“Poor Richard” Review | Planning Magazine
February 2014
Poor Richard, An Almanac for Architects and Planners by Mark David Major was reviewed by the American Planning Association’s regular Book Reviewer, Harold Henderson, in the February 2014 issue (“A thought a day”, page 51) of Planning Magazine.
Read an excerpt below:
Excerpt:
The author seems to be following both Benjamin Franklin and Ambrose Bierce, and those are big shoes to fill. Not all the epigrams reach their mark, but the successful ones make it worthwhile. (Week 33, Day 5: “As obese the governed so shall be the entity that governs them.”)
RE-POSTING THE MOST POPULAR ARTICLE IN 2013 ON THE OUTLAW URBANIST! THIS ARTICLE EDGED OUT BY ONLY 3% THE “URBAN PATTERNS” ARTICLE ON OLMSTED’S RIVERSIDE SUBURB IN CHICAGO.
Steve Jobs on the Social Potential of Built Space by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor
While reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of the co-founder of Apple and former majority shareholder of Pixar Animations Studios, Steve Jobs (review available here on The Outlaw Urbanist), I came across a fascinating passage. I wanted to share it because the point is so powerful, it bears repetition and celebration. The most important passages are in bold.
Pixar Animation Studios was reaping the creative and financial benefits of a $485 million worldwide gross for Toy Story 2 so…
(Excerpt) …it was time to start building a showcase headquarters. Jobs and the Pixar facilities team found an abandoned Del Monte fruit cannery in Emeryville, an industrial neighborhood between Berkeley and Oakalnd, just across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco. They tore it down and Jobs commissioned Peter Bohlin, the architect of the Apple Stores, to design a new building for the sixteen-acre plot. Jobs obsessed over every aspect of the new building, from the overall concept to the tiniest detail regarding materials and construction. “Steve had the firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture,” said Pixar’s president Ed Catmull… (John) Lasseter had originally wanted a traditional Hollywood studio, with separate buildings for various projects and bungalows for development teams. But the Disney folks said they didn’t like their new campus because the teams felt isolated, and Jobs agreed. In fact he decided they should go to the other extreme: one huge building around a central atrium designed to encourage random encounters. Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings.
“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,” he said. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow.” and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.” So he had the Pixar building designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. “If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity,” he said. “So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see…” “Steve’s theory worked from day one,” Lasseter recalled. “I kept running into people I hadn’t seen in months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”
For those who don’t believe architects such as New Urbanist Andres Duany or Space Syntax people such as Alan Penn, Tim Stonor and Kerstin Sailer about the social potential of built space, then believe the words of a genius like Steve Jobs. Design matters, space matters, and architecture matters to innovation.
Space Syntax for Dummies | Part 1 OVERVIEW by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor
A couple of months ago, Steve Mouzon (author of The Original Green and New Media for Designers + Builders) asked me to write an easy-to-understand introduction to space syntax on The Outlaw Urbanist. I don’t think he actually used the words ‘space syntax for dummies’ but it’s a good title (and a purposefully provocative one), so I’m running with it. There is a lot of material available in print and online about space syntax. However, for someone unfamiliar with the principles of space syntax, it can be a daunting prospect deciding where to begin when there are 30 years of material freely available from multiple sources. If you don’t chose wisely, there’s the very real risk of accidentally diving into the deep end before getting your feet wet in the shallow waters of the space syntax pool.
Space Syntax model of floor plan in the Tate Gallery, Millbank in London, UK (Image: Space Syntax Network).
When I say 30 years, I mark the beginnings of widespread space syntax research from the publication date of The Social Logic of Space by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson. However, there were about 10 years of groundwork involving many people preceding its publication in 1984. For example, the 40th Anniversary celebrations of the MSc in Advanced Architectural Studies course at University College London (of which I am a graduate and former Course Director) occurred this year and one can easily mark the beginnings of space syntax using this date. In the past, Bill Hillier has referred to me as the founder of International Space Syntax Symposia (now approaching its 20th anniversary) and, while that is generally true, like all things space syntax it was really a collaborative genesis involving myself, Tim Stonor and several others. The fact is I haven’t attended an International Space Syntax Symposium since the second one in Brasilia, Brazil (I was scheduled to present a paper at the third symposium in Atlanta in 2001 but was unable to attend though my paper on Savannah was still included in the proceedings).
What follows – I hope – is a simple, three-part introduction for those totally unfamiliar or only vaguely familiar with space syntax. For those familiar with space syntax (including its practitioners), this introduction will most likely be boring (perhaps in the extreme). Along the way, I will direct readers to other useful resources and additional reading if they want to learn more.
Part 1 draws upon home page of the Space Syntax Network, which provides a simple and direct 10,000-foot overview of space syntax (3,048-meters for those on the metric system) without getting too much into the details. It also includes a short, informative introduction video (embedded below) featuring Professor Alan Penn. Part 2 (Basics) and Part 3(Results) draw upon distilled excerpts from the space syntax overview chapter of my forthcoming book, Relentless Magnificence: The American Urban Grid. As such, this means Space Syntax for Dummies is primarily intended for an American audience though I hope readers in other parts of the world will still find it useful.
Because space syntax is such a collaborative research program (remarkably so, in my opinion), Space Syntax for Dummies synthesizes the ideas and words of others over the last three decades as well as using my own words for introducing space syntax to a new audience. It would be almost impossible to compile an exhaustive list of people contributing to space syntax over this time period – and this introduction, in particular – but certainly the most important to cite are Bill Hillier, Julienne Hanson, Alan Penn, Tim Stonor, John Peponis, Nick “Sheep” Dalton, and Alasdair Turner.
Space syntax is a science-based, human-focused approach that investigates relationships between spatial layout and a range of social, economic and environmental phenomena. These phenomena include patterns of movement, awareness and interaction; density, land use and land value; urban growth and societal differentiation; safety and crime distribution.
Space syntax was pioneered in the 1970s by Professor Bill Hillier, Prof Julienne Hanson and colleagues at The Bartlett, University College London. Today, space syntax is used and developed in hundreds of universities and educational institutions as well as professional practices worldwide. Built on quantitative analysis and geospatial computer technology, space syntax provides a set of theories and methods for the analysis of spatial configurations of all kinds and at all scales.
Research using the space syntax approach has shown how:
– movement patterns are powerfully shaped by spatial layout
– patterns of security and insecurity are affected by spatial design
– this relation shapes the evolution of the centres and sub-centres that makes cities liveable
– spatial segregation and social disadvantage are related in cities
– buildings can create more interactive organisational cultures.
Watch the UCL introduction video featuring Professor Alan Penn below:
Additional resources: Tim Stonor’s blog, The Power of the Network, is a good resource for reading about the ideas and findings of space syntax expressed in layman’s terms without getting blogged down in the nitty gritty details of the research behind the words.
Stay tuned for Space Syntax for Dummies, Part 2: Basics!
Steve Mouzon was recently a guest on the Urbanism Speakeasy podcast with Andy Boreau.
Excerpt below:
“OK, maybe I’m overemphasizing Steve’s point. We talk about what Steve calls “the era of the company” and “the age of the idea”. Steve thinks we’re moving into the age of the idea. That suggests individual thought and creativity is more important than an assembly line or factory mentality. If you’re a design professional, you know the factory mentality all too well. Professional planners and designers still predominantly live in an extinct era. See what you think about Steve’s prophecy of things to come.”
Genius of ‘Poor Richard’ Laughs Our Way to Great Cities
“You have to out-think the box before you can think outside of it.” – Poor Richard
JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA – Architect, urban planner and entrepreneur Mark David Major has seen a lot over 20 years of professional experience in academia and the public and private sector spanning the United States, Europe and other parts of the world. And much of it is bad… or worse. Major was born and raised in the Tower Grove neighborhood of St. Louis and attended Collinsville High School. He is a graduate of Clemson University in South Carolina and the University of London in the United Kingdom with Bachelors, a Masters, and PhD in Architecture.
Frustrated with the sprawling state of our cities and complicity of professionals charged with shepherding them, he decided to do something when he established The Outlaw Urbanist, a blog dedicated to architecture, urban design and planning issues. Then he began posting on Twitter, to date, more than 600 proverbs and witticisms to help professionals and laymen better understand what makes a great city, great architecture and good practice. The result is a series of sometimes biting, sometimes obscure, but always insightful proverbs using Benjamin Franklin’s 18th century Poor Richard pen name (“A penny saved is a penny earned”). Major admits the Poor Richard moniker is a homage to the wisdom of one of the America’s most famous Founding Fathers but also a subtle dig at American urban studies theorist, Richard Florida, who was recently named the World’s Most Influential Thinker in a published ranking by MIT Technology Review. Major points out, crucially, MIT’s ranking was based on the frequency of online social media mentions and not the content of those mentions. “Too often, we confuse talking with thinking,” said Major, “and we’re too thankful for half-wrong measures when it comes to our cities and architecture because we hope they are also half-right. The results are seldom satisfying.”
Major’s Twitter postings generated such a positive response that he collected together the first 366 proverbs in Poor Richard, An Almanac for Architects and Planners, first published in Spring 2013 but now available in digital format in Apple iBooks. The book contains a witticism for each day of the year plus one for years “in a state of leaping.” Major has continued writing and posting proverbs on Twitter. He plans to publish a follow-up book, Poor Richard, Another Almanac for Architects and Planners in 2014.
Drawing inspiration from Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and many others, Major crafts anew a series of general rules of thumb for anyone interested in the architecture, urban design and planning of our cities. The result is a stunning book marked as much by its breadth and depth as the brevity of its words on the subject. According to leading New Urbanist architect Julia Starr Sanford, in her Foreword to Major’s Poor Richard, the book represents “genius, extraordinary wit, passion for good design and mastery of the history of planning (in a) hilariously righteous epitome of 21st century sense and sensibility.” The unmistakable message of Major’s Poor Richard is we can do better for our cities, we must do better for our cities, and, before the 20th century, we did do better for our cities.
“Thomas Jefferson gave Americans the regular grid. A committee of roadway engineers gave us suburban sprawl. Always walk with giants, never ride in the clown car.” – Poor Richard
Poor Richard, An Almanac for Architects and Planners is a 136-page book with black and white illustrations published by Forum Books, available in print from Amazon, CreateSpace, and other online retailers and digital format from the Apple iTunes Store. Visit the author’s architecture, urban design and planning blog The Outlaw Urbanist for more information.
“Poor Richard” Review | Planning Magazine
Poor Richard, An Almanac for Architects and Planners by Mark David Major (Forum Books, 136 pages, black and white illustrations)
Pixar Animation Studios was reaping the creative and financial benefits of a $485 million worldwide gross for Toy Story 2 so…
“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,” he said. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow.” and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.” So he had the Pixar building designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. “If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity,” he said. “So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see…” “Steve’s theory worked from day one,” Lasseter recalled. “I kept running into people I hadn’t seen in months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”
It would be almost impossible to compile an exhaustive list of people contributing to space syntax over this time period – and this introduction, in particular – but certainly the most important to cite are Bill Hillier, Julienne Hanson, Alan Penn, Tim Stonor, John Peponis, Nick “Sheep” Dalton, and Alasdair Turner.
Major’s Twitter postings generated such a positive response that he collected together the first 366 proverbs in Poor Richard, An Almanac for Architects and Planners, first published in Spring 2013 but now available in digital format in