Architecture and Environment

Sometimes an architect has a wide-open space, a large budget, and unlimited freedom to design a structure. In these cases established best practices will lead to a technically impressive result. Looking at the Burj Dubai, the appearance is of a very tall structure which required engineering expertise and advanced materials to build. With this sort of tower superproject, genuinely new and unexpected patterns are comparatively rare. The technology and academic literature certainly progress as in other fields, but the result of one of these projects is pretty much what you would expect: a very tall structure on a flat foundation.

Now consider a heavily constrained project, like Frank Geary’s fallingwater house. In this case the client requested a house that fit on a unique piece of land, with forested hills and a waterfall going through the property. You might guess that limiting the possibilities available to the architect would produce limited results, but the reality is exactly the opposite. In those unique circumstances, Geary produced the famous cantilevered design and spectacular proportions which endure as iconic examples of the craft. I don’t want to suggest that one can design a skyscraper without any creativity, or build the fallingwater house without any engineering skill. In fact both projects require a great deal of both abilities. I will suggest that the skyscraper requires comparatively more of the engineering part, and the fallingwater house requires more of the creative part.

Here there is an analogy with other disciplines. Architectural concepts apply to any situation where complicated systems of interacting components have to be designed. Courses of education, business processes, and software systems are some examples.

Working programmers dream about having unlimited resources and freedom to build monumental skyscrapers of software design, but reality does not often accomodate these fantasies. Schedules and budgets are limited, often severely. Large systems usually include legacy infrastructure which was not intended to perform the task at hand. Instead of designing with a blank slate, working around these limitations makes up the bulk of a programmer’s day to day experience. I would argue that the reality makes professional programming a much more creative pursuit than it might seem after reading the textbooks and papers. This is good! It makes the job interesting and even fun at times.

The Ludum Dare competition is a great example of the same phenomenon. Each round the participants vote on a thematic constraint to impose on their game projects. Together with a deadline, this limitation acts as a catalyst for ideas. If I’m asked right now to come up with an arcade game, it probably won’t happen soon. Ask me for a game which has, say, a theme of “Escape” or “Tiny world” and the ideas come a lot faster.

The point is not just that constrained projects demand the creative side of architecture, but also that limiting the scope of a project can encourage creativity. The next time you find yourself at a loss for new ideas, try imposing some arbitrary constraints. It will probably help.