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Book Review

Reviewed by Dan Willis

The Culture of Building

by Howard Davis
New York: Oxford University Press, 2006

Although I could not find a reason explicitly stated on the publisher’s website, I would like to think that there is a purpose behind Oxford University Press’s decision to reprint Howard Davis’s The Culture of Building (originally published in 2000) in paperback. No matter. I am happy to supply my own. Davis’s dense and lengthy tome (325 pages of text and 41 of notes and bibliography) ought to be required reading for all the architecture firms rushing headlong into Building Information Modeling (BIM) without thinking carefully about the impact it is likely to have on architectural and construction practices. It should also be mandatory for architecture students and faculty who, looking for ways to use digital technologies that excel at depicting shapes and generating infinite geometric variations, have resurrected reductive formalistic tools such as “shape grammars.”

It is not that Professor Davis’s book engages these topics directly. Instead, The Culture of Building puts forth a detailed argument that places architects — along with developers, financiers, engineers, clients, builders, regulatory bodies, neighborhood organizations, material suppliers, insurance companies, and many others — within a mutually dependent and ever-changing subculture. In Davis’s carefully crafted reflections, not only are architects subject to the influence of the other members of the building subculture, the subculture itself is always reacting to shifts in our broader culture. Davis’s observation that “architectural history has tended not to see buildings as the result of such processes” could be applied to many articles being written today about architectural practice. In a similar way, most histories of industrialization have not portrayed buildings “as artifacts with symbolic, cultural meaning, as opposed to objects of production, exchange, and profit” (12).

Davis's dense and lengthy tome ought to be required reading for all the architecture firms rushing headlong into Building Information Modeling (BIM) without thinking carefully about the impact it is likely to have on architectural and construction practices.

Davis teaches architecture at the University of Oregon. Like his Oregon colleagues Edward Allen and Christine Theodoropoulos, Davis rejects the idea that architectural form can be understood in isolation. For Allen, the most important influences on architecture are the techniques and materials of construction. The connection between building technology and design — also a recurrent but by no means dominant theme in Davis’s book — appears to be a founding principle in what might be called the “Oregon School” of architectural thought. From the department’s website, we read: “For more than three decades, the Department . . . has been in the forefront of teaching the integration of architectural design with building technology. This integration has been facilitated by our policy of having all faculty teach both design studios and subject courses. While most of our graduates are recognized as having a strong ability to combine design and technical issues in the process of building, perhaps the best measure of our success is the large number of our alumni who are currently teaching both design and technical subjects at universities world-wide.”

In addition to operating in an academic milieu that reinforces the notion that architecture exists in a cultural continuum, Davis acknowledges Christopher Alexander, with whom he wrote The Production of Houses (1985), as a mentor. Davis adopts Alexander’s idea of “patterns” and archetypes as a way to describe and categorize the imprints culture leaves on architectural form. This leads me to my first criticism of Davis’s argument: It leans heavily on an ill-defined amalgam of typological theories without bothering to explain why “building types” are anything more than cultural conventions. A prominent strain of thinking in the discourse on building types is abstract and reductive. Alexander, in Davis’s characterization, “stressed archetypal relationships that cut across history and culture” (10). To my thinking, it undermines Davis’s larger argument for an inextricable link between architecture and culture if any aspect of architectural form-making transcends local culture. It is difficult to square Davis’s support for place-bound, regional solutions to architectural design with the supposed universality of building types. What Davis calls “type” is a manifestation of building culture, not an a priori cause of it. Davis seems to recognize this too, when late in the book he observes, “For continuity of type to have validity, it must be accompanied by continuity of the social reasons for which type existed in the first place” (279).

In Davis's carefully crafted reflections, not only are architects subject to the influence of the other members of the building subculture, the subculture itself is always reacting to shifts in our broader culture.

Other aspects of Davis’s book strike me either as inconsistencies or missed opportunities to engage directly with architectural and cultural theorists who could support its general thesis. For one thing, Davis, an expert on vernacular architecture, several times makes the claim that no clear distinction is possible between architecture and building, or between vernacular and non-vernacular buildings. While I agree that no simple formal distinctions can establish such a difference, distinctions about process can be made. Following the writings of Ivan Illich, I believe that we can tell vernacular from industrial production by focusing on the difference between vernacular methods and industrial techniques. In vernacular production, no attempt is made to find the “best way” to accomplish a particular task, nor are builders trying to achieve any abstract ideal. (As Davis puts it, “No two buildings are exactly the same.”) Vernacular building methods may be precise and even ingenious, but they are never dedicated solely to efficiency or an idealized end result. In a similar vein, when Davis proposes a “modern view of craftsmanship” (Chapter 10), he mostly neglects the element of risk, which was the central principle in the best exploration of craft I know, David Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968).

Even given its length and considerable scope, there are places in The Culture of Building where I wish Davis had elaborated his points. On page 90, he dispenses with building rituals — a vitally important component of preindustrial building cultures — with a single paragraph on the construction of Shinto shrines in Ise, Japan. Davis also limits his explanation of the social and cultural benefits of site-constructed buildings, where the contractor’s employees become temporary members of a community, to less than a page (178). When Davis criticizes the architectural profession’s obsession with image (122), and when he mentions how the various institutions that control aspects of building culture have led to the fragmentation of that culture, he could use the theoretical backup of scholars like Dalibor Vesely. In Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, Vesely shows how the choices architects make about how to represent their designs led to the professional emphasis on difference and novelty, and this, in turn, “not only to results of questionable merit but also to isolation from the world that we all, in one way or another, share.”1

Davis does address the changing role of architectural drawings as contract documents (184 – 185) and suggests that the architect’s craftwork is the making of drawings. But since most of Davis’s book is devoted to post-Enlightenment examples of building culture, I expected some further recognition of the inverted way we “moderns,” in comparison to our pre-Enlightenment predecessors, use drawings to produce buildings. To the medieval mason, architectural drawings were understood to be approximations of an only partly knowable future reality — the building. In contrast we have come to consider architectural drawings (or Building Information Models) as the ideal, and the constructed building as an approximation of that ideal. For most architects, buildings have become representations of drawings. Much of the tension that exists between architects and builders revolves around this change. Architects are rarely satisfied with buildings that deviate from their drawings, while builders can’t understand how architects can draw things that are impossible to build. This is also the underlying reason why most contemporary architects do not recognize “constraints on form imposed by craft” (233).

To my thinking, it undermines Davis's larger argument for the inextricable link between architecture and culture if any aspect of architectural form-making transcends local culture.

Of course any reviewer can critique the chosen boundaries of an author’s study. Within the area Davis has elected to address, The Culture of Building is extremely detailed and well researched. His writing is most engaging when he stops being descriptive and begins to champion a cause. He writes, “The fragmentation between source of investment, place of construction / manufacture, and place of ultimate use is devastating to the quality of the built world. This is true not only for manufactured housing but also for buildings where little of value comes from the local place” (178). Yet these pronouncements, which appear throughout his text, tend to lack theoretical rigor and therefore the reader will encounter qualifiers and backtracking shortly after a strong declarative statement is made. Davis is not naive, and he tends to recognize when his rhetoric has outstripped his theory. In this particular example Davis a page later qualifies his stance, observing that the “development of modern insulation materials, engineered wood members, efficient heating systems, and many other parts of a modern building depend on the ability of large companies to produce and market individual technical innovations on a large scale” (179). This is the conundrum of industrialized building: A connection to a specific place and culture is lost, but safer, more efficient, more affordable buildings may be gained.

In his conclusion, Davis argues that all of the “Two billion buildings in the world, and those still to be built . . . are important in fundamental ways, intertwined with our lives and communities — so much so that it often becomes difficult to understand the changes that have taken place in the connection between buildings and the cultures that make them” (325). The difficulty to which Davis refers underscores the enormity of the task he sets for himself in his Introduction. Davis attempts to provide us with “a general framework of thought in which all of these things [architectural styles, the prices of building materials, how the craft economy was replaced by modern manufacturing, etc.] are related — a framework in which the process of building production [his emphasis] as a whole is understood in terms of the various components that make it up” (4). I’d estimate that he is only about half successful in satisfying his own expectation, while I would add that his limited success is nevertheless an admirable achievement.

The Culture of Building is simultaneously detailed and theoretically imprecise. It presents its readers with enough specific examples to both test and illustrate a general theoretical framework on this subject. What it doesn’t provide is the framework itself. To do so would have required Davis to offer a metatheory encompassing industrialization and globalization, the relationship between architecture and technology, between capitalism and culture — all the while tying these to the more familiar architectural debates over typology, regionalism, and the uses of representation. He’d also have to give us a clear prescription for creating a “healthy building culture,” something he repeatedly advocates but never fully specifies.

We have come to consider architectural drawings (or Builduing Information Models) as the ideal, and the constructed building as an approximation of that ideal. For most architects, buildings have become representations of drawings. Much of the tension that exists between architects and builders revolves around this change.

Davis’s strength is as a critic and observer rather than a theoretician. He is excellent at teasing out the unforeseen and still unrecognized effects of building conventions that others rarely notice. For example, he points out that the lump sum construction contracts in the late 19th-century English and contemporary American construction industry are the root cause of much of the conflicts between the contractor and the client and the contractor and the architect. It is this convention of our building culture that fuels the need for extremely precise drawings, specifications, and contract language. Davis details the history of the loss of cultural agreement over what the word good means. A 1668 contract calls for “Good sound and well seasoned Timber Boards.” By the mid-1700s, “such adjectives are eliminated and replaced with quantitative descriptions or with qualitative descriptions that go into considerably more detail” (187 – 188). Later he points out that our modern conventions of writing contracts, codes, and regulations, in which the intent of the provision is not stated, can result in fallacious interpretations of the regulations: “Abstract rules either act as roadblocks to decisions based on reasonable discretion or are used for purposes other than those for which they are intended” (214). Here Davis is thinking of the misuse of zoning “to restrict social and economic diversity,” and cites the case Southern Burlington County NAACP vs. Township of Mt. Laurel in his endnotes as an example.

At another point, Davis makes an astute observation regarding contemporary buildings that are convenient and familiar but difficult to love. In order to illustrate what it means to have a strong cultural connection between buildings and people, he begins with a description of this sort of tight fit in vernacular architecture. “The characteristic of vernacular architecture that has been most thoroughly described is the close fit between buildings and human life — so close that it may become almost impossible to talk about one without reference to the other” (154). Davis then contrasts this “close fit” to mere familiarity. We are familiar with and somewhat dependent on our contemporary shopping malls and convenience stores. “This familiarity, however, is not the same as deep feeling. Consider . . . the convenience store attached to a gas station. . . . To many people who are on the road every day, these places are useful, familiar, and expected. If they disappeared suddenly, we would miss them. But we would not remember them wistfully; we would not see ‘a part of our past’ disappear as we do when our childhood home is torn down for a new development. Most people’s relationship to these places is functional rather than emotional” (155).

Davis's strength is as a critic and observer rather than a theoretician. He is excellent at teasing out the unforseen and still unrecognized effects of building conventions that others rarely notice.

In an effort to give his long book a narrative structure, Davis divides his text into three major parts: The first two are more descriptive, and the last, “Transforming Modern Building Cultures,” advocates change. This last part is particularly valuable because of the many examples Davis provides of practices that deviate from our cultural norms in ways that contribute to a “healthy building culture.” His examples range from the design-build projects of Christopher Alexander to Japanese construction practices. He describes the revival of many low-tech building methods, such as thatched roofs in England. Architects from around the globe are presented, including Michael Pyatok, Avi Friedman, Greg Burgess, Patricia and John Patkau, Feilden Clegg Bradley Architects, and Team ZOO. Architects with notable regional practices, such as O’Neil Ford and Edwin Lundie, are also mentioned. Particular examples of “healthy” building cultures are presented, including those of downtown Portland, Danish row houses and Charleston single houses, and community-built projects in India and New Guinea.

Davis leaves it to us to discern what qualities make each of these disparate places “healthy” beyond perhaps the notion that they are to varying degrees “pockets of resistance” to the dominant practices of a capitalistic, technological society. This interpretation harkens back to Davis’s Introduction, where he writes, “One of the purposes of this book is to give legitimacy to contemporary efforts [of resistance] by anchoring them in the building culture as a whole and by showing that they are compatible with processes that have taken place throughout history” (21). Davis goes beyond superficial appreciation of these countercultural projects, places, and processes, delving into such intricacies as the ways the projects have been financed. Of particular interest is his explanation of community-based banking in Bangladesh, where social capital is intertwined with financial capital. Describing this form of banking, he writes, “Loans are made to women who belong to groups, for individual projects such as the start-up of a small business, and the group as a whole is responsible for ensuring that the individual repays the loan. . . . Social pressure . . . guarantees the repayment of individual loans” (310).

It is amusing and dangerous for a reader to attempt to discern an author’s political leanings from a single scholarly writing. I have Professor Davis pegged as a compassionate (cultural) conservative. This supposition is based on his defense of contemporary classicism (274), his embrace of Leon Krier (275 – 276), and his relatively uncritical stance toward New Urbanism (279). At another point in his book, Davis names the architecture programs at Notre Dame and the University of Miami as “hopeful initiatives” in architectural education. In one of his livelier chapters — surprisingly, given that its focus is on codes and other forms of regulation — Davis shows a libertarian streak, as he gets his dander up on the subject of overly restrictive building codes that assume almost no responsibility on the part of building users: “For example, a series of articles in The Building Official and Code Administrator describes the need for smaller widths of [stair] guard-rail openings. These articles are accompanied by extensive statistics and reports of accidents and court cases. In one of these articles, the author states, ‘The ideal design is, of course, a solid, smooth guard with no openings or projections upon which children can climb or be injured during a fall against the railing itself.’ That opening is indeed ideal, assuming no responsibility on the part of children or their parents” (217).

The Culture of Building also has a homespun quality I found endearing. The author took most of its numerous photographs, including one of his living room / study. Many of the drawings and diagrams are by him also. Davis is obviously well traveled; he has been to nearly all of the far-flung places he describes. One gets the sense that he has been preparing to write this book for a long time. I also surmise that his publisher viewed The Culture of Building as a book that might become required reading in architectural schools. (It is not a book that lends itself to being read by architects — or anyone — on airplanes.) This helps to explain its length and level of detail. It took me the equivalent of one semester to read it carefully, and I suspect that my students would react to it best if it were presented to them a chapter at a time.

Even though aspects of The Culture of Building struck me as inconsistent or underdeveloped, Davis’s main thesis easily survives these lapses. That thesis, which is summarized in the statement below, is an extremely important one for the present moment in which architectural schools and practices are abandoning theory and critical thought to pursue efficient production. This is why the reissuing of Davis’s text in a more affordable form is so welcome.

In a healthy building culture, buildings of meaning and value are being made by people who are themselves improving their lives through making those buildings. The various parts of the culture reinforce each other and make it stronger, its customs and rules are understandable and make sense, and the culture’s stability and its ability to change according to new conditions are in balance.(13)

Dan Willis, is Professor of Architecture and Architecture Department Head at Penn State University; author of The Emerald City: And Other Essays on the Architectural Imagination.

Note
1. Dalibor Veseley, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 12.