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| Chalk marks on the ground. |
In order to achieve this aim, the building must be generated in an entirely different manner. It cannot be made by following a working drawing slavishly. What must be done, essentially, is to fix those points which generate the spaces—as few of them as fossible—and then let these points generate the walls, right out on the building site, during the very process of construction.
You may proceed like this: first fix the corner of every major space by putting a stake in the ground. There are no more than a few dozen of these corners in a building, so this is possible, even if the measurements are intricate and irregular. Place these corner markers where they seem right, without regard for the
exact distances between them. There is no reason whatever to try and make modular distances between them. If angles are slightly off, as they often will be, the modular dimensions are impossible anyway,
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| “Staking out” |
These simple marks are all you need to build the building. Once construction starts, you can start very simply, by building a column, over each of these marks. These columns will then generate the rest of the building, by their mere presence, without
212 COLUMNS AT THE CORNERS
any further need for detailed measurements or drawings, because the walls will simply be built along the lines which connect adjacent columns: and everything else follows.
For the upper storys, you can make drawings of the column positions and once again transfer them to the actual building while it is being built. As you will see from final column distribution (213), upper story columns do not need to line up perfectly with downstairs columns.
With this procedure, it becomes possible to transfer a rather complex building from your mind, or from a scrap of paper, to the site—and regenerate it in a way which makes it live out there.
The method hinges on the fact that you can fix the corners of the spaces first—and that these corners may then play a significant role in the construction of the building. It is interesting that although it is based on entirely different arguments from structure follows social spaces (203), it leads to almost exactly the same conclusion.
Therefore:
On your rough building plan, draw a dot to represent a column at the corner of every room and in the corners formed by lesser spaces like thick walls and alcoves. Then transfer these dots onto the ground out on the site with stakes.
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| columns at corners |
Once you have the columns for each floor on your vault plan, reconcile them from floor to floor and put in intermediate col-
CONSTRUCTION
umns—final column distribution (213). Note, especially, that it is not necessary for the corner columns to fall on a grid. The floor vaults and roof vaults can be made to fit any arrangement of columns, and still make a coherent structure—thus allowing the social spaces to determine the building shape without undue constraint from purely structural considerations—floorceiling VAULTS (219), ROOF VAULTS (220).
These columns will not only guide your mental image of the building, they will also guide construction: first put the columns and the column foundations in place; then, to make the frame complete, tie the columns together around each room with the perimeter beam—root foundations (214), box columns
(216), perimeter beams (217). Give special emphasis to all free-standing columns with the idea that when you build them, you will make them very thick—column place (226). . . .
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213 final column
DISTRIBUTION**
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to this one center increases; and land values around the center rise so high that houses are driven out from there by shops and offices—until soon no one, or almost no one, is any longer genuinely in touch with the magic which is created day and night within this solitary center.
The problem is clear. On the one hand people will only expend so much effort to get goods and services and attend cultural events, even the very best ones. On the other hand, real variety and choice can only occur where there is concentrated, centralized activity; and when the concentration and centralization become too great, then people are no longer willing to take the time to go to it.
If we are to resolve the problem by decentralizing centers, we must ask what the minimum population is that can support a central business district with the magic of the city. Otis D. Duncan in “The Optimum Size of Cities” (Cities and Society, P. K. Hatt and A. J. Reiss, eds., New York: The Free Press, 1967, pp. 759—72), shows that cities with more than 50,000 people have a big enough market to sustain 61 different kinds of retail shops and that cities with over 100,000 people can support sophisticated jewelry, fur, and fashion stores. He shows that cities of 100,000 can support a university, a museum, a library, a zoo, a symphony orchestra, a daily newspaper, AM and FM radio, but that it takes a population of 250,000 to 500,000 to support a specialized professional school like a medical school, an opera, or all of the TV networks.
In a study of regional shopping centers in metropolitan Chicago, Brian K. Berry found that centers with 70 kinds of retail shops serve a population base of about 350,000 people (Geography of Market Centers and Retail Distribution, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 47). T. R. Lakshmanan and Walter G. Hansen, in “A Retail Potential Model” (American Institute of Planners Journal, May 1965, pp. 134—43), showed that full-scale centers with a variety of retail and professional services, as well as recreational and cultural activities, are feasible for groups of 100,000 to 200,000 population.
It seems quite possible, then, to get very complex and rich urban functions at the heart of a catch basin which serves no more than 300,000 people. Since, for the reasons given earlier, it is
. . . assume that you have placed the corner columns which define the spaces—columns at the corners (212). It is now necessary to fill in the gaps between the columns with intermediate stiffener columns as required by efficient structure (206). This pattern gives the spacing of these intermediate stiffener columns, and helps to generate the kind of walls which efficient structure (206) requires. It also helps to generate ceiling height variety (190).
How should the spacing of the secondary columns which stiffen the walls, vary with ceiling height, number of stories and the size of rooms?
In some very gross intuitive way we know the answer to this question. Roughly, if we imagine a building with the walls stiffened at intervals along their length, we can see that the texture of these stiffeners needs to be largest near the ground, where social spaces are largest and where loads are largest, and smallest near the roof, where rooms are smallest and where loads are least. In its gross intuitive form this is the same as the intuition which tells us to expect the finest texture in the ribbing at the fine end of a leaf where everything is smallest, and to expect the grosser, cruder structure to be near the large part of the leaf.