Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Selected Reviews
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Ian Bentley, Alan Alcock, Paul Murrain, Sue McGlynn, & Graham Smith, 1985. Responsive Environments: A Manual for Designers. London: The Architectural Press. |
Reviewed by David Seamon
Paul Murrain, one of the authors of this innovative workbook in urban design, was a keynote speaker at the 1990 Environmental Design Research Association meetings at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. In his talk, Murrain emphasized the need for environment-behavior researchers to incorporate social, economic, and aesthetic demands in regard to urban design. Responsive Environments, which he wrote with colleagues at the Joint Center for Urban Design at England's Oxford Polytechnic Institute, presents a practical effort to provide such a holistic vision for the city. The authors, all designers, seek to integrate behavioral, economic, social and aesthetic needs in regard to particular people in particular places.
To hold in sight and reconcile these many, often conflicting, dimensions of place, the authors provide a set of practical design guidelines that contribute to responsive environments‑-i.e., places that provide their users "with an essentially democratic setting, enriching their opportunities by maximizing the degree of choice available to them" (p. 9).
The authors argue that, design-wise, a physical environment can affect this degree of choice in terms of seven qualities of the built and human environment: (1) permeability, (2) variety, (3) legibility, (4) robustness, (5) richness, (6) visual appropriateness, and (7) personalization. To each of these seven qualities, the authors devote a chapter comprised of two parts: First, a discussion of how, through the physical environment, the particular quality contributes to choice; and, second, a set of field work and design-conception sheets that describe practical ways for designers to support the quality through environmental design.
Permeability relates to the way that a design affects where people can go and cannot go within a city district. The authors insist that the urban designer must always consider permeability first because it involves pedestrian and vehicle circulation within the city district as a whole. The greater the number of alternative routes through an environment, the greater people's freedom of movement and, therefore, the greater the responsiveness of that place. In the two layouts in the figure below, for example, the large-block pattern on the left offers only three alternative routes between A and B, while the small-block layout on the right offers nine different routes.
Variety, the second quality of a responsive environment, refers to the range of uses that a place provides, for example, housing, shopping, employment, recreation, and so forth. Easily accessible places are of little use if their choice of experiences is limited. The authors' aim is to maximize the variety of uses for a given project by, first, demonstrating how one can assess the level of demands for various uses and, then, determining the widest mix of uses feasible economically and functionally.
The third element of a responsive environment is legibility, which relates to the ease with which people can understand the spatial layout of a place. Drawing largely on Kevin Lynch's Image of The City (1961), the authors provide practical ways whereby the designer can determine and enhance the perceptual clarity of the paths, landmarks, boundaries, and so forth that have emerged through consideration of permeability and variety.
Permeability, variety, and legibility all refer to larger-scale physical elements that contribute to the urban district's overall spatial order and sense of place. The authors next move to the scale of individual buildings and groups of buildings. Important here is robustness, which describes buildings and outdoor spaces the design of which does not limit users to a single fixed use but, rather, supports many different purposes and activities. To design for robustness is "to make...spatial and constructional organization suitable for the widest possible range of likely activities and future uses, both in the short and long term" (p. 10).
Once the general appearance of individual built elements is tentatively decided, one next considers visual appropriateness‑-the way in which the design physically can make people aware of the choices the place provides. A crucial design consideration here is the development of visual cues that express directly the levels of choice already provided by the first four qualities. In other words, the authors believe that a city hall should look like a governmental building or that a row of walk-up flats should look like homes.
The authors' last two qualities focus on details of buildings and open spaces: richness involves ways to increase the choice of sense experience that users can enjoy (experiences of touch, sound, light, and so forth) while personalization refers to designs that encourage people to put their own mark on the places where they live and work. In the last chapter of the book, the authors demonstrate the practical value of the seven-step approach by presenting their design for a large inner-city development in Reading, England.
COMMENTARY
One way in which Responsive Environments contributes to a qualitative, descriptive approach to environmental experience and design is the authors' definition of environmental success on the basis of human choice. This perspective is valuable because it provides a way to speak of the physical world as an active contributor to the quality of human life. The authors suggest that modernist architects like Le Corbusier and Gropius, even though they held high social and political ideals, often failed to create vital places because they did not understand how the physical environment helped sustain human life and community:
The tragedy of modern design ...is that designers never made a concerted effort to work out the form implications of their social and political ideals. Indeed, the very strength of their commitment to these ideals seems to have led designers to feel that a concentration on form itself was somehow superficial. Form, they felt, ought to be the by-product of progressive social and political attitudes. But in adopting this stance..., designers failed to realize that the humanmade environment is a political system in its own right: try walking through a wall, and you'll notice that it is the physical fabric, as well as the way it is managed, that sets constraints on what you can and can't do. Multiplied to the scale of a building or‑-crucially‑-a city, this is indeed a political matter (p. 9).
The authors of Responsive Environments are by no means the first designers to emphasize the built environment as an integral contributor to human life. What is innovative about their work is their effort to present a conceptual framework in applied form that might actually foster this place-people intimacy. To counter the criticism that their approach is constrictive and arbitrary, the authors emphasize that they provide a creative process for place design rather than a predefined recipe: "ideas are intended as springboards for design, not as straight-jackets on the designers imagination" (p. 11).
In fact, the actual designs presented in the book, including the master plan for the Reading project, seem somewhat contrived economically and socially, and the aesthetic impact is, overall, lackluster. In spite of these shortcomings, however, the book is an important contribution to design as place making. Presently, what are needed are provocative experiments that seek reconciliation between the many difficult opposites that architects, designers, and planners face. Responsive Environments is one such experiment and, the authors are to be thanked for a brave effort to reconcile theory and practice.
In an urban-design studio or an environment-behavior seminar, one can imagine that the instructor might assign a design problem that students explore, first, through the approach of Responsive Environments and, then, through other urban-design models‑-for example, Christopher Alexander's New Theory of Urban Design (1987), Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Oscar Newman's Community of Interest (1980), and so forth. Each conceptual approach would provide students with yet another vision whereby to foster urban place making. The resulting range of awareness, especially in terms of similarities and contrasts, should help students become more flexible, both in terms of programming and designing. Books like Responsive Environments help widen students' base of understanding and envisioning. In turn, this expanded base might move students' design work in directions that would be out of sight otherwise.
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