My penchant for Christopher Alexander is on the rise again after spending the weekend at an inspiringly-comfortable bed and breakfast in Green County. Here’s an excerpt from A Pattern Language that cuts to the heart of what Getting Real is about.
202. BUILT-IN SEATS
Problem
Built-in seats are great. Everybody loves them. They make a building feel comfortable and luxurious. But most often they do not actually work. They are placed wrong, or too narrow, or the back does not slope, or the view is wrong, or the seat is too hard. This pattern tells you what to do to make a built-in seat that really works.
Solution
Before you build the seat, get hold of an old arm chair or a sofa, and put it into the position where you intend to build a seat. Move it until you really like it. Leave it there for a few days. See if you enjoy sitting in it. Move it if you don’t. When you have got it into a position which you like, and where you often find yourself sitting, you know it is a good position. Now build a seat that is just as wide, and just as well padded – and your built-in seat will work.
Jemaleddin S. Cole
on 05 Mar 08It’s like the old chestnut about how to lay out the walkways at a university: don’t. At least not for the first year. Just put down grass everywhere, and then come pack the next year and put in sidewalks wherever the grass is dead.
Schools that don’t do this have big wide paths that nobody uses and huge swaths of dead grass.
Colin Carmichael
on 05 Mar 08Reminds of something I read a few years back about a new university campus that allowed the students to roam free for a year between buildings and only then determined where the paved paths should be based on the naturally worn paths.
Wish I could find the reference for that… sigh.
JF
on 05 Mar 08IIT did this when they built their new student center. The hallways and are actually the old walking paths across the grass before there was a building there.
Roman Bercot
on 05 Mar 08If you’ve gone through all the trouble of finding a nice comfortable chair and placing it in the perfect spot, wouldn’t the Getting Real solution be to leave the nice comfortable chair in the perfect spot?
mkb
on 05 Mar 08I look to the new NYC MTA subway cars for seating inspiration. What does that say about me?
Paul Souders
on 05 Mar 08My first thought on reading this quote was “why not just leave the chair in that place?” If it’s that good, the built-in won’t feel like an improvement. Chairs are easy to repair, move, customize and replace; built-ins…not so much. Moreover, what you find comfortable for that chair, I might find uncomfortable. A house full of built-ins doesn’t feel “comfortable” or “luxurious” to me; it feels “constraining” and “fussy.”
A previous employer was redesigning the office (at enormous expense) using Herman Miller pods specially designed to enhance collaboration. Prior to the reconstruction, the entire creative team was moved into a temporary space which was essentially a large shed. We had no cube walls, no “pods”, no conversation-canceling pink noise. We were almost literally shoulder to shoulder, with no planning or regard for space or teams. We also had no barrier to moving furniture or fixtures to wherever they needed to go … after all, the space was due for demolition and redevelopment.
Productivity skyrocketed.
I wondered then and ever since why we didn’t just continue using our “temporary” workspaces indefinitely.
Walker Hamilton
on 05 Mar 08Yes, but, unfortunately, the destinations on the campus have changed because the buildings are now there! So there are new paths being worn.
The seating within the new student center is anything but comfy.
Also, I get an email every couple months to my student account informing of an accident on-campus involving a pedestrian and the “state street express-way” that runs right through campus.
Instead of building a pedestrian friendly campus (pedestrian bridges?) IIT chose to divide itself down the middle by a thoroughfare know for it’s speeding.
I avoid State street for as long as possible when I ride my bike from work (in the loop) to an evening class. But there are two blocks where I haven’t been able to determine any other way and so I have to ride on State. Pretty scary, I tell you.
Justin Knoll
on 06 Mar 08The emergent-walkways-on-a-university-quad story has been claimed to be about just about every campus under the sun. Larry Wall popularized the concept among programmers in a comment about Perl’s design philosophy which attributed the practice to UC-Irvine.
Another source attributes it to Harvard, but with “dead grass” replaced with “tromped down snow.”
The term for these paths is “desire lines.”
This discussion is closed.