Ghetto Architecture

Photographer and ethnographer Camilo Vergara explains why he has dedicated his attention to urban poverty. "I've always been interested in places that enhance my sense of instability and the precariousness of my own existence." His current project documents the reuse of ghetto architecture as storefront churches. The churches, proclaimed sacred spaces by ambitious pastors and re-branded with homespun additions and hand painted signs, often disappear as quickly as they arrived.

Source: Core77

Amos Klausner suggests that "these spaces become increasingly valuable because they are truly reflective of the people who live and work there". And according to Jane Holz Kay, these images "raise fundamental questions about the definition of architecture".

So much for escaping from the architecture ghetto then, eh Mr Koolhaas?

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Marcus Fairs, Rem Koolhaas (ICON, June 2004)

Jane Holtz Kay, Ghetto architecture: an exhibition of makeshift design (Christian Science Monitor, 7 October 1983)

Amos Klausner, Undesigning America (Core77, undated)

Margaret Rhodes, Voluntary Ghettos: A Radical Idea for Reclaiming Urban Space (Wired, 17 December 2014)

What's Wrong With Principles 2

@gparasEA suggests that EA Principles Have Little Value. I agree with his title, but his actual text appears to argue that EA Principles have significant potential value and should be taken more seriously.

My view is that EA principles are hugely overrated. In my post What's Wrong With Principles I observed that principles are usually ill-conceived and generally fail to provide a sound basis for collective decision-making and governance. But instead of trying to fix this by producing better sets of principles and enforcing them better, I think we should simply abandon the fantasy that difficult EA judgements can be driven by any simplistic set of top-down abstract principles.

If we are to regard principles as more important than casual suggestions and slogans, then there are some critical requirements they must satisfy. For one thing, credible principles should be based on concrete evidence that they actually work (true and/or useful), rather than the kind of vague wishful thinking and motherhood statements that we find in countless EA documents and presentations. I have seen very little serious attempt to satisfy these requirements, and the belief that things would be okay if only we had better principles sounds to me like wishful thinking.

In a Linked-In discussion (Considerate EA), Ron Segal agreed that principles to underpin strategy cannot just be wishful thinking, and provided a couple of concrete examples. He suggested that the principle 'achieving long term loyalty' entails excluding the kind of campaigns and services that attract short term customer loyalty. So the application of the principle calls for some empirical knowledge about the kinds of thing that are conducive of long-term loyalty, and some understanding of the relationship between long-term loyalty and short-term loyalty. My guess is that this relationship is not straightforward - some kinds of short-term loyalty may evolve into longer-term loyalty - in which case we can only really understand this relationship properly by observing and analyzing the behaviour of customers over an extended period. What I object to is the notion that this kind of principle can be applied as an exercise in pure reasoning, without reference to empirical knowledge.

As for Ron's principle of 'reducing the effort of compliance' - this presumably has to be interpreted as 'other things being equal'. Thus you probably wouldn't want to reduce the effort of compliance if this had the effect of doubling the downstream costs of legal action and compensation. Again, such a principle can only be meaningfully applied in the context of an empirically verifiable (or refutable) model/theory about the interdependencies between different classes of cost/effort.

But here's the thing. If our architectural reasoning is based on principles, and the principles are derived from practical and empirical knowledge, then architectural reasoning must ultimately be justified in terms of this detailed knowledge rather than abstract principles. A simplified and abstract set of principles may provide a useful summary and reminder, but we should not make a fetish of these principles. And if the principles are not supported by practical and empirical knowledge, why should anyone take them seriously?

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See reply by Joe McKendrick, Viewpoint: 'enterprise architecture principles hugely overrated' (ZDNet, July 2010)

Related post The Power of Principles (Not) (January 2011). Includes extended discussion with Nick Gall in the comments.

Common Sense Architecture

@EnterprisingA offers a thought for the day: "Good architecture is common sense. Bad architecture is complete nonsense. No architecture is somewhere in between." (retweeted by @tetradian).

I object to this statement on several counts.

1. It makes architecture seem like an exercise in pure reason and sense-making - as if you could do architecture simply by thinking about it. (Intelligence and skill may be necessary but are not sufficient.)

2. It makes architecture seem redundant. Many architects spend most of their energies trying to find counter-arguments to the "common sense" of developers, project managers and users. Surely the very reason we need architects (and other professionals) is because common sense sometimes isn't good enough. As @malcolmlowe replies to Jon, "one person's common sense is another person's non-common sense!"

3. There is a thin line between "common sense" and popular preconception. (See my post on the Power of Preconceptions.)


4. Jon's statement only seems to allow for a single cause/explanation of architectural error - a sense-making failure. But architects often arrive at judgements that make sense at the time, based on false information or incorrect assumptions or poor doctrine.

5. Architectures evolve. A good architecture can degrade over time, as many people make short-term compromises. For that matter, a bad architecture can be improved over time (but don't count on it).

6. There are different notions of quality. As @chrisdpotts points out, the difference between 'good' and 'bad' architecture might mean (a) the structure collapses, or (b in the eye of the beholder or (c) the structure doesn't achieve its intended performance.

7. Judgements of quality are not just a question of perspective (who is the beholder?) but timescale. A bad structure may collapse immediately, or it may collapse in an exceptionally high wind: a good architecture is one that has not yet collapsed. And if the "intended performance" of an architecture has to do with long-term architectural properties such as flexibility and lifetime cost, how many years must we wait before we can evaluate the success of an architecture in delivering these objectives?