Professional Transformations William L. Porter Given my long association with MIT School of Architecture Planning I thought that a good way to portray its “techno-social” turn was to report on how these issues influenced roles that I played from the early 1960’s through the 80’s. Nurtured as a designer in Louis I. Kahn’s office in Philadelphia, I then became urban design assistant to Willo von Moltke in Venezuela, working on the Ciudad Guayana project, with eyes opened to social and political dimensions of urban planning and design. From there I became a student at MIT’s Urban Studies and Planning, and found myself developing a computer-based system to aid urban designers as my doctoral work, drawing from some of MIT’s technological innovations. As a joint appointment with Architecture and Urban Studies, I taught analytical methods of design and approaches to problem setting and environmental programming. Later I became dean of the school after having worked with the faculty to devise an approach to curricular and program development, and guided the school in that spirit through a decade of change. 1962-1964 Concern that the planning professions were not able to deal with the range of problems that society exhibited, as well as, I suspect, intellectual impatience, had led Lloyd and Martin Meyerson in 1959 to create the Joint Center for Urban Studies of Harvard and MIT. It was conceived as interdisciplinary, as a place where scholars from a variety of fields could bring and contrast their various understandings of cities and of urban development, with the hope that new avenues of thought and new kinds of research would open up solutions to pressing urban and regional problems as well as provide a much needed intellectual basis for the education of planners. It was in this frame of reference that the Guayana project was created in 1961 in collaboration with the Corporación Venezolana de Guayana. Lloyd Rodwin of MIT’s Department of City and Regional Planning was the central figure both in the project’s conception and its execution. A student of British New Towns1, he believed that planning and design could help Venezuela to realize its ambitious goals through the development of an important new city and its region. At the same time he saw the opportunity to demonstrate a new definition of urban and regional planning that incorporated its latest ideas, as well as the best thinking in the social sciences. Combining professionals and academics in a broadly conceived team, incorporating both Venezuelan and US 1 British New Towns Policy, Problems and Implications, Lloyd Rodwin, , Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1956.
1
personnel, would result in a durable and sensible strategy for the practical aims of Venezuela and in experience that could be tapped for ideas that would form the foundation for new definitions of the planning profession. I arrived in Venezuela, having been hired by Willo von Moltke, formerly director of design for the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. I was to be his assistant in urban design of the city and a part of a diverse interdisciplinary team. In my previous position, working for Louis I. Kahn in Philadelphia, I had attempted to understand and internalize the approach of the master, looking on the one hand for the strength of design to be found in the essential nature of materials and assemblies and, on the other, to essences of human institutions captured in epigrammatic phrases and in diagrams: design and form, as he put it. The exhilarating sense that these essences could be discovered by patient and imaginative individual work contrasted with my new circumstances in Venezuela. There, the social, political, environmental, historical conditions demanded articulation. The justcompleted design for the new city of Brazilia seemed dream-like and detached from such practical realities as we would have to address in Venezuela: a city that could become Venezuela’s Pittsburgh, that could help to diversify the economic base for the country, that, coupled with a plan for the Guayana region could justify the World Bank’s funding of the Guri Dam that, at the time of its inauguration in 1978, was the largest hydroelectric dam in the world. To do that the city would have to attract the technical elite required to lead and operate a wide range of manufacturing industries; it would have to accommodate the inevitable migration of a relatively rural population, and it would have to be a city, once the initial work was finished, capable of self sustaining and independent growth. All of this would require elaborate justification that would have to persuade many groups at the national, regional and local levels; and that persuasion would have to occur before very much was in place, and before there could be measures taken of actual outcomes. I came from a quest that was deeply individualistic, with the artist’s lonely search as its paradigm, to one that was social and political, requiring an understanding of cultures with which we were not familiar, working in parallel with others whose disciplines and cultures were less familiar, and requiring as well persuasion of co-workers, administrators, and governmental administrators and leaders. Moreover, working in a foreign country made it necessary to articulate
2
ideas and issues that could too-easily be left unexamined in our own culture. After a brief romance with some unrealistic design ideas for housing in part of the city, we found ourselves needing to translate the economic forecasts for the city into quantitative expressions of land use, and levels and types of activity. Thus, from invention to deduction was another shift in my professional practice. Fidelity to quantities was requisite. And the professional activity itself was dictated by the necessity of having a solid city plan to accompany the World Bank application. Lisa Redfield Peattie, a social anthropologist, arrived at the project about the same time as I did, and she chose to live in the Guayana region, in St. Felix, one of the two existing towns that were to be incorporated into the new city. The design team had elected to work in Caracas, some 350 kilometers away, as our counterparts were there and decisions were, presumably, made there. Lisa’s first hand living experiences there and her skilled articulation of her understanding of the people she lived with provided us with a bridge to what otherwise we would not have known. Her distinction between settlements of despair and settlements of hope made us aware of the rapid change linked to economic betterment that occurred in some settlements, and the tragic stasis in others. Moreover, she helped us to see the radically different roles that the physical environment played for the people it housed, enabling for some and frustrating for others, and how its administration and servicing was integral to these roles. Rafael Corrada, expert in low-income settlements, developed approaches to accommodating migrants through sites and services programs as well as through housing strategies. In the design group we attempted to accommodate some of these ideas in settlement and infrastructure designs that could develop through time into wellserviced middle class communities. However, location and administration of these designs were not as we had hoped, the project leadership having been very reluctant to place low-income developments near future middle class areas, and the assignation of parcels sometimes based on other-than economic criteria. Based on Kevin Lynch’s work, Donald Appleyard, in Planning a Pluralist City, analyzed how various groups saw the city, based in part on where they lived and how they traveled. These multiple ways of seeing raised important questions about what the “form of the city” actually was. Certainly it took the emphasis off of large shape making as the essence of form. Even though that had never been a dominant
3
aspiration, Appleyard made clear that it was not a widely valued perception by many groups in the population. His work also highlighted the varied levels of importance that people attached to various parts and features of the region. But perhaps most importantly, it underlined the importance not only of seeing the city through the eyes of those who were and would be there but also of shaping the design to support those ways of seeing. 1964-1967 In 1964, after having been attracted to the ideas and agendas of people from the MIT faculty including Don Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, Lloyd Rodwin – as well as faculty from other institutions including Robert Mitchell from the University of Pennsylvania and Bill Doebele from Harvard’s GSD, I entered the PhD program in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Drawn to MIT in the first place because of the opportunities to learn more about society, social forces, and the economics of cities, I was richly rewarded with courses given by Rodwin (urban economics) Lynch (theory of city design), Jim Beshers (urban sociology), and others. Aaron Fleisher drew me into his web of concern for how quantitative reasoning could best enter planning thought. He prompted my return to the question of how design intuition was related to rationality. What could be made explicit in design, and of that, what was describable in rational terms? I did not believe that design could or should be reduced to a set of logical propositions, nor that design should be revealed as the emperor unclothed. Instead I wanted to explore possibilities of harnessing the power of rationality to design intuition more effectively, of releasing the cavalry of thought (or intuition) when needed for important things, after having rested it when not really needed (to paraphrase Whitehead in The Aims of Education). Re-examining the urban design of Ciudad Guayana I discovered that many of the locational decisions could be made explicit and formulated as logical statements. This led in a number of directions: sitting in on Minsky’s on artificial intelligence in which he talked more about the mind, and how it might be thought of as working, than about the computer; listening to John Donovan’s 6.251, the introductory course for undergraduates majoring in computation, in which telling the machine what to do, though difficult, was possible; continuing to learn from Kevin Lynch and Appleyard about linkages among behavior, esthetics and the physical form of the environment, and attempting to make those more explicit.
4
These were heady days in which artificial intelligence was full of promise -- without apparent limits, in which the beginnings of geographic modeling, visualization, and interactive computing promised tools for working with computational representations of the physical world, and in which some computer languages were structured in ways that facilitated the programming of elements and their logical relationships, as if computation really could accommodate thought! AED (Automated Engineering Design), designed by Douglas Ross at MIT, was touted as the first software engineering design language, and it was our language of choice for our early experiments. Critiquing current urban modeling practices with Aaron Fleisher, we saw new opportunities opened up by interactive computing of how computation might extend design. Instead of being a big black box in which inputs were distant from outputs, the computer could be a medium in which the implications of small moves could be immediately seen. This changed computational modeling from a ponderous and opaque medium to one that was transparent, bringing it closer to the actual processes and procedures of how one made specific design choices, and allowing it to participate in acts of thought. We rediscovered a basis for modeling in the logic and actions of design.
Figure 1 Think of attributes as activities to be placed on the land. Each location was a ring; each activity was a ring. Where they intersected, that activity was at that location. Each could be looked up in its own dictionary. The structure and programming of the AED programming language reflected the logic of these elements and their relationships.2
Discourse was the name of the language that we developed, signaling the potential for interactive conversation with the machine -- the formalized self -- that its facilities afforded. Kathy Lloyd at the 2 The Development of Discourse, A Language for Computer Assisted City Design, William Porter, PhD Dissertation 1969. P75
5
beginning, and Wren McMains later brought extraordinary programming skills to its development, a partnership of design and computation created by Aaron Fleisher. It took form in my PhD dissertation, Discourse, A Language for Computer Assisted City Design. 1967-71 In 1967 I was jointly appointed to both departments of Urban Studies and Planning and of Architecture. The work on Discourse formed the basis for my teaching Analysis of Urban Design with Wren McMains. In that course students learned to formulate ideas about activities and their locations and to see the consequences of those ideas rigorously computed. Because of the immediate feedback, they were able to adjust ideas and consequences until their design interventions were satisfactory. The exercises served both to increase understanding of the regularities and the logic of existing arrangements in cities as well as to project the implications of new ideas. And they served to hint at the power of computational tools for urban design. Discourse also became part of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded Cambridge Project that was paving the way toward an integrated system for social science computing. John Klensin became critical to this effort, bringing his computational expertise and his knowledge of social science to link structure and content of Discourse to other social science computing systems -- the hope being to make the boundaries of any system relatively invisible to the user and giving the analyst flexibility to look in a rigorous way at problems from the point of view of a number of different disciplines. With Professor Jack Myer of the Architecture Department, I led the Environmental Design Program, bringing work derived from Lynch, Appleyard, and Myer on how cityscapes were seen, structured, and used, as well as the more analytical approach through computationally assisted teaching. And Professor Lisa Peattie and I taught a subject dealing with how problems for planning and design could be constructed, what constituted evidence, what evidence was important, and how one could draw clues from individuals and groups, either through direct interaction or through observations of behavior. During this time I developed a close working relationship with Donlyn Lyndon, Head of the Architecture Department, reflecting with him on the next episode in the teaching of architectural design. In 1969, the department stopped offering the Bachelor of Architecture degree and began the M.Arch. degree as the only accredited professional degree in
6
the department. This changed the ecology of the department in that MIT undergraduates, who of necessity satisfied all of the MIT course requirements, no longer comprised all let alone the majority of the students in the professional program. By itself this change required rethinking the curriculum, but placing it on a graduate level, a challenge that was being faced nationally by other schools, required rethinking the content of architectural education in the light of societal challenges the profession would face, as well as education founded in newer areas of research, in particular from the social sciences and technology that MIT had in generous supply. The department was in need of change, and it was ready for it. These were tumultuous times. Student protests were happening at many campuses. At MIT they were perhaps less disruptive because the faculty and administration were better tuned to the times. Howard Johnson, MIT’s president, was amazing in his ability to handle the difficulties; his sense of humor buoyed us all. Nevertheless, there was a sense of urgency about social issues and a driving need to address them somehow. These, coupled with extraordinary recent insights from scholars from the social sciences and from architectural theorists, plus the promise -- as well as the hazards -- of technology, all called for a re-centering of the school in the service of society, an emergence from the self-absorption of the professions, and a re-definition of professional aspirations and practices. Having already worked closely with Lloyd Rodwin and others in Urban Studies as well as with faculty in Architecture, I became part of a school-wide group of faculty thinking about the mission of the school for the next decade. The formation of this group was occasioned by Dean Lawrence Anderson’s intention to retire after the academic year 1970-71. 1971-73 Out of this study group a very considerable consensus grew. The faculty and leadership felt sufficiently confident in its direction and in the guiding ideas that they nominated me, an insider to the School, as its next dean. Jerry Wiesner, newly appointed as President of MIT, embraced the recommendation, welcoming the direction and the consensus, as well as the youth of the nominee! Many of the study group’s ideas were expressed in a proposal to the National Science Foundation3 to re-shape and re-direct the school. For 3 Proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation from MIT on behalf of the School of Architecture and Planning, 1971.
7
example, about architecture, it looked beyond the limits of the field imposed by conventional criticism to argue that What was taken to be the “crisis of architectural design" has proven to be a fundamental questioning of the concept of design. Does any type of design--that of engineers, city planners or politicians--serve human wellbeing except according to dangerously circumscribed criteria? In general terms, events and criticisms of recent years have shaken our confidence in man's ability to exert a socially beneficial control over his environment by design--by the systematic direction of actions calculated to achieve a static pre-visioned goal. Such a proposition goes far beyond architecture, challenging our reliance on human rationality and rationally guided action. p. 10, NSF Proposal 1971. We were energized by the possibility of distinctive and salient contributions to a more unified approach to society’s problems. Each department saw its relevance. Thus it is our [Architecture’s] contention that the loose and adaptive but value and idea-impregnated characteristics of environmental form enable the architect to make valuable contributions to society in terms of improved physical surroundings. The problem structure and the methods of design and architecture, rather than being irrelevant, may offer a model for problem solving in other disciplines. It is on the basis of such possibilities with the field of architecture, that we must now redirect the Department toward a critical examination and development of the theory and practice of design. p.12, NSF op cit. The program for the development of the school was to be focused through a new Center for the Human Environment, again quoting from that proposal: The Program for the School’s development consists of four related parts: A. Research and Curriculum Development; B. Fieldwork; C. New Methods, Groupings and Clients; and D. Information and Media. In Research and Curriculum development we propose to develop the new core of study we have identified for the School and then to open up selected new fields relating to that core which break out of existing academic boundaries. The results should both deepen our understanding of the environment and provide a more solid base of knowledge for our educational programs. In Fieldwork we propose to initiate new administrative, academic, social and spatial settings which can join action and theory. By establishing new roles in the School and by developing techniques appropriate to the preparation, execution, and evaluation of fieldwork projects we aim to overcome the causes of failure characteristic of action involvements. In New Methods, Groupings and Clients we 8
propose to devise new teaching methods and new uses of environments to enhance the educational processes; to encourage the formation in the School of fluid program Groups as the School’s primary Intellectual units-small numbers of students and faculty focused on areas of their current interests, often crossing departmental boundaries; and to attract midcareer citizens and professionals in urban management, community leadership, social action and environmental design roles. Lastly, in Information and Media we intend to research the problems of communicating environmental Information, to increase the quantity and quality of readily available information, to enable students and faculty to scan, select and analyze Information in its many forms with a minimum of time and effort, and to coordinate these efforts with related efforts in other parts of the Institute. p. 17, NSF op cit. This last area, Information and Media, was stimulated in part by the emergence of interest and technological skills in media, promulgated by Professor Nicholas Negroponte through his Architecture Machine Group, later to become the core of the new Media Lab by the beginning of the next decade. Though the proposal was not funded, it had its effect on both departments, their leadership having been so much involved with the study group and the NSF proposal’s production. Curricular reform and innovation and recruitment of new faculty were carried out in each department consistent with the ideas of the faculty study group and the proposal. This was particularly so in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning where the new perspectives challenged traditional faculty composition, created new areas of advanced study, proposed new roles in practice that incorporated the implementation of planning and policy ideas through governmental, institutional and other means, and opened up an international perspective on planning and development. Most obviously missing from the current structure of the School was a way of giving leadership, cohesion, and relevance to the Fieldwork portion of the proposal. This was an activity that was seen as an important extension of education in both fields, to actualize engagement as part of the student’s experience and to let the conceptualization and management of it become, through the faculty’s efforts, an extension of their professional disciplines. For these reasons we formed the Laboratory of Architecture and Planning precisely to promote and guide fieldwork, to establish the network of connections necessary for continuity of the program and for its relevance to communities, and to provide funding for it and for the study of it in order that it be fully incorporated into the school’s professional fields.
9
We appointed a talented architecture graduate, David Judelson, who led it through its initial years. 1973-80 The decade played out in the context of this consensus, symbolized by the collaboration leading to the NSF proposal. There was continuing social ferment and questioning of MIT’s mission and of the departments’ missions as well. In retrospect I should have forced a reexamination of the consensus later in the decade, but I proceeded on what I thought to be an implicit consensus. Clearly there were activities that had fallen off the train, and for others the vision had dimmed. However, much that happened later was within the spirit that characterized the first part of the decade. New programs reflected a more general commitment to release the creativity of others, and to redefine the principles and practices of the profession accordingly. The Community Fellows Program was formed in Urban Studies to bring minority leaders into the context of professional education, both to help them plan for their own career and to influence the content and direction of faculty teaching. Sites and Services for developing countries, initiated by Horacio Caminos in the Architecture department, was transformed by Reinhart Goethert to play a more instrumental role for the residents. Setting forth ideas provisionally, reflecting, with the client and other stakeholders, during the course of rendering professional services, allowing for uncertainty and remaining open to fresh contributions from new participants or from more careful observations were characteristics of the new models of professional practice, not just for international development projects, but for the mainstream of the profession as well. Rather than creating prescriptions for action, we thought of establishing frameworks. These could be social frameworks accomplished through the mediation of environmental conflicts. Here it was against a backdrop of policy and prediction that professionals were dedicated to articulating options, consequences, values in the context of on-going discussion and negotiation among the interested parties. They could be physical frameworks where different groups’ interests focused on particular spaces that would maximize their freedom of action. Here it was necessary to create a kind of environmental contract in which, for example, builders, equipment manufacturers, clients, and interior designers could, by virtue of strategic agreement on certain dimensions, placements, and tolerances, open up a wide range of choices for the client that could accommodate most currently available equipment in a variety of
10
possible configurations. And the new media, a rapidly growing industry expanding the environment we experience, needed similarly to be creatively explored for the sorts of frameworks that would satisfy and enable individuals and groups while being consistent with our democratic society. The New Media Lab, to be born in the next decade, opened up further possibilities for the exploration of these as well as the technological and artistic issues that formed so much of its backdrop. These social, physical and media frameworks “should comprise the complex scaffolding of thought and action for those who would participate in society…” (Frameworks, p.5, Plan 1980) 4 Research in the school became much more active, with the appointment of John Habraken as Head of the Department of Architecture and the introduction of the PhD program in Art, Architecture and Environmental Studies both in 1975, and with the addition of the faculty in Urban Studies and Planning into many areas bordering on the social sciences and the augmentation of the PhD program. Planning for the new Media Lab required engaging faculty not traditionally associated with a school of architecture and planning, and now seeing their research agendas as part of the school’s enlarged scope and transformed role. What of the individual creativity of the designer and the detached standing of the professional in the light of these social and technological changes of the 70’s? I close with a quote from the last paragraph of my introduction to Plan 1980: The resolution of the issue of creativity in this instance resides, as it always has, in the delicate balance between freedom and the limits of human action. Personal creative validity must not depend on control of the collective decision-making process. The frameworks I describe are boundary conditions and conceptual objects in the landscape, which, once negotiated, become the references for subsequent individual and professional actions. This collaboration implies new types of professional practice, teaching, and research to be explored in the coming decades. (Frameworks, p. 5, Plan 1980)
4 Plan 1980, Perspectives on Two Decades, Plan Number 11, School of Architecture and Planning, MIT. Ed. Jeffrey L. Cruikshank
11