ANTHROPIC ARCHITECTURE
Gabriel Oliver 2014
A third path exists, moderating the Traditional and the Modern, idealism and pragmatism, and the increasingly disparate worlds of architecture and construction. While much of the current architecture emphasizes the Image and the Creative, relying on the power of technology to decode and encode human endeavor, Anthropic Architecture redirects these energies of the age toward the inertia of the history of building and the humanity it maintains.
From Method to Technique: A Problem with Standard Practice
The homogeneity of many modern buildings is antonymous to the typological similarities found in those from the past. A built-up tradition of craft, steeped in convention and methodologies developed over time and technological change, has devolved into standard practices designating efficiency as primary to all other concerns. Technology’s ability to facilitate, expedite, and often generate results exacerbates the condition, leaving little authority for the passive contemporary architect.
The devolution was a predictable outcome following the flourish of building that accompanied the strides made in fastener and lumber manufacturing technology and the corresponding development of ways for assembling them more efficiently. Over time, these methods used to erect buildings have been streamlined and simplified such that tradespeople are now highly specialized economists of scale, developing time- saving techniques to realize the greatest efficiencies in each operation. Volumes of transcribed procedures, semesters of trade school, and codified best practices have been devised to quantify and organize these techniques for dissemination and implementation. There is a problem, however, with this shift from Method to Technique.
Method, in this context, refers to an approach to building based on broad, diverse problem solving schema, enabling and encompassing multifarious techniques developed over time for the execution of effective, high quality building. Technique, by contrast, is specific individual procedures and responses to specific building problems, wherein efficiency is the principle, isolated motivator.
As building technology evolves, once appropriate construction techniques become convoluted and untenable ways of executing (often slow to change) building types. For every foreseeable or encountered design conflict (always less than the total that will ultimately be encountered), a specific technique is developed to resolve it. Because the volume of individual techniques grows well beyond the retention or application of the average tradesperson, and understandably so, real-time conflicts are ultimately resolved using inadequate, if not altogether inappropriate, techniques.
Additionally, as evidence mounts of the inefficiency of a particular technique, Technique demands a narrowing of scope in an attempt to limit the potential for the emergence of further inefficiencies. The intended consequence of the resulting repetition is to increase familiarity and its associated improved economy and quality. On the contrary, the reduction of necessary skill outside of one’s scope afforded by repetition leads to an overall decline in quality as builders are increasingly ill-equipped to elegantly address conflicts they’ve not encountered before. Consequently, the benefits intended by Technique are rarely realized.
Nevertheless, the trend is that buildings are ostensibly becoming more simple, in terms of individual construction tasks, and repeatable, while the few atypical examples are often plagued by technical shortcomings brought on by their prototypical nature and their reliance on obtuse Technique rather than sound Method to solve seemingly inevitable design issues.
The Power/Peril of Planning: Technology Copes with Resistance
A combination of innate capability and experience-wrought ability enables the effective tradesperson and architect to anticipate problems and propose solutions. However, no amount of advance planning or reasoned procedure can save them from the frailty or sturdiness of material, the myopia of human intention, and the unpredictability of nature. To rely on contingent successful outcomes is as perilous as leaving success to chance alone. Technology’s promise is that of a tool to mitigate this uncertainty, but with that promise comes its own threat to the Method.
Industrial machines eliminate nearly all interaction and the accompanying resistance rendered by material. Digital interfaces yield approximations of anticipated sequences and outcomes, leading to plans of action. Even so, like the limit of a ladder’s reach, technology’s aid is both finite and precarious. Competing realities, virtual and physical (e.g. a line on screen having no thickness, whereas a saw blade does; a circle being easily drawn on screen, but difficult to construct within a building) are in constant conflict as the virtual attempts to usurp the domain of the physical, with varying success.
In physical reality, uncertainty is a certainty and, at the moment, building still exists in the physical domain. The unavoidable incidences of failed planning (i.e. surpassing the limits of technology and ability), either through flawed Method or insufficient Technique, put the tradesperson in constant confrontation with how to cope with resistance: Should one seek out paths of less resistance able to be crossed with existing tools, seek out improved technological tools to eliminate existing resistance, or use the resistance itself as equipment to confront future inevitabilities, thereby improving the Method?
The current trend in building is to either seek paths of less resistance by applying inappropriate techniques or to attempt to eliminate the resistance through further specialization. The former predictably yields shoddy, unpredictable results; the latter simply speeds the process through which the tradesperson will encounter the next heretofore unencountered resistance, initiating a new confrontation.
The Absent-Minded Builder: Reconciling Craft and Computation
The increased efficiencies accompanying the industrial revolution were made possible, in part, by minimizing the direct use of the hand in the production of craft. Consequently, the best craftsperson in the age of the machine was one who most effectively manipulated the machine and used their hand the least. In turn, accuracy, repeatability, and scale of production all improved dramatically as the new industrial equipment matured and were exploited ever more efficiently. However, as control left the hand and moved within the machines, the craftsperson’s facility in producing craft directly with their hands diminished.
Similarly, the best craftsperson in the current computological age is the one who most effectively utilizes the computational power of the new machines, using their own mind less and less as the technological tools become more adapted to logical tasks. As reasoning leaves the mind and becomes the throughput of the computer, the craftperson’s faculty for working Methodologically dwindles. The consequence of handless, mindless craftspeople devoid of the Method is both plain and bleak: there can be no craft produced.
In building design, the technological tools have proved alluring, powerful, and tethering. CAD, for example, has metamorphosed from a drafting aid into a design tool. Although as early as the 1970’s the term CADD was being used to distinguish Drafting from Design, today’s descendent software programs are performing complex algorithmic tasks to govern previously subjective design decisions, tasks of a different nature than those perhaps best positioned to benefit from computological expediting such as those related to drafting - clarity, accuracy, speed, etc. In other words, CAD today is being used to perform design, not aid it.
Likewise, parametric design software allows for fantastically complex forms and content not feasible by previous means, nevertheless usurping much of the underlying decision making and inherently confining the forms and content possible to the software’s boundaries. The arc of the future of design, considering today’s software as antecedents to future digital tools, bends towards an objective choicelessness, devoid of meaningful human input.
Anthropic Architecture: What Cannot Be Reduced Cannot Be Recreated
To counter the erosion of their influence in building, the hand and mind must be reintegrated with the tradesperson and architect. Moreover, the matters of construction cannot solely be under the purview of a tradesperson’s disembodied hand and matters of design cannot be the sole concern of an architect’s disconnected mind. These matters must converge under the combined agency of tradespeople/architects - Builders.
The greatest appeal of Architecture for the Builder is in the concrete act of building, not in the abstract realm of designing buildings. This distinction has cascading consequences vis à vis technology and standard practice. When designing, the Builder draws a plan to be laid-out in reality and, as such, their relationship to the virtual building will be tempered by the strings, gravity, and traffic brought to bear on the physical building, concerns now essential to their decision making.
Additionally, Builders challenge tradespeople by design, electing at the outset to appeal to the industrious tenacity compelling the best tradespeople. Contrary to the current trend toward Technique-laden ‘fool-proof’ designs, appealing to tradespeople's eagerness to embrace challenging work will gradually and continually arm them with a more effective Method, and fine Building will result.
The reintegrated Builder must also reexamine their relationship with technology. There is neither a means nor a necessity for halting or slowing technology’s continued encroachment into building. The materials and techniques made possible by its advance offer the ability to expand existing limits and facilitate constructions not possible in the past while also providing increased capacity to confront challenges not yet imagined. Nevertheless, technology must remain an aid to human ability and a substitute for human incapacity, not a replacement for humanity. Like the conveniences preceding it, design software is a tool appropriate for a use. Using tools to displace distinctly human activities in building design and construction will only serve to diminish the enduring impression of discipline and of resistance overcome.
The Building that emerges at the end may be pleasing, or it may not. It may be economical to repeat, or it may not. It may be lasting, or it may not. Nevertheless, it will possess a quality, something fundamental, that will remain, crucially, intangible and illogical. For it is through the work of the human hand and mind that a Building comes to possess a nature, an ineffable spirit that can no longer be grasped by the hand nor reduced by reason. Individual elements may be analyzed and specificities abstracted, but the Building has become a demonstration of the human will - an Anthropic Architecture.