ‘unlawful assembly’ sends collaborators to jail in many countries, including the United States. California’s Penal Code 407 prohibits the coming together of two or more people “to do an unlawful act, or to do a lawful act in a violent, boisterous, or tumultuous manner.” In other words, we may be loud alone, but should collaborate quietly. In India, Section 144 of the Criminal Code prohibits assembly of four or more persons, along with public meetings. (That fourth collaborator seems to push things over the edge). Read more…

If they are to be believed, designers cherish their computers, their books, and their cameras. At least, that’s what Frank Phillipin and Billy Kiosoglou were told by most of the 50 designers they interviewed for their book I Used to Be a Design Student. The book, from Laurence King Publishing, lays out a series of profiles of designers, both the way they are now, and as they were as students. Compressed into one volume, it creates a frank look at nearly every aspect of a designer’s life that can be expressed on a page—their process, their inspirations, their projects, their favorite food, their weight. The list goes on.

With the goal of understanding how their processes and motivations have changed, the authors have catalogued the creative evolution of these designers from their days as students to their present careers. There’s no road map to success here, but a trove of interesting insights and, for the aspiring designer, it is full of sound advice that will lead in the right direction. Read more…

“Was James Stirling modernism’s last great prophet, or postmodernism’s original poster child?” If this question keeps you up at night you might not rest any more easily after you’ve finished the book that it launches, Amanda Reeser Lawrence’s James Stirling: Revisionary Modernist. But the fault would rest more with the intriguing excess of ideas that the author presents, rather than the absence of any comparably pithy, one-line answer.

Contemporary architectural taxonomy, when you narrow it down to subjects worth a book-length study, is difficult about as often as it is simple. No boundary is more suspect than one between modernism and postmodernism, where laws become undermined by endless inbred impulses, whether conscious or not. These classification debates can lead to oversimplified questions of whether a building’s appearance suggests doctrinaire rigidity or ironic quotation; that glib test of whether it looks like the Villa Savoye on the one hand or a clock, a buffalo, a tureen,  a Cistercian gristmill on the other. In the absence of other evidence, sometimes purely structural analyses are a fair foundation for these judgments.

Happily, however, Lawrence is engaged in quite a different, and far more rigorous pursuit. She’s concerned with a close analysis of Stirling’s own thinking about his projects and his idiosyncratic conception of modernism, as “a set of principles that transcended association with the contemporary or even with the twentieth century; they had nothing to do with any stylistic language, modern or remote. As Stirling was fond of saying, ‘There’s nothing fundamentally new about modern architecture,’ by which he meant that modern qualities could be found in buildings throughout all of history.”

This may not be a useful way of thinking about either modernism or postmodernism in the larger world, but it certainly is an interesting way to think about James Stirling. Lawrence advances the Harold Bloom-influenced thesis that Stirling’s invocation of the past bore a unique stamp, forsaking reference for its own sake in favor of a vital present-ness.

“’To revision’ something, as Bloom notes, is to literally ‘see’ it ‘again.’ This is a distinct idea from referencing, a more neutral act in which the element brought forward from the past is acknowledged as complete and left more or less intact. The Latin root of ‘reference’ defines an origin point—-in other words, a fixed and knowable beginning. Copying similarly implies that the original element is unmodified; the later version simply a repetition of the earlier incarnation. Re-visioning, on the other hand, acts more violently and more decisively on the precedent, violating its initial terms. The act of revision necessitates some kind of change—-a ‘correction,’ to use Bloom’s term.”

Lawrence takes as her focus only six of her subject’s significant works, those “focused on Stirling’s investigation of historical sources and their investigation to modernism,” a tour which affords a fascinating frame for her thesis but, just as valuably, the opportunity for a rigorous examination of several of Stirling’s greatest works.

An intriguing starting point: a list of Stirling’s declared favorite works while in architecture school featured Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture and Ouevre Complete but also A.E. Richardson’s Monumental Classic Architecture in Britain and Ireland, and Fritz Saxl and Rudolf Wittkower’s British Art and the Mediterranean, a volume I’ve never heard of, but which traces the seemingly very un-Stirlingesque “Mediterranean influence on English art, from prehistory to the nineteenth century.”

We start, unsurprisingly, with Corbusier. Stirling’s Flat at Ham Common (a collaboration with James Gowan) was an acknowledged response to Corb’s Maisons Jaoul, which Stirling repeatedly disparaged for its perceived turn from that architect’s earlier “rationalism.” And why revise a master’s undistinguished work?

Partly, Lawrence speculates, to distinguish the project from prewar modernism and, more importantly, to “rationalize” Corbusier’s precedent. Stirling and Gowan modeled a close accord between structural circumstance and visibility, bathrooms and bedrooms cluster along the structural cross walls, living rooms along the facades freed from load-bearing constraints. They jettisoned French vernacular features, such as the earth roof and the Catalan vault at Jaoul, while turning to English cheap and “messy” Londonstock brick. Later Stirling paired a photo of a window at Ham Common with one of a Liverpool dock, to emphasize a natural English connection; at the same time he was tidying the perceived irrationality of Jaoul. He referred to bricks as a “9-inch-by-4 ½ inch pre-cast-system” and used them precisely here, distinctly differentiating brick sections of the facade from concrete, another retort to the perceived subjective sloppiness of Corbusier’s treatment of these two materials at Jaoul.

Stirling and Gowan, Ham Common. The de Stijl–influenced stair volume of the two-story buildings. Photo: James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal © CCA

Stirling’s and Gowan’s game becomes subtler in the next example, the design for Churchill College at Cambridge. Here they embrace the traditional courtyard model, on a vast scale. “More broadly, symmetry at Churchill was put in the service of a very different ideological goal than it had been for the Neo-Palladians,” writes the author. “Rather than operating as any kind of idealizing or historicizing impulse, it instead became a means to distill the core attributes of the courtyard type into a pure form, to reduce the courtyard model to its essence. For example, the idiosyncratic outer walls of a typical Cambridge college that must respond to existing structures or sight constraints are here, in the absence of any context, made rectilinear; the ‘quadrangle,’ more often than not a five- or six-sided shape, with randomly angled sides of uneven lengths, its taken to its logical endpoint of a perfect square; the usually erratic paths across the courtyard are now straightened and evenly spaced. Symmetry, then, as employed at Churchill College, abstracts and ‘corrects’ the typical features of the Cambridge College…” Read more…