Thread by @paraschopra

Notes from this classic #book on architecture that I read recently.

(A thread)

1/ This book is actually about design of anything and not just architecture.

More than a practical how-to manual, it’s really about the spirit and philosophy of good design.

2/ The central idea is that things - buildings, objects, interfaces - have a quality that’s hard to describe.

Terms like comfortable, whole, free, exact, eternal, egoless come close. The closest term to this quality without a name is “alive” but that still doesn’t capture it

3/ Alive really means that the users interacting with the thing feel alive themselves.

Badly designed things slowly suck the life out of the users.

The central question then is: what makes something alive?

4/ The answer lies in design that resolves all the forces and drives that a user has without conflict.

As an example, windows have to be at the right height so as to let a person see outside without getting exposed himself / herself.

5/ The problem with scripted and modular design is that all the windows at an apartment complex are made the same - without accommodating for the immediate surroundings

All the houses with wrong window height create daily hesitation and conflict - and that sucks life out of user

6/ So a good architect, like a good designer, understands the natural inner forces of people who’re going to be interacting with the object and helps those forces get resolved without any inner conflict.

7/ Patterns of design that have survived - like a courtyard with a small garden - embed the resolution to human drives (many of which are deep and unrecognised - like biophilia)

Reinventions of design are usually deficient in one way or another because they’re forced top down.

8/ Contrast the old charm of European town squares with the modern American suburb.

Which one of them seems more “alive”?

Reflect on why is that the case.

9/ The difference lies in cookie-cutter design that doesn’t respect the context in which it is applied vs a design that’s evolved and made bottom up taking the rich context into account.

10/ In most of the history (and even right now), people had this tacit knowledge of design and they used to make their own buildings few rooms at a time.

Houses grew over time and people who would live in it will evolve the design so that their inner forces get supported.

11/ This meant all the windows were different (to accommodate the context) and yet were similar (because their design was not innovated for the sake of innovation, but borrowed from timeless patterns that dictated how wide and long these should be)

12/ So good design is paradoxical.

It’s extremely standard (because human drives are more or less common) but extremely personalised (because environment and context dictates how these drives will get resolved)

13/ Bad design is exactly the opposite of it.

Innovative (for the sake of designer’s ego-boosting) yet templated (because it ignores user context)

14/ We see a lot of bad design around us because we are impatient and think of ourselves as geniuses.

The real genius is in recognising that good design isn’t pretty, it’s comfortable

invertedpassion.com/why-is-enterpr…

15/ If design isn’t evolved from the bottom up, what we get is the American suburb.

And since our thinking is linear, our designs will miss context dependency (in time and space) of users’s drives.

16/ Instead of creating things that add life into the user, we will end up creating things that suck the life from the user - one frustration at a time.

You have to doubt your top-down genius and let bottom-up evolution do its job.

https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1125649647173660672

17/ That’s it!

Hope you liked the thread.

If you have any examples of things that make you feel at home, make you feel alive, reply with your thoughts.

(It’ll be hard as such things are usually invisible)