garethace

I may as well link this old 2003 thread here, as some people seem to like it even still:

https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=2209

Basically, some stuff I wrote on Architects and the digital revolution.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

We have ‘top heavy’ planning code in Ireland, too much at the high end, and nothing at the low end – except for the ‘Building Regulations’. The Building Regulations, served to join Architectural Draughtspeople together with planners, but not Architects and Planners. Built into the notion of ‘Building Regulations’, is a negative association, to do with unfortunate Technicians, re-visiting their built work, to notice something they are held liable for – and then perhaps, getting fired by their employer! The Buildling Regulations have failed, in one way, because they have not forced Architectural professionals to think. In short, the Reg’s did pave the way for Architects to commit much larger atrocities – confident, they are covered by the Building Regulations. The retail boxes placed all along Capel Street bridge, is a classic example of this.

The low end, is exactly where you need your code to be thorough, in order to generate the ‘beer garden’ idea you spoke of. You can see, something emerging in inner suburban Dublin, Ranelagh and Churchtown, two village centres that spring to mind – which isn’t very well regulated either. The project to contribute better fine-grained code, seems to be orphaned by planners at the present. You are aware of this, when you look at Cow’s Lane, and it’s failure to take off as anything sucessful. Too many bars and restaurants, having been allowed to happen, before the Cow’s Lane end, had gotten off the ground. This is a mistake, as that end of the Temple Bar region, always had much more to offer, than in it’s current state. Just like the West of Ireland was under developed or poorly developed, compared with the East. The planning system in Ireland has a lot of trouble, working with these things, due to a ‘forking’ of the sourse stream. Architects and Planners, should have a fat pipe of communication between each other, and should overlay, their respective solutions, to find where the gaps are – in time as well as space. I don’t know exactly, how one regulates to create that fat pipe for communication, but I hope it happens soon. In the third level spatial design faculties perhaps? Here is a quote from from Jet-Li’s latest movie, ‘Unleashed’.

Get ’em young, and the possibilities are endless!

Planners using their code to define things, and architects using their drawings. That is the only difference between the two traditions, and it is silly how neither one talks to the other. Both should learn to speak the others language, from a young age. That is really how Ireland is going to see progress, on the environmental front, I am sure. I try, today, to see the integration of these systems as the top priority. I would like to see more people undertaking design work here in Ireland, to view their task in the same hybrid way. This is really needed, ‘to get the max’ from your investment in any project – from a long term social, financial and environmental point of view. It was interesting lately, to hear Merit Bucholtz speak of Manhattan as a sustainable environment, on a radio talk show programme. Manhattan, is getting better as a sustainable environment, it would seem. Can the same be said of Dublin, Cork, Limerick or Galway nowadays? Manhattan you should remember, was regulated to a very strict pattern, repeated across a whole pennisula. In some ways, like the Aran Islands field system, was also a ‘coded landscape’.

I would tend towards the other extreme of planning rules, allowing just about anything anywhere with restrictions on the locations of very noisy or smelly businesses.

Take the tax on chairs on side walks for instance, a necessary measure at the fine-grained level of the planning system. It was needed to ‘patch up’ another badly executed piece of urban design code – pedestrianisation. Having given the business folk here in Dublin, pedestrianisation, their response was to think of a street as a ‘free piece of property’ outside their door – to be used to generate a revenue windfall – like the Quays pub on New Square, Temple Bar so painfully demonstrates today. What is more, the newly pedestrianised street became this piece of land, upon which no further liability was accumulated, or need for it’s management. It was liked ‘Manna from Heaven’, and yet, there is was, written straight into our source code! Pedestrianisation holds no effective financial obligation, on the part of the business trader, towards up keep and management of the space, despite greatly inflating revenue stream! That is why I think, pedestrianisation, is such a useless piece of code. Allowing the Property Team, as in Auctioneer, etc, to divert massive revenue out of the space, and into the pockets of a few rich bankers. The whole system, has not been fully thought out from beginning to end. But I think, that is our friend, the ‘Invisible Hand’, the hand of human greed, intervening here again:

https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4223

Now we are talking about joining Henry Street and Grafton Street, with one massive pedestrian plaza on Westmoreland Street! This issue still isn’t put to bed, by any manner of speaking, as the problems with the northern end of the Millenium Bridge, clearly demonstrates. Zoe Developments, must know of this loop hole in the planning regulation, a little bit too well, and have sold commercial property to wine bars there, who block most of the pedestrian walking route. It is this forking of spatial design traditions, and consequent lack of granularity in the spatial code, which has given us Temple Bar, as we now know it. Sure the designs of buildings and spaces were ‘well considered’, but who gives a constitutional f***, the code attached to those public spaces was, and still is, complete and utter crap.

What frightens me most, as a ‘would-be’ spatial designer in Ireland, is not my level of ability to undertake an urban project, but I can foretell, too early on, the rotten aftermath of completing such an exercise. A code-based incubation unit, needs to be implemented for these projects, early on in their lives, to allow them to ‘grow’ into something worth doing at all. That is the side of the equation, that Architects are not trained to understand, and furthermore, they refuse to acknowledge. The problem is, that projects have ‘gotten legs’ by the time, they hit the planning authorities desk, and nowadays, have been helped along, by someone called ‘a planning consultant’. Which basically amounts to past, local authority planners, setting up shop on the outside, with an eye on the private sector money pie. Architects, are developing a closer working relationship with the planning profession, but it is not the one we should hope for. The aim is to ‘build large urban projects’, and turn their backs on them later. This is how we ended up with the abortion, that is Temple Bar. Not many of my contemporaries would share my views perhaps, being too busy enjoying their ‘prosperity’. So, all I can really do, is point, to a litter of so-called urban projects, like Zoe developments mess, on the northern end of the Millenium Bridge. As if one, wine-drinking quarter hole wasn’t enough on the south side. There seems to be no stopping the same rash happening on the north side.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

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.

You are wrong about Architects and Planners not ‘having touched it’ in the past 30 years,… it has been the site of many a battle. Instead of ‘having it out’ on Westmoreland Street though, they have scrapped over things, closeby, in areas such as Temple Bar. Every time one side, ‘thinks’ it has gained an advantage, the other side responds quickly with something that will put it down. This reminds me of the Cold War, where Asian Countries inadvertedly, got used for that purpose. My biggest fear, is that the Irish landscape itself, has become a stage for this power struggle. In the aftermath of sagas such as Temple Bar, there is ‘for’ and ‘against’, both sides. You have to place Westmoreland Street within the context of this ‘cold war’ politics. To do otherwise, is to ignore the reality. You have to look at the state the Architectural profession too, and what kind of a ‘battle’ it could hope to mount these days. I reckon myself, that code and the planning tradition have made massive leaps in capability and penetrated deeply, into the system, in the last decade or so. On the other hand, I cannot see a reciprocal advance on the part of the Architects.

Yeah, I do reckon, Architects and Planners were more evenly matched in the 1970s and 1980s, and therefore couldn’t quite decide who ‘would win’ on Westmoreland Street. But following debacles most recently, such as Henry Street and Parnell Street, I would think the matter will get settled shortly. That is the context, in which, I would like people here to consider Westmoreland Street. There are future careers, reputations and respect at stake here, much more than just the sum of all the parts. I was always told in Architecture school, that Architecture is like frozen music. If this is so, then I think, that the only ‘music’ being played at the moment, is by the Planners and by their Planning code. I have added these short few passages, from ‘Rebel Code’, to help further ‘flesh out’ my point.

Unix programming is an art, Raymond believes, because ‘when you do it at a high enough level, there’s a very strong aesthetic satisfaction that you get from writing an elegant program. If you don’t get that kind of gratification, you never join the culture. Just as you don’t get composers without an ear for music, you don’t get hackers without an ability to be aesthetically gratified by writing programs.’ This element of aesthetic gratification perhaps provides the key to explaining one of the missing pieces of Raymond’s otherwise comprehensive explanation of the open-source process.

In a follow-up essay to The Cathedral and the Bazaar, called Homesteading the Noosphere, Raymond explored an apparent paradox at the heart of open-source software: If everyone is free to take the code and modify it, why do major projects like Linux or Apache rarely split, or ‘fork,’ as hackers say, just as the old-style commercial Unixes did? He suggests that peer esteem, the key driving force for people working in the world of free software, explains the effect. He demonstrates well that the dynamics of such a ‘gift economy’ – where prestige is measured not by what you have, but by what you give away – tend to reduce the threat of forking.

[cut…]

Knuth was born in 1938, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During a brilliant early career as a physicist and mathematician at Case Institute of Technology – where he was awarded a master’s degree contemporanesously with his B.S. – he became interested in the young world of computer science.

[cut…]

Knuth summarizes his views this way: ‘Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. Programmers who subconsciously view themselves as artists will enjoy what they do and will do it better.’

It is in light of the above quote, that you have to see the frustration, of so many young Irish Architects. While the Code has being accelerating on, at an alarming pace, the Architects, merely drop in as it suits. Architects, generally are far too charismatic and charming, to read something like the planning and regulatory code. Yet, they still seem to huff and puff like Billy-o, if the Planning System hasn’t managed to integrate their specific needs into it. I mean, if you refuse to be an integral part of the process, when it comes to the building of a large urban project, as in the case of Group 91 Temple Bar Architects, are you surprised when that system, does not provide you with the necessary service, you expect?

I often wonder about the education process for architects in Ireland too. I mean, when designing something as monumental as an Olympic Swimming Pool for the Docklands, the architectural student usually spends about 5-6 weeks concept-ing, design-ing and present-ing, stuff on boards to show off as their design. Note, the highly personal nature, of the last sentence – It is my design, and how dare you lay your fingers upon it! You see? You actually do get rewarded in the educational process, for coming up with the most individually inspired, ‘totally awesome’ solution. But where in this whole process, is the consultation with a local authority, to see if they have any input? I mean, for heaven’s sake, given the size of an Olympic Swimming Pool, yet we are just going to sit here on our lonesome, and create a grand masterpiece! And yet somehow, the system rewards you for that course of action? I take the point that student projects are meant to be illusionary, without a real-world client very often. But yet, the same exercises are meant to prepare one for the real world. I mean, seriously, how many people could get away with designing an Olympic Swimming Pool for Dublin’s Docklands area, and not meet with a planner at some stage?

This gets me right back to exercises like Group 91 in Temple Bar. Do Architects seriously think they are allowed to just ‘slip things in there’, like large urban renewal projects, and expect that no one will even notice? Yet, you often hear the architects complain about how the local authority ‘got in their way’, or will not let them ‘get on with the job’. This aspiration to plough their own furrow, is not getting the Irish Architectural profession very far, I fear. And still, somehow, the Irish Architectural profession, manages to reward it’s members, for all of the wrong reasons. It is frightening to think, how far we need to go back, to find a time in Ireland, when the Architect was more than just a ‘side-show’ to the whole process. You would have to go back further than the 1960s I would think. The very last straw for me, is noticing all of those site notices around, for crucial sites here in Dublin, where the planning consultants name, has become more important than that of an Architect. This just sends out another discusting message, that Architects have lost another ‘foothold’ in the process.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Since this thread is about Westmoreland Street Brian, what solutions do you offer to this blockage in mindset, practice and efficency of which you speak,…. pertinent to Westmoreland Street?

When I started Architecture in the early 1990s, there wasn’t much publicity about architecture in Ireland. There wasn’t any debate much and there wasn’t any building going on. It was more about ‘the opposite’ of building, the ‘code’ associated with ‘Un-Building’, if I can coin that phrase,… and about de-commissioning of the city, rather than construction of the city. We see that in the respective titles of Frank McDonald’s books, the Construction and the Destruction of Dublin. What there always has been in Ireland, throughout the construction and destruction phases, is a raging battle over the faith of Westmoreland Street. That battle has burned up more resources, man-hours and money, than others I know. Westmoreland Street, has always been, and continues to be, a very useful test-zone, in which the Irish Planning Tradition is able to refine it’s wealth – it’s Intellectual Property – The Irish Regulatory and Planning Laws. This is shown clearly by the ‘nature’ of the following quote:

No doubt Treasury were not advised that there would be so much opposition to this scheme at that particular time and there is little doubt that this case is one of the reasons why Part iv of the act is so comprehensive.

The final product, you see in Westmoreland Street, shows many signs of a war between the Irish Planner and the Irish Architect. As if both were using the opportunity to stake out their territory. I like to compare the Irish Planning Wars that raged on Westmoreland Street, to another epic battle over territorial dominance, the wars between man and machine in the movie called ‘The Matrix’. Using that analogy, I have penned the short piece down below. But I think it is time for Westmoreland Street to cease being, a ‘test-bed’ for the Irish Planning and Regulatory Law, and to become a real life street once again – one which is designed and envisaged by Architects. Not by Planners trying to execute some kind of ‘Code Language’.

Which will it be Neo? The Blue Pill,… or the Red Pill?

The biggest problem with computers, these days, is not their lack of ability to crunch through the most baffling problems in higher algebra or statistics,… but, for all their apparent ‘brain’ power, computers, still can not distinguish between a photo of Bin Laden and a hamburger. I wonder what is going to happen, fifty years from now, when Ireland eventually has the ultimate set of planning and building regulations, but faces the same trouble when looking at a complex urban site. How will the machine ‘know’ what it is looking at – unless it learns to see, as well as crunch through the code? In the face of this question about computers, and similarities between code running on silicon chips, and code designed to regulate the built environment, I think there is a serious question we should be asking. Indeed, a question the Irish Architectural Profession has been avoiding for some time. When faced with building anything on a complex site, why is the first person ‘engaged’ for guidance, a planning consultant rather than an Architect? An Architect, being a person, who is meant to understand real space, more than ‘code space’.

I cannot help but notice the Planning Consultant’s name on the site notices, for many of the ‘difficult’ sites in Dublin. Is the challenge of designing on those sites too much for the older practioners of spatial design? I think the monopolisation of the architectural disipline, has had a ‘knock-on’ effect, whereby, the building code, rather than an Architect, is being used to design our environment. Given the scarcity in the past, of good architects who were fully integrated, into the process of designing the environment,… we have managed to fine tune a system, whereby the environment is laid out, without the intervention of humans at all. There is much evidence of this, in something like pedestrianisation. Pedestrianisation, is a rejection of the need for any human intervention in the design process. Pedestrianisation is a ‘piece’ of code, readily available to the planners, and executed as they deem fit or appropriate, all over the place. They seem almost ‘trigger-happy’ with this particular piece of legislation.

The handy thing about pedestrianisation, of course, is the Irish Planning Tradition owns the Intellectual Property Rights, to execute the code. Because, on streets such as Westmoreland Street, the Irish Planning Tradition has worked tirelessly, and fought many a battle, to get that code written. Given the suffering people must have endured to deliver the code, the Irish Planning Tradition is now very reluctant, not to use that code, whenever and wherever, they see an opportunity. We have already witnessed (the pedestrianisation of) Grafton Street, and Henry Street, explode in all directions. Now, we are in a position, to join up the two! Such is the power of the planning regulation code. I am sorry, but I do not see the necessary opposition to this force, to maintain a balance. It certainly isn’t going to come from the (Irish) Architectural profession, so where will it come from?

I cannot help but be reminded of movies like the Matrix Trilogy, in which the human race awaited the savior, the one that would bring balance. That, someone with the strength of body, mind and soul, to go into head-to-head fist fights, with the code which forms the matrix, and it’s human personification, Mr. Smith. There is this wonderful scene in the final installment of the Matrix Trilogy, where the machines finally locate and invade, the human stronghold, the underground city of Zion,… there the humans are forced to make their ‘last stand’. I cannot help, but be reminded of this scene, when walking down Westmoreland Street,… I can never decide, what I am looking at – the result of a human designer or just another physical personification of the Irish Planning and Regulation Code. Like a famous line from the movie, how deep does the rabbit hole go? Anyone here care to guess? I fear, that pedestrianisation, would push the balance, just too far in the machine’s favour. Okay Architects, now get your mini-guns out!

Brian O’ Hanlon.

No doubt Treasury were not advised that there would be so much opposition to this scheme at that particular time and there is little doubt that this case is one of the reasons why Part iv of the act is so comprehensive.

In order to point out, how the Irish Environmental Design system, appears to be ‘learning’ at the moment, I am going to draw an analogy from the world of computers. One of the arguments made in relation to computers being really dumb, is to do with, the computer’s lack of opportunity to learn. To learn, as small infant human beings do, from an early age, through the sense of sight, taste, touch, hearing and smell. I want to draw your attention to a certain book, which might be worth reading, if you get the time. The book by George Gilder, is called: The Silicon Eye: How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete. The following blurb describes what the book is about.

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.”

Basically, humans have a very large brain that allows them to do all kinds of things, but also, humans have a brain which is highly connected to the outside world, via the many nerve ends, like eyes, ears, digits with sensory capability, and what not. In order for the Environmental Design Tradition in Ireland to grow and evolve, at a pace sufficient to keep up with the explosion of ‘easy-capital’ and demand for services, facilities and what not,… the Environmental Design system, here in Ireland, has to have ‘the ability to learn’ built into it’s very fabric. The only way to do this, is to allow many more bright young individuals called ‘Architects’ to infiltrate the planning regulatory bodies. You will have to forgive, my scepticism,…. but making ‘part IV of the Act so comprehensive’,… just underlines the poverity of connectedness, our system displays, without the necessary sensory organs that may enable it to learn. The kinds of ‘organs’ that would enable the Environmental Design system to learn over a period of decades, are those like ‘Architecture’ and such,… there needs to be bi-directional communication going on there. That is exactly what happens with the human brain, and organs like the eyeball, the brain talks to the eyeball and visa versa,… it isn’t just ‘one-way’ communication, like we have in the Environmental Design system right now. The Irish Planner, telling the Irish Architect something, or quoting a line of code, and thats it. I must stress the ‘bi-directional’ nature of that communication, because Architects do need to learn from Planners, and Planners, visa versa, need to learn from Architects. I have added my little piece below, as a snipet, a view of the world we live in,… which could be of use to some part of the Irish Planning ‘Brain’.

Dublin City Council, looks set to replicate the ‘Henry Street Approach’, in Westmoreland Street – without analysing the fact, the situation in Henry Street doesn’t work. I experienced Henry Street last night around 10pm, and it was dead as a door nail. Yet, Parnell Street at that time of night was vibrant and felt okay – it is very strange how the bit-flips during the day light hours, as the car invades Parnell Street, and the footfall practically ‘wipes out’ Henry Street,… with poor old Moore Street doing the difficult job of ‘in-between’ space,… where you go for an Afro-Caribbean haircut.

The above little quote, may not seem like very much at all,… indeed it might be garbage, like a lot of the information discarded in ‘real time’ by the human brain, as it goes about it’s daily existence,… but more importantly, what my little quote does represent, is the humble, but sure beginnings of a ‘sensory capability’ within the Irish Planning profession. We need to ‘expose’ the Irish Planning brain, to more of those stimuli. The only feasible way I can think of doing that, is to open up and enlarge the profession of Architecture in this country. Rather than using the profession of Architecture, as an exclusive monopoly, why not use ‘Architecture’, to fill the voids within the Irish planning system, with those sensory capabilities it needs. While I have no doubt that the Environmental Design system here in Ireland, is growing and developing at an astounding rate,… what I always have in the back of my mind, is the story of the Silicon intelligence, the computer chip, and how poverty stricken it’s development has become, through a shere lack of sensory organs. While I can understand, the wishes of a very small elite community in Ireland, to maintain it’s numbers tightly and preserve it’s ‘golden monopoly’,… my problems isn’t that,… but the effect, that this architectural monopoly,… is having on the system-wide growth and development of the Irish Spatial Design ‘brain’.

“Part IV of the act is so comprehensive”.

It is like saying, this dumb piece of computer silicon chip technology, is so clever, because it can run some mundane task, a piece of code, very reliably. But what currently exists in Ireland, just as happened in the world of computers and Silicon, is a growing mass of human-generated ‘code-base’,… but very little basic learning. While the ‘code-base’ of many software firms represents it’s intellectual property, and therefore, it’s actual wealth,… as the Irish Planning Tradition has continued to improve and refine it’s valuable code base,… we should not fall into the same trap, as the dumb piece of silicon. I have no doubt whatsoever, that we are accelerating towards this Nirvana of Spatial Planners – a comprehensive set of planning regulations. But at the end of the day, all you are left with is an ‘intelligence’ simulated by humans beings – as opposed to one which has grown with the benefit of eyes and ears. The eyes and the ears, by the way, are those ‘Precious Licenses’, that are handed out each year by the Irish Architectural system.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

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I always like to look ‘outside’ the fields of architecture and urban planning, to gain some insight from what other disiplines, other industries have discovered in trying to manage difficult and complex problems. Tom Peter’s classic book, In Search of Excellence, is a good place to look for interesting views on the matter. On the subject of spatial designers in Ireland, and their lack of contact, with the artifacts of their toil,… either before or after a brick has been laid down,… I think the following quote illustrates the point well:

Thus, when ‘touch it’, ‘taste it’, ‘smell it’ become the watch-words, the results are most often extradordinary. Equally extraordinay are the lengths to which people will go to avoid the test-it experience. Fred Hooven, protege of Orville Wright, holder of thirty-eight major patents, and senior engineering faculty member at Dartmouth, describes a ludicrous, yet all-too-typical, case: ‘I can think of three instances in my career in which my client was making no progress on a complicated mechanical probelm, and I insisted that the engineers and the technicians (model builders) be put in the same room. In each case the solution came rapidly. One objection I remember being offered was that if we put the engineers in the same room with the shop it would get the drawings dirty.’ Hooven adds, in support of the overall point, ‘The engineer must have immediate and informal access to whatever facilities he needs to put his ideas into practice…. It cost more to make drawings of a piece than to make the piece, and the drawing is only one-way communication, so that when the engineer gets his piece back he has probably forgotten why he wanted it, and will find out that it doesn’t work because he made a mistake in the drawings, or that it needs a small change in some respect, which too often takes another four months to make right.

The next bit, is about what Tom Peters calls ‘Excellent Companies’, and how the Excellent companies make sure, good people are tasked to review and examine the investment proposal carefully. This is increasingly hard to do, given how exclusive, few and monopolistic our spatial design professionals have become. We do not have the debate, focus or determination to give serious considerations, to an urban design proposal.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

The is no more important trait among the excellent companies than an action orientation. It seems almost trivial: experiments, ad hoc task foces, small groups, temporary structures. Whether it’s the introduction of IBM’s System 360 (a seminal event in the American business history) or a three-day ad hoc task force at Digital, these companies, despite their vast size, are seldom stymied by overcomplexity. They don’t give in and create permanent committees or task forces that last for years. They don’t indulge in long reports. Nor do they install formall matrixes. They live in accord with the basic human limitations we described earlier: people can only handle a little bit of information at one time, and they thrive if they perceive themselves as even somewhat autonomous (e.g., experimenting modestly).

The major complaint about organisations is that they have become more complex than is necessary. Refreshingly, the excellent companies are responding by saying: If you’ve got a major problem, bring the right people together and expect them to solve it. The ‘right people’ very often means senior people who ‘don’t have the time’. But they do, somehow, have the time at Digital, TI, HP, 3M, IBM, Dana, Fluor, Emeson, Becthtel, McDonald’s, Cititbank, Boeing, Delta, et al. They have the time in those institutions because those companies aren’t transfixed with the organisation charts or job descriptions or that authority exactly matches responsibility. Ready. Fire. AIm. Learn from your tries. That’s enough.