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The Culture of Building First Printing Edition Howard
Davis Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Howard Davis
ISBN(s): 9780195112948, 0195112946
Edition: First Printing
File Details: PDF, 24.17 MB
Year: 2006
Language: english
THE CULTURE OF BUILDING
THE CULTURE OF BUILDING

HOWARD DAVIS

New York Oxford

Oxford University Press

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
www.oup.com
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2006
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Publication of this book was supported by a grant from the
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davis, Howard, 1948-
The culture of building / by Howard Davis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13 978-0-19-511294-8; 978-0-19-530593-7 (pbk.)
ISBN 19-511294-6; 0-19-530593-0 (pbk.)
1. Building. 2. Corporate culture.
3. Architecture and society. I. Title.
TH153D374 1999
720—dc21 98-19051

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in China
on acid-free paper
To the memory of my father,
member of the New York City building trades
This page intentionally left blank
PREFACE

M yoshinji Temple, in Kyoto, is a place that for hundreds of years has

harbored many traditional crafts, including carpentry, roof-tile manu-
facture, gardening, screen painting, plastering, metal work, bell casting, and
others. The craftsmen who built it were working—and continue to work—
within ancient traditions that embodied discipline and an insistence on
perfection. As I write this, I am sitting at the edge of one of the temple's
gardens, in a physical world of beauty and peace, an exemplar of one of the
great traditions of world architecture.
Outside is modern Japan, and there can be few contrasts in the world that
are more extreme. The world outside is one of bright lights, pachinko parlors
and convenience stores, businessmen and skyscrapers, buildings trying to be
as different from each other as possible. The people who built that world
work within contemporary traditions of window manufacture, concrete
préfabrication, steel erection, curtain wall assembly, mortgage finance.
A similar contrast exists in some form in most countries of the world, in
which there are fundamental differences between traditional and contempo-
rary systems of building production, linked to fundamental differences in
the environments they produce. The world of traditional building is not a
golden past that must be reattained. But if one believes, as I do, that the
modern built environment is to a large extent brutal and alienating, and that
 traditional environments contained at least elements of human feeling and
aesthetic sensibility, one is face-to-face with the question of understanding
the past and traditional practice in ways that can shed light on improving the
present.
This book was conceived through experiences that helped make me
aware of the importance of the social contexts in which building happens,
and how those contexts affect the built result. In professional work in differ-
ent countries, I realized the importance of working in the framework of
local systems and local competencies, instead of assuming that my knowl-
edge was necessarily superior. In my travels I saw both the beauty of tradi-
tional architecture, and the ways it had been submerged by real cultural and
economic forces, transformed into the ubiquitous concrete frame, re-bar,
and concrete block buildings that have become the new global vernacular.
Through much of this, I was trying to reconcile, in my teaching, the often
conflicting needs for the quality of the individual building on the one hand
and the improvement of the built world as a whole on the other—all the
while listening to the frustrations of students about to enter a professional
world in which such conflicts have not been resolved.
This book is an essay about the origins and potentials of contemporary
building practice. It depends on cross-cultural comparisons rather than
intensive studies of one or two cultures, and one of my intentions is to help
break down intellectual barriers that have up until now prevented us from
seeing the world of building as a whole. These barriers—between the ver-
nacular and "high-style" architecture, between different cultural traditions,
between tradition and innovation, between craftsmanship and technology,
between architectural practice and building practice—are artificial creations
that do not respect the complex human interactions that guide building
activity. Any act of building is connected to all others, and its success
depends ultimately upon improving the overall conditions of shared knowl-
edge and human relationships on which the production of the built world
depends.
I wrote this book in optimism and hope for the new century, as the
quality of buildings and cities is re-emerging as a central responsibility and
challenge.

I am grateful to the many people and organizations who have helped me

with this book: to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine
Arts for a generous publication grant; the University of Texas at Austin for
a summer grant that allowed me to research the ancient lights doctrine in
London; to two offices of the University of Oregon—the Humanities Cen-
ter for appointing me one of its first Humanities Fellows to develop a first
draft of the book and the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs for
two summer grants that allowed me to explore the building cultures of Lon-
don and New York in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and to
Columbia University, which gave me visiting scholar status in 1996. Two
department heads of the Department of Architecture at the University
of Oregon, Donald Corner and Michael Utsey, have been generous with
research leaves and have allowed me to teach courses on the material in this
book.

viii PREFACE
 Discussions with many people have helped me think through the ideas
discussed here. David Week and I have had conversations in the four corners
of the world about culture and building; Hajo Neis and I have discussed
Japanese and German building practice and the question of how innovative
ideas are implemented; Tom Kerr has been the most knowledgeable guide to
modern Indian cities; John Rowell, Don Corner, Peter Keyes, and Rob Thai-
Ion have helped me understand contemporary building and planning prac-
tice and housing production. I have valued my connection to the Vernacular
Architecture Forum, whose members have broadened the scope of scholar-
ship in the field while maintaining the highest standards of quality.
Several colleagues were generous enough to read and comment on the
entire manuscript: Chris Alexander, Greg Brokaw, Jyoti Hosagrahar, Peter
Keyes, Hajo Neis, John Rowell, Nick Seemann, Rob Thallon, Glenda Utsey,
and David Week. Jenny Young applied a perceptive literary and architectural
eye to an edit of the final draft. Members of a graduate seminar at the Uni-
versity of Oregon read an early version and were as frank as they needed
tobe.
Many other people helped in large and small ways: John Anstey, Rasem
Badran, Greg Burgess, Peter Clegg, Christie Coffin, Alvin Comiter, Ken
Costigan, Philip Dole, Stephen Duff, Gail Feld, Jerry Finrow, Alan Forrest,
Avi Friedman, Bill Gilland, Peter Ho, Joanne Hogarth, Aso Jaff, Ramzi
Kawar, David Krawitz, Aaron Lamport, Paul Larson, Ron Lovinger, Andrew
Morrogh, Brook Muller, Paul Oliver, Jorn Orum-Nielsen, the office of Patri-
cia and John Patkau, Leland Roth; Dr. Shigemura, Tsutomu; Mimi Sullivan,
Seishi Unuma, Ellen Weiss, and two anonymous reviewers for Oxford Uni-
versity Press. Donald Corner and Jenny Young have been the most loyal
friends and knowing colleagues.
Graduate student research assistants have been particularly helpful: Linda
Babetski, Lewis Chui, Decker Flynn, Stewart Green, Donald Harris, Ken
Hutchinson, Ellen Linstead, and Corey Saft. Peter DeMaria drew the axono-
metrics in chapter 9. Kevin Sauser designed early versions of the page
layouts and the simulation drawings of the Islamic city in chapter 9. Adam
Sharkey was of great help with the selection of all the illustrations and in the
final production of the manuscript. John Paull and Anup Janardhanan did
many of the line drawings and diagrams.
Many archives allowed me the use of their collections. Special thanks
are due to Mrs. Marie Draper, archivist for the Bedford Estate in London
and at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire; Mireille Galinou, curator of the
prints, paintings, and photographs collection of the Museum of London;
Mary Beth Betts, architecture curator of the New-York Historical Society;
and Sheila Klos, Architecture and Allied Arts Librarian at the University of
Oregon.
My greatest help has come from Christopher Alexander, who wrote
things a long time ago that resonated with me and who through his friend-
ship, his own example, and numerous conversations about this book has
challenged and inspired me for nearly twenty-five years. His help with the
manuscript over the last year was critical in clarifying its intention and form.
To a large extent, the book is an outgrowth of ideas that he has put forward
and represents an attempt to ask questions about the social frameworks that

PREFACE ix
 might make possible the kinds of building processes, and the kinds of build-
ings that can enhance our lives, that he is working to achieve.

A Note on Language

Despite the fact that women have, over history, often taken a central role in
the planning, construction, and use of buildings, before the final decades of
the nineteenth century there were very few female architects in England or
the United States; before the middle of the twentieth century there were very
few female construction workers. The language used in this book reflects
those facts. I have used terms like "craftsmen" and "tradesmen," and
"he"/"his," referring to architects and building workers at times when they
were virtually all men, and I have tried to use such words as "craftsperson,"
and to shift between female and male gender when such language would
help to point up the slowly changing contemporary situation.

Eugene, Oregon H. D.
October 16, 1998

x PREFACE
CONTENTS

Introduction: Two Billion Buildings 3

PART I: B U I L D I N G S AS C U L T U R A L PRODUCTS 23

1 Building as a Unified Social Process 27

2 Four Building Cultures in History 43
3 Building Cultures of the Contemporary City 67

PART II: RULES AND K N O W L E D G E ABOUT B U I L D I N G 85

4 Connections to the Larger Culture 89

5 Builders, Architects, and Their Institutions 107
6 Shared Architectural Knowledge 131
7 Value and the Flow of Money 159
8 Agreements, Contracts, and Control 181
9 Regulation 201
10 Shaping Buildings and Cities 219

PART I I I : T R A N S F O R M I N G M O D E R N B U I L D I N G C U L T U R E S 241

11 Postindustrial Craftsmanship 245

12 Culturally Appropriate Buildings 269
13 Human-Based Institutions 301

Conclusion: Cracks in the Concrete Pavement 321

Notes 327
Bibliography 351

Credits 369
Index 375
This page intentionally left blank
THE CULTURE OF BUILDING
This page intentionally left blank
INTRODUCTION

Two Billion Buildinigs

In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth . . .

T. S. Eliot, "East Coker,"

Four Quartets

The Built World

There are between / and 2 billion buildings on the earth.1 How did they come
to be, and how can the knowledge of their origins help us improve buildings
in the future?
This book argues that large-scale improvements to the built world do not
depend solely on the individual acts of architects and city planners; instead,
they depend largely on the gradual transformation of the building culture—the
coordinated system of knowledge, rules, and procedures that is shared by
people who participate in the building activity and that determines the form
buildings and cities take.
Only recently has systematic exploration of the nature of the built world
begun, along with the beginnings of a general understanding of just how it
comes to be the way it is. We understand quite a bit about various components of
this world, taken individually—about architectural styles, or the prices of
building materials, or the history of zoning regulation, or the ways in which
building plans have evolved hand in hand with social life, or how the craft
economy was replaced by modern manufacturing, or the role building devel-
opers play in the emergence of land-use patterns.
What is lacking is a general framework of thought in which all of these
things are related—a framework in which the process of building production as a
 Figure I.I.View from the Empire State Building, 1984.There are over 800,000
buildings in New York City.

whole is understood in terms of the various components that make it up.

Such a framework is needed, and not only from an academic point of view.
The built world is not in very good shape, and the responsibility for this situ-
ation cannot be laid at the hand of any one profession. It is counterproduc-
tive to lay blame primarily on architects, or banks, or an uneducated public,
or any one sector of society. Architects are right when they say that they are
at the mercy of building codes and client committees and have no time to do
a good job within available fees. Builders are right when they say that archi-
tects leave too much out of drawings. Ordinary citizens are right when they
complain about lifeless cities and the lack of affordable housing. Building
officials are right when they are strict in their enforcement of codes. Insur-
ance companies are right when they exert pressure on the building codes.
Bankers are right when they base their lending decisions on appraisers, who
are right in the way they base their appraisals on the current market. Archi-
tectural educators are right in their criticisms of the profession, and the pro-
fession is right in its criticism of the schools.
Everyone is "right," yet the built environment does not really get better. It
satisfies the quantifiable and separate needs of individual institutions, but as
many people have pointed out, much of it is fragmented, lacking in human-
ity, without real depth of feeling.2 The widespread acknowledgment of these
problems makes it critical to look at the history of their cultural and institu-
tional sources. The idea that increased knowledge about the building culture
might lead to the improvement of the built world is the central purpose of
this book.

4 INTRODUCTION
 Figure 1.2. Austin, Texas, 1986

The Culture of Building

The culture of building is the coordinated system of knowledge, rules, pro-

cedures, and habits that surrounds the building process in a given place and
time.3
The building culture is responsible for the character and formation of the
collection of everyday buildings, in addition to individual, well-known buildings, at
a given time and place. This culture is a collective phenomenon: thousands
of different buildings are produced through shared processes held together
by shared knowledge—of what to build and also of how to build—rather
than through individual acts of creation.
Within a building culture, construction is rarely a solitary act, isolated
from the material, social, and aesthetic world around it. A building's con-
struction is almost always embedded in a recognizable web of human rela-
tionships between many participants: contractors, craftspeople, clients,
building users, architects, building officials, bankers, materials suppliers, sur-
veyors, building appraisers, real estate brokers, manufacturers. This web of
relationships, in turn, is characterized by the predictable ways people carry
out their jobs and the predictable ways they deal with each other.
As in any culture, the actions of members of the building culture are
guided by a relatively small number of rule systems and habits of belief and
behavior. These define the culture itself. The participants in the building pro-
cess share common understandings that may be only partly understood by
the larger culture outside them. But at the same time, the building culture is a
part of the larger world, embedded in it, and the two worlds share ideas,

INTRODUCTION 5
 Figure 1.3.
Stone delivery in
Jaisalmer, Rajasthan,
India, 1988

Figure 1.4.
New England Medical
Center, Boston, under
construction, 1980

Figure
o
1.5.
Guanajuato, Mexico,
1994

6
 Figure 1.6.
Delft.The Netherlands,
1990

Figure 1.7.
House construction,
Eugene, Oregon, 1989

Figure
o
1.8.
Sheet-metal
fabrication shop, 1996

7
 business practices, attitudes about buildings and the environment, and forms
of education and training.
The product of the building culture is the built world as a whole—the
world of houses and warehouses, churches and libraries, schools and facto-
ries, barns and shops, the monumental and the everyday, the imported and
the vernacular, the famous and the unknown. This world, much larger than
the world with which architects usually concern themselves but intimately
tied to it, is what makes up people's everyday experience of buildings and
towns—and vast quantities of money and resources are used toward its
construction.

The Cathedral and the Bicycle Shed

The first step in understanding the source of the 2 billion buildings in the
world lies in going beyond the traditional concerns of architectural history,
toward a view which recognizes that all buildings have significance and are
part of a complex, collective phenomenon.
At the beginning of An Outline of European Architecture, Nikolaus Pevsner
wrote a sentence that has been widely quoted: "A bicycle shed is a building;
Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture."4 This statement represents an
intellectual tradition that until very recently has divided the world of building
into two separate parts. Architectural history, a descendant of nineteenth-
century German art-historical scholarship, traditionally recognized only cer-
tain buildings as worthy of study: buildings built by ruling elites, built to last,
and built for religious or spiritual reasons. Churches, town halls, universities
and libraries, castles and palaces make up most of the buildings that have
been studied by architectural historians.
Yet the vast majority of buildings in the world—the ordinary building
fabric of cities and towns, including houses and workshops and minor civic
buildings, and virtually all buildings in the countryside apart from churches,
castles, villas, and manor houses—have until recently not been considered fit
subject for study and are barely covered in the best-known books about
architectural history. The bulk of the built world that people see and experi-
ence every day is made up of these vernacular buildings, both domestic and
public, rather than monuments or buildings designed as extraordinary events
in deliberate breaks from tradition.5
In fact, "architecture" and "building" are different aspects of the same
phenomenon. One characteristic of any building culture is that it links all
buildings together—large and small, domestic and public, architect-designed
or not—so that from a real point of view, the word vernacular itself loses
meaning, and it makes more sense to seek understandings that do not make
such distinctions.6 It is the inherent conservatism of building knowledge and
technique, combined with the diffusion of knowledge and technique over
time and geographical space, that leads to the continuities and variety in the
world of building.
These kinds of understandings have been central to new investigations in
both architectural history and vernacular architecture. Scholars in many dif-
ferent schools of thought have seen the importance of the artifact in cultural

8 INTRODUCTION
 Figure
o
1.9.
Chartres Cathedral, 1997

Figure 1.10. Santorini, Greece, 1981 .The houses at the top were built after neo-
classical styles had been reintroduced following Greek independence in the nine-
teenth century.
 continuity and recognized the value and depth of traditional forms. These
scholars use varying descriptions and models, but they all recognize that the
cultural nature of the artifact may be defined by a few attributes of common
understanding.
The architect, builder, and author Christopher Alexander sees these
attributes in terms of patterns or centers and has stressed archetypal rela-
tionships that cut across history and culture. Alexander's formulations
explain how the built world may be understood as a continuous structure
that includes buildings of different sizes and types, and how this structure is
connected to human purposes.7
Some architectural theorists, such as Leon and Rob Krier, and Aldo
Rossi, saw common attributes in terms of historically repeated configura-
tions or types. This was understood by some architects as a systematic way of
understanding connections to the continuity of architectural history and to
the physical continuity of the city, both of which were ruptured by several
decades of ahistorical modernism, beginning in the 1920s.8 The theoretical
work of N. J. Habraken has dealt with how the form of the built environ-
ment, based on repeated configurations and acted on by a variety of agents,
changes over time.9
Modern scholarship in vernacular architecture emerged from cultural
anthropology and cultural geography. It began through attempts to describe
the artifacts of a cultural landscape in terms of a systematic classification of
buildings and building elements.10 The folklorist Henry Classic developed a
structuralist approach to building types and thereby helped to connect the
field of vernacular architecture to linguistics and anthropology.11 Scholar-
ship on vernacular building types now stresses both their classification and
their social origin—and has shown the ways in which building knowledge
spreads throughout and across cultures.
These formulations emerge from different intellectual places. But they
speak to similar sorts of continuities in the built world: continuities that link
architectural and urban space, the present to the past, and one culture to
another. Together, this approach represents a new view of the world: one in
which the relationships among things are as important as the classification of
things themselves, and one which makes it very difficult to sustain a view of
architecture that excludes vernacular, ordinary building from a general
understanding.
Ultimately, this understanding goes beyond an understanding of form
and social context and includes the process of building itself. The continu-
ities of building form that exist between the vernacular and the nonvernacu-
lar (and between one place and another) come about because buildings are
built in a world in which most of the various players—craftsmen, building
inspectors, architects, masons—do not fundamentally change the way they
work because of Pevsner's distinction between "architecture" and "build-
ing." They tend to do the same things, although perhaps to different degrees,
on different kinds of buildings.
This leads to a different view of Lincoln Cathedral and the bicycle shed.
The cathedral may share features with a parish church, for example, for a
simple reason: the same people, or people trained in the same craft, worked
on them both. These people were doing what they knew how to do, some

10 INTRODUCTION
 applying their knowledge to a cathedral, others applying their knowledge to
the church. The parish church shares features with a smaller manor house.
The manor house shares features with a merchant's house. The merchant's
house is similar in some ways to a smaller house, similar to a farm building,
and so on, down through history to the bicycle shed. And this continuity
points up the importance of process—what people know and how they
work—as the mechanism through which the building culture operates to
produce the built world.

The Process of Building

The idea of the building culture represents a view of the social process that
results in the form of the built world. Rather than individual phenomena
that result from independent acts of creation, buildings are products of
social processes that vary in systematic ways from place to place and over
time.
Building is a highly complex process entailing a sequence of discrete
steps:

• Making the decision to build in the first place.

• Choosing and developing appropriate building sites.
• Regulating the character and placement of building on these sites.
• Financing the construction.
• Designing the building.
• Producing and supplying materials.
• Constructing the building.
• Regulating the building's construction.
• Occupying, using, and modifying the building.

Of course, in their particulars these steps differ from culture to culture.

In Renaissance Europe, much building was financed by private patrons.
In modern American culture it is financed by banks. In traditional Chinese
culture the site was chosen through principles of feng shui (geomancy). In
eighteenth-century London, sites were laid out by large landowners who
tried to carve as many sites as possible out of a piece of land. In medieval
Europe, building activity was regulated by guilds. In modern American cul-
ture it is governed by municipal building departments. To some extent, these
particulars—and differences among them—define the cultures themselves.
These steps also differ in their relation to each other. In so-called primi-
tive cultures where buildings are built from materials taken from the land
around them, the production of materials is the same as the "financing" of
the building. In advanced industrial cultures, the production and supply of
materials includes préfabrication: steps that partly construct the building
before on-site construction begins. In some situations the decision to build
comes directly from the conditions of occupancy and use. In others the
decision is based on more abstract financial or symbolic need. So the defini-
tion of these steps themselves is fluid and may take on different forms in dif-
ferent cultures.

INTRODUCTION 11
 Moreover, in many building cultures today, these steps are initiated and
controlled by formal institutions. For example:

• Making the decision to build: Developers, pension funds, large corpora-

tions
• Choosing and developing building sites: Developers, government planning
departments, regulatory bodies, banks, title companies, appraisers,
environmental groups, soils engineers, lawyers
• Regulating the placement and character of building. Zoning bodies, utility
districts, neighborhood organizations, lawyers, environmental and
other regulatory bodies
• Finance: Banks, savings and loan organizations, escrow companies,
large private investors, appraisers, community development corpo-
rations, accounting firms
• Design: Institutional clients, architectural firms, large materials sup-
pliers, civil engineering firms, landscape architects, consultants
• Materials: Materials suppliers and manufacturers, producers' and
manufacturers' cartels, trade associations, banks, fabrication shops,
testing laboratories, truckers, truckers' unions
• Construction: Contracting firms, construction management firms,
building trades unions, safety regulating bodies, banks, manufactur-
ers and distributors
• Regulation of construction: Building code regulating bodies, workplace
safety regulating bodies, testing laboratories, insurance companies

Architectural history has tended not to see buildings as the result of such
processes. But it is only through understanding process that it is possible to
understand "2 billion buildings"—and their character—as clear and coher-
ent phenomena. The tens of thousands of buildings under construction at
any time are being created through processes that involve tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands of people who are responsible for different aspects
of the overall process. In a particular place, they are acting in coordinated
ways according to similar systems of knowledge and rules. In the same way
that the study of living things started with taxonomic classification but went
on to address biological processes, the emphasis on the artifact as a finished
and complete thing can be balanced with an understanding of the process
through which the artifact came to be.
Today the question of process is being examined by economic and social
historians, who have studied such things as the economic background to
building development, the rise of building labor unions, and the relation-
ships between the building trades.12 One of the major themes of building
history is the gradual transformation of craft production, during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, into industrial production. This devel-
opment was accompanied by many other changes in society, including
urbanization, the accumulation and concentration of capital, and the growth
of professions. While related to vernacular architecture research, building
history does not include a strong emphasis on buildings as artifacts with
symbolic, cultural meaning, as opposed to objects of production, exchange,
and profit.

12 INTRODUCTION
 The understanding of process depends on seeing technology as a human
system. The word technology is sometimes interpreted to indicate something
that is particularly modern. It is seen in opposition to craft processes, seen as
dealing with large, impersonal machines or sophisticated engineering. The
word is also sometimes connected to a realm of human activity that is at
some distance from art, particularly when technology is associated with
science.
But of course the word technology need not have the connotation of the
modern or the unartistic. In its broadest sense, technology refers to the
entire means of production and is not limited to tools and machines. No
tool or machine can be understood outside the context of the actions of the
person who is using both it and the other tools used in conjunction with it.
In Japanese building, the transformation of the double bevel chisel to
the single bevel chisel allowed for much greater precision in cuts and the
simultaneous development of more complex joints.13 The commercial manu-
facture of pigment for house paint, which came about with the invention of
new machinery, was accompanied by a gradual decline in the ability of
American house painters to make their own colors.14 Technology includes
people and tools together and is associated with particular results in con-
struction and detail.15 In these broad terms, a building culture is itself, in one
sense, a technological system—and the development of building cultures
over history has gone hand in hand with changes to what we usually under-
stand as technology.
So far the discussion has only laid out the idea of the building culture
itself, in terms of the range of artifacts that are considered within it, and the
human processes that produce them. But if these ideas are to be useful for
positive change in the contemporary world, we need to be able to make judg-
ments based on value. As the built world is the product of building cultures,
we need to be able to critically look at building cultures in terms of their
effectiveness in making good environments and improving the lives of peo-
ple who work and dwell in them—and who build them. This leads to the
idea of healthy building cultures.

Healthy Building Cultures

In a healthy building culture, buildings of meaning and value are being made
by people who are themselves improving their lives through making those
buildings. The various parts of the culture reinforce each other and make it
stronger, its customs and rules are understandable and make sense, and the
culture's stability and its ability to change according to new conditions are in
balance.

The Long-Term Value of Buildings and Types

The health of a building culture lies partly in its ability to produce artifacts of
long-term human and spiritual value, or to maintain building knowledge that
has such value.
By this définition, we have no trouble seeing the building cultures that
produced the churches and palazzi of Renaissance Florence, or the religious

INTRODUCTION 13
 Figure I.I 1 .A street in Bath, 198 3. The terraced house type is highly adaptable.

buildings of early Ottoman Istanbul, or the squares and crescents of Geor-

gian Bath, Bristol, London, or Edinburgh, as having aspects of good health.
Those buildings lasted, have stood the test of time, and continue to be aes-
thetic paradigms.
With buildings that are in more of a state of change—tents of nomadic
peoples, mud buildings in villages that may be in continuous states of slow
but steady transformation—the building itself might not have permanence,
but the village as a whole might. Although the building may last just a few
years, the village may last a lot longer: it is being collectively and continuously
produced by the members of the building culture.
Long-term value may also come from the strength of the type or rules of
design and the resultant flexibility of the type over time. Examples are court-
yard houses, row houses, and many other vernacular configurations that are
maintained as culturally shared design ideas even as the buildings themselves
change. But in a building culture where the artifact and the type both have
transient value, the artifact does not contribute to the health of the culture.
This is the case with contemporary building types like "superstores" in
American suburbs: these buildings not only drain life out of cities but
become obsolete once their original use has reached its end—sometimes a
matter of only a few years.

Shared Knowledge: Rules and Rule Systems That

Are Understandable and That Make Sense
In a healthy building culture, knowledge is shared among many people,
inside and outside the culture, and there is common understanding of build-

14 INTRODUCTION
 Figure 1.12.
Traditional log building in
Ukraine, 1991 .The product
of shared knowledge.
o

ings and the way they are built. This is not to say that knowledge is equally
shared or that everyone is equally skilled in designing buildings or building
them—of course the greatest works of architecture depended on specialists
who maintained knowledge and language that other people were not privy to
and who devoted their lives to their work. But even so, such buildings are
approachable—they represent ideas and ways of life that are felt by people,
their designs are familiar, and their construction involves techniques and
processes that people can understand intuitively even if they cannot carry
them out themselves.
Another way of putting this is that knowledge and processes are "trans-
parent"—one can see through them to their intention; they are obvious in
their ability to achieve an accepted purpose. Historic building processes like
timber framing, and the bracing and cutting of joints it entailed, were trans-
parent in this way—anyone could see the effect of the brace and the joint on
the stability of the frame, and although the skill of carpentry itself was
restricted, what carpenters were doing was commonly understood.
This understanding, and the sharing of knowledge that it allows, helps to
maintain individuals' connections with each other and thereby helps the cul-
ture itself to maintain its integrity and definition.

Cultural Sustainability
Healthy building cultures have systems of knowledge, design, production,
and exchange that reinforce each other, even as the culture may have interac-
tions with cultures outside it. For example, the building industry and artistic
life may be mutually supportive when the money spent on building helps to

INTRODUCTION 15
 Figure 1.13.
Apartment build-
ings in Striy,
Ukraine, 1991.
The products of
an unsustainable
building culture.

regenerate economic and cultural life. Moreover, a building culture that

causes another culture to wither is not healthy: witness the Japanese building
industry's use of hardwood from Malaysian rain forests for concrete form
work—and how this contributes to the destruction of those forests and
their cultures.16 Centralized Soviet control over countries like Ukraine had
devastating effects on the building cultures of those cultures, wiping out tra-
ditional and useful knowledge.17 In Papua New Guinea in the late 1970s, all
new government housing was based on three prototypes, using technologies
of concrete blocks and sheet metal imported from Australia—this in a coun-
try with a rich and still-living tradition of wooden buildings.18 In these cases,
none of the changes introduced from outside were a natural evolution of the
culture. Neither the culture being exploited nor the culture doing the exploit-
ing could exist without one of them being destroyed.

A Balance between Stability and Change,

Tradition and Innovation
A healthy building culture can change even as it is stable enough to provide
continuity. It can take care of new needs as they arise, without upheaval; it
has the ability to learn from experience and not be destroyed in the process.
During the eighteenth century, when a series of building laws gradually
reshaped building in London, carpenters and bricklayers were able to easily
incorporate these laws into their practice. During the nineteenth century, the
introduction of electricity and central heating into buildings was able to be
absorbed into a process that included many other trades. The building cul-
ture was able to incorporate innovation into its normal practice.
But such gradual incorporation of change may have its limits. By the
beginning of the twentieth century, as the number of building trades and
laws mushroomed, a fundamental change in the culture divorced architects
from direct relationship with craft. And one can only speculate that in large
parts of the contemporary building culture, the gradual buildup of well-

16 INTRODUCTION
 Figure 1.14.
Old and new in
Amsterdam, 1990.
The balance between
stability and change.

intentioned rules based on the prospect of litigation has become so onerous

that a fundamental change will again be necessary.
In more general terms, the idea of tradition as a handing down of atti-
tudes, habits, and rules is integral to the definition and coherence of a cul-
ture.19 Shared traditions allow people to maintain connections to a common
past, and therefore to each other. But the concept has a charged meaning,
particularly today, when the world is changing so fast. After all, modernism,
as it has been defined through the twentieth century, is inherently antitradi-
tional. The idea of "traditional architecture"—particularly traditional ver-
nacular architecture—is sometimes seen as static, locked in the past, and
inappropriate to today's society; those who promulgate it are regarded as
hopelessly reactionary and conservative.20 Indeed, if we look at tradition
purely in this way, as buildings from the past, such criticisms may be valid.
But if tradition is seen not as a blind handing down of habits and objects but
as part of a process in which what has come before has the ability to teach,
then the concept takes on a more dynamic meaning.21
The notion of tradition existing as part of a dynamic process is made
even more powerful when we consider the relationship between tradition
and innovation. Once again, these are opposite sides of the same coin.
Sometimes "tradition" is appropriate for conditions that do not change, or
that change slowly enough that habit can still prevail; sometimes innovation
is needed for conditions that have changed, so new responses are needed. In
a culture that is functioning well, tradition and innovation may each be
appropriate responses to particular situations.

INTRODUCTION 17
 The Culture Supporting the Life of Its Members
Finally, a healthy building culture is not something that is purely instrumental
with respect to buildings. It is not like the machines and production system
in a factory, which exist only to produce a particular product. Instead, there
is a reciprocal relationship between the quality of the product and the
increased health of the culture itself: members of the culture are better off
for having been a part of it. It generates its own life, and not purely in eco-
nomic terms: it engenders a sense of self-satisfaction, of increased life, in
the architects and builders and other people who are involved in it. William
Morris expressed this idea eloquently in an 1885 discussion of labor:

The chief source of art is man's pleasure in his daily necessary work,
which expresses itself and is embodied in that work itself; nothing else can
make the common surroundings of life beautiful, and whenever they are
beautiful it is a sign that men's work has pleasure in it, however they may
suffer otherwise. It is the lack of this pleasure in daily work which has
made our towns and habitations sordid and hideous.... Terrible as this is
to endure in the present, there is hope in it for the future; for surely it is
but just that outward ugliness and disgrace should be the result of the
slavery and misery of the people; and that slavery and misery once
changed, it is but reasonable to expect that external ugliness will give place
to beauty, the sign of free and happy work.22

It should not be considered impractical, or overly nostalgic, to see some

truth in these thoughts over a hundred years later.23

Figure 1.15. William Morris

18 INTRODUCTION
The Building Culture and Contemporary Practice:
The Possibility of Improvement

The idea of wide-scale improvement to the built world has been part of
architectural discourse for many decades. The modern movement itself was
originally seen partly as a means to counter the ugliness and squalor of nine-
teenth-century cities. But modernism had its own problems, including its
assumption that culture could be universal and that place was not important;
as a result, modernism engendered a reaction against itself. Throughout the
world, there were local architects—William Wurster in California, David
Williams and O'Neil Ford in Texas, Edwin Lundie in Minnesota, Sedad
Eldem in Turkey, Knut Knutsen in Norway—who resisted the universalizing
aspects of the International Style. These efforts, however, as effective as they
were individually, were mostly made within the existing systems of building
production and were therefore only symbolic of a genuine resistance to the
hegemony of modernism. The growing system of bureaucratic and techno-
logically oriented production continued to be given legitimacy by the propo-
nents of modernism.
But today there is a renewed understanding of the importance not only
of what is built but of the process of building itself. This understanding
has come from architects who choose, on leaving architecture school, not to
follow a "standard" professional path but to turn instead to community ser-
vice or building construction; from builders who choose to work more
closely with clients or architects; and from clients who recognize the poten-
tial problems in the institutionalization of architecture and building and who
deliberately choose architects or builders who are trying to work in more
integrated ways.

Figure 1.16.
Community participation:
housing project for cycle-
rickshaw drivers atVellore,
Tamil Nadu, India, by
ILLAM (The Centre for
People's Housing/Tamil
Nadu) and CEDMA
(Centre for Development
Madras)

INTRODUCTION 19
 Figure 1.17. School designed by Atelier Iruka,Team ZOO, Japan

An explicit connection between the scholarship on building history and

alternative forms of modern practice does not yet exist. But some of these
alternatives are, sometimes unknowingly, reinstituting historical modes of
production. There are attempts to put craftsmanship back into building, new
rules that allow design and building to be done by the same firm, a desire
on the part of some practitioners to personally do both design and building,
environmental movements that call for sustainable building and planning
practice, and new small shops that produce windows, doors, and other
"custom-made" building components. Many of these developments arise
from a dissatisfaction with various aspects of contemporary practice, and to
be sure, many of them are not part of the "mainstream" of building produc-
tion. But even as they make use of modern tools and modern methods of
management, many of them seem to resemble various preindustrial tech-
niques and methods of organization.
Indeed modern society, all over the world, contains many pockets of
resistance to the dominance of abstract, central control: communities fight-
ing for their own autonomy and language; architects who insist on working
closely with their clients, and staying in their own communities; craftspeople
who are more concerned with doing a good job than with maximizing their
profits; people working to change archaic zoning laws; architectural educa-
tors seeking to connect their students to the great traditions of architecture
or to make students aware of how architecture might be a catalyst for con-
temporary social change. There are entrepreneurs who believe that social
responsibility and making money do not have to conflict, farmers who are

20 INTRODUCTION
Figure 1.18. The reintroduction of craft in design and construction: visitors' cen-
ter at West Dean, Sussex, England, by Christopher Alexander

growing organically and making a go of it, banks that see the importance of
making loans to people who have traditionally been cut out of the banking
system.
Although these efforts are relatively minor, they take on more signifi-
cance within a framework of belief in the free market of ideas, which under
the right conditions should allow valuable innovations to flourish. It is partly
by anchoring these new and fledgling efforts in a historical and contempo-
rary understanding of the building culture that we can connect them to
something solid rather than leaving them isolated. One of the purposes of
this book is to give legitimacy to contemporary efforts by anchoring them in
the building culture as a whole and by showing that they are compatible with
processes that have taken place throughout history. And this added legiti-
macy may help strengthen these efforts themselves.
This book uses the experiences of history to help develop and expand on
the model of a healthy building culture. Having such a model will help us
understand how the continuing transformation of contemporary building
practice might be directed toward fostering a healthy building culture—one
that gives dignity to people making buildings, that is respectful of other cul-
tures and of the environment, and that is capable of producing common-
place buildings that can enhance and elevate the spirit and lives of everyone
in society.

INTRODUCTION 21
This page intentionally left blank
BUILDINGS AS
CULTURAL PRODUCTS I
This page intentionally left blank
T
he world we live in, a world of 2 billion buildings, is being continuously built
and rebuilt, through processes that seem completely natural to us because we
live in the midst of them. A developer subdivides a tract of farmland, puts
up thirty houses, and offers them for sale. Additions are built to several
houses in each of dozens of neighborhoods in the city. A neighbor installs
new vinyl windows in his house, and another neighbor lays a concrete drive-
way. A new commercial strip development is built along an important road.
An office building is erected downtown, and office space there is advertised
through local commercial realtors. The local university decides to build a
new building to house its law school and hires an out-of-town architect to
design it. A large foreign corporation builds a semiconductor plant on the
outskirts of town after exerting pressure on the local political establishment
to approve it. A successful doctor buys a beautiful piece of land and hires an
architect to design a house for her.
Individual actions like this are repeated hundreds, thousands, tens of
thousands of times, taking on different form in different parts of the world
and resulting in the gradual transformation of the built world. Each of these
actions that we see from our car window or walking along the street is just
the visible result of a complex system of human relationships and knowl-
edge—a building culture. In the modern world, this culture is highly articu-
lated. It includes large, bureaucratic organizations; millions of construction
workers; banks whose profits depend on the marketability of real estate;
architects; developers; building departments; insurance companies. Many of
the jobs within these organizations are highly specialized. The organizations
and the people who work for them operate individually and deal with each
other in ways that are understood and predictable. And together they pro-
duce buildings, millions of them, that are also understood and predictable.
To begin to understand this enormous complexity, Part I describes sev-
eral different building cultures in history and in various conditions of social
and economic development. Building cultures did not always have the form
they do today. They have changed through history, sometimes slowly, some-
times quickly. But at any time, in any particular place, the building culture can
be described as a specific configuration of knowledge, institutions, rules, and
built results. A brief description of these various building cultures, with their
similarities and differences, will begin to define both the nature of building
cultures themselves and the way our present building cultures result from a
long historical evolution.
In describing any historic building culture, several questions must be
asked:

• What was the relationship between the building culture and the soci-
ety, the larger culture, in which it existed?
• What were the major institutions of the building culture?
• What were the major human roles within those institutions?
• What kinds of agreements did people enter into with each other in
the building activity?
• How did money and materials flow?
• How was building activity regulated?
 • What was the building operation itself like?
• What were the typical built results of the building culture?

These basic questions include issues of how the culture sees itself, the major
social groups, rules of exchange, and rules of behavior within the culture. It
turns out that although individual building cultures handle different issues in
similar ways, different building cultures vary in the way they work. The dif-
ferences from one culture to another help illuminate each culture's particular
characteristics. In Part I, by revealing the unique identity of different build-
ing cultures, we will explore the idea of a building culture itself. And by look-
ing at building cultures from different historical epochs, we will begin to
understand the origins of our own.

26 B U I L D I N G S AS C U L T U R A L PRODUCTS
BUILDING AS A UNIFIED
SOCIAL PROCESS
1
Traditional Villages and Informal Settlements

A t its root, a building culture may be characterized by fundamental

-¿A-human relationships and social habits, and not all building cultures
require large and formal institutions. In this chapter, we will deal with two
generic building cultures: the traditional village, which has been the subject
of much study in vernacular architecture, and the informal settlements that
characterize cities in many Third World countries. Although formal institu-
tions do not play a major role in these building cultures, both of them work
as complex and integrated human systems.

The Building Culture of the Traditional Agricultural Village

If there are about 2 billion buildings in the world, there are about 2 million
or so villages.1 Only a few of these villages exist in cultures where there has
still been little contact with the modern world; some are in cultures where
there has been quite a bit of contact with the modern world but where tradi-
tional village life persists; most others are changing rapidly under the impact
of agricultural modernization, industrialization, and the internationalization
of the economy. This section focuses on the village that exists as an agricul-
tural community and that has tended to maintain traditions that stretch back
 over many generations, even in the face of agricultural improvements and
social change. These are the mud villages of India, some stone villages in the
Alps and farming communities in the American Midwest and Plains, rice-
growing villages of China and Southeast Asia, villages of kraals in Africa,
and wooden villages of the Ukraine and Russia that persisted even through
seven decades of Soviet collectivization.
Over the last hundred years, anthropologists and other specialists in ver-
nacular architecture have studied many of the villages in the so-called primi-
tive world. Anthropologists work by "joining" a culture as much as possible,
by immersing themselves in the subtleties and minutiae of life, and by writ-
ing unique accounts based on these observations. They have shown, dispas-
sionately, the enormous diversity of cultures of the world and have made us
aware of the legitimacy of each one. Much of the strength of anthropology
lies in this body of work—in the particulars, to the extent that generaliza-
tions are often looked at with a healthy and productive skepticism.2
Indeed, villages in different cultures may have entirely different religious
and social structures, different economies and agricultural systems, different
relationships to cities and towns, and people with different worldviews. Vil-
lages' settlement patterns and buildings and the way people go about build-
ing also differ widely from place to place. This diversity does seem to belie
the idea of generalization. But removal from specific situations also gives us
the perspective to see commonalities that may exist among them. Although
these commonalities may not apply to every village everywhere, some of
them are so striking, across villages that are very far apart geographically and
culturally, that they suggest principles that may be at least partially acultural.3
The size of villages, for example, often depends on the productivity
of the agricultural land that surrounds them and the consequent ability of a

Figure 1.1.
Stone construction in Corippo,
Ticino, Switzerland, 1989

28 B U I L D I N G S AS CULTURAL PRODUCTS
 Figure 1.2.
Plan of Corippo

certain number of people to work an amount of land that is reasonably close

to the village. In villages based on agriculture, the protection and safekeeping
of crops is of major concern, so such villages contain symbolically impor-
tant buildings for this purpose—ranging from the loft of the Norwegian
farm, to the granaries of the Dogon, to the protected yam storage huts of
the Trobriand Islanders in New Guinea.
In the traditional agricultural village, building both fulfills direct need and
affirms the cosmic order connected to daily and annual cycles of life. The
timing of building activity may be tied to agricultural cycles and human ritu-
als of birth, marriage, and death. Individual life and beliefs are often subor-
dinate to those of the community. The cosmic order and the functional
order of daily life are intertwined.
The form of the village is itself often a representation or reaffirmation of
the cosmic order as seen by the culture. Villages so organized are as various
as the linear plans of the Nias Islanders,4 where the chief's house stands at
the end of the axis; the square plans of the Creek Indians in the American
Southeast, where the vertical axis connecting the underworld and heaven
passes through the intersection of the four cardinal axes;5 and the positions
of longhouses in the Amazon rain forest, which anchor the community to its
ancestors.6
In the village, ordinary building is an ordinary act, even though it may be
accompanied by ceremony and ritual. There are no formal institutions and
knowledge of building is widely shared. In many cases, members of each
family are involved in building and pass this knowledge on to their children
by involving them in house construction year after year. Even though the
level of skill involved may enable people to consistently produce beautiful
things, in many cultures this skill is as basic to life as cooking supper. In some
cases, where there is craft specialization, craftsmen live in the village and are
known to its people. Agreements are informal and unwritten, but expecta-
tions are clear and commonly understood. Learning is by doing and is passed
on from generation to generation. Control over the building activity is
almost entirely implicit and unspoken.7
Little or no money changes hands. Materials are taken directly from the
earth or from the by-products of agriculture: mud, straw, baked earth, tree

B U I L D I N G AS A U N I F I E D S O C I A L PROCESS 29
 Figure 1.3.
Four circular villages
O
of the
Trobriand Islands, Papua New
Guinea. Yam storage buildings
are located toward the center.

Figure 1.4. Plan of African village.

Seven grain storage buildings are
located just inside the outer ring of
houses.

Figure
O
1.5.
Plan of Indonesian village.
O

The chief's house is at the top.

 Figure 1.6. Creek Native American square ground symbolism

branches, coconut palm leaves, stone. There is a very limited palette of mate-
rials and techniques. Building form is intimately tied to available technology,
and there is little difference between decisions about design and decisions
about construction.8 And the skill of building itself, while often gender-
specific (in some traditional villages of Africa, for example, it was women
who had primary responsibility for building), is usually not restricted to a
particular professional class but shared across society as a whole. In other
cases, as with the stone shelters of southern Italy or the reed buildings of the
Iraq marshes, builders were members of the small local community. It is not
necessarily the case that in villages of this type, all construction is carried out
by the "users."
Building types are stable over time, similar from site to site, and there is
little individual invention. But within such typological uniformity, no two

BUILDING AS A UNIFIED S O C I A L PROCESS 31

 Figure 1.7.
Village in Tamil
Nadu, India, 1994

Figure 1.8.
Wattle wall of gristmill,
Ukraine, 1990

Figure 1.9. Village in Papua New Guinea

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