Alexander; Silverstein; Murray; Ishikawa; Abrams (1975): The Oregon experiment. Oxford University Press
Alexander, Christopher; Silverstein, Murray; Angel, Schlomo; Ishikawa, Sara; Abrams, Denny; The Oregon Experiment, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
2
The
University, swamped by these technocratic invasions, in peril of its life, needed
a master plan to control its growth, and make the campus environment
reasonable, alive, and healthy once again— as it had been during the early
years of its growth. We persuaded the university authorities that this could
only be done if they were willing to entertain an entirely new kind of planning
process. They agreed to try this process.
The process
itself is one practical manifestation of the theoretical ideas presented in
Volumes 1 and 2.
Volume 1,
The Timeless Way of Building, describes a theory of planning and building which
is, essentially, a modern post-industrial version of the age-old pre-industrial
and traditional processes which shaped the world’s most beautiful towns and
buildings for thousands of years.
2-3
Volume 2, A
Pattern Language, is an explicit set of instructions for designing and
building, which defines patterns at every scale (…) set out in such a way that
laymen can use it to design a satisfying and ecologically appropriate
environment for themselves and their activities.
3
Volume 3,
this book, is the master plan for the University of Oregon, and describes a
practical way of implementing these ideas in a community. However, we must
emphasize at once that we are dealing here with a very special kind of
community. Unlike most communities, it has a single owner (The State of
Oregon), and a single, centralized budget. This situation is not only unusual,
it is even opposite to the ideas which are actually needed to make the way of
building which we call the timeless way, appear in a society.
(…)
4
We repeat,
that we do not consider these kinds of institutions ideal. In a future tfook we
shall describe the process of implementation that is needed in a more ideal
neighborhood or community, where people own their houses, common land and workshops,
and where there is no centralized budget. In this book, we nevertheless propose
a process which can allow people under the half-ideal conditions of the
centralized budget, to take care of the environment for themselves, and have
some measure of control over their own lives.
(…)
we believe
that the process of building and planning in a community will create an
environment which meets human needs only if it follows six principles of
implementation:
1. The
principle of organic order.
2. The
principle of participation.
3. The
principle of piecemeal growth.
4. The
principle of patterns.
5. The
principle of diagnosis.
6. The
principle of coordination.
5
(…) we now
outline these six principles.
1. The principle of organic order.
Planning and construction will be guided by
a process which allows the whole to emerge gradually from local acts.
2. The principle of participation.
All decisions about what to build and how to
build it, will be in the hands of the users.
3. The principle of piecemeal growth.
The construction undertaken in each
budgetary period will be weighed overwhelmingly towards small projects.
6
4. The principle of patterns.
All design and construction will be guided
by a collection of communally adopted planning principles called patterns.
5. The principle of diagnosis.
The well being of the whole will be
protected by an annual diagnosis which explains, in detail, which spaces are
alive and which ones dead, at any given moment in the history of the community.
6. The principle of coordination.
Finally, the slow emergence of organic order
in the whole will be assured by a funding process which regulates the stream of
individual projects put forward by users.
7
Anyone who
reads what we have written about these principles will be able to modify them
to suit his own community. And finally, although these principles are written
to apply to communities with one owner and a centralized budget, we believe
that modified, decentralized, versions of these principles will probably have
to be followed in all communities where people seek comparably human and
organic results. In this sense, then, we believe that the cores of these six
principles are fundamental to all processes in which the timeless way of
building can arise in our society.
9
CHAPTER I
ORGANIC ORDER
10
(…) the
master plan, as currently conceived, cannot create a whole. It can create a
totality, but not a whole. It can create totalitarian order, but not organic order.
(…) although
the task of making sure that individual acts of building cooperate to form a
whole is real, the conventional master plan—based on a map of the future—cannot
possibly perform this task (…) because it is too rigid to do so—and, because,
in addition, it creates an entirely new set of other problems, more devastating
in human terms than the chaos it is meant to govern.
10-11
Let us
begin with the idea of organic order. Everyone is aware that most of the built
environment today lacks a natural order, an order which presents itself very
strongly in places that were built centuries ago. This natural or organic order
emerges when there is perfect balance between the needs of the individual parts
of the environment, and the needs of the whole. In an organic environment,
every place is unique, and the different places also cooperate, with no parts
left over, to create a global whole—a whole which can be identified by everyone
who is a part of it.
14
We
define organic order as the kind of order that is achieved when there is a
perfect balance between the needs of the parts, and the needs of the whole.
18
(…) in
practice master plans fail—because they, create totalitarian order, not organic
order.
23
(…) as a source
of organic order, a master plan is both too precise, and not precise enough.
The totality is too precise: the details are not precise enough. It fails
because each part hinges on a conception of a “totality,” which cannot respond
to the inevitable accidents of time and still maintain its order. And it fails
because as a result of its rigidity, it cannot afford to guide the details
around buildings which really matter; if drawn in detail, these details would
be absurdly rigid.
Master
plans have two additional unhealthy characteristics. To begin with, the
existence of a master plan alienates the users—in this case the students,
faculty, and staff. After all, the very existence of a master plan means, by
definition, that the members of the community can have little impact on the
future shape of their community, because most of the important decisions have
already been made.
26-27
The
principle of organic order: Planning and construction will be guided by a
process which allows the whole to emerge gradually from local acts. To this end,
the community shall not adopt any form of physical master plan, but shall
instead adopt the process which this book describes; the most basic fact of
this process is that it enables the community to draw its order, not from a
fixed map of the future, but from a communal pattern language; the process
shall be administered, on behalf of the community, by a single planning board
of less than 10 members, made up of users and administrators in about equal
numbers, and a director of planning; the director of planning shall have a
staff, of roughly one person/2000 population, to guide community action.
28
(ii) The
most basic fact of this process is that it enables the community to draw its
order y not from a fixed map of the futurey but from a communal pattern
language.
30
In order to
correct these natural defects which will occur in any system where power is too
centralized, it is essential, first and foremost, that all projects be
initiated by their users—not by the administration.
38
CHAPTER 2
PARTICIPATION
Only the
people can guide the process of organic growth in a community. They know the
most about their own needs, and they know most about how well or how badly the
rooms and buildings, paths and open spaces are working.
39
Can it be
done? Do the faculty and students have enough time available to them to take
part? Are the practical arrangements with architects of such a kind that the
users are actually able to express their ideas, without having them ridiculed
and distorted? Is the information in the pattern language actually powerful
enough to let people make designs for themselves? Are the building projects
small enough to make this process practically feasible? Do people have enough
stake in a community which they do not actually own to make responsible
decisions? To what extent do the users need guidance, and where do they get it
from while they are designing with the pattern language?
Let us
begin by asking exactly what “participation” means. It can mean any process by
which the users of an environment help to shape it. The most modest kind of
participation is the kind where the user helps to shape a building by acting as
a client for an architect. The fullest kind of participation is the kind where
users actually build their buildings for themselves.
40
(…) participation
is inherently good; it brings people together, involves them in their world; it
creates feeling between people and the world around them, because it is a world
which they have helped to make. Second, the daily users of buildings know more
about their needs than anyone else; so the process of participation tends to
create places which are better adapted to human functions than those created by
a centrally administered planning process.
41
Whenever
people have the opportunity to change the environment around them, they do it,
they enjoy it, and they gain enormous satisfaction from what they have done. On
the other hand, people need a chance to identify with the part of the
environment in which they live and work; they want some sense of ownership,
some sense of territory. The most vital question about the various places in
any community is always this: Do the people who use them own them
psychologically? Do they feel that they can do with them as they wish; do they
feel that the place is theirs; are they free to make the place their own?
These two
aspects of involvement—creative control and ownership—are of course related.
You cannot control a place unless to some extent you own it. And you cannot
have a sense of ownership unless to some extent you can control it.
41-42
The first
reason to encourage participation, then, is that it allows people to become
involved in their community, because it gives them some sense of ownership, and
some degree of control.
We come now
to the second reason for participation: the fact that the users of a building
know more about their needs than anyone else; the fact that it is virtually
impossible to get a building which is well adapted to these needs if the people
who are the actual users do not design it.
45
There are,
however, two important objections to the idea of participation. First:
“Participation will create chaos, because in design and planning, people don’t
know what they are doing.” Second: “Most students, and many faculty, stay at
the university for less than five years; there is, therefore, no reason why
they should design the places in the university since, after five years, the
actual users will no longer be the same people as the users who made the
designs.”
45-46
(…) The
recent history of architecture and planning has created the false impression
that architects and planners are the only people who know how to lay out
buildings. The evidence from the last two or three thousand years of human
history tells the opposite story. Almost all the environments in human history
have been designed by lay people. Many of the most wonderful places in the
world, now avidly photographed by architects, were not designed by architects
but by lay people.
46
But of
course, in order to create order, not chaos, people must have some shared
principles. Nothing would be worse than an environment in which each square
foot was designed according to entirely different principles.
47
Within a
framework of shared patterns, we can be sure that the process of participation
will create a rich and various order.
The
objection that participation does not make sense, because the users who design
the university today will not be users in the years to come, is more subtle.
48
The
alternative is that the design is not made by users at ally but by a group of
architects and administrators who are still more remote from the users’ needs (…)
The only question is: How different shall they be?
(…) To
drive the point home: on the housing market, personal and individual houses are
always worth more than mass-produced houses. When you buy such a house, it fits
you better, not because you are the person who created it, but simply because a
particular 'person created it.
49
It is
clear, from all this, that participation is desirable. But is it actually
possible? Is the kind of participation we advocate attainable, under modern
social conditions? Can a design conceived directly by lay people have the
qualities of life and order that good architects give to their buildings?
58
The principle
of participation: All decisions about what to build, and how to build it, will
be in the hands of the users. To this end, there shall be a users design team
for every proposed building project; any group of users may initiate a project,
and only those projects initiated by users shall be considered for funding; the
planning staff shall give the members of the design team whatever patterns,
diagnosis and additional help they need for their design; the time that users
need to do a project, shall be treated as a legitimate and essential part of
their activities; the design team shall complete their schematic designs before
any architect or builder begins to play a major role.
67
CHAPTER 3
PIECEMEAL GROWTH
We now come
to the idea of piecemeal growth. By piecemeal growth we mean growth that goes
forward in small steps, where each project spreads out and adapts itself to the
twists and turns of function and site (…) In this chapter we shall argue that
piecemeal growth, like participation, is essential to the creation of organic
order.
67-68
Let us
begin by examining the notion of organic growth and repair. Any living system
must re pair itself constantly in order to maintain its balance and
coordination, its quality as a whole.
68
68-69
(…) All the
good environments that we know have this in common. They are whole and alive
because they have grown slowly over long periods of time, piece by piece. The
pieces are small—and there are always a balanced number of projects going
forward at every scale.
76
The basic
philosophical difference between the two approaches is this: Large lump
development hinges on a view of the environment which is static and
discontinuous; piecemeal growth hinges on a view of the environment which is
dynamic and continuous.
77
Large lump
development is based on the idea of replacement. Piecemeal growth is based on
the idea of repair. Since replacement means consumption of resources, while
repair means conservation of resources, it is easy to see that piecemeal growth
is the sounder of the two from an ecological point of view.
77-78
But there
are even more practical differences. Large lump development is based on the
fallacy that it is possible to build perfect buildings. Piecemeal growth is
based on the healthier and more realistic view that mistakes are inevitable. Of
course no building is perfect when it is built. It always has mistakes in it.
The mistakes show up gradually during the first few years of the building’s
use. Unless money is available for repairing these mistakes, every building
once built, is condemned to be, to some extent, unworkable.
84
For all
these reasons, piecemeal growth works to create organic order; large lump
development tends to break it down.
91
We can
safely conclude that the small projects created by the piecemeal growth approach
will cost no more per net usable square foot than the projects created by large
lump developmenty and may perhaps cost less.
101
CHAPTER 4
PATTERNS
Let us
begin with a brief definition of a pattern, remembering that from our present
point of view, the essential feature which every pattern has, is that it forms
the basis for a shared agreement in a community. Each one is, therefore, a
statement of some general planning principle so formulated that its
correctness, or incorrectness, can be supported by empirical evidence,
discussed in public, and then, according to the outcome of these discussions,
adopted, or not, by a planning board which speaks for the whole community.
101-102
(…) we may
define a pattern as any general planning principle, which states a clear
problem that may occur repeatedly in the environment, states the range of
contexts in which this problem will occur, and gives the general features required
by all buildings or plans which solve this problem. In this sense, then, we may
regard a pattern as an empirically grounded imperative, which states the
preconditions for healthy individual and social life in a community.
136
We now
discuss the practical steps which must be taken to promote the use of patterns,
at the University of Oregon, and, above all, to make sure that the patterns are
gradually improved and enlarged by members of the university, community.
The
important issues are these:
1. We want
to make sure that the community can use the published pattern language.
2. We want
to make sure that the patterns have the status of formally adopted planning and
building principles.
3. We want
to make sure that there is a mechanism by which new patterns can be introduced,
and bad patterns replaced by better ones.
4. We want
to make sure that there is a process which will guarantee the gradual
improvement of patterns by empirical experiment and observations.
The
practical procedures which we have used, at the University of Oregon, for
maintaining these objectives, are captured by the following principle:
The
principle of patterns: All design and construction will be guided by a
collection of communally adopted planning principles called patterns. To this
end, the planning staff shall modify the published pattern language, by
deleting and inserting patterns, to meet local needs; those patterns which have
global impact on the community shall be adopted formally by the planning board,
on behalf of the community; the collection of formally adopted patterns shall
be reviewed annually at public hearings, where any member of the community can
introduce new patterns, or revisions of old patterns, on the basis of
explicitly stated observations and experiments.
144
CHAPTER 5
DIAGNOSIS
(…) we have
not yet solved the problem which the master plan was intended to solve. It is
still not clear where global order will come from, without a master plan.
This
problem has been described in theory in The Timeless Way of Building. It is
explained there that the thousands of small acts of building can be made to
create larger, global, order if each pattern that is built is always built in
such a way as to contribute to some larger pattern as well.
147
A group of
users who have not had the benefit of our experience may not be able to
synthesize these six patterns quite so easily. How can our experience be
recorded and made available to the people who need it?
These
examples make it clear that a piecemeal planning process, with designs made by
users, could easily fail to generate the global order which the university
environment needs.
147-148
We propose
to solve the problem in a way that is almost perfectly analogous to the way in
which it is solved in nature. We therefore begin by explaining the problem, and
its solution, for an organism. When an organism grows, how is it that the
millions of different cells that are growing at various places throughout the
organism manage to form a unified whole, with as much order in the overall
structure of the organism, as in the small parts which make it up?
148
Essentially,
the problem is solved by a process of diagnosis and local repair.
150
We see,
then, that global order within the organism is governed at two levels. First,
the growth fields create the context for growth, and determine the location
where growth shall occur. Then the genetic code carried by the cells controls
the local configurations which grow at those locations, modified always by interaction
with the growth fields themselves.
(…)
We
propose to solve the problem of global order in the university by means of a
very similar process of diagnosis and repair.
157
Superficially,
the diagnosis may seem like a conventional master plan. There is, however, a
great difference. The master plan tells us what is right, for the future. The
diagnosis tells us what is wrong, now, in the present. The diagnosis, and a
typical master plan, are also very different in the amount of detail they
portray. The master plan, since it is intended to show positive action, shows
rather little detail—only broad outlines of what ought to be done in any given
area. The diagnosis, since it shows only what is wrong, can go into enormous
detail in pinpointing errors.
159
The
principle of diagnosis: The well being of the whole will be protected by an
annual diagnosis which explains, in detail, which spaces are alive and which
ones dead, at any given moment in the history of the community. To this end,
the planning staff, working together with the people who use individual spaces,
shall prepare an annual diagnostic map for the entire community; this map shall
be formally adopted by the planning board, after a series of public hearings,
and then published and made available to everyone who wants to initiate a
project.
162
CHAPTER 6
COORDINATION
163
We believe,
in short, that the full-fledged organic order which we seek can only be created
by a form of responsible anarchy, in which people are free to build as they
please, are strongly encouraged by self-interest to act on behalf of larger
community needs, but are not forced to do so by centralized fiscal or legal
control.
163-164
The principle
of coordination: Finally, the slow emergence of organic order in the whole will
be assured by a funding process which regulates the stream of individual
projects put forward by users. To this end, every project which seeks funds for
construction shall be submitted to the planning board, on a standard form,
which explains its relation to the currently adopted patterns and diagnosis;
the projects submitted for funding in any given budget year shall be put in
order of priority for funds by the planning board, acting in open session; at
this session projects shall be judged by the extent to which they conform to
the community's adopted patterns and diagnosis—with the clear understanding
that projects will be built in every size range, and that projects of different
size will not compete for funds.
166
Even though
this procedure has slightly bureaucratic overtones, we consider it essential
that every project, no matter what its type, be submitted for approval, and for
funding, on the same form, so that the members of the planning board can test
different projects against the criteria given by patterns and by the current diagnosis;
and can then compare them equally with one another.
187
Our point
is now transparent. The precise order that emerges as a result of the gradual
coordination of hundreds of acts of piecemeal design cannot be known in
advance; it can only arise slowly out of a community that is sharing patterns,
responding to diagnosis and taking responsibility for its own plans and
designs.
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