The Effects of Planning on Design

I hope I’m not being overly simplistic in my response, but there is a provision in the PDA 2000 for pre-planning meetings between a developer and the planning department, in which many of the issues that would otherwise arise at a later stage can be debated and (hopefully) agreed in advance. This is particularly important in the context of large scale mixed use developments.
From conversations I’ve had with some architect friends, one of their chief bugbears is the lack of design training among planners, whether through an architecture degree or art/architectural history. Is this the thrust of your post here?
From my perspective (art history BA, architectural history MA, planning masters), I find it instructive to look back, say, 30 years and see what buildings architects thought worthy of awards. Makes for very interesting reading. I think the same will probably occur 30 years from now. I would venture that very little of our current crop of buildings will have much lasting value. However, I also feel that it is inherently difficult to prioritise design quality in the context of a profit-maximising development culture. For example, since the demise of the classical tripartite division of skyscrapers (to reflect the proportions of the classical column, like), I can think of relatively few tall buildings that have serious design merit, i.e on a par with, say, the Pirelli tower or Swiss Re/St Mary Axe. Heuston Gate was passed by ABP on design grounds, which I think is nonsense. It’s just an extruded floorplate (IMHO :rolleyes: ). Another example might be the recent scheme in Sandyford (the Microsoft site, I think), with the big copper egg. So it’s a ‘feature’- so what? Gimmickry, no more no less.
Further, design is an inherently subjective area, and one man’s clay cup is another’s holy grail. I know of some architects who pray that they’ll get a certain planner in a local authority, i.e. one who is acknowledged to be sympathetic to contemporary design.
I realise this doesn’t answer your question, but then I’m not sure your question is answerable. 😉 By which I mean I don’t think design objectivity is achievable, though certain approaches such as an insistence on quality materials can help somewhat.
I do concur with you, though, that the seemingly arbitrary nature of some planners’ interventions is lamentable. Which, I guess, brings us back to pre-planning meetings… 🙂

Sorry for the ramble- I’m sure this will occupy my thoughts for a while yet (maybe for my whole career?).
(“With any luck,” sez the architects!)

Basically, while I accept the planning profession, does play a crucial role, in programming the code, needed to crunch through the everyday more mundane ‘problem’, to do with the environment we inhabit,… I need also to draw attention to an aspect, of how the Irish Planning Tradition, is growing,… without the sensory capabilities it needs to receive information from the same world they are trying to programme for. The following blurb is about a book, called ‘The Silicon Eye’, by George Gilder.

Known for weaving engrossing stories from material knotted with numbing complexity, Gilder (Telecosm; Microcosm) delves once again into the world of high-tech business, this time focusing on the company Foveon and its efforts to develop a device that will allow digital machines to see as the human eye does. “Computers can perform instantaneous calculus… and search the entire contents of the Library of Congress in a disk-drive database,” he writes. “But they cannot see. Even today, recognizing a face glimpsed in a crowd across an airport lobby, two human eyes can do more image processing than all the supercomputers in the world put together.”

Notice how the kind of ‘human’ perceptive abilities described in the quote, far out-stretch those of the best written code, or the fastest supercomputers on the planet. What worries me about Ireland, is how a huge chunk of that human perceptive ability, is ‘locked’, within an outdated, defunct, and cosy monopoly of spatial designers, known as ‘Architecture’. I have a persistent vision of the Planning System here in Ireland, of this pure unfortunate creature attempting to feel it’s way around in the dark,… rendered immobile, and un-feeling, without a sense of touch, trying to see without a sense of vision, and trying to hear without even rundimentary eardrums.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?p=38300#post38300

@garethace wrote:

Notice how the kind of ‘human’ perceptive abilities described in the quote, far out-stretch those of the best written code, or the fastest supercomputers on the planet. What worries me about Ireland, is how a huge chunk of that human perceptive ability, is ‘locked’, within an outdated, defunct, and cosy monopoly of spatial designers, known as ‘Architecture’. I have a persistent vision of the Planning System here in Ireland, of this pure unfortunate creature attempting to feel it’s way around in the dark,… rendered immobile, and un-feeling, without a sense of touch, trying to see without a sense of vision, and trying to hear without even rundimentary eardrums.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Brian? Is that you? Talk to me… Say something. I can’t hear you…

So I’m left with this vision of the planning system as some kind of numb white slug in a pitch-black cave. Should be an interesting night’s sleep.

But seriously: I think your characterisation of the planning system is a little harsh. We do live in the real world too, commuting, eating and playing like the real people. I agree that the profession generally could be better versed in matters of design, but it should also be remembered that design is but one of the planner’s concerns, none of which can really be dismissed as ‘everyday more mundane’ problems, as this seems to imply a belief that the concerns of architects are in some way more noble.
Also, just as different architects could devise different responses to a brief, each valid, so different planners could have different senses of the priorities under consideration in an application (I’m presuming in this thread that we’re talking about local authority development control planners).
My hope would be that, where planners intervene in matters of design, it is done on fairly objective grounds rather than matters of taste.

Perhaps I misunderstood you, but y’know, my hearing isn’t what it used to be. 😉

“Are my ears on wrong?”
(Charles Ives)

As a planning student I have to say my biggest disappointment and constant complaint about the course (undergraduate) is the poor level of architectural and design studies. There is a huge focus on sustainability, ecology, natural resources managment etc but very little effort put into developing a knowledge of good and bad architecture. I think this is a mistake. I think a planner has to be able to have a critical opinion on a new development, to be able to appreciate the good elements of a building and to recognise the bad elements. I think most planning students probably leave college without the ability to even communicate with an architect.

@StephenC wrote:

I think most planning students probably leave college without the ability to even communicate with an architect.

I agree- the pity being that they will then defer to architects in matters of design.
You say that planners must ‘be able to appreciate the good elements of a building and to recognise the bad elements’- but would you agree that objectivity in this regard is nigh on impossible? Whether architects like to admit it or not, style and taste DO feature in their profession. They might claim otherwise, but they’re wrong. :p

There’s a great quote from Robert Maxwell (architectural critic, not dead newspaper tycoon) on this subject- I’ll try to dig it out of the library later today if I have time.

Any architects care to comment?

Objectivity in any area is a difficult thing to master but to be objective you also have to be knowledgeable. You have to actually know what you are looking at! However I dont think (albeit at this early stage) that a planner alwasy should be objective. There is plenty of low-grade stuff going through the planning system and very often it is up to the planner to improve the projects through pre-planning consultations, conditions attached, etc. And when this doesnt happen the usual comment is ‘bad planning’…its the planner fault for letting that get built! The fact is most laypeople see planners as arbitrartors of good taste in design. I know this is a bit expectation to put on planning but the very least the profession can do is give the individual planner the tools to at least appreciate the design in front of them.

Stephen-
This raises the question of whether the public’s opinions of architectural styles tallies with those of architects or planners- and if they don’t, who’s right? I often think that if we had the chance to ‘educate’ the public, then more interesting, innovative design would follow, but the strong possibility remains that lay-people actually do like the attenuated classicism of a plastic portico stuck to the front of a three-bed semi.
An interesting study was done a few years ago (1998 or so) by the contemporary classical architect Robert Adam, in which it was discovered that ‘modern’ design fared badly with the English house-buying public who favoured traditional or pastiche English styles. This reminded me of a comment my ex-girlfriend’s father made a few years ago- upon seeing a new ‘classical’ house with PVC windows and door, and suburban-style lawn in the countryside outside Midleton, he said admiringly “That’s a fine block of a house”.
Perhaps contemporary architecture is alright for apartments and contemporary civic buildings but not for people’s own houses?

I agree- the pity being that they will then defer to architects in matters of design.

I would have put this the other way around: Architects defer too much in matters of planning, to the planners. I cannot help, thinking, this cross-over in observation, has something ‘eerie’ about it. As if some ‘Invisible Hand’ were reaching out, the hand of greed perhaps? The characters involved in that process, have sucked too much ‘speedy’ reward from the environment. For those people, it was more profitable, to see Planners and Architects in distinct, separate enclosures. Their profit margins sky-rocketed, every time, an Architect and Planner duked it out, on some street corner or some small bothereen in the country, and the design professionals lost what benefit they could hope to gain. I think this ‘forking’, has left the respective traditions, in a state of both financial and creative poverty. Neither side being capable, of striking ‘a decisive blow’, on behalf of the environment or it’s inhabitants. With some exceptions, the only time an architect and planner meet today, is to have a scrap. I am sure, you can remember several incidents, and have black eyes, or even scars to remember the incident by. It would be ironic, not to say the least, typical, that a major cause of the problems, has nothing to do with design, but with a lack of ability to talk to one another.

As a planning student I have to say my biggest disappointment and constant complaint about the course (undergraduate) is the poor level of architectural and design studies. There is a huge focus on sustainability, ecology, natural resources managment etc but very little effort put into developing a knowledge of good and bad architecture. I think this is a mistake. I think a planner has to be able to have a critical opinion on a new development, to be able to appreciate the good elements of a building and to recognise the bad elements. I think most planning students probably leave college without the ability to even communicate with an architect.

That is quite funny actually, as in my posting right here:

https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3522&page=4

I refered to the architectural education systems, lack of awareness of the planning profession in Ireland,… and in practice later on too, it can sometimes take young architects, years to even realise that a planning authority exists,… you can spend too much of your career as an architect, completely avoiding the issue. Then when suddenly, you do discover the existence of all this work by planners and the code or regulations they compile,… Architects are often horrified, that so much work has gone on, without their knowing more about it. I feel this problem must be particular in some way to Ireland – I even hear mature Irish architects often, offering a very poor opinion of Irish planners – perhaps based on ignorance, rather than understanding and appreciation. Planning code, is the kind of stuff, that seems to fry an Irish Architect’s brain, far too easily. Mostly from a total lack of exposure to it, in their daily lives. You see all the unfortunate implications of this, in crucial and sensitive sites in Dublin city now, being ‘planned out’, as it were, by planning consultants rather than architects. Architecture in Ireland, is really now, at a critical ‘low’ ebb, perhaps the lowest in centuries. They don’t seem to know how to drive out of this rut either.

I went a lot into the idea of code and it’s potential to be beautiful on the thread I linked. One particular project we had to do in college, I well remember, was on the Aran Islands. The project was supervised by an architect, who really did have an interest in the ‘synergy’ of planning and architecture. We looked at the environment of the Aran Islands and it’s field system, which, in photographs I always, see, is like a highly regulated code. It was most probably, a code, that everyone must have agreed upon, as the best way to ‘survive’ in such a brutal and harsh environment. I guess, that is why she tried to make the point to us young architects, that the Aran Islands was so special, in a similar way, to how I talk about Westmoreland Street as a laboratory for Irish Planners. The trouble was, I think, most of the young architecture students brains, did ‘fry’ on the Aran Islands project – as this notion of living in a ‘coded’ landscape, such as the Aran Island, rocked our naive little sense of security, in the containment of a profession, a little too much. Later though, we did try to experiment, on some projects for the Dublin Docklands, in which we attempted to create ‘sustainable’ environments, by generating some kind of rule, or code-making, for development ‘to simply happen’ rather than designating it, as in the case of a Master Plan.

Similar examples have been offeredy by Frank Taylor from the planning tradition, here at Archiseek, about how Georgian Squares, were really an initial ‘rule’ that some developer laid out, and everyone just had to follow that rule of using a standard plot and build all around the edges of this square. But just look at the sophistication, embedded in that code for development. It doesn’t specify, the usual ‘Turnkey’ approach, as used in so many Irish Master Planned projects nowadays. But rather, an approach, where the whole design, management and resources for a project, are embedded into the development of the site, from the beginning. Rather than just getting some humungous bank draft, of ‘Easy-Credit’ for the construction stage costs. While I did speak on the linked thread, of humans being the ‘designers’ of everything in the environment,… I am also aware, that code itself can create objects of beauty, just like the computer programmers believe,… and furthermore, that a programmer who believes in his/her inate ability to create objects of beauty, will indeed create much better code source. Unfortunately, I think that code has been abused in the current context of Irelands expansion, as much, or perhaps more than design has been. Like these bits of malware, such as ‘pedestrianisation’ which are used with such abandon and disregard these days. When you compare this with the brute industrial strength of the Georgian’s building code, the difference becomes very apparent, how weak and awful ours really does look now. The arguments were raised on the radio talk show lately, about Section 22, tax designated development, being ‘all about the block’ – which speaks of a problem in the code – of it’s lack of granularity.

A lot of code and planning in the environment these days, is not fine grained enough. You need Architects, firmly embedded into the whole process, of compiling your code, in order to benefit from the said granularity, of the end product. When you do not have that important input, at any stage in the process, the code still gets written in some fashion. But, it is clearly visible now, when you compare treatments of Henry Street, relative to Parnell Street, or Moore Street relative to either of those two streets. This is really why I wanted to ‘introduce’ this debate on code and the environment we live in, as a part of the Westmoreland Street thread,… because we have a historical legacy of being capable of the creation of some very good environments here in Ireland, in the distant past,… it is just a problem nowadays, that neither the Architectural, nor the Planning tradition is sophisticated enough, to fully interpret the sophistsication of the older models. Be it, the Aran Islands inhabitation system, the Georgian Street or the Irish town and village. Sure planners can assimilate some of it, the Architects manage to understand a little more, but without a proper working synergy, of the two traditions, any chance of a total synthesis, is unavailable. It has all got badly garbled somewhere, in the current mess of distinct traditions, distinct professionals and distinct ‘forking’ of the source stream. Finally, I feel that this lack of acceptance, of either one’s presence, at either side of the great divide, is the worst thing that could have happened for the environment here in Ireland. Architects thinking, nothing special can come out of the code,… while planners being guilty, of ‘scripting’ things very badly at times, and excluded too much of the design problem, which we need human eyes to see. Remember, the rallying cry of the open source software movement, that ‘given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow’. Just like silicon intelligence will some day require full senses in order to learn. The Planning code right here in Ireland, will need that too, in the form of Architects. One has to go back to Georgian times here in Ireland, to find a healthy working synergy, between planning and architecture, one that we seem to have ‘lost’ in the meantime.

I will just cap off here, with a description from Rebel Code, of a nearly disasterous ‘forking’ of the Linux code development project,.. a row that exploded publically, on the kernel source code mailing list.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Large scale forking is generally regarded as a kind of fratricidal civil war, the worst thing that can happen to a hacker community and to be avoided at all costs. Forking is quite different from the ideological differences that exist between the supporters of, say, the original free software movement and the newer open source; it is not only possible but common for people from both sides to work together on a single project. In effect, there may be a rainbow of ideologies involved in a given project. A fork, however, is an either/or matter, and unless the two opposing camps manage to effect a coming together, a process called ‘healing the fork,’ the divergence between them is likely to grow and the gulf become ever more unbridgeable.

One of the most famous forks in the free software world took place in 1993, not in Linux but in Emacs, when a group of hackers decided to start their own Emacs development line, separate from the work led by Richard Stallman. Among the leaders of this group was Jamie Zawinski, who had been involved in free software for many years and was one of the senior figures at the Freeware Summit in April 1998.

The following is a descriptive re-creation of the ‘fork’ that almost occured in the Linux community, back in 1998.

What had begun as a simple question about an obscure bug some forty hours earlier had turned into an increasingly heated argument raging across two continents and ten time zones. Suddenly, Linus has had enough. First, he fires off a shot directed specifically at Dave Miller:

Quite frankly, I just got very fed up with a lot of people. David, when I come back, I expect a public apology from you.

And then adds one for everybody else:

Others, look youself in the mirror, and ask youself whether you feel confident that you could do a better job maintaining this. If you can, get back to me, and maybe we can work something out.

In one last message a couple of hourse later, he first explains why he dropped Ted Ts’o’s patches (and so, by implication, of everyone else’s, too), and then issues one dangerously exasperated statement of annoyance:

Note that if some person cannot be bothered to re-submit, i don’t WANT the patch. Anybody who is not willing to take that much care of his patches that he can’t maintain it while I haven’t accepted it, I don’t want to accept patches from anyway.

The basic point is that I get a_lot_of patches, and I have to prioritize my work. That means that I require people who send me patches to keep at it until they make it into the kernel.

Quite frankly, this particular discussion (and others before it) has just made me irritable, and is ADDING pressure. Instead, I’d suggest that if you have a complaint about how I handle patches, you think about what I end up having to deal with for five minutes.

Go away, people. Or at least don’t Cc me any more. I’m not interested, I’m taking a vacation, and I don’t want to hear about it any more. In short, get the hell out of my mailbox.

From these exchanges, nobody could mistake the dire state of relationships between the key hackers on the kernel mailing list.

A few hours after Linus’s final posting, Eric Raymond added his commments on the situation.

People, these are the early-warning signs of potential burnout. Heed them and take warning. Linus’s stamina has been astonishing, but it’s not limitless. All of us (and yes, that means you too, Linus) need to cooperate to *reduce* the pressure on the cricitcal man in the middle, rather than increasing it.

He points out one central fact for the Linux development process:

Linus is god until *he* says otherwise. Period. Flaming him doesn’t help, and isn’t fair – and you need to have been the key man in dvelopment of a must-never-fail piece of software before you even have standing to *think* about doing it.

But Raymond is also unsparing in his analysis of the broader effects of what has been happening:

Patches get lost. Patches get dropped. Patches get missed. This is bad and wasterful in itself, but it has a secondary effect that is worse – it degrades the feedback loop that makes the whole process work…. The effect of rising uncertainty as to whether good work will make it in at all is certainly worse than that. Anybody who starts to believe they’re throwing good work down a rat hole will be *gone*. If that happens too many times, we’re history.

In other words, Linus’s dropping patches too often was not just inconvenient but undermined the very mechanism that powered the open source development model.

Raymond concludes with a warning couched in characteristically graphic and appropriate terms:

These risks are bound to get worse over time because both system complexity and the developer pool are increasing. And the critical man in the middle – the ‘Jesus nut’ in our helicopter – has a stress limit. We’re going to hit that limit someday. Maybe we’re pushing it now.

He concludes:

I’ve been worrying about this problem for months. (I’m our anthropologist, remember? It’s part of my *job* to notice how the social machinery works and where the failure modes are.) I was reluctant to say anything while it was still theoretical, but I take the above as a neon-lit warning that it’s damn well not any more.

wow!. very interesting brian. it will take me a while to take it all in so i will read it again but just on the threads matter….i have recently had to deal with a few planners who didn’t like a design i was trying to show them based on personel experience of a similiar one in the states. this was a hotel and the planner in question staying a night in one similiar and didn’t like it and therefore asked us to re-design. this to me is strange. i don’t know if this happens everywhere but surely this can’t be right.
also are planners thought depth perception in college? because two different planners ( 1 a senior planner ) i have recently met had no idea. in the meeting it reminded me of a fr. ted sketch where ted was explaining to dougle about small and far away. it was truely that incredible.
on the other hand i have met a planner that was very interested in design and had a few discussions with her on the subject and it was very much when putting in an application you hoped it was in her particular area. sadly she has left that local authority.terrible loss for that area.

i believe that if planners had more design knowledge then we wouldn’t be poles apart and we could start to work on the urban framework of which brian eluded too. it could help the built environment a significant amount.

also are planners thought depth perception in college? because two different planners ( 1 a senior planner ) i have recently met had no idea. in the meeting it reminded me of a fr. ted sketch where ted was explaining to dougle about small and far away. it was truely that incredible.

Richard Dawkins book, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder, has a very interesting discussion about people who have accidents and loose certain capabilities, like the perception of depth or the ability to recognise faces. Apparently it leads to a quite frightening experience of the world. One example Dawkins described was that of birds who spend a lot of their lifes perched on branches in trees. The branches constantly move up and down as they sway in the breeze. For most species this would be like living in a permanent earthquake situation. In order to counteract this situation, birds have adapted using a sophisticated combination of muscles and joints in their necks. Which allow them to eliminate the ‘permanent earthquake’ effect of living on branches in trees. Their brains thereby learn to filter out the non-newsworthy parts of their vision, the swaying of the branches, and to isolate the crucial bits of information, such as a cat stalking them in the long grass. It is easy to find planners’ lack of perception strange. But it is crucial to appreciate how ‘well adapted’ architects have become to their situation.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

lol. like bobbing our heads?
that’s very interesting lexington. although not quite sure if it is a good idea or not. there are some immense benefits to this but could it make a planner think that they are architects too and redesign a complete project to fit in with their own design philosophy.overall i think it is probable good but the proof has to be seen.