"I'd come to building looking for a way to get past words, only to
learn from an influential contemporary architect that architecture was really
just another form of writing."
Much of this book's dynamic hangs on the conflict, actual and
implicit, between architect and contractor.
I'll take as my starting point the statements: "Much of this
book's dynamic hangs on the conflict, actual and implicit, between architect
and contractor", and that "architecture is really just another form of
writing. "
Writing creates information in an explicit form. This "information" is
often confabulated to mean "knowledge ". Knowledge can be tacit or
explicit. An excellent example of the variance between the two, in a design
project, is described in The Knowledge Creating Company by Nonaka and
Takeuchi. They illustrate the process of designing and manufacturing the
first successful bread making machine for the consumer market.
Knowledge is about beliefs and commitment, action, and meaning. I think that
people get seduced by their own cognitive models and forget half of
knowledge; tacit know-how, craft, skill. When you really know something it
is physical. What does it mean to be reminded "that our bodies were making
meaning out of the world long before our language had a chance to"? Does it
mean that anyone who hopes to design a fine torsion roof must first spend
years nailing together stud walls and waterproofing foundations? How to
bridge the gap between the cognitive; paradigms, beliefs, schemata,
viewpoints, perspectives, and the technical; know-how, craft, skill? How
does tacit become explicit? How do metaphors, analogies, and models
change to concepts and hypotheses? Such a huge gap. Such short legs.
One place to start is by examining accepted doctrines. Hand Labor is Bad.
Wendell Berry in his essay Six Agricultural Fallacies studies this simple
statement in a marvelously succinct paragraph:
"We can only assume that we are faced with an unquestioned social dogma when
so astute a writer as Jane Jacobs can say without blinking that 'cotton
picking by hand is miserable labor; driving a cotton picker is not' (Cities
and the Wealth of Nations,1984). A great many questions have to be asked and
answered before this assertion can be allowed to stand. Wes Jackson is
certainly right in his insistence that the pleasantness or unpleasantness of
farm work depends upon scale--upon the size of the field and the size of the
crop. But we also need to know who owns the field, we need to know the
experience and the expectation of the workers, and we need to know about the
skill of the workers and the quality of the work After consideration of such
matters, we can say that probably any farm work is miserable, whether done
by hand or by machine, if it is economically desperate--if it does not secure
the worker in some stable, decent, rewarding connection to the land worked.
We can say that hand work in a small field owned by the worker, who can then
expect a decent economic return, is probably less miserable than mechanized
work in somebody else's large field. We can suppose with some confidence,
moreover, that hand work in the company of family and neighbors might be less
miserable than work done alone in the unrelieved noise of a machine."
I don't wish to dwell on cows and plows. My implication is that tools are
the point of departure from ideas to concrete reality and that the use of
those tools and the nature of those tools themselves are a critical question
to examine. The tool you are using right now, your computer, needs to be
questioned as to its usefulness, usability, and productivity. Thomas K.
Landauer does just that in The Trouble With Computers. I was surprised, but
not greatly so, to find out that "having spent several trillion dollars, the
United States greatly outpaces all other nations in buying computers. In
most U.S. industry, information technology is second only to real estate in
capital investment. But the United States trails almost all other major
industrial nations in productivity growth." Do we want productivity growth ?
There doesn't need to be conflict between architect and contractor if there
is no conflict between our explicit and our tacit knowledge of a thing or
idea.
learn from an influential contemporary architect that architecture was really
just another form of writing."
Much of this book's dynamic hangs on the conflict, actual and
implicit, between architect and contractor.
I'll take as my starting point the statements: "Much of this
book's dynamic hangs on the conflict, actual and implicit, between architect
and contractor", and that "architecture is really just another form of
writing. "
Writing creates information in an explicit form. This "information" is
often confabulated to mean "knowledge ". Knowledge can be tacit or
explicit. An excellent example of the variance between the two, in a design
project, is described in The Knowledge Creating Company by Nonaka and
Takeuchi. They illustrate the process of designing and manufacturing the
first successful bread making machine for the consumer market.
Knowledge is about beliefs and commitment, action, and meaning. I think that
people get seduced by their own cognitive models and forget half of
knowledge; tacit know-how, craft, skill. When you really know something it
is physical. What does it mean to be reminded "that our bodies were making
meaning out of the world long before our language had a chance to"? Does it
mean that anyone who hopes to design a fine torsion roof must first spend
years nailing together stud walls and waterproofing foundations? How to
bridge the gap between the cognitive; paradigms, beliefs, schemata,
viewpoints, perspectives, and the technical; know-how, craft, skill? How
does tacit become explicit? How do metaphors, analogies, and models
change to concepts and hypotheses? Such a huge gap. Such short legs.
One place to start is by examining accepted doctrines. Hand Labor is Bad.
Wendell Berry in his essay Six Agricultural Fallacies studies this simple
statement in a marvelously succinct paragraph:
"We can only assume that we are faced with an unquestioned social dogma when
so astute a writer as Jane Jacobs can say without blinking that 'cotton
picking by hand is miserable labor; driving a cotton picker is not' (Cities
and the Wealth of Nations,1984). A great many questions have to be asked and
answered before this assertion can be allowed to stand. Wes Jackson is
certainly right in his insistence that the pleasantness or unpleasantness of
farm work depends upon scale--upon the size of the field and the size of the
crop. But we also need to know who owns the field, we need to know the
experience and the expectation of the workers, and we need to know about the
skill of the workers and the quality of the work After consideration of such
matters, we can say that probably any farm work is miserable, whether done
by hand or by machine, if it is economically desperate--if it does not secure
the worker in some stable, decent, rewarding connection to the land worked.
We can say that hand work in a small field owned by the worker, who can then
expect a decent economic return, is probably less miserable than mechanized
work in somebody else's large field. We can suppose with some confidence,
moreover, that hand work in the company of family and neighbors might be less
miserable than work done alone in the unrelieved noise of a machine."
I don't wish to dwell on cows and plows. My implication is that tools are
the point of departure from ideas to concrete reality and that the use of
those tools and the nature of those tools themselves are a critical question
to examine. The tool you are using right now, your computer, needs to be
questioned as to its usefulness, usability, and productivity. Thomas K.
Landauer does just that in The Trouble With Computers. I was surprised, but
not greatly so, to find out that "having spent several trillion dollars, the
United States greatly outpaces all other nations in buying computers. In
most U.S. industry, information technology is second only to real estate in
capital investment. But the United States trails almost all other major
industrial nations in productivity growth." Do we want productivity growth ?
There doesn't need to be conflict between architect and contractor if there
is no conflict between our explicit and our tacit knowledge of a thing or
idea.