Automatic construction.

02 Feb, 2025

There may be a building building itself to life built incidentally, creating built environment expressant various genii: populi, tempi, loci; that would, if it were, be formed efficient at the centre of its formation, inevitable outcome of the transformatory energy that's incidental to all life and locally spent, ideal product of ideal process of ongoing built-environmental formation as response to and result of all acts of all lives lived and living within and around it.

Such an ideal will be too as all the other ideals are, abstractions and imperfect even in the imagining. Grim grave reality fast attends all acts of construction, and reality of the type that manifests physical proof of itself, in the present reality a reality as close as could be to a sort of ideal most beneficial to a particular type of sponsor-profiteer - a technocratic ideal of expertise strident and aloof, a mean bureaucratic one of boxes ticked and no more, a capitalistic one acquisitory and selfish wherein benefits are by design to flow to a few. Imperfection in this reality is only ever fault but perfection its own enemy. Imperfection in our abstract alternative is feature and aim, an imperfection with room and opportunity for refinement, correction and character.

Some believe in something called the clockwork universe, cosmic apparatus encompassing all things, brought into being by some creator, left alone to tick along in perpetuity to the limits imposed by its own inviolable internal rules: thermodynamic, physic, and so forth. Such grand construction containing infinite automatic constructions, there as belief, is here as mere metaphor and no less for it; heaven to the earthly is never more than a notion and no less again for that.

Alike in pursuit of an ideal, Ebenezer Howard wrote once of a 'minimum of organisation that would secure the benefits of planning while leaving to individuals the greatest possible control over their own lives'. For our age and ends would we further to Howard allow for those benefits to include for the satisfaction of some standards of which more later, for the implementation of design to be synonymous with organisation, for everything within and all together to represent the scope, limit and end of professional input.

The entirely automatic built environment left alone will meet the standards it sets for itself, never those with regulatory heft, never any without a steer.

The entirely automatic built environment might seem to call for unlimited distribution of agency, but without some appropriate internal rules or governing patterns pits all agents against each other, with all freedoms limited by all the others.

The automatic is of course always contingent, those contingencies internal and external, and our ideal automatic may well fundamentally be in the negotiation and absorption of contingency.

Ebenezer's and our minimum of organisation may be the entirely bespoke, or may instead be the general application of a pattern. There would surely be some barest minimum of the bespoke, at the very least to adjust any standard solution to a local condition. There would surely be some minimum of pattern too, without which any intellectual or professional ground a designer could ever stand on would be rather shaky, any established theory or standard practice useless to them.

This does of course assume professional input, and in our techno-bureaucratic age it cannot, absent revolutionary upheaval, be otherwise.

Qualitative considerations are reserved, for while professionalism proposes consistency of standards, professional quality is variable.

Howard above could be read to suggest that individual freedom and organisational planning bear inverse relationship: in the greater measure of one is the lesser of the other. It need not be so though and it might well be otherwise - the most rigorous of organisation can seem effortless, and the most rigorous of organisation may bring to the greatest number the greatest measure of freedom. This most rigorous of organisation may be such as to seem none at all, such as to seem the native state. Maximum organisation might seem rather minimal, and minimum organisation may well seem rather maximal. Well-organised or ill may well be to that same respective effect, seeming in either case as minimum or maximum, help or hindrance.

It isn't necessarily then in the minimum of organisation that the good balance of order and agency is found, but rather in the quality and character of it. It is in organisational tolerance and forbearance, in the knowledge, judgement and humility to leave decisions unmade until the appropriate agent be ready to make and act on them, and to allow the appropriate space for the same. It is in organisational resolution that resolves the necessary and no more, but that resolves the necessary unequivocally.

In standard constructional contractual arrangements, the complete implementation of this appropriate measure of organisation will, and must for broader purposes of commerce, concept, legality, narrative & propriety, bring us up to and over that liminal line called 'practical completion'. There is in any appropriate measure of organisation a deal of design work required to obviate to the greatest extent any pre-PC construction work beyond that needed to meet all regulatory or qualitative standards in order to avail of the advantages offered by that appropriate organisation.

To achieve the greatest measure of post-PC freedom for the future occupant, there would seem some easy gains to be made from excluding some of the standard elements from the scope of professional influence.

There would perhaps seem such wins to be made from excluding all of those standards without regulatory requirements attached.

Of course no designer with any measure of training or experience could approach a design problem without bringing with them some preconceived standards beyond the regulatory.

Market standards have the importance one is willing to give them, and that rather more than they generally deserve, manifest most often in supply side 'features' more appropriate to consumer products and with the built-in obsolescence that attends. An impulse to satisfy some assumed profile of a market shopper will offer the worst of all worlds, hardly likely to meet the desire of the profile, much more to miss by miles the needs of the most and flatten to a non-descript grey our entire shared environment.

Aesthetic standards are arguable, the chief argument being whether they could ever be considered objectively met or reasonably imposed. Some impulse towards imposition of the aesthetically neutral might seem the appropriate approach for the designer, sponsor or regulator who can't quite let go, but no such imposed aesthetic standard could ever be remotely neutral. The aggressive dullness of a perceived neutrality is its own particular kind of violence, and that with its own self-sustenance built in truly detestable. The architect will tend to build to the aesthetic standard held by the project sponsor, the planning authority, the general fashion, and, should there be any room left for it, their own.

Regulatory standards alone are an onerous load indeed, carrying with them notionally absolute legal force (notional because negotiable to those with the means, there being of course those bound but not protected and those protected but not bound), and often almost absolute moral force along with it. Planning and the broader building control regime are necessary to meet the minimum standards that have resulted from the centuries-old and ongoing development of building regulation. This regulation has often taken shape in response to events often tragic and painful, caused sometimes by omission, sometimes by the unforeseen, sometimes by accident, sometimes by negligence. All of the preceding, should it need to be said, would absolutely not be to condone or propose any deregulatory impulse or approach; rather, it would be to bring to bear that 'minimum of organisation' of Howard's required to ensure regulatory compliance (and the benefits thereof) while still allowing that greatest possible measure of devolved control, not simply to the letter of the regulation but also and above all to the spirit.

So then, having followed some formula arising from the foregoing and brought into being this building, with such attendant rigorous organisation as required by the aim and the age, could we still present it as 'automatic' in any way? With reality having manifested itself so fully even in the ideal, and along with it the all-pervading regulatory regime of the age, what can be left of such an idea as automatic construction, what room left for the actions of the autonomous agent?

Well the right answers, with the right questions, are positives and infinity, and with the wrong ones or none some stripe of status quo.