12 Conceptual vision of a still larger process

It was Margaret Rule who told me that she had personally found nearly a hundred skeletons and human remains in the underwater mud. I suggested, […] that we build 700 stone tablets forming a memorial way into the Museum, to bring the deaths of these men sharply into focus.
Margaret refused. She understood, at once, the emotional impact the 700 stone tablets would make, each with a carving of an archer on it. In the dry consumer-oriented character of 20th-century museums, such a direct appeal to human experience and human feeling — she believed — would have been inconsistent, and out of place. I believe she was wrong.

The effect of this “whole-oriented” pattern-awareness was strong, and immediate. Even in the very early sketches, the building looks, in its physical character, like buildings built 2000 years ago, or 200 years ago, or perhaps as buildings may appear in some future era 200 or 2000 years from now. This was not stylistic. It is simply a mark of living structure that a hierarchy of distinct, and well-formed levels must exist in which coherent centers occur at every level of scale.
Emphasis on the fundamental process typically brings such a character into existence, because it puts a focus on emerging centers (large, middle-sized, small, and very small). It sounds commonplace. Yet is has the power to create beauty. Today’s system of design rarely gives schematic designs that character.
The problem is aggravated because schematic design is too often done by people do not know how to build with their own hands. If they do not know (with their own hands) how to build, they can have no authentic sense of what hierarchy of details is probable, or possible.

Money is the life-blood of every building. How it is garnered and spent determines the outcome and the artistic life and soul of the finished building. It is the overall global pattern of expenditure which controls the way feeling can occur, because it is this which controls the overall pattern of material, in quantity and quality — just as it is the overall pattern of color which controls the way feeling can occur in a painting.

In program budgeting, a cost plan is made starting even before design begins. This cost plan is an assignment of budget amounts allocated to different categories of work. To start with, the cost plan is made intuitively, to capture how much one wants to spend in these categories.
It may seem strange to say that a responsible cost plan was based on intuition, but that is indeed so. One guesses and can feel the result of spending 14% on foundations, 22% on roof structure, etc. The purpose is to find a set of numbers which are realistic, and yet create the best possible depth of feeling that can be attained within the given budget envelope.
For a team with experience, numbers like these translate directly and intuitively into a sense of how the building will turn out, and whether available money is being spent in the right places, in the right relative amounts to bring the building into harmony, and is likely to have the overall feeling effect which is desired.
Of course the allocations in the first cost plan are subsequently tested and modified continually, as the work goes forward, and finally made sound by later bidding processes. After receiving bids, to see what can be achieved with the allocation initially proposed, further more refined intuitive allocations are made. These, again, become a benchmark for actual expenditure.
The assumption throughout is that the numbers will remain within the framework set. What floats is the design, not the price. One assumes that “something” can always be done for any sum suggested, and the subcontractors and general manager must make do with that so as not to disturb the whole — the whole, in this instance, being the overall budget distribution that has been allocated in the cost plan.
Thus, as the building design develops, each subcontractor is presented with the opposite of the normal situation. Instead of being shown the drawings and asked to bid the work, he is told the sum allocated, and asked what he can do that is best for the project within that sum of money.
This procedure requires extensive negotiation, and the manager must be flexible in his understanding of the reality faced by the subcontractor, so as to maintain a fair and equitable attitude to the work. However, the benchmark of the process is that that the allocation which has been made gives the failsafe distribution: in the best interest of the building overall, and it is unwise for any one operation to be allowed to drive it out of balance, merely because something has been drawn or specified, which is expensive. Rather, one takes the attitude, let this allocated amount be fixed, and — unless exceptional conditions dictate otherwise — whatever can be done for that amount will serve the project well.

Doesn’t sound like that worked so well in the case of the Julian Street Inn, does it…? Alexander’s CES seemed to have to cover a lot of work and cost that wasn’t in the budget.

The feeling of a material does not depend on what it us — it depends on how it is handled.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/4 Large public buildings#