Coffer, originally uploaded by plemeljr
In Bryan Boyer’s essay Matter Battle! (prodded by Urbanscale) he talks about the struggle between ideas and physical matter:
Most of the time it will be too expensive to fully predict the behavior of matter or the full extent of actions which will be required to execute your desires upon matter. This explains the difference in tolerance between industrial activities, such as product-making which relies on repetitive processes, and more singular activities such as building a building. Unless one has the time and money to fixate on material decisions there will be some flying by the seat of one’s pants. In certain complex piles of Matter these ad-hoc decisions may compound to produce undesirable effects.
This is exactly why we prototype, prototype, prototype at IDEO using an iterative process at full scale to test our ideas. While architects continually produce models – both physical and digital – I’ve found that full scale prototyping of the space is magnitudes more enlightening. From using rough foamcore walls to define space to using regular office furniture to role-play service scenarios.
You can’t underestimate the value to working at full scale when you are designing at full scale.
While this is true for “one off” nature of buildings, but is hugely valuable for any project which has a great initial cost, is repetitive, or rolls out to multiple locations. Look at what Apple did for their retail stores: they rented a warehouse and created an full scale Apple Store mockup:
“One of the best pieces of advice Mickey ever gave us was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work,” says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product. Apple Store Version 0.0 took shape in a warehouse near the Apple campus. “Ron and I had a store all designed,” says Jobs, when they were stopped by an insight: The computer was evolving from a simple productivity tool to a “hub” for video, photography, music, information, and so forth. The sale, then, was less about the machine than what you could do with it. But looking at their store, they winced. The hardware was laid out by product category – in other words, by how the company was organized internally, not by how a customer might actually want to buy things. “We were like, ‘Oh, God, we’re screwed!'” says Jobs.
But they weren’t screwed; they were in a mockup. “So we redesigned it,” he says. “And it cost us, I don’t know, six, nine months. But it was the right decision by a million miles.” When the first store finally opened, in Tysons Corner, Va., only a quarter of it was about product. The rest was arranged around interests: along the right wall, photos, videos, kids; on the left, problems. A third area – the Genius Bar in the back – was Johnson’s brainstorm.
Communication Breakdown
I have found that times where I’ve lost the Matter Battle is when we were trying something new or we weren’t communicating well to the builders. While full scale prototyping will improve your design and help diminish matter battle issues (especially at those tricky details), because we build at human scale, there is a ton of documentation we have to do to get anything built. I suppose the whole BIM movement is attempting to solve this problem.
But this is really an issue of time: we live in a tension of “trying new cool stuff” and “let’s detail this out nicely” all within tight budgets and deadlines. I don’t want to tell my fellow professionals how to run their firms, but when I hear of friends working on weekends to produce a drawing set for an alternate building scheme which will be submitted only to be amended back to its current state at a later date I think about how much waste that is.
While Matter Battle is real, designers and architects can prevail by better using their time as spatial specialists to solve the problem and better communicate the solution.
