Author, activist, consultant, and SketchUp user Stewart Brand
http://www.well.com/user/sbb/ gently guided the 300+
in attendance today at 3D Base Camp
through a thought-provoking presentation on the true nature of buildings. From Palestine’s Jericho of 8000 B.C. to the squatter cities of today’s third world, Brand drew from his long and varied research and writing career to describe how building evolve, change, and learn. After the conference, in a move quite unusual for a keynote speaker, Brand stayed on to sit in on some user sessions.
He had this crowd of designers eating from the palm of his hand. At lunch, his presentation was the most popular topic. (We ate, by the way, at the old @Last Software headquarters on
Pearl Street, now a shell waiting its next life. I thought we were eating in an example from Brand’s presentation, on how buildings change over time.)
“My SketchUp skills are klutz,” Brand began.
Two years ago he tried to draw a basic design for his new home in
Marin County, California, and was stymied trying to draw a hip roof. A friend suggested he try SketchUp, and suddenly the hip roof was complete. “SketchUp helps you dance through so many design problems,” Brand said.
Most of Brand’s presentation was both summary and update of what he considers his most substantial book,
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built (Viking-Penguin, 1994;
in the UK, Orion Books). Today Brand is president of the
Long Now Foundation, a group doing a variety of activities to raise awareness of planning for the long-term future of humanity. One of their big projects is to build a clock that will run for 10,000 years on bronze-age technology. He compared the design principles used to design the
Great Clock to contemporary architectural design:
Longevity: With occasional maintenance, the clock should reasonably be expected to display the correct time for the next 10,000 years. Buildings that survive are easily adapted to periodic maintenance. Untouchable, unchangeable buildings (like the geodesic domes popular a few decades ago), do not offer true longevity.
Maintainability: The clock should be maintainable with bronze-age technology. The original Levitttown now looks like just another suburb, because by design those so-called inhumane cookie-cutter homes were designed to be easily maintained and modified by their owners.
Transparency: It should be possible to determine operational principles of the clock by close inspection. Buildings that evolve over time are easily understood by their non-specialist owners.
Evolveability: It should be possible to improve the clock with time. In the squatter cities of the developing world, the small owner-built homes change often over the years as they are adapted for new purposes. By contrast, the worst slums in any squatter community are the homes built by governments. There is no sense of ownership, and they are almost always too rigid in construction to adapt to the ways of the informal economy that drives squatter community.
Scalability: It should be possible to build working models of the clock from table-top to monumental size using the same design. Without saying it in so many words, Brand’s references to SketchUp and a design tool that allows the user to “dance through design” is a model of scalability, as it brings makes 3D design accessible.
Brand’s colleague on the Great Clock project, computer scientist Danny Hillis, is also a SketchUp user. Hillis has created preliminary designs using the software. Brand shared drawings of a plan for the entry room. To enter the room, one must push a lever to open the door, which at the same time helps wind the clock.
A single, short blog entry can’t do justice to Brand’s presentation. It was warmly presented, thoroughly engaging, and totally thought-provoking. I’ll save my five pages of single-spaced typed notes and produce a longer report after 3D Base Camp is over. But let me share with you his parting words: “Design never stops.”
You can see a photo of Stewart Brand speaking at 3D Base Camp in the AECnews.com photo gallery.
--RSN