To live in a home where there is such a place alters your experience. It invites you to put something precious there, to conceal, to let only some in on the secret and not others. It allows you to keep something that is precious in an entirely personal way, so that no one may ever find it, until the moment you say to your friend, “Now I am going to show you something special”—and tell the story behind it.
There is strong support for the reality of this need in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Sface (New York: The Omen Press, 1964). We quote from Chapter 3;
With the theme of drawers, chests, locks and wardrobes, we shall resume contact with the unfathomable store of daydreams of intimacy.
Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life. Indeed, without these “objects” and a few others in equally high favor, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy. They are hybrid objects, subject objects. Like us, through us and for us, they have a quality of intimacy. . . .
If we give objects the friendship they should have, we do not open a wardrobe without a slight start. Beneath its russet wood, a wardrobe is a very white almond. To open it, is to experience an event of whiteness.
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An anthology devoted to small boxes, such as chests and caskets, would constitute an important chapter in psychology. These complex pieces that a craftsman creates are very evident witnesses of the need for secrecy, of an intuitive sense of hiding places. It is not merely a matter of keeping a possession well guarded. The lock doesn’t exist that could resist absolute violence, and all locks are an invitation to thieves. A lock is a psychological threshold. . . .
Therefore:
Make a place in the house, perhaps only a few feet square, which is kept locked and secret; a place which is virtually impossible to discover—until you have been shown where it is; a place where the archives of the house, or other more potent secrets, might be kept.
| secret place |
|---|
 |
Classic types of secret places are the panel that slides back, revealing the cavity in the wall, the loose board beneath the rug, the trap door—closets between rooms (198), thickening THE OUTER WALLS (21 I) , FLOOR-CEILING VAULTS
(219). . . .
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CONSTRUCTION
At this stage, you have a complete design for an individual building. If you have followed the patterns given, you have a scheme of spaces, either marked on the ground, with stakes, or on a piece of paper, accurate to the nearest foot or so. You know the height of rooms, the rough size and position of windows and doors, and you know roughly how the roofs of the building, and the gardens are laid out.
The next, and last part of the language, tells you how to make a buildable building directly from this rough scheme of spaces, and tells you how to build it, in detail.
* *
The patterns in this last section present a physical attitude to construction that works together with the kinds of buildings which the second part of the pattern language generates. These construction patterns are intended for builders—whether professional builders, or amateur owner-builders.
Each pattern states a principle about structure and materials. These principles can be implemented in any number of ways when it comes time for actual building. We have tried to state various ways in which the principles can be built. But, partly because these patterns are the least developed, and partly because of the nature of building patterns, the reader will very likely have much to add to these patterns. For example, the actual materials used to implement them will vary greatly from region to region . . .
Perhaps the main thing to bear in mind, as you look over this material, is this: Our intention in this section
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places can be in the boundaries of neighborhoods, communities and subcultures—see subculture boundary (13); others, not noisy or noxious, can be built right into homes and neighborhoods. In both cases, the crucial fact is this: every home is within a jew minutes of dozens of workplaces. Then each household would have the chance to create for itself an intimate ecology of home and work: all its members have the option of arranging a workplace for themselves close to each other and their friends. People can meet for lunch, children can drop in, workers can run home. And under the prompting of such connections the workplaces themselves will inevitably become nicer places, more like homes, where life is carried on, not banished for eight hours.
This pattern is natural in traditional societies, where workplaces are relatively small and households comparatively self-sufficient. But is it compatible with the facts of high technology and the concentration of workers in factories? How strong is the need for workplaces to be near each other?
The main argument behind the centralization of plants, and their gradual increase in size, is an economic one. It has been demonstrated over and again that there are economies of scale in production, advantages which accrue from producing a huge number of goods or services in one place.
However, large centralized organizations are not intrinsic to mass production. There are many excellent examples which demonstrate the fact that where work is substantially scattered, people can still produce goods and services of enormous complexity. One of the best historical examples is the Jura Federation of watchmakers, formed in the mountain villages of Switzerland in the early 1870*5. These workers produced watches in their home workshops, each preserving his independence while coordinating his efforts with other craftsmen from the surrounding villages. (For an account of this federation, see, for example, George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962, pp. 168—69.)
In our own time, Raymond Vernon has shown that small, scattered workplaces in the New York metropolitan economy, respond much faster to changing demands and supplies, and that the degree of creativity in agglomerations of small businesses is vastly greater than that of the more cumbersome and centralized
CONSTRUCTION
has been to provide an alternative to the technocratic and rigid ways of building that have become the legacy of the machine age and modern architecture.
The way of building described here leads to buildings that are unique and tailored to their sites. It depends on builders taking responsibility for their work; and working out the details of the building as they go—mocking up entrances and windows and the dimensions of spaces, making experiments, and building directly according to the results.
The patterns in this section are unique in several ways.
First, the sequence of the patterns is more concrete than in any of the earlier portions of the language. It not only corresponds to the order in which a design matures conceptually, in the user’s mind, but also corresponds to the actual physical order of construction. That is, except for the first four patterns, which deal with structural philosophy, the remaining patterns can actually be used, in the sequence given, to build a building. The sequence of the language corresponds almost exactly, to the actual sequence of operations on the building site. In addition, the patterns themselves in this section are both more concrete, and more abstract, than any other patterns in the language.
They are more concrete because, with each pattern, we have always given at least one interpretation which can be built directly. For instance, with the pattern root foundation, we have given one particular interpretation, to show that it can be done, and also to give the reader an immediate, and practical, buildable approach to construction.