The Introduction to SPACE
IS THE MACHINE
by Professor Bill
Hillier
In 1984, in The Social Logic of Space, written in collaboration with
Julienne Hanson and published
by Cambridge University Press, I set out a new theory of space as an
aspect of social life. Since then the theory has developed into an extensive
research programme into the spatial nature and functioning of buildings
and cities, into computer software linking 'space syntax' analytic tools
with graphical representation and output for researchers and designers,
and into an expanding range of applications in architectural and urban
design. During this time, a large number of articles, reports and features
have appeared, theses have been written in many universities using the
theory and methods of 'space syntax', and research has been initiated
in many parts of the world into areas as diverse as the analysis of
archaeological remains and the design of hospitals.
During this time, many theoretical advances have also been made, often
in symbiosis with the development of new techniques for the computer
representation and analysis of space. One key outcome of these advances
is that the concept of 'configuration' has moved to centre stage. Configuration
means, put simply, relations taking into account other relations. The
techniques of 'configurational analysis' - of which the various 'space
syntax' techniques are exemplars - that have been built from this idea
have made it possible to bring the elusive 'pattern aspect' of things
in architecture and urban design into the light of day, and to give
quantitative expression to the age old idea that it is 'how things are
put together' that matters.
This has in turn led to a clear articulation of a philosophy of design.
Architectural and urban design, both in their formal and spatial aspects,
are seen as fundamentally configurational in that the way the parts
are put together to form the whole is more important that any of the
parts taken in isolation. The configurational techniques developed for
research can, in fact, just as easily be turned round and used to support
experimentation and simulation in design. In linking theoretical research
to design in this way, we are following a historical tradition in architectural
theory which has both attempted to subject the pattern aspect of things
in architecture to rational analysis, and to test these analyses by
embodying them in real designs. The difference now is only that the
advent of computers allows us to bring a much great degree of rigour
and testing to theoretical ideas.
The aim of this book is to bring together some of these recent developments
in applying configurational analysis to issues of architectural and
urban theory into a single volume. The surprising success of configurational
ideas in capturing the inner logic of at least some aspects of the form
and functioning of built environments, suggests that it might in due
course be useful to extend these idea to other areas where similar problems
of describing and quantifying configuration seem to be central, including
some aspects of cognitive psychology, but also perhaps sociology itself.
At present we are encouraged by the present interest in these ideas
across a range of disciplines, and just as the last decade has been
devoted to the development and testing of techniques of configurational
analysis within architecture and urban design, so we hope that the coming
decade will see collaborations amongst disciplines where configuration
is identified as a significant problem, and where some development of
the configurational methodology could conceivably play a useful role.
The immediate context of the book is the changing theoretical debate
within and around architecture. Looking back, it is easy to see that
in spite of the attention paid to theory in architecture in the twentieth
century, and in spite of the great influence that theories have had
on our built environment, architectural theories in the last decades
have in general suffered form two debilitating weaknesses. First, most
have been strongly normative, and weakly analytic, in that they have
been too much concerned to tell designers how buildings and environments
should be, and too little concerned with how they actually are. As a
result, theories of architecture have influenced our built environment
enormously, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill, but they have done
little to advance our understanding of architecture.
Second, there has been an explosion of the historic tendency to form
architectural theories out of ideas and concepts borrowed from other
disciplines. As a result, architectural discourse has been dominated
by a series of borrowings, first from engineering and biology, then
from psychology and the social sciences, then from linguistics and semiology,
and most recently of all from literary theory. Each of these has had
the merit that it allowed architecture to become part of wider intellectual
debate. But there has been a price, in that very little attention has
been given to the internal development of architecture as a discipline.
Through this turning away, architecture has increasingly ignored the
lessons waiting to be learned from the intensive study of experimental
twentieth century architecture, and acquired what now amounts to a hidden
history in which key aspects of recent architectural reality have been
suppressed as though they were too painful to talk about.
The aim of this book is to begin the process of remedying this bias
towards overly normative theories based on concept borrowing from other
disciplines, by initiating the search for a genuinely analytic and internal
theory of architecture, that is, one based on the direct study of buildings
and built environments, and guided by concepts formed out of the necessities
of this study. The guiding belief is that what we need at the end of
the twentieth century is a better and deeper understanding of the phenomenon
of architecture and how it affects people's lives, and how this relates
to innovative possibility in architecture, and the central role of the
architectural imagination.
This book is therefore concerned with what buildings and cities are
like, why they are as they are, how they work, how they come about through
design, and how they might be different. The word 'theory' is used not
in the common architectural sense of seeking some set of rules which,
if followed, will guarantee architectural success but in the philosophical
and scientific sense that theories are the abstractions through which
we understand the world. An architectural theory, as we see it, should
deepen our grasp of architectural phenomena, and only subsequently and
with great modesty, suggest possible principles on which to base speculation
and innovation in design. Such a theory is analytic before it is normative.
Its primary role in to enquire into the puzzle that we see and experience
architecture, but we do not understand what we see and experience. However
strongly we may feel that architecture may be wrong or right, we rarely
understand the architectural grounds on which such judgments are made.
This book therefore seeks an understanding of the theoretical content
of architecture.
The book is in four parts. The first, 'THEORETICAL PRELIMINARIES' deals
with the most basic of all questions which architectural theory tries
to answer: what is architecture, and what are theories, that they can
be needed in architecture? In the first chapter, 'What architecture
adds to building', the key concepts of the book are set out on the way
to a definition of architecture. The argument is that in additional
to functioning as bodily protection, building operate socially in two
ways: they constitute the social organisation of everyday life as the
spatial configurations of space in which we live and move, and represent
social organisation as physical configurations of forms and elements
that we see. Both social dimensions of building are therefore configurational
in nature, and it is the habit of the human mind to handle configuration
unconsciously and intuitively, in much the same way as we handle the
grammatical and semantic structures of a language intuitively. Our minds
are very effective in handling configuration in this way, but because
we do work this way, we find it very difficult to analyse and rationally
talk about the configurational aspects of things. Configuration is in
general 'nondiscursive', meaning that we do not know how to talk about
it and do not in general talk about it even when we are most actively
using it. In vernacular buildings, the configurational, or nondiscursive,
aspects of space and form are handled exactly like the grammar of language,
that is, as an implication of the manipulation of the surface elements,
that is words and groups of words in the language case, building elements
and geometrical coordinations in building. In the vernacular the act
of building reproduces cultural given spatial and formal patterns. This
is why is seldom seems 'wrong'. Architecture, in contrast, is the taking
into conscious, reflective thought of these nondiscursive and configurational
aspects of space and form, leading to the exercise of choice within
a wide field of possibility, rather that the reduplication of the patterns
specific to a culture. Architecture is, in essence, the application
of speculative and abstract thought to the nondiscursive aspects of
building, and because it is so, it is also its application to the social
and cultural contents of building.
Chapter 2, 'The need for an analytic theory of architecture', then takes
this argument into architectural theory. Architectural theories are
essentially attempts to subject the nondiscursive aspects of space and
form to rational analysis, and to establish principles to guide design
in the field of choice, principles which are now needed as cultural
guidance is no longer automatic as it is in a vernacular tradition.
Architectural theories are both analytic in that they always depend
on conjecture about what human beings are like, but they are also normative,
and say how the world should be rather more strongly than they say how
it is. This means that architecture can be innovative and experimental
through the agency of theories, but it can also be wrong. Because theories
can be wrong, architects need to be able to evaluate how good their
theories are in practice, since the repetition of theoretical error
- as in much of the modernist housing programme - will inevitably lead
to the curtailment of architectural freedom. The consequence to this
is the need for a truly analytic theory of architecture, that in one
which permits the investigation of the nondiscursive without bias towards
one or other specific nondiscursive style.
Chapter 3, 'Non-discursive technique', outlines the prime requirement
for permitting architects to begin this theoretical learning: the need
for neutral techniques for the description and analysis of the nondiscursive
aspects of space and form , that is techniques that are not simple expression
of partisanship for a particular type of configuration, as most architectural
theories have been in the past. The chapter notes a critical difference
between regularities and theories. Regularities are repeated phenomena,
either in the form of apparent typing or apparent consistencies in the
time order in which event occur. Regularities are patterns in surface
phenomena. Theories are attempts to model the underlying processes that
produce regularities. Every science theorises on the basis of its regularities.
Social sciences tend to be weak not because they lack theories but because
the lack regularities which theories can seek to explain and which therefore
offer the prime test of theories. The first task in the quest for an
analytic theory of architecture is therefore to seek regularities. The
first purpose of 'nondiscursive technique' is to pursue this task.
Part II of the book, 'NONDISCURSIVE REGULARITIES', then sets out a number
of studies in which regularities in the relation between spatial configuration
and the observed functioning of built environments have been established
using 'nondiscursive techniques' of analysis to control the architectural
variables. Chapter 4, 'Cities as movement economies' reports a fundamental
research finding: that movement in the urban grid is, other things being
equal, generated by the configuration of the grid itself. This insight
allows completely new insights into the structure of urban grids, and
the way these structures relation to urban functioning. The relation
between grid and movement in fact underlies many other aspects of urban
form: the distribution of land uses, such as retail and residence, the
spatial patterning of crime, the evolution of different densities and
even the part-whole structure of cites. The influence of the fundamental
grid-movement relation is so pervasive that cities are conceptualised
in the chapter as 'movement economies', in which the structuring of
movement by the grid leads, through multiplier effects, to dense patterns
of mixed use encounter that characterise the spatially successful city.
Chapter 5, 'Can architecture cause social malaise' then discussing how
this can go wrong. Focussing on specific studies of housing estates
using configurational analysis coupled to intensive observation as well
as social data it is shown how the overly complex and poorly structured
internal space of many housing estates, including low rise estates,
leads to impoverishment of the 'virtual community' - that is the system
of natural co-presence and co-awareness created by spatial design and
realised through movement - and this in turn leads to anti-social uses
of space, which are the first stage in decline towards the 'sink estate'.
Because the role of space in this process is to create a disorderly
and unsafe pattern of space use, and this is then perceived and experienced,
it is possible to conceptualise how architecture works alongside social
processes to create social decline. In a sense, the creation of disorderly
space use through maladroit space design creates the first symptoms
of decline, even before any real decline has occurred. In a sense, then,
it is argued, we find that the symptoms help to bring about the disease.
Chapter 6. 'Time as an aspect of space' then considers another fundamental
difference between urban forms: that between cities which serve the
need of production, distribution and trade, and those which serve the
needs of social reproduction, that is of government, major social institutions
and bureaucracies. A series of 'strange towns' are examined, and it
is shown how in their spatial properties, they are in many sense the
opposite to the 'normal' towns considered in Chapter Five. The detailed
spatial mechanisms of these towns are examined, and a 'genotype' proposed.
An explanation is then suggested as to why 'cities of social reproduction'
tend to construct these distinctive types of spatial patterns.
Chapter 7, 'Visible Colleges', then turns to the interiors of buildings.
It begins by setting out a general theory of space in buildings, taking
into account the results of settlement analysis, and then highlights
a series of studies of buildings. A key distinction is made between
'long and short models', that is, between cases where space is strongly
governed by rules, and therefore acts to conserve given social statuses
and relationships and cases where space acts to generate relations over
and above those given by the social situation. The concept of long and
short models permits social relations and spatial configuration to be
conceptualised in an analogous way. A ritual is a long model social
event, since all that happens is governed by rules, and a ritual typically
generates a precise system of spatial relationships and movements through
time, that is a spatial 'long model'. A party is a short model event,
since its object of to generate new relationships by shuffling them
in space, and this means that rules must be minimised by using a spatial
'short model'. In a long model situation space is adapted to support
the rules, and behavioural rules must also support it. In a short model
situation, space evolves to structure, and often to maximise, encounter
density.
Part III of the book, 'THE LAWS OF THE FIELD', then uses these noted
regularities to reconsider the most fundamental question of all in architectural
theory: how is the vast field of possible spatial complexes constrained
to create those that are actually found as buildings? First, in chapter
8, 'Is architecture an ars combinatoria?', a general theory of 'partitioning'
is proposed, in which it is shown that local physical changes in a spatial
system always have more or less global configurational effects. It is
the laws governing this passage form local physical moves to global
spatial effects that are the spatial laws that underlie building. These
local-to-global spatial laws are linked to the evolution of real buildings
through what will be called 'generic function', by which is meant the
spatial implications of the most fundamental aspects of human use of
space, that is the fact of occupation and the fact of movement. At this
generic level, function imposes restraints on what is spatially viable,
and this is responsible for what all buildings have in common as spatial
designs. Generic function is the 'first filter' between the field of
possibility and architectural actuality. The second filter is then the
cultural or programmatic requirement of that type of building. The third
filter is the idiosyncrasies of structure and expression that then distinguish
that building from all others. The passage from the possible to the
real passes through these three filters, and without an understanding
of each we cannot decipher the form function relation. Most of all,
without a knowledge of generic function and its spatial implications
we cannot understand that what all buildings have in common in their
spatial structures is already profoundly influenced by human functioning
in space.
In Chapter 9, 'The fundamental city', the theory of generic function
and the three filters is applied to cities to show how much of the growth
of settlements is governed by these basic laws. A new computer modelling
technique of 'all line analysis', which begins by conceptualising vacant
space as an infinitely dense matrix of lines, containing all possible
structures, is used to show how the observable regularities in urban
forms from the most local to the most global can be seen to be products
of the same underlying processes. A fundamental settlement process is
proposed, of which particular cultural types are parameterisations.
Finally, it is shown how the fundamental settlement process is essentially
realised through a small number of spatial ideas which have an essentially
geometrical nature.
Part IV of the book, 'THEORETICAL SYNTHESES', then begins to draw together
some of the question raised in Part One, the regularities shown in Part
Two and the laws proposed in Part Three, to suggest how the two central
problems in architectural theory, namely the form function problem and
the form meaning problem, can be reconceptualised. Chapter 10, 'Space
is the machine' reviews the form function theory in architecture and
attempts to establish a pathology of its formulation: how it came to
be set up in such a way that it could not be solved. It then proposes
how the configuration paradigm permits a reformulation, through which
we can not only make sense of the relation between form and function
in buildings, but also we can make sense of how and why buildings, in
a powerful, sense are 'social objects' and in fact play a powerful role
in the realisation and sustaining of human society.
Finally, in Chapter 11, 'The reasoning art', the notion of configuration
is applied to the study of what architects do, that is design. Previous
models of the design process are reviewed, and it is shown that without
knowledge of configuration and the concept of the nondiscursive, we
cannot understand the internalities of the design process. A new knowledge
based model of design is proposed, with configuration at its centre.
It is argued from this that because design is a configurational process,
and because it is the characteristic of configuration that local changes
make global differences, it is argued that design is necessarily a top
down process. This does not mean that is cannot be analysed, or supported
by research. It shows however that only configurationally biased knowledge
can really support the design process, and this, essentially, is theoretical
knowledge. It follows from this that attempts to support designers by
building methods and systems for bottom up construction of designs must
eventually fail as explanatory systems. They can serve to create specific
architectural identities, but not to advance general architectural understanding.
In pursuing an analytic rather than a normative theory of architecture,
the book might be thought by some to have pretensions to make the art
of architecture into a science. This is not what is intended. One effect
of a better scientific understanding of architecture is to show that
although architecture as a phenomenon is capable of considerable scientific
understanding, this does not mean that as a practice architecture is
not an art. On the contrary, it shows quite clearly why it is an art
and what the nature and limits of that art are. Architecture is an art
because, although in key respects its forms can be analysed and understood
by scientific means, its forms can only be prescribed by scientific
means in a very restricted sense. Architecture is law governed but it
is not determinate. What is governed by the laws is not the form of
individual buildings but the field of possibility within which the choice
of form is made. This mean that the impact of these laws on the passage
from problem statement to solution is not direct but indirect. It lies
deep in the spatial and physical forms of buildings, in their genotypes,
not their phenotypes.
Architecture is therefore not part art, and part science, in the sense
that it has both technical and aesthetic aspect, but is both art and
science in the sense that it requires both the processes of abstraction
by which we know science and the processes of concretion by which we
know art. The architect as scientist and as theorist seeks to establish
the laws of the spatial and formal materials with which the architect
as artist then composes. The greater scientific content of architecture
over art is simply a function of the far greater complexity of the raw
materials of space and form, and their far greater reverberations for
other aspects of life, than any materials that an artist uses. It is
the fact that the architect designs with the spatial stuff of living
that builds the science of architecture into the art of architecture.
It may seem curious to argue that the quest for a scientific understanding
of architecture does not lead to the conclusion that architecture is
a science, but nevertheless it is the case. In the last analysis, architectural
theory is a matter of understanding architecture as a system of possibilities,
and how these are restricted by laws which link this system of possibilities
to the spatial potentialities of human life . At this level, and perhaps
only at this level, architecture is analogous to language. Language
is often naively conceptualised as a set of words and meanings, set
out in a dictionary, and syntactic rules by which they may be combined
into meaningful sentences, set out in grammars. This is not what language
is, and the laws that govern language are not of this kind. This can
be seen from the simple fact that if we take the words of the dictionary
and combine them in grammatically correct sentences, virtually all are
utterly meaningless and do not count as legitimate sentences. The structures
of language are the laws of which restrict the combinatorial possibilities
of words, and through these restriction construct the sayable and the
meaningful. The laws of language do not therefore tell us what to say,
but prescribe the structure and limits of the sayable. It is within
these limits that we use language as the prime means to our individuality
and creativity.
In this sense architecture does resemble language. The laws of the field
of architecture do not tell designers what to do. By restricting and
structuring the field of combinatorial possibility, they prescribe the
limits within which architecture is possible. As with language, what
is left from this restrictive structuring is rich beyond imagination.
Even so, without these laws buildings would not be human products, any
more than meaningless but syntactically correct concatenations of words
are human sentences.
The case for a theoretical understanding of architecture then rests
eventually not on aspiration to philosophical or scientific status,
but on the nature of architecture itself. The foundational proposition
of the book is that architecture is an inherently theoretical subject.
The very act of building raises issues about the relations of the form
of the material world and the way in which we live in it which (as any
archaeologist knows who has tried to puzzle out a culture from material
remains,) are unavoidably both philosophical and scientific. Architecture
is the most everyday, the most enveloping, the largest and the most
culturally determined human artifact. The act of building implies the
transmission of cultural conventions answering these questions through
custom and habit. Architecture is their rendering explicit, and their
transmutation into a realm of innovation and, at its best, of art. In
a sense, architecture is abstract thought applied to building, even
therefore in a sense theory applied to building. This is why, in the
end, architecture must have analytic theories.
Space is the Machine by Professor Bill Hillier and published by Cambridge
University Press is now available.
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