Design by committee works if the committee will be among the users. But some problems can be fixed only through continuous repair. Above: A dangerous, isolated spot outside the new science buildings. Below: Handrails or monorails? Winter/Spring 1991 RAIN Page 35 The ideology is making slow, but definite, progress through many channels. In the past these suggestions might have sounded like a call for anarchy to many planners, architects, civic politicians and their staffs, but now some are beginning to see that the University's smallscale, democratic design is much more responsible than the abusive politics and economics they participate in every day. The role of planners The campus planners that have emerged from The Experiment have great patience, negotiating skill and earnest interest tn their users. They have little power over some issues, but they share what power they do have with those concerned. In contrast, from 1915 through the second World War the University grounds were ruled by an autocrat, Ellis Lawrence, a skilled architect who designed and built from plans seen only by a few. The impressive distance between Ellis and modern campus planners is partly Alexander's doing, partly a change in administrative attitudes since the 1960's, and partly a change in design theory. Many designers before Alexander's time combined good intentions with narrow notions about the impact of their work on people's lives. They tried to change society from the drafting board. Many believed, for example, that poorly designed tenement projects caused urban poverty; skyscrapers were at fault for urban stress; poor mall design meant a poor town economy; a good road created a good neighborhood; students studied if they had just the right kind of desk. There is no doubt that different structures constrain in different ways. Certainly, good buildings are a part of some very stimulating environments, but only if certain demographic, geographic, political, economic, and cultural conditions are met. Engineering cannot change everything. The assertion that design can solve social problems was wishful ignorance of complex activities: Urban poverty is maintained through economics and politics that favor the wealthy; urban stress is associated with hectic economic activity, lack of job satisfaction, and, dangers related to the differences in wealth between people in the city; weak town economies are made when money and resources leave town; neighborhoods are drawn together by social needs, not by roads; student success depends on motivation, which is sparked more by the curriculum than by the furniture. But proposing such a broad analysis would have been threatening to those who funded limited design research. Alexander and the new environmentalists of the late 1960's still believed in social engineering, but they rejected the old school's rough determinism. They found in evolutionary biology the useful notion that Form and Function do not absolutely follow one another. User needs cannot be turned into a single building
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