The Design Necessity A Casebook of Federally Initiated Projects in Visual Communications Interiors and Industrial Design Architecture Landscaped Environment L. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013 http://archive.org/details/designnecessitycOOcher The Design Necessity A Casebook Visual Communications Interiors and Architecture Landscaped Environment of Federally Initiated Industrial Design Projects in Ivan Chermayeff Prepared for the Published by The MIT Press Copyright © 1 973 by All rights reserved. No part Richard Saul Wurman First Federal Design Assembly Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Massachusetts Institute of this book may be reproduced Ralph Caplan sponsored by the and London, England of Technology in any form or by any means, Peter Bradford Federal Council on the Arts • electronic or mechanical. With and the Humanities Library of Congress including photocopying, recording, Jane Clark under a grant from the catalog card number; 73-2022 or by any information storage . National Endowment for the Arts ISBN: 0-262-03047-0 (hardcover) and retrieval system, ISBN: 0-262-53026-0 (paperback) without permission in wnting from the publisher. Preface What follows is a book-long defi- nition of the design necessity. Initiated and produced for an As- sembly directed toward Federal administrators, the book seeks to provide a definition of design for designers as well. The First Fed- eral Design Assembly was not cre- ated as an end in itself but as a beginning — a vehicle for dissem- inating the ideas that led to its creation in the first place. This book is not the result of an honor awards search. The projects in it were chosen to illuminate spe- cific points in the development of our design definition. These points appear in the theme statement on page 4 and in "scan level" copy at the top of every page of text, an arrangement intended to make the book conform to the design per- formance criteria discussed in it. In gathering material we learned a lot about the state of Federal de- sign. Although many of the designs shown here are truly first-rate and gratifying, we are of course not uniformly satisfied with the exam- ples selected. The obvious thin- ness of certain areas is grounds for immediate design concern. A great many people helped in compiling the material that makes up this book. Our thanks to them appears in the form of the full proj- ect credits at the end of the vol- ume. But three persons in particu- lar deserve special mention here. Lani Lattin, Executive Secretary, Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, and Bill N. Lacy, Di- rector, Architecture + Environ- mental Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, were creative and con- structive critics during the months Ttie Design Necessity was in prep- aration. Jane Clark, who re- searched the book, performed with diligence and imagination and un- failing good humor. Beginnings are at once difficult and exciting. Ivan Chermayeff Richard Saul Wurman Ralph Caplan Peter Bradford Washington, D.C., 2 April 1973 Contents Visual Communications Interiors and Industrial Design Architecture Landscaped Environment Theme Statement ot the First Design Assembly Introduction: The Design Necessity" National Park Service Minitolders Graphics Programs for the Internal Revenue Service "Teaching Taxes" program 16 Recruiting Brochures 18 Graphics Standards Manuals United States Postal Service Design Control Guidelines 20 USIA Design Manual 21 'Atoms at Work" an Atomic Energy Commission exhibition 22 The Acorn School 28 Space Planning and Interior Design Study for the Opera- tions Control Center Building for the Washington Metro- politan Area Transit Authority 32 Laboratory Outfitting for The Salk Institute for Biological Studies 34 'Interior Design in Manned Spacecraft or Space Sta- tions," National Space and Aeronautics Administration, Literature Search #20724 36 Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit System 38 Student Housing, State University College at Brockport, N. Y. St. Francis Square Housing Project Grand Coulee Third Power Plant 42 44 Everett McKinley Dirksen Building 48 Old Buildings Restored The National Collection of Fine Arts and The National Portrait Gallery 50 Old St. Louis Post Office 50 Renwick Gallery 51 Dulles International Airport 52 Dallas Urban Design Pro- grams and Strategies 64 Spaces for Recreation The Court of Ideas 68 Tyson Park 68 Harlem River Bronx State Park 69 "State of Hawaii Land Use Districts and Regulations Review" 70 Portland Auditorium Forecourt Fountain 74 58 \ Credits and Acknowledgments 78 Theme Statement The First Federal Design Assembly was devoted to an examination ot "the design necessity." The Assembly program dis- cussed the necessity of design in visual communications, in interiors and industrial design, in architec- ture, and in the landscaped envi- ronment. Design was considered as an instrument of organization, a medium for persuasion, a means of relating objects to people, a method for improving safety and efficiency, and a way of coping with the complexity of contempo- rary Federal agency assignments. The Assembly's emphasis, then, was on design performance in re- sponse to human needs. Moreover, the emphasis was on demonstrable design performance. The Assembly program, the book called The Design Necessity, an exhibit and a short film all docu- ment the following points. 1. That there are sound, proven criteria to be applied in judging de- sign effectiveness. 2. That design is an urgent re- quirement, not a cosmetic addition. 3. That design can save money. 4. That design can save time. 5. That design enhances com- munication between people. 6. That design simplifies use, simplifies manufacture, simplifies maintenance. 7. That the design necessity is recognizably present in projects ranging in scale and complexity from a postage stamp to a national highway system. 8. That the absence of design is a hazardous kind of design. Not to design is to suffer the costly consequences of design by default. 9. That, on any given project, designers and Government officials are committed to the same basic goal: performance. 10. That effective design of pub- lic services is itself an essential public service. Criteria for the design necessity are illustrated, in both the book and the exhibit, by case studies of Federally sponsored projects that work because they were designed to work. The case studies deal with significant aspects of design not visible on the surface, and discuss how problems were solved. The aim of the First Federal De- sign Assembly was to present a clear and compelling view of de- sign as a process. For in Govern- ment today that process is crucial. Introduction 1. There are sound, proven criteria for judging design effectiveness. Design is necessary because it serves human needs. That is its only excuse for being. As human needs have become more compli- cated, and human beings more numerous, the design necessity has become more intense. Nowhere is design more neces- sary than in the Federal Govern- ment, the nation's largest client for design in visual communications, interiors, industrial design, archi- tecture, and in the landscaped environment. Yet Federal design, like corpo- rate design of 20 years ago, is often mistaken as a luxury. There are easily understood reasons for this misconception. A responsible government has to defend what- ever it does on all fronts, and the handiest defense is quantification. It is easy to suppose that we can- not afford what we cannot measure. Easy but invalid. Some design achievement — more than one might think — can be measured; but even where it cannot be, the results of design are measurable. And so are the results of nondesign, which is indefensible. Nondesign is truly what we cannot afford. In the fifties the architect Richard Neutra wrote a book called Sur- vival by Design. It was a stimulating book and became a popular one; but the title was even more popular than the book, perhaps because it seemed so highly innovative. The idea of design as a means of sur- vival was surprising to many. Yet everything that is made by men to serve human needs has to be designed. When we refer to the architect of a foreign policy pro- gram or the designer of a scientific experiment, we acknowledge that programs and experiments are as designed as are buildings, posters, and traffic circles. Design itself is often what sur- vives. And design is in large meas- ure what civilizations and their gov- ernments are remembered by: how the public buildings looked and how the ruins look, what the sol- diers wore, the shape of their weapons, the flags and banners. As a visual image The Spirit of 76 carries meaning to Americans who have never read the Declaration of -^"^ Independence and even more meaning to those who have. To think of Washington, D.C., is to think of the Jefferson, Washing- ton, and Lincoln memorial monu- ments and of the Capitol dome. But those are appearances, and the appearance of things is not to be trusted wholly. Yet we all know that appearances matter nonethe- less. The aim of design is to bring form and performance into corre- spondence, not to substitute one for the other. The way things look is not irrelevant to the way things work: liow tliey work is how they should look. Looking right does not neces- sarily cost more than looking wrong. After all, everything has to have some look. All other things being equal, beauty and ugliness carry the same price tag. But this is not a book about beauty, although there are many handsome designs in it. Neither is this a collection of "best designs." It is a collection of designs exe- cuted for the Federal Government (either directly or with major Fed- eral funding) and included here on the basis of performance. The designs in this book have not been assembled for any honor- ific purpose, as in an awards pro- gram. Effective institutional design is rare enough to merit recogni- tion; and awards programs, such as the General Services Adminis- tration's and the Department of Housing and Urban Develop- ment's, have their place. We have a different purpose. The projects shown here have been selected to illustrate one or more points about the design process. That process is one in which ob- jects, systems, and environments are related to people. When envi- ronments were simpler, objects fewer and handmade, communica- tion less complex, and systems primitive, there was less need for a separate design function. Today we cannot survive without design, and in many areas of government no one would be foolish enough to try. No city, no highway, no traffic light, no spaceship, no transpor- tation system would or could be brought forth without designers. The need for design is less obvi- ous in the case of office furnish- ings, office forms, public spaces, brochures, announcements, signs, courtrooms, information desks, agency reports, and so on. Yet the design necessity is operable in these areas, and we ignore it at our peril, or at least at great cost. A badly designed questionnaire is unlikely to elicit useful re- sponses. It may, in fact, keep peo- ple from responding at all. And the process of producing and handling a badly designed form can cost thousands of dollars in extra print- ing costs, typing costs, costs of needless errors, costs of dupli- cated information — to say nothing of the immeasurable cost of hu- man frustration. It should go without saying, but unfortunately doesn't, that design is directed toward human beings. To design is to solve human prob- 6 Introduction lems by identifying them, examin- ing alternate solutions to them, choosing and executing the best solution. Question: Who can do this? Answer: A designer. Question: Any designer? Answer: Well, no. At least not equally well. Just as some designs are more necessary than others, some designers are more neces- sary than others. Yet any designer is experienced in the process and has some un- derstanding of the materials and methods appropriate to a given so- lution. Appropriateness is a key word: a sense of the appropriate lies at the heart of design judg- ment. That sense derives from the habitual vision of design in the service of people, rather than vice versa. The late Henry Dreyfuss wrote of his industrial design practice: "We bear in mind that the object being worked on is going to be ridden in, sat upon, looked at, talked into, activated, operated, or in some other way used by people individually or en masse." That sort of concern has become increasingly urgent in recent years. At the same time, scientific re- search has been yielding vast stores of information on human needs and behavior. It is the de- signer's responsibility to use this information in shaping the de- signed environment. As a simple indication of the di- rection this might take we need look no further than the shift in em- phasis in the Dreyfuss office alone. During the forties Dreyfuss was in the vanguard of design-related human factors research, by virtue of his having developed anthropo- metric data relating to the essential measurements of men, women, and children. Niels Diffrient, a part- ner in the present Henry Dreyfuss Associates, has for years been de- veloping materials that go beyond anthropometrics to bring together psychology, sociology, anthropol- ogy, lighting, and other disciplines in what he calls a "grammar of human comprehension." Ideally, all designers would be knowledgeable in pediatrics and geriatrics, with some supplemen- tary experience in dealing with the middle years. In fact this doesn't happen and won't. That does not mean that design can't take into account what science has revealed about people. It only means that, where complex problems are in- volved, design must be an inter- disciplinary, collaborative process. In such a collaboration, design is the means of integrating the in- sights of other disciplines, bringing them to bear on problems, and giving form to the solutions. Question: If designers vary in ability, and design varies in qual- ity, how can I tell "good design" when I see it? Answer: Forget (at least for the time being) about "good design." The fact that the phrase is in quotes suggests its ambiguity. If you think instead of effective design, it be- comes easier to see the bases for judgments and your own qualifica- tions for meeting them. There are criteria for determin- ing design effectiveness, and some of them appear in the theme state- ment on page 4. These basic criteria overlap. (It is, for example, almost impossible to save time without saving money.) But that does not lessen their usefulness. It merely ensures that the most im- portant points for evaluation will be covered one way or another. It is important to remember that these are design criteria as well as designer's criteria. They suggest what design can do for consumers and clients, citizens and public of- ficials. In the light of these criteria we can survey the projects assem- bled in this book. 2. Design is an urgent requirement, not a cosmetic addition. The most urgent requirement for people and other animals is the availability of certain life essentials: drinkable water, clean air, arable land, and food for both energy and cell building. In addition to being essential, these life-sustaining elements have something else in common: they all come from the environment. There is no place else they can come from. The human race has been slow to realize this, but the need to design for environmental protection has in our time become firmly established. The comprehensive plan for the future of Dallas (page 64) is rooted in an ecological study of the area. Although the Dallas plan starts with ecological data, it does not stop there. The ecological study is now being used to determine transit corridors. With design appearing first as persuasion, then regulation, then policy, the planners hope to make the design-planning proc- ess a normal feature of daily city government. The Dallas approach dramatizes how very little genuine urban de- sign has to do with beautification programs. It also dramatizes the fact that compromises, euphemis- tically known as trade-offs, are in- trinsic to most difficult environ- mental decisions. Design is an instrument for revealing and com- municating the precise point at which a trade-off is most sensible. 3. Design can save money. An official of fine Department of Housing and Urban Development points out that the Dallas approach "uses design as the basic means to identify and communicate the options that are to be negotiated beween the public and private sec- tors. Design approvals are becom- ing the most effective means that local governments have in modify- ing the important consequences that large-scale private develop- ments exert in urban areas." Similarly, in the Master Plan for Hawaii (page 70), design is the means by which the need for growth and the inevitability of growth may be reconciled with the deep need for preservation of land and landscape. None of the projects on the fol- lowing pages is merely cosmetic. None is an example of "applied design" added as a final touch to make things pretty or at least more palatable. But the designs here are not all vehicles for biological survival ei- ther. There are levels of urgency in what people need; and our needs go far beyond the basic ani- mal requirements for staying alive. We need room, we need an oppor- tunity to keep in touch with natural resources, we need places for peo- ple to come together, we need public areas that encourage spon- taneity and delight. And the urban environment is where we need all of these things the most. The Portland Auditorium Fore- court Fountain (page 74) satisfies these urgent needs. Design at its best brings out people at their best. It is not so much that people "live up to" the splendors of the foun- tain and the related plazas and malls as that in enjoying the water they enjoy themselves and each other as well. Enjoyment of this sort is an urgent civic requirement. When the subject of design is in- troduced in an area in which de- sign is not normally taken for granted, a predictable question comes up: Isn't it too expensive? Whether it is expensive or cheap (and it can be either), there is no getting around the fact that design costs something. It has this in com- mon with such other professional undertakings as medicine, religion, and public service. The question that needs to be asked, of course, is not whether design costs money but whether it is worth it The an- swer depends on a number of vari- ables and one of them is whether a given design saves money. For that is one of design's pur- poses: to perform efficiently, re- ducing the cost of materials, labor, production and materials. Design can save money in many ways. The wooden playground equipment in Tyson Park (page 68) has minimized maintenance. Moreover, by greatly increasing the park's use at all hours, the design seems thus far to have eliminated vandalism. (To get some idea of what a savings this represents one need only consider that New York City's new Parks Commissioner took office with the announcement that if neighborhoods continue to vandalize parks, or permit them to be vandalized, the City will simply stop trying to maintain them.) That, like the Portland fountain, is a case of the public's rising to a design. Vandalism diminishes in part because there are usually peo- ple around. But vandalism itself is often a response to design and a judgment about it. Few schools anywhere are ade- quately budgeted. The design pa- rameters for the Acorn School (page 28) required that an un- usual educational philosophy be expressed in an interior that didn't cost much money. By showing the way the building works, by ex- posing, rather than concealing, the building's operating equip- ment, and by using factory-made devices and systems, ordered right out of the catalog, the designers were able to effect a solution that simultaneously cuts cost and en- hances learning. Saving money is always a mat- ter of choosing priorities. The de- sign of the St. Francis Square Housing Project (page 44) reflects the architects' ordering of priori- ties in favor of the project's envi- ronmental aspects. The space be- tween the buildings looks, and is, as important as the buildings them- selves. This emphasis meant scrimping on such apartment spec- ifications as kitchen size, hardly a trivial detail. It would be nice not to have to make such choices at all, to have environmental amenity and large kitchens, But where housing pro- ject budgets force the choice, it is better that it be made knowingly and designed into the product as it was in this case. Sometimes design can save money by incorporating proce- dures that already exist and don't have to be invented. Here the de- 8 Introduction signer's general knowledge can serve botin him and his clients. The ecological study at the base of the Dallas Master Plan is eco- nomically computerized through the use of a program originally de- signed for the Wisconsin Light and Power Company. The use of in- dustrial components for housing and schools saves money while it demonstrates the extreme flexibil- ity of industrial technology. Economy, like other features of design performance, is most likely to result when a client knows what he wants. The Dormitory Authohty of the State of New York made an initial contribution to minimizing the cost of its student housing at Brockport (page 42) through an unusually well developed system for evaluating bids. Paradoxically, the price was kept down by set- ting a predetermined per-bed cost, thus eliminating price as a factor in bidding. Performance was the sole criterion. The most satisfying design ex- perience is one in which a wide range of objectives are achieved at once. The National Park Serv- ice (NPS) "Minifolders" program (page 14) comes close to fitting this description. The reduction in size first of all serves the park vis- itor, who can carry the folders in his or her shirt pocket. It serves Park Service employees by mak- ing storage and accessibility much easier. And because the employees can carry them in their shirt pock- ets too, each park worker be- comes a reliable guide, able to an- swer questions at a glance. Each of these design features is desirable in its own right, but the redesign grew out of an in- escapable need for economy. For the National Park System, the six- ties was a period of growth and change, unprecedented in both speed and variety. There were 188 parks in 1 961 ; there are 298 today, and more are being planned. There were 86 million park visits in 1961 , compared to 202 million visits in 1971. The early parks were estab- lished on Federal lands in the West; more recent parks are set up in areas complicated by joint state, local, and private ownership. Na- tional park "recreation" was quite a limited concept in the past, con- sisting largely of sightseeing and picnicking. The enormous popu- larity of camping and hiking — along with canoeing, diving, skiing, biking and snowmobiling — has vastly changed the character of National Park use. One thing was clear: however many parks there were, however many people visited them, and whatever it was they did there — park management costs would soar unless something were done. The minifolders hardly seem an adequate device for addressing problems of that magnitude, but they have greatly reduced costs of paper, typesetting, layout, print- ing, production, transportation, mailing, and storage. 4. Design can save time. The NPS's minifolders save money in part because they save time in manufacturing. They also save the users' time, with clear maps and a minimum of guide prose. The Brockport Design/Build System (page 42) is based on sav- ing time through such techniques as on-site assembly of factory- made components and panelized cladding that can be attached from the inside of the building without scaffolding. The system saves time by trim- ming both field labor and fabrica- tion procedures. Dormitory sys- tems usually take 30 to 48 months to complete after planning. This system will take 1 8 months. One of the difficulties with any new graphics program can be the time it takes to implement it. Graphics standards manuals like those shown on page 20 generally have two purposes. One is to pre- vent the design from being vitiated somewhere along the line through carelessness or uninformed judg- ment. But designers can expect bad judgments because good ones are hard and time-consuming to make, especially by people with no qualifications for making them. Trying to decide just how a trade- mark or symbol should be used on a truck or an interdepartmental memo form can take time. To re- duce that time, by narrowing the areas in which decision can be made, is the other major purpose of a standards manual. The Army painting program is a good ex- ample of graphics standards con- trol based on the use of identifiable and consistent symbols. If the jet plane symbolizes man's semi-conquest of time, the jet-age airport tends to symbolize just the opposite. It is by now common- place to observe that getting a traveler to the plane can take more time than flying him to the airport of his destination. What can be done about it? The best-designed answer to date is probably Dul- les International Airport (page 52), which was, planned from the be- ginning for'jets. That is to say, it was planned for jet passengers, who can reach their aircraft with- out having to take ten-minute walks through terminal "fingers." 5. Design enhances communication. Designing a new kind of air- port required radical decisions tliat would require the cooperation of the major airlines that used the airport. The necessity to make those decisions clear and to ex- plain the reasons behind them pre- sented a peculiar problem to the designers. Because the most com- pelling design parameters had to do with time and movement, the designers concluded that film was the only medium that could per- suasively convey the complex mes- sage A film The Expanding Air- port," was commissioned and made. Produced primarily for a tiny audience of top airline execu- tives, it became a significant tool for winning understanding and ac- ceptance of the Dulles idea. Among the most striking and useful Federal graphic products are the Department of the Interior Geological Survey maps like the one of Washington, D.C. shown below. It is both unjust and heart- ening that such a high order of design excellence should be taken for granted by so many of us Most communication between people does not happen through print. An office, a school, and a courthouse are all environments ostensibly. created for the purpose of enhancing communication. Yet few schools and courthouses, and even fewer offices, are designed to perform this service well. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) Office System Proposal (page 32) re- flects a growing trend in office de- sign The trend is to try to antici- pate the kinds of communication that take place, to identify the par- ticipants, and then to design a sys- tem that supports the process as strongly and as flexibly as possible. The interior of the Acorn School (page 28) is designed to support the special communicative pat- terns of modified Montessori learn- ing. As pointed out earlier, much of the school equipment comes "out of the catalog." It is worth noting that a catalog does not ob- viate the need for design. In fact, just the opposite is true: design is required to make effective use of a catalog. Without design you have the average office building or the average mail-order-furnished room. With design, you can have the Acorn School. 6. Design simplifies use, manufacture, maintenance. A project designed for perform- ance and oriented to the human user is almost certain to meet more than one of the working criteria. Design criteria rarely exist in isolation from one another. The de- sign factors that save passengers time at Dulles International Airport (page 52) are the same factors that simplify the airport's use. The design factors that save money in the Acorn School, NPS Minifolders Program, St. Francis Square Hous- ing Project, and the Brockport De- sign/Build System are the factors that simplify manufacture, mainte- nance, and use. 10 Introduction 7. Design necessity is recognizably present in projects ranging in scale and complexity from a postage stamp to a highway system. The designs selected for this book cover a wide range of design prob- lems in the Federal Government. An NPS minifolder is, by definition, very small. Dulles International Air- port is very large and designed to become much larger when the occasion demands. Most design problems fall between those two extremes. But the urgency of a de- signed solution does not depend on the size of the project. 8. The absence of design is a hazardous kind of design. Not to design is to suffer the costly consequences of design by default. Just as "no-politics is a kind of politics," no-design is a kind of design. There are no examples in this book of design by default, at least not deliberately. But exam- ples abound and are all about you. As a matter of statistical probabil- ity, you probably work in an en- vironment that was designed by the space and the furnishings rather than by a designer thinking of the work that has to be done and the people who have to do it. That environment is called the office. It is where 40 percent of the nation's working population do their work against odds made stag- gering by the absence of design. There is, to be sure, plently of dec- oration in offices. But, apart from size and accessories, it is difficult to distinguish the office of an ac- countant from that of a writer, a sales manager, a salesman, a su- pervisor, a department head, a contractor, or a designer. By the late sixties this phenom- enon had attracted some serious attention and research. Among the results are a variety of "open plans" or, in the jargon of the trade, "office landscaping." Open planning had commonly been used in factories but was un- usual in offices — except in news- paper offices, where it was the rule. The city desk ringed by avail- able editor-reporters was based on the need for quick communica- tion with relatively little concern for privacy. But office layouts tended generally to award privacy according to rank, rather than the kind of work done, and to seriously inhibit communication. In the fifties the rabbit-warren office complex was challenged by designers who rediscovered open planning at about the same time elementary schools were begin- ning to rediscover it. It happened during a period when architects generally had stopped talking about rooms and started talking about "space." The term "office landscaping" was attached to a German firm called Quickborner Team, and it became known as the Quickborner approach. In America designer Robert Propst had for years been studying offices in a new way. Investigating what people did in offices, he came up with a lively set of observations. He found what Government work- ers must always have known but never codified: that important (or at least useful) information was squirreled away in drawers and never used or even seen again, while unimportant (or at least un- usable) information was clogging desktops, offices, and minds. View- ing the office as "a facility for change," Propst developed rec- ommendations for the kind of en- vironment and equipment that would make desired change feasi- ble. Through a furniture manufac- turer he translated his ideas into a line of office furniture and related accessories designed to make work efficient in a variety of pos- sible office plans. 9. On any given project, designers and Government officials have the same basic goal: performance. "Unless there is a commitment trom above, design won't worl<," says Vincent Gleason, Cliief of the Division of Publications, National Park Service. He surely is right, especially in respect to design in a large and complex institution, such as Gov- ernment. But the commitment can- not be given form until there are clear performance goals. Having a goal does not neces- sarily mean being able to describe the goal in design terms. As a gen- eral rule, therefore, the designer or design team ought to be in- volved in a project early. To call in a designer for the first time after decisions affecting de- sign have been made is always a mistake and often a tragic one. De- signers called in, for example, after hardware specifications have been frozen have to either "design around" arbitrary obstacles or to "undesign" what was wrongly done in the first place. In either case the result is time consuming, expensive, and less than fully effective. That error was fortunately avoided in the Atomic Energy Com- mission exhibition on page 22. The designer was called in to develop a trailer exhibition to travel in Latin America. He accepted the assign- ment with the stipulation that the AEC suspend any commitment to trailers until he had made a pre- liminary study. The study indicated that an air-supported structure promised to make a more effective, more flexible, more economical ex- hibition than a trailer would have. The result was a major exhibition that had impact and duration far beyond that customarily expected of trailer shows. For some design projects the performance goals are so specific, and their achievement dependent upon such highly specialized study, that "the designer" is really a team. The Magruder Environ- mental Therapy Complex in Or- lando, Florida, is a good example of what such an interdisciplinary team can accomplish. Magruder is a playground de- signed to make major play experi- ences accessible to physically handicapped children. In achiev- ing this the designers — an archi- tect, a psychologist, physical ther- apist, physical education expert, school principal, and others — ex- pect to improve the children's mental health, increase their edu- cability, and make new discover- ies about the relationship between play and learning. , 10. Effective design of public services is itself an essential public service. Such services as our national parks, our courthouses, our Fed- erally sponsored schools and transportation systems and muse- ums and housing projects are the most tangible forms through which Government reaches the public. In a democracy, then, these are the forms through which we get in touch with ourselves. That is the design necessity. Design will not create peace out of war, affluence out of poverty, commitment out of cynicism, or justice out of injustice. It will not right social wrongs. It will not even make up for lack of talent. But an environment can help bring out the best in people or the worst. We rise to our problems in order to design. We rise in re- sponse to designed environment. That is the design necessity. The problems of Government are complex, and their solutions de- pend upon diverse resources. As a way of applying interdisciplinary insights to the lives and work of human beings, design is neces- sary to Government. The effective design of public services is indeed an essential public service in itself. And that is the design necessity. -*s; ' '-tit OT Visual Communications National Park Service Minifolders 14 Graphics Programs for tine Internal Revenue Service "Teaching Taxes" program 16 Recruiting Brochures 18 Graphics Standards Manuals United States Postal Service Design Control Guidelines 20 USIA Design Manual ' 21 'Atoms at Work" an Atomic Energy Commission exhibition 22 14 Visual Communications National Park Service Minifolders Drastic size reduction and modular format save money, save time, enhance com- munication, and simplify manufacture and use. Funding Agency: Department of the Interior National Park Service Designers: National Park Service Division of Publications Staff, Vincent Gleason, Chief Saves money: individual folder cost drops from 4y2 0 to 21/2 0. The brochures shown here are "minifolders" distributed by the National Park Service at more than half of the nearly 300 national parks. In 1973 NPS will publish some 150 different minifolders with a print run of 16 to 17 million. Effective design depends upon a clear perception of the problem or problems to be solved. A common means of identifying the problem is to look for the intersection of ob- jectives and constraints. The general objective of the Na- tional Park Service's (NPS) free folders program is straightforward enough: to tell park visitors about the particular parks they are visit- ing. But how much information should be supplied and what kind? The Park Service defined what the typical visitor needs as follows: 1. A brief text telling where to go, what to see and when. 2. An accurate, easily read map, with pictures and diagrams. 3. Information about such mat- ters as safety, clothing, weather and altitude. 4. Information about food and accommodations. As a design constraint, all of that basic information was to be offered in a folder small enough to fit into a shirt pocket or purse. In a large-volume Federal print program, however, the primary constraints are usually budgetary. Congressional restrictions limit the money spent for publication. Regu- Revised format for giveaway folders frees staff to spend time improving literature that the Park Service sells. lations set by the Joint Committee on Printing restrict color reproduc- tion and paper stock, Tliere are costs of shipping and storage and of distribution to the public. The minifolder program suc- ceeds within these constraints and in fact gets improved results be- cause of them. The paper, colors, and typeface are all more appro- priate to the job of the folders than more lavish treatment would be. The Division of Publications in 1964 proposed reducing the free folder to the smallest size and the lowest cost. Information in more depth, and with more flavor than the minifolder could provide, would be offered in one of the publica- tions that are sold. "The place where Hell bubbled Covers are usually one color. Maps are simplified. Text is condensed to basic information. Copy, of stand- ardized width, is typewriter- set in house. The savings are obvious enough: less paper, less expensive ship- ping, simpler handling. And the time 'Saving features range from simpler distribution to fewer argu- ments about cover illustrations (there are no cover illustrations). Many in the NPS are convinced that the new program has improved the quality of information in the free folder (since the information is basic, it is easier to be accurate and current) and in the process freed the publication division to turn its attention to the user-subsi- dized sales publications, improv- ing them in turn. Vincent Gleason, Chief of the Division of Publications, summa- rizes the minifolder savings: Format: "Text material is reduced, and annual changes have been made easier and cheaper. Layout problems are simplified to a few combinations. Maps are standard- ized. Type is restrained to a few faces and measures." Printing: "Low-cost paper is specified, and less paper is used. Most of the minifolders are printed in two colors. Press time is more efficient because there are more impressions per hour." Shipping and storage: "We use fewer cartons for packing, and it costs less to ship. The minifolder is easier to hand out and cheaper to mail." Average current costs: "A new regular folder costs 41/2 0; a new minifolder, 2^/2 0. A reprinted regu- lar folder costs 2y2 0; a reprinted minifolder, 1 V20. "A careful estimate would put the combined time and money savings at 20 percent." 16 Visual Communications Graphics Programs for the Internal Revenue Service "Teaching Taxes" program uses rotogravure publica- tions designed to look like Sunday supplements. They go to 4,000,000 students in 24,000 schools across the country. Funding Agency: Department of tine Treasury Internal Revenue Service Designers: ("Teaching Taxes") IRS Publishing Services Branch Design Group, David Haussman, Betty Moran, Project Designers (Recruiting Brochures) IRS Publishing Services Branch Design Group, Dick Servatius, Project Designer At the heart of Federal spending is Federal income, or taxes. And at the heart of the Federal tax system are self-assessment and voluntary compliance. These features of the Federal tax system place upon the citizen the burden of deciding how/ much he owes the Government as well as the burden of paying it. Even if paying taxes were easy, computing them is not. Yet citizens have to do it, regardless of their arithmetical sophistication, in the face of new regulations, policies, codes, rulings, etc. A number of design problems come together here. Tax forms must look as welcome as possible under circumstances that make it very unlikely that they will ever be truly welcome. Explanatory publi- cations must make complicated issues clear. Publications have to perform well without any hint of lavishness, which might seem par- ticularly inappropriate for the Inter- nal Revenue Service. Graphic design for the Internal Revenue Service is, in other words, the point at which the Federal Gov- ernment of the United States reg- ularly addresses its individual citizens, usually on the same sub- ject, which happens to be less than agreeable. Voluntary compliance is a signif- icant IRS cost-saving policy, for it makes the citizen a partner in the bookkeeping and compilation process. The function of the IRS educative programs is to make him a knowledgeable partner. With the help of these materials the IRS ex- pects this year's tax returns to re- flect a 90 percent voluntary com- pliance with the law. Much of the IRS communica- tion effort goes into bringing tech- nical information to accountants, tax lawyers, and other specialists. But a certain amount of technical information has to be presented to the layman as well, and this is per- haps the biggest challenge faced by the IRS. The service publishes special-problem materials, always strongly identified on the cover, as in the "Farmer's Tax Guide." *The Internal Revenue Service's recent emphasis on clarity in its forms and on public understand- ing of its procedures has given the Publishing Services Branch of IRS an educative function. Its "Under- Increased format size saves money, reducing page total by 25 percent. Album format enhances IRS educative function by permitting legi- ble display of tax forms keyed to explanatory text. 18 Visual Communications The Internal Revenue Serv- ice issues one publication designed to show IRS em- ployment opportunities in general. Other publications help recruit people for spe- cific jobs. standing Taxes" program is de- signed to reach liigli scliool stu- dents just as they are about to be- come taxpayers. "Understanding Taxes" — Gen- eral Edition (Publication 21) had an initial 1971 printing of four million. This was not enough. A barrage of enthusiastic requests from teach- ers and school principals required an additional printing of 20,000. The two "Understanding Taxes" booklets shown here are 10%" by 1 23/4" and are almost identical, ex- cept that one is designed for sub- urban youth, and the other has several pages of additional mate- rial for rural youth. The material is lucid and nonpatronizing both in text and in illustrations. The illustrations are essential, for most of them are simply re- productions of the tax forms them- selves, .showing how they should be filled out under various circum- stances. Illustrations are closely keyed to the text. In the previous format (7%" by lO^A") each tax form had to take up a page in order to be legible. By going to the larger "album" style the designers were able to reduce the total number of pages from 64 to 48, with a marked savings in printing and production costs. Another IRS problem addressed in part by graphic design is re- cruitment. In the late fifties IRS ad- ministrators came to believe that they were not getting their fair share of the talent pool. Investigat- ing the recruiting procedures of large industrial corporations, they discovered a great disparity be- tween the quality of corporate re- cruiting literature and their own literature. As a result IRS design- ers created a new set of recruiting materials, with each job category treated in a separate two- or three- color brochure. The recruiting brochures are sent out to 58 district offices and their college representatives and to ten service centers. Of the six recruiting brochures, five deal with specific jobs and are intended chiefly for college em- ployment offices. The sixth, "A New Dimension in Taxation," con- tains general information on IRS opportunities and is used to answer general requests. Talent recruitment is one area in which industry and the Federal Government are competitive. IRS recruitment officers feel that the image of the IRS in particular, and the Federal Government in gen- eral, tended to be one of "green eyeshades." These brochures help counter that image for both pros- pective employees and recruiting agents, who are proud to be as- sociated with the new materials. In the words of James Pugh, IRS Director of Recruitment, "The new brochures attracted college stu- dents that we otherwise never would even have seen." Recruiting brochures use bright but not splashy graphics to attract "kids we otherwise would never even have seen." System is designed to save money and time by using same drawings more than once in different colors. 20 Visual Communications Graphics Standards Manuals United States Postal Serv- ice Design Control Guide- lines is issued in two ver- sions, saving money and simplifying use. Full manual goes to those with heavy design responsibility. Smaller manual provides information in less detail for general administrators. Funding Agencies: (United States Postal Service Design Control Guidelines) United States Postal Service (USIA Design Manual) United States Information Agency Designers (United States Postal Service Design Control Guidelines) United States Postal Service Creative Services, Vincent Hoffman, Division Manager Raymond Loewy/William Snaith, Inc. (USIA Design Manual) United States Information Agency, Robert Sivard, Art Director Identification system is ap- plied to United States Postal Service products ranging from change-of-address forms to mail carrier's satchels. Design, like otlner media for organ- ization, has to be directed in order to be effective. TInis need becomes especially conspicuous when an agency adopts a visual identity program. With its new status as an inde- pendent establishment within the executive branch of Government, the postal service took on a new symbol. The symbol serves as the basis for new "U.S. Mail" and "United States Postal Service" em- blems that are key elements in an identification system for vehicles, mail boxes, stationery, printed forms, uniforms, carrier's satchels and other official paraphernalia. To implement the identification system, and to assure its consist- ent use, the designers prepared a design guidelines manual. The manual demonstrates proper use of the symbols under various cir- cumstances, much as similar graphics standards manuals do for private corporations. The USIA Design Manual takes a different tack, for the USIA's problems and aims are different. This manual is not a prescription for correct use, but a guide to in- telligent and effective performance of the USIA's mission in respect to print. As such it has far more latitude than typical graphics standards manuals. Except for such con- stants as the Agency seal and the Agency symbol, there are almost no directives in the book, and even the seal and symbol are treated loosely. The text discusses ways in which the seal is "normally used," and suggests "If your post designs its own version [of the symbol] please send a copy to the Art Di- rector for the record." This freehandedness does not of course stem from indifference. It stems from a realization that the USIA's cross-cultural function makes uniformity both undesirable and impossible. The manual, which is loaded with examples of imagi- native graphic designs from ex- tremely diverse sources, instructs USIA officers in what design can accomplish and how. It is in fact an excellent introduction to graphics for any administrator, in or out of Government, who has some de- gree of responsibility for design. One of many design elements the manual explains is the use of a grid system. Since the USIA man- ual itself is laid out on a grid, it be- comes its own illustration. The three-column-by-four-unit grid is included in the manual, and the user can remove the looseleaf page and place it over other pages to see how the system works. USIA Design Manual en- hances communication by drawing on, and explaining, a wide range of effective graphic designs from out- side Government and ex- plaining how they work. Simplifies use by means of such devices as removable overlay that tells what a grid system is and shows how it works. 22 Visual Communications 'Atoms At Work" Time saving and money sav- ing structure can be erected by 12 workmen in four days. White on outside for heat reflection, it is black inside for light control. Lecture-demonstration area, like the rest of the exhibition, uses theatrical light control to make points clear and dramatic. Funding Agency: Atomic Energy Commission Architect: Victor Lundy Planning and Coordination: Albert H.Woods Exhibit Design: Carlos Ramirez Film Production: Francis Thompson Architect's two-celled form both expresses and makes feasible the dual-level na- ture of the exhibition. Draw- ing of plan shows film area, lecture-demonstrsition areas, and technical area which is open to public vie^wing. "Atoms at Work," an exhibition on tine peaceful uses of atomic energy, was sponsored by tine Atomic En- ergy Commission. Tine exhibition toured for four years in Latin Amer- ica and another four years in Europe and the Middle East. In the fall of 1959 the AEC out- lined its aims for an exhibition on United States progress in atomic energy. The exhibit was intended to travel to several locations in South America. To plan and coordinate the ex- hibition AEC retained a designer, who then began to do research into both atomic energy and the prob- lems of Latin America. The AEC wanted an exhibition addressed to a large audience of the lay public and a smaller audi- ence of scientists, technicians, and advanced students. The designer decided that, with a subject as complex as atomic energy, the only way to avoid compromise was to address the two audiences sepa- rately. He proposed a technical section of the exhibition with a sep- arate entrance and admission by invitation. This section would in- clude an extensive working labora- tory, with United States and Latin American scientists performing co- operative experiments. For the public section the de- signer outlined a film treatment of a generalized message. Film was chosen because of its possibilities for dramatic effect, because it lent itself to presenting the gigantic physical facilities associated with atomic energy, and because it can be converted from one language to another with reasonable success. The technical area was also to be part of the show in the public area: after the introductory film, the audience would be able to watch scientists at work. The exhibition had to move from city to city on a limited budget. These constraints indicated the use of mobile units. The project was already referred to as "The Latin American Trailer Show," and negotiations were under way to buy a number of large trailers. The de- signer took the assignment with the understanding that trailer pur- chases be delayed until he had a chance to investigate alternatives. In the process of investigating al- ternatives he came across a port- able air-supported missile-mainte- nance enclosure that the Army had installed in Alabama at a cost of $1.50 per square foot. The architect — chosen on the basis of his ability to handle com- plexity in simple and visually strik- ing ways — confirmed the feasibility of an air-supported structure. His solution, shown here, consists of two cells, one for the film and one for the technical center and public lecture-demonstrations. The two balloon shapes are slightly warped for acoustical reasons. The struc- ture consists of two pressurized Model traces power produc- tion from reactor vessel (circle) to heat exchanger (square) to generator (diamond). Animated symbol for med- ical exhibit reveals brain, heart and thyroid gland with twinkling lights indicating radioactivity. 24 Visual Communications Three-screen film enhances communication by treating the scale and diversity of atomic energy applications. skins of vinyl-coated nylon, sepa- rated by a four-foot air space. Port- able walls separate the audience from the building's inner skin. In both content and technique the film was designed especially for this exhibition. Faced with the problem of introducing the subject of atomic energy to a lay audience as arrestingly as possible, film- maker Francis Thompson experi- mented with various arrangements of projection surfaces. Three ad- jacent screens — a format which had been used before in some- what different ways — offered Thompson the latitude he needed to solve the problem. The three-screen configuration proved well suited to the complex- ity of the subject. Clear explana- tion was supported by the simul- taneous display of live action and animation. Motion picture footage projected next to stills helped maintain a sense of movement even though many of the important shots were of static equipment and situations. The "visual overload" provided by three screens takes advantage of the viewer's peripheral vision, usually ignored in conventional filmmaking. The result here was the ability to emphasize the abun- dance of information relevant to atomic energy and to deliver as much of it as possible to large crowds as they moved through the exhibition. Top panel (page 25) shows two views of city; center panel shows three views of a solar observatory mirror; bottom panel uses pan shot across all three screens. ^^. ^W flmWP ■■;m^a S^>2 '^:^ Interiors and Industrial Design The Acorn School tions Control Center Building for the Washington Metro- politan Area Transit Authority 32 TheSalk Institute for Biological Studies 34 "Interior Design in Manned Spacecraft or Space Sta- tions," National Space and Aeronautics Administration, Literature Search #20724 36 Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit System 33 28 Interiors and Industrial Design The Acorn School New York, New York Funding Agencies: Department of Housing and Urban Development Phipps Houses Architects: Mayers & Schiff The Acorn School was built in "found" space on the ground floor of a New York City high-rise apart- nnent building financed with FHA funds and a bank loan. If there is one American institu- tion that has been roundly con- denined in our time, it is the school. The epithet "joyless," given cur- rency by a popular book on the subject, has been applied to class- rooms across the nation. The Acorn School is anything but joyless, and it is located in a city where the schools are consid- ered by many to be the embodi- ment of everything wrong with education in America. Acorn, of course, is not a public school, and it is not situated in a conventional school building, but in an area that the builders had in- tended for doctors and dentists. But there is no reason that public schools cannot be located in found space. That possibility has become attractive to administrators lately as an alternative to the imperson- Design of community school on the ground floor of an apartment building is re- sponsive to needs of par- ents, teachers, and above all children, some of whom made drawings of what they wanted the school to be like. ality of large schools and the amounts of money and time re- quired to build them. In addition to economy (it is gen- erally cheaper to rehabilitate exist- ing spaces in already sound struc- tures than to build new ones), found space has certain educational ad- vantages. Instead of segregating the educational process, it inte- grates formal education into other aspects of daily life. And the en- vironmental excitement of found space is likely to exceed that of a standard classroom building. But Acorn is interesting less be- cause of where it is than because of what the designers did there. Performance goals were not dif- ficult to set. Acorn is a parent- owned community school, loosely Montessori in philosophy. It con- sists of an upper school for ages 5 to 11 and a Idwer school of nur- sery and kinde/gartenl The upper school was programmed for an open classroo/n, and ohildren are encouraged td mix, irrespective of Hospital cubicle track is suspended from the ceiling in a circle seven feet above the floor. Fabric dividers hang from the track and can be swung in front of study carrels to form private spaces. Service ducts are labeled to say what they are. 30 Interiors and Industrial Design "Found" space is comple- mented by "found" interior components ordered right out of catalog. Urethane carts equipped with pro- jectors are wheeled up to carrels made of scaffolding, and slides are projected on back of shelving. ages, according to their own inter- ests. So as much equipment as possible had to be designed for use by children of various sizes and sophistication and with varying degrees of coordination. The openness of the classroom space had somehow to be made compatible with the need for pri- vacy and intimacy (several of the children prepared sketches for the architect, and these tended to stress nooks, niches, crevices, treehouses and similar warm, pri- vate retreats). Since Acorn is owned by middle- class parents, there were severe budgetary restrictions to the proj- ect. The designers avoided the ex- pense of a dropped ceiling. They left all ceiling pipes and ducts ex- posed for reasons of economy, and also to enliven the appearance. Some of those components are labeled with vinyl lettering, mak- ing children aware of mechanical features of a building that are usu- ally hidden. The block walls are covered with "self-healing" vinyl that closes over holes when tacks and pushpins are removed. The design solution is colorful, low-cost and extremely flexible. The basic design element is a col- lection of standard builder's scaf- folds, each fitted out for specific functions: storage areas, book nooks, dens, study carrels, theater areas. The scaffolding modules roll wherever the kids want to roll them. When combined with mov- able urethane projection carts the scaffolds become mini-theaters. What is so special about the scaffolding, of course, is that it is not special at all. Other right-out- of-the-catalog items include hospi- tal cubicle track suspended from the ceiling, clamp-on spotlights for the scaffolding modules, dock lights, and plastic industrial storage bins mounted on rails along the Lower school is lit by truck- ers loading-dock lights. Carpeted stairs are used as story-telling area or stage. Alphabetical plastic bins can be removed for wash- ing. Basic module for the media area is standard alu- minum builders scaffolding. walls. The marked electric race- ways increase flexibility, permitting lights, audio visual devices, and other electrical equipment to be plugged in anywhere. Lighting is variable, and for the most part the kids vary it them- selves. Pipe-mounted spots and truck dock lights are on dimmers, and each scaffold module has its own clip-on incandescent spots. According to architects Mayers and Schiff the total cost of the proj- ect (for which they selected or de- signed all furnishings) was $108,- 000, which comes to $20 per square foot and $1,000 per student. New York City's present going rate for school construction and furnishing is between $50 and $60 per square foot and between $5,000 and $7,000 per student. The imaginative response to con- straints of space anq money, the incorporation of the client'.s objec- tives into the solution, and above all the concern for the users make Acorn School an unusually good example of design performance. 32 Interiors and Industrial Design Space Planning and Interior Design Study for the Operations Control Center Building for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Washington, D.C. Architects conducted a comparative study of open planning versus conven- tional offices and made comparative drawings of furnishings and other features. Funding Agency: Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Architects and Planners: Keyes, Lethbridge and Condon Problem: Offices for the Washing- ton Metropolitan Area Transit Au- thority (WMATA) have to be adapt- able to a new and constantly changing organization. Solution: Architects Keyes, Leth- bridge and Condon based their space planning and interior design program on a study of open versus conventional office planning. WMATA was set up to plan, de- velop and operate the capital's subway system, now under con- struction. Recently it has been charged with the responsibility of operating the bus system as well. That indicates the kind of organ- ization WMATA is: one that has al- ready changed and will change even more as the subway is com- Open and conventional work stations for various employee functions are compared. pleted and the responsibility shifts from building a subway system to running and maintaining one. Early in the study pictured here, the designers were convinced that open planning was indicated, pri- marily because flexibility was so important. Open layouts could be rearranged with minimal disrup- tion and — especially important — were more likely to be. Landscaped offices, the designers discovered, were moved more often to increase or maintain efficiency because the moves could be made handily dur- ing off hours. Conventional offices, on the other hand, discouraged moves and changes because of the disruption they caused, and encouraged making do with ineffi- cient arrangements. Circulation routes in open space are also less rigid and easily rede- fined as needs change. The lower maintenance costs of open planning were just as impres- sive as the convenience and effi- ciency advantages. The open office, hov/ever, is not without disadvantages. Chief among them is the absence of pri- vacy and quiet. Carpeting, acoustical ceilings, and sound-absorbent dividers make the space acoustically work- able, though open. The effect is supported by "masking sound." Work stations (the open layout counterpart of offices and desks) are kept apart visually by divider screens, storage units, and plants. After developing space and equipment standards for each em- ployee function, designers made detailed evaluations of open versus conventional plans, excluding items common to both plans, such as carpeting, window treatment, standard desks, chairs, and tables. Because WMATA's space needs are expected to keep changing rapidly over a ten-year period, cost estimates were projected for ten years. While the initial cost of a conventional office plan was esti- mated to be approximately 15 per- cent less than in the open plan, the latter could be moved five times as much for half the cost and could be maintained for 20 percent less. Charts, comparing parti- tioning systems and furnish- ings, indicate open layouts can be moved five times as often for half the cost. Conventional layout is shown to require rigid circulation patterns, while open layout permits traffic flexibility. WMATA is adopting a modi- fied version of open plan- ning, with conventional offices in the central core and open-plan work sta- tions along the windows. ■!» J .tkfl i^xa^iSiSM^ii^^ESi Convenlionai 34 Interiors and Industrial Design Laboratory Outfitting for The Salk Institute for Biological Studies San Diego, California Funding Agencies: Department of Health, Education and Welfare, National Institutes of Health The National Foundation The Avalon Foundation Eli Lilly & Co. Kettering Fund Architect: Louis I. Kahn Laboratory Consultants: Earl L. Walls Associates The Salk Institute of Biological Studies in San Diego, California, is housed in a new but already widely known building designed by Louis I. Kahn. The laboratory interiors shown here reveal something of what the designer can contribute to science: interiors and equipment reliably adaptable to the perform- ance of varied tasks. Even if interior work spaces are badly designed, work does get done in them. It may suffer in qual- ity and in quantity, and the worker may suffer physically and mentally. But rarely is the organization or the employee totally prevented from performing tasks. That becomes less true as work becomes more highly specialized. Perhaps the most highly special- ized work of all is performed by scientists. The equipment they use has to work or they can't. The very nature of science im- poses another requirement on equipment: extreme adaptability. An assembly-line worker may per- form a very highly specialized task — so highly specialized that it must be performed in precisely the same way over and over again. If he does it differently he will lose his job. With a scientist it is just the oppo- site. His job is discovery, and dis- covery keeps changing the job. The Salk Institute of Biological Studies is conceived of as a place conducive to scientific creativity. That is what it and the new building Modular systems approach permits open or enclosed laboratory interiors in new building, recognizing im- portance of adaptability. Simplifies use, saves time. that houses it are for. The laboratory equipment is as new as the building for which it is designed. Its design began with an analysis of the needs of biological researchers. Some work is better performed under private or semi- private conditions; some work requires constant access to col- leagues. It was particularly impor- tant to define the relation of the researchers to each other and to the equipment and apparatus they would be working with. Each person's "thinking and working area" (in other words, his desk) was placed between his lab- oratory space and the window wall, enabling him to relate either to the laboratory or to the view outside. This option made it necessary to find ways — either by desk place- ment or draperies — to permit the researcher to "turn off" the outside environment. When that could not be done, according to the de- signer, "we found a considerable presence of aluminum foil or poster applications on the window wall." Toward the center of the labora- tory is each researcher's personal laboratory-work area, usually the laboratory bench. In the center of the space the designers placed enclosures — such as warm rooms, cold rooms, dark rooms, instru- ment rooms, centrifuge rooms — that relate equally well to both sides of the laboratory. These un- enclosed storage spaces make a Simplifies maintenance: basic support spline from which cabinets are hung affords plumbers and elec- tricians easy access. Casework is off the floor for access and maintenance ease. Drawers are removable fiberglass trays that can be placed in an autoclave. communication link from one side of the laboratory to the other. The modular interior system per- mits either open or enclosed space to be created anywhere on the laboratory floor when desired. Laboratory furniture design has changed very little since the first commercial casework was intro- duced more than fifty years ago, and the available casework was insufficiently adaptable and gener- ally inadequate for the new facil- ity. The designer established basic criteria for satisfying the needs of researchers in the biological sci- ences. Working with the manufac- turer, he designed a casework sys- tem made up of individual storage cabinets cantilevered from a cen- tral structure, permitting benches to be assembled with only two floor supports. The cantilevered cabi- nets can be easily moved along the support frames as required. The casework drawers are re- movable autoclave-proof plastic trays. One tray is specifically de- signed to accept soiled glassware, permitting it to undergo decontami- nation without having to be touched by clean-up personnel. The flexibility of the new case- work system has already been put to use. Scientists have swapped entire storage cases with drawers intact. A case can be removed from a support framework and re- attached somewhere else in about five minutes without special tools. 36 Interiors and Industrial Design "Interior Design in IVIanned Spacecraft or Space Stations — Literature Search #20724" This computer read-out on interior design standards is a design dividend of the Apollo program. Space research spinoffs such as this are being made increasingly accessible through NASA's Technology Utilization Program. Funding Agency: National Aeronautics and Space Administration Scientific and Technical Information Office, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. <— — •! 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O- > L fN -J 0 11 ( _J < L 1 ,-■ 11 z a f ^1 7 < >• 0 r. 0 < 7. n ( " > 5" 1"^ r ■' > 1- u 'O 3 T 1— ^ < _ -^ X — < ^ L. 38 Interiors and Industrial Design Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit System Morgantown, West Virginia Performance goal: to dem- onstrate that a personal rapid transit system under automated control is feas- ible for meeting urban com- munity transit needs. A sys- tem carrying between 5000 and 8000 passengers per hour would be equivalent to four-to-six lane highway. Funding Agency: Department of Transportation, Urban Mass Transportation Administration Prime Contractor: The Boeing Company The vehicle shown below does not really look unfamiliar. Even though you have never seen one, you have been seeing pictures of similar ve- hicles for the past twenty-five years. Those were renderings or models. This one is a prototype and represents the Urban Mass Transportation Administration's ef- fort to address problems of mass transportation now, an effort al- ready visible in San Francisco's BART system. This car is part of the Morgan- town Personal Rapid Transit Sys- tem implemented in Morgantown, West Virginia, under UMTA's Re- search, Development and Demon- stration Program. Begun in 1972 and scheduled for revenue operations in fiscal 1975, the Morgantown project is de- signed to uncover and help solve typical problems that a PRT sys- tem would face in other cities. UMTA funded a 1969 feasibility study recommending a fully auto- mated system along fixed guide- ways. U.MTA then funded follow-up research and development, with Morgantown becoming a kind of vehicular model city. Morgantown is the home of the three-campus University of West Virginia, where at each class break some 1100 students depend on 17 buses to carry them between cam- puses. The PRT route connects two of the campuses with the business district of Morgantown. When com- System will operate on schedule during peak peri- ods, on demand during slack periods. Vehicle size, small for mass transit, was selected for economical service during both periods. pleted, the system will use some 75 cars running between six sta- tions along the guideway. The city's terrain precludes pe- destrian or bicycle paths for long distances. There is a feeling that most basic transportation prob- lems are represented here. As with Dulles Airport (page 52), the problems called for more than the mere improvement of existing facilities. Something truly new had to be tried. The PRT system is "personal" because, unlike other rapid transit systems, it is more like a car than like a train or bus: it comes when you call it. The vehicle not only comes when a passenger wants it to, it goes where he wants it to, as a self-service elevator does. Each vehicle can carry 21 pas- sengers, eight seated and 13 stand- ing. The cars are 1572 feet long, six feet wide, weigh about 8,000 pounds when empty and run at a top speed of 30 miles per hour. A computer system operates PRT through the interaction of cen- tral control, station control and ve- hicle control. The PRT passenger will press a button to indicate where he wants to go. The system will then signal which car will take him there, and that car will automatically enter the guideway system in the first avail-' able time slot. The basic conceptual problem was to design a public transporta- Three off-line stations with multiple boarding slots con- nect two West Virginia Uni- versity campuses with Mor- gantown's business district tion system that would have the flexibility of autos without the at- tendant pollution and congestion, and without the delays of buses and subways. Intrinsic to the sys- tem is the concept of the vehicle's attending the passenger instead of the passenger's waiting until the vehicle comes along. To be eco- nomically feasible, particularly dur- ing nonpeak hours, this concept demands a driverless vehicle. And a vehicle without a driver is a ve- hicle that cannot be permitted to mix with others in traffic, so a guideway is necessary. Another way in which PRT ve- hicles are more like autos than tra- ditional public transportation is that the vehicles, rather than the track system, do the turning. Rub- ber guidewheels running on a ver- tical steering rail are electronically directed to left or right at each junction, The small, driverless ve- hicles are being developed in sev- eral alternate models, all fully auto- mated and all self-switching. In the Morgantown project UMTA is developing a full-scale operating system to explore the role of tech- nology in addressing mass transit problems. The project's signifi- cance lies in its applicability to the nation's urban transportation needs. "The goal," according to an UMTA official, is "to make this new system eligible for UMTA's capital grants program throughout the nation and to make the design available to all qualified parties on a nonproprietary basis." Cars run along elevated concrete guideway (shown at left and in cross section below) with power and steering rails along sides. 42 Architecture Student Housing State University College at Brockport Brockport, New York Building components were fabricated in various cities, shipped to the site, assem- bled on a rail-mounted production line and trucked to the crane. Funding Agencies: Department of Housing and Urban Development Dormitory Autliority of tfie State of New York Design/Build Team: Caudill Rowlett Scott, Arcliitects M. Paul Friedberg & Associates, Landscape Architects The Engineers Collaborative W. E. O'Neill Construction Co. In April 1972, the ground breaking took place for student housing on the Brockport campus of the State University of New York. Due to the efficient and rapid life-cycle cost- ing methods of the Design/Build System, these dormitories were available for Va occupancy by January 1973. Design/Build is one of many advanced industrial tech- nology building systems sponsored by the Federal Government. We live in a nation and an age characterized by mass production and industrial systems. Yet we have rarely exploited the potential of industrial systems in architec- ture. The cause is probably a blend of psychological resistance, pro- fessional resistance, and ignor- ance. "Systems" run counter to the image of the architect as giver of form, though they needn't do so. "Systems" are sometimes held up as examples of the brutalizing ef- fect of industry, although they needn't be. What brought systems construc- tion to the Brockport campus of the State University of New York was the same urgent need discern- ible at campuses both private and public across the country: student housing is becoming less satisfac- tory as it becomes more costly. The design emerged from an imaginative exercise in bidding and evaluation for construction contracting, New York State's Dor- mitory Authority eliminated price Dormitory area is designed as an apartment complex organized to accommodate students, trees, walkways. This project goal was found to be perfectly compatible with a systems approach to construction. as a bidding factor by specifying $5,825,000 for the project.. (This comes to $5,825 per bed as com- pared to the average of $8,300 per bed the Dormitory Authority had been paying for dormitories.) An elaborate evaluation system weighed each element on its mer- its, with extra points for merit in areas of special importance to the Dormitory Authority and consulting teams. Acting as consultants in the evaluation system were four teams of architects, engineers, interior designers, students, faculty and staff. The result is Design/Build— a French building system adapted by American architects, landscape architects, and engineers. Design/Build has been de- scribed as "a series of procedures that make building erection more efficient." Components are assem- bled on-site on a rail-mounted production line, then lifted into place. Columns are bolted to the foundation, to which trays are at- tached accommodating all wiring, piping, and ducts. Completed 1 8 months after plan- ning, as compared with the 30 to 48 months normally required, Design/Build is a successful ex- periment in the turnkey approach to dormitory project delivery. Lightweight, factory-made frammg panels are hoisted mto place by crane, fully assembled. 44 Architecture St. Francis Square Housing Project San Francisco, California Funding Agencies: Departnnent of Housing and Urban Development Joint Pension Fund, International Longshoremen's & Warehousemen's Union, Pacific Maritime Association Architects: Marquis & Stoller Landscape Architects: Lawrence Halprin & Associates St. Francis Square is a moderate- to low-income housing project in San Francisco, financed under Section 221 (d)(3) of the U.S. Hous- ing Code in 1962 and completed in 1964. It consists of 299 garden apartments, most of them with two or three bedrooms. Unusually well maintained by the people who live there, the housing project is characterized by a high occupancy and by a low crime rate in a high crime area. Because there are no through streets, small children are able to go out of doors unattended and nonresidents are discouraged from using the public facilities. The sense of community is enhanced by the fact that the buildings are all turned inward, so that all living rooms face interior open space. This also strengthens both physical and psychological security. Low rise housing complex with no through streets uses generous landscaping to create safe, well maintained environment. By arranging the buildings in three separate rectangles around distinct interior courts the design- ers laid the framework for sub- communities. Each court has both service and play facilities serving about 100 families. Landscaping is generous, at- tracting residents to the outdoor spaces and providing the visual continuity important to the concept of a single community. That St. Francis Square works ana the precise extent to which it works are well established by an intensive study made from 1967 to 1971 by Clare Cooper and Phyllis Hackett of the Center of Planning and Development Research at the University of California, Berkeley. The study, supported in part by U.S. Department of Health grants, consisted of two analyses, from which the material here is drawn. Environment "welcomes" children by eliminating traf- fic hazards, providing grassy surfaces. Semi-mature trees were specified because they had a better chance to survive child's play. 46 Architecture Eight years later the St. Francis Square project still has a waiting list for apart- ments, is still in excellent shape, is still enjoyed. The first analyzed design deci- sions, and the second surveyed resident satisfaction. Then the re- searchers put the two together to see whether the design decisions were justified by the results. Probably the most important de- sign decision was to focus atten- tion on the project as a whole rather than on individual apart- ments or buildings. In general, this was unquestionably the right deci- sion although it led to some errors in detail: insufficient storage space, kitchens too small to eat in. Yet the architect's decision to emphasize the whole rather than the individual apartments contributes to an archi- tectural strength that is invulner- able to patio screens and other de- tails that tenants contribute. One design objective was to pro- vide an alternative to suburbs for middle-income families. Three- quarters of the residents of St. Children at St. Francis can move safely to play areas throughout the project. Apartment balconies have in some cases been glassed in by tenants to create an extra room. (Opposite) Francis Square are middle-income, and one reason is that the environ- ment "welcomes" children. The emphasis on the project en- vironment, rather than on the indi- vidual units, is reflected in the fact that more than 90 percent of the residents attribute much of their satisfaction with St. Francis Square to the outdoor areas. Seventy per- cent of the residents rate the land- scaping as "very important." When asked which they would choose if given a choice between trees or a larger living room, trees or a larger kitchen, etc., more than 60 per- cent of the tenants said they would choose trees. Because St. Francis Square is located in what had been a rela- tively high crime area, it is particu- larly interesting that it meets the standards of "Defensible Space" in Oscar Newman's book of that title. St. Francis Square, Newman says, "answers almost all of the requirements of defensible space design: It defines territorial areas and paths of transition from public to private; it provides for easy and natural surveillance of public areas; communal amenities are located in public areas to create a casual as- sociation that defends commonly shared pursuits and focuses sur- veillance; the number of families sharing an entry is limited to six; and finally, the image of the project is that of a single-family row-house development." 48 Architecture Everett McKinley Dirksen Building Chicago, Illinois Funding Agency: Public Buildings Service Government Services Administration An essential public service: Federal courthouse and office building provides swift elevator access to courtrooms and large office areas adaptable to various Federal agency functions. Architects and Engineers: Schmidt Garden & Erikson The Ottice of Mies van der Rohe D. F. Murphy Associates A. Epstein & Sons, Inc. The 30-story Everett McKinley Dirk- sen Building is a courthouse and Federal office building finished in 1965, as Phase I of the Chicago Federal Center. Construction for the two other buildings which will complete the complex was begun in the summer of 1971. The goal was to create a "total Government center which could become a model for other Government proj- ects throughout the country." A courthouse is a structure in which certain patterns of communi- cation are predictable. Walter H. Sobel, Chairman of the American Institute of Architects' Task Force on Courtroom Facilities, has iso- lated four types of communication WW =t:=trz ~A^ ^W\\l / 1 ( 1/ //^'^'^^^^^ 9k ^H in any courtroom: "Visual, audio, movement of people and docu- ment transfer." These categories of communica- tion involve specific roles: judge, lawyers, clients, bailiff, press, spectators, witness, court reporter, jurors, clerk, police officers, social Courthouse and office build- ing are part of complex that will include another Federal office building and a one- story Post Office. Courtrooms are embraced by general purpose office space. workers, etc. Any design of a Fed- eral courtroom should be based on a study of how these people actu- ally relate to each other and of the distinct physical requirements of private and public communication. A courtroom so designed won't make trial by jury a pleasurable experience. But it can help make It an efficient one, with concerned parties able to see and hear each other without strain. The prime determining factor of the size of floors in the Everett McKinley Dirksen Building was the size of the courtrooms and the amount of space required for easy elevator access to them. To make the courtrooms as accessible as possible, elevators were placed in two main cores, each located be- tween twin courtrooms. 50 Architecture Old Buildings Restored The Patent Office building in Washington, D.C. has been transformed for radi- cally different use: to house The National Collection of Fine Arts and The National Portrait Gallery. St. Louis's Old Post Office combines the solidity of a fortress, including under- ground tunnels and a 25- foot moat, with the elegance of grand staircases, Vene- tian curved fireplaces, vaulted ceilings. Plans for commercial redevelopment include construction of a 6,000-square-foot skylight over the existing courtyard. Funding Agencies: (The National Collection of Fine Arts and The National Portrait Gallery) Smithsonian Institution (Old St. Louis Post Office) Public Buildings Service Government Services Administration (Renwick Gallery) Smithsonian Institution Designers: (The National Collection of Fine Arts and The National Portrait Gallery) Faulkner, Stenhouse, Fryer & Faulkner (Old St. Louis Post Office) Peckham-Guyton, Incorporated (Renwick Gallery) John Carl Warnecke and Associates Hugh Newell Jacobsen & Associates Most of the case studies in tliis book are examples of some kind of innovation. The three buildings presented here are also innovative in the use of materials and tech- niques. They are not directed to- ward the solution of new problems, however, but rather toward the preservation of traditional values. They show the role of design in saving the past. And the past is one of our most important re- sources for the future. Government is the logical agency for preserving these values. General Services Administration, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are the Fed- eral agencies that have been most influential in funding restoration. The National Collection of Fine Arts and the National Portrait Gal- lery are housed in the old Patent Office Building, which had been scheduled for demolition in the fifties. The General Services Ad- ministration, which had planned to do away with the building in order to create space for a parking lot, responded to public and private pressures in favor of saving the structure. At the time restoration began the original interior design was largely hidden behind partitions, many of which were removed in the restoration process. The restored building is one of the major recent tourist attractions The Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. was built in 1858 as the first Corcoran Gallery of Art. It has been restored to serve as the Smithsonian Institution's museum of design, crafts and decorative arts. in Washington's downtown urban renewal area. The Renwick Gallery, National Collection of Fine Arts, opened in 1971 after a sustained public con- troversy in the sixties about whether it should be torn down in favor of a park. A feasibility study by the designers concluded that the gallery could reasonably be re- stored to its original function, al- though the effect of weather ex- tremes on the building's intricate structure had left 90 percent of its ornamental work in ruins. Even after the facade was cleaned, ex- perts were unable to make out many of the original motifs. A search through Library of Congress records and other old files yielded the original 19th century architec- tural specifications and a number of Matthew Brady photographs. When the photographs were blown up, considerable detailing was vis- ible— roundels, garlands, festoons, keystones, capitals — and could be authentically restored. In 1880, when the old Post Of- fice in St. Louis was built, its con- struction was considered an out- standing example of the architec- tural use of advanced technology. The Chicago fire of 1871 had fo- cused attention on fireproof con- struction, which was accomplished in the old Post Office by building arches between the bottom flanges of the iron beams with ordinary bricks on edge. After a series of cliff-hanging public episodes, the precise fate of the old Post Office has still not been determined, but it will not be destroyed. There are plans to use the building for a commercial development, pending conveyance to developers by the General Services Administration. 52 Architecture Dulles International Airport Chantilly, Virginia Federal Agency: Department of Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration Architects and Engineers: Ammann & Whitney Eero Saarinen Burns & McDonnell Ellery Husted Dulles International Airport was dedicated in November, 1962, as a public airport owned by the Fed- eral Government. Except for the problem of getting a cab driver to go there, Dulles In- ternational Airport is the world's most conveniently designed travel terminal. The architect, Eero Saari- nen, has been called "the most professional of architects but an amateur airport designer," and the excellence of Dulles has been at- tributed to his amateur standing. In fact what a designer brings to a client is expertness in solving prob- lems rather than specialized knowl- edge of a client's business. It is the very lack of such specialization that often enables a designer to see problems clearly, objectively, and in a new light. Dulles has a number of signifi- cantly unique features, and surely the most important of these is the mobile lounge. Predicated on the conviction of the engineers and ar- chitects that there had to be a bet- ter way of handling passengers, the idea from the very beginning was to bring the passenger to the plane ratherthan bringing the plane to the passenger. This would avoid the expensive, awkward and tiring "fingers" of most jet airports. The simplest way of accomplishing this would have been to use buses, as many European airports do. But Saarinen believed that the solution to a jet-age terminal had to reside Widely celebrated as an architectural expression of the jet age, Dulles Interna- tional Airport is as carefully thought out as it looks. The terminal building, the run- ways, the approaches and the interior details are all designed for the convenient and swift handling of both passengers and planes. in the aichilecture. The now-famous solution is the mobile lounge — a part of the termi- nal that detaches itself from the rest of the building as required. The concept of the mobile lounge is so logical that it is hard in retro- spect to remember what an auda- cious idea it seemed at the time. In order to convince the airline management of the mobile lounges' reasonableness, Charles Eames was asked to prepare a short film. The result was "The Ex- panding Airport," produced for an audience of airline executives. It was instrumental in getting the lounges built. A fleet of 21 lounges had been built by the time the airport opened Passengers enter the termi- nal building between the outward-sloping concrete piers that make the ap- proach so dramatic. Every step of the way from ter- minal doorway to plane is the result of study by designers and engineers. 54 Architecture Because the Mobile Lounge concept eliminated the need for long pedestrian "fin- gers", the architects were able to make the terminal building unified and com- pact. Departing passengers enter directly in front of ticket counters, then cross the 150-foot wide building to the gate, which opens into the mobile lounge. The lounge carries passen- gers to the planes without requiring the ramps or stairs used in European bus-loading systems. The lounges are docked at the main concourse level. The gate is the gate to a departure lounge rather than to the plane. in 1 962. Each is powered by a 1 72- lip engine. Each lounge holds 102 passengers with 71 of them seated. The lounge is 54 feet long, 16 feet wide, 17y2 feet high, and weighs 76,000 pounds. With the advent of the 747 and the DC-10, modifica- tion in the design of the lounges was required, and there are now 12 "second generation" units. Not all Dulles flights use the mo- bile lounge. Local feeder lines, ex- ecutive planes, and helicopters can taxi directly to an apron in front of the terminal building, for conven- tional loading and unloading from ground level. The design of the lounge is illus- trative of the way in which design can achieve more than a client ini- tially expects it to, Saarinen re- marked that "no one asked us to grapple with the problem of a jet- age terminal beyond the question of pure architecture." But the ar- chitects and the engineers made an analysis of the entire problem. This included an investigation of jet manufacture and operation, high- way and environmental factors, flight schedules, baggage han- dling, economics, stores and other services, and — most important of all — what people do at airports — how an airport works. The data yielded by this research were reduced to a series of 40 charts that pinpointed three critical areas. The first was the difficulty of getting passengers to and from 56 Architecture The interior has the char- acter of a departure lounge, not of a bus. And it has space for hand luggage. Capacity of this lounge is 102, with 71 seated. planes, a difficulty that was sure to be magnified by the jet age. The second was the enormous cost of taxiing jet aircraft. The third was the need for flexibility in servicing aircraft. The mobile lounge ad- dresses all three points. The attention to detail that char- acterizes the mobile lounge ap- plies to the entire airport. The run- ways have 25-foot-wide paved shoulders to prevent the jet en- gines from sucking in dirt and debris. The two-level terminal building is 600 feet long and can be expanded to 1,800 feet by the addition of a 600-foot extension at either end. The main roof of the terminal is supported by a row of reinforced concrete frames. Supporting col- umns, founded in rock at their base, are connected by a rein- forced concrete edged beam at their head. Any inward overturning force applied to the base of the frames by the suspended roof is counteracted by the main floor act- ing as a horizontal strut. The parking lot is slightly lower than the terminal ground floor, per- mitting three levels at the front of the terminal. The result is a passen- ger flow that separates arriving and departing passengers so effectively that the terminal building is uncon- gested even at peak times. The easily installed, maintained and cleaned tandem seating — now a part of airport interiors the world over — was developed by Charles Eames for Dulles. Taxiways run parallel to runways, to which they are linked by high- speed turnoffs. This makes it pos- sible for a plane to leave a runway at a speed of 65 miles per hour. The cost of Dulles International Airport, including the limited-ac- cess highway, was $108.3 million. Construction costs are expected to be recovered in the first 30 years. Driver cabs are located at each end of the lounge. The vehicles are 54 feet long, 16 feet wide. 58 Architecture Grand Coulee Third Power Plant Columbia Basin, State of Washington Funding Agencies: Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation "Corrugation" of concrete increases strength for sup- porting large loads imposed ,™.r vm*^s.»- *-^v-x by the lifting machinery. ^„^^n,V./ -:.V?H; v.^^: ■'■fe^'^- Environmental planning Kenneth W. Brooks, Consulting Architects: Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P Smith with Thomas Hayes, Associate Architects and Engineers Bureau of Reclamation, ^»- Engineering .^^ and Research Center Visitors will park at top of Forebay Dam, walk along lip of dam to elevator sta- tion, descend to mid-station by means of glass enclosed inclined elevator. Observa- tion balcony is cantilevered from trussed w/tm^ rt '' Jiw?^-^ ^*;- V'" -'^ ■s»r " ijh" iji ' ^ , , y* '.*^' -.f. ' - x^' r^f«* 60 Architecture Visitor access route in cross section shows options: not everyone has to take the same tour. Full tour roughly parallels flow of water from Forebay Dam through the pen stocks, through the Third Power Plant and into the river downstream. Plan view shows existing dam, new Forebay dam, pen- stocks, an^ Third Power Plant. The Department of the Interior's Bureau of Reclannation has the del- icate job of exploiting the environ- ment on one hand, while protecting and preserving it on the other. Moreover, it has to accomplish all this in public: tens of millions of visitors use the Bureau's reservoirs for recreation, and hundreds of thousands more tour the sites dur- ing construction. The Third Power Plant at Grand Coulee and Forebay dams will be the world's largest power com- plex. Each of the six generators in the Third Power Plant alone will have a capacity of 600 thousand kilowatts. The architecture has a function beyond merely housing the gen- erators. Its purpose is to enhance a visit to the dam and make it un- derstandable. Because of the maj- esty of the natural setting and the hugeness of the power project, the choice of a designer was espe- cially sensitive. The Bureau has its own Board of Environmental Consultants, and it was the Board that recommended Marcel Breuer and Associates as architects for the Third Power Plant and related visitors center. Breuer chose to use reinforced concrete, eliminating the need for a steel structural skeleton. The scale of the power complex is, if anything, intensified; the building's profiled walls are cantilevered up out of bedrock, the multifaceted panels contrapuntally playing against the dam's stolid mass. Third Power Plant, shown here during construction, is designed to be integrated with Grand Coulee Dam and the new Forebay Dam. 64 Landscaped Environment Dallas Urban Design Programs and Strategies Dallas, Texas Funding Agencies: Department of Housing and Urban Development City of Dallas Designers: Weiming Lu and staff of thie Urban Design Office, City of Dallas Ecological Study Consultant: Phillip Lewis With an average of 3500 acres of land developed and urbanized each year, Dallas may be the fastest-growing metropolis in the country. To try to make this growth benign the city's urban designers are conducting 24 separate planning programs. ^'Mi'MM:^! These maps are computer print-outs indicating eco- logical data relating to the area shown at left in aerial view and plan. The Urban Design Office, Dallas Department of Planning and Ur- ban Development is in the midst of an urban design plan that tries to tackle environmental problems on all fronts simultaneously. It con- sists of 24 distinct operational programs in ecology, historic pres- ervation, sign ordinances, com- mercial districts, pedestrian and vehicular arteries, mini-parks, bond-financed capital improve- ment, fire protection, recreational facilities, storm drainage, neigh- borhood improvement, tree ordi- nances, land use, and housing. Dallas is the eighth largest city in the nation, with a population of 900,000. The planners anticipate that by the year 2000 the popula- tion will more than triple. The urban plan is most unusual in its comprehensiveness, in the number of areas of urban concern it touches on, in the depth in which it treats them, and in the variety of methods by which supporting data are gathered. In seeking to create a design responsive to the needs of Dallas citizens, the planners consistently turn directly to the citi- zens themselves for help. This process consists in part of a sur- vey of how Dallas looks to the peo- ple who live there and in part of a concentrated campaign to tell peo- ple about the planning process and the progress being made. Since 1965 the city has conducted a "Goals for Dallas" program, in oaaaaaaa. eaaaaaaa. «^aaaaaaK. xaaaaaaao . (x oaaaaaaaaox . xeaaaaaaeeaea .exaaaaaaaaaa .H.aaaaaaaaa ... .aaaaaaaaaaa.. eaaaaaaaaaex. .x .aaaaaaaaao. .*. .. xaaaaeaaaa.^x ... .taaaaaaaaaat*. . eaaaeaaaa .aaaaaaax . 4^»t8Bao .aaaaaaa. . t,....8. saaaaai- . . xos.. eaaae.*^. +08088 . .eaaaaaa x . • '•"toe • xaasaaaaaaaae . ... . . eaa«aaa«aaaa . ..oaeaaaeaaaae. * .ex.oaaaaaaaaaa. . .. ....e. .aaaaaaaaaaaaes. .xox. ,aaaaaaaaaaa« .eeaaaaaaaae . • •'f'fBaaaaaaaae .. .aaaaaaaa. aaaaaaaa .c. . xax. t^eaaaaaaaoaaaaoj . xaaasu ^aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa . f aeaaaaaaaasaaaaaaaa-^ . ; aaaaaaaaaaoaaaaao . o jaaaaaaaaaaeaaaaa. o I saaaaaaaaaaaaaaax . o xaeaaaaaaeaeaaaaa^^ 3>eaauo. 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K«n ■ ««t6i. fla. • • ^1 exB. • • ^^^^fl X«H ♦». .S^. ^^^^^H .B. i^at 4-9. ^^^^^H , X .H ^^^^^H • ^ ^ B XgO. K,,'* ^^^1 toax ■ K • ^^^^^H .ae. • a^^^^^l .xato. • t ^^^^^H . .68. H ,+ 1 ^^^^^^^^K^ - .>-'v-.''»?SSiV^. >. gjjgg^g^l^Wa'itgB—r- ■ which more than 100,000 residents have participated, The 16-man urban design team is interdisciplinary and includes architects, graphic designers, in- dustrial designers, urban planners, political scientists, and ecologists. Their planning procedure is based on a physical inventory of all ele- ments in the community that are sensate and measurable: every- thing that can be seen, touched, smelled, heard or described in physical terms. The result is a series of ecologi- cal maps of 31 elements in an area of approximately 40,000 square miles. Weiming Lu, who directs the urban planning project, believes that a rational approach to the city's environmental problems is impossible without a comprehen- sive environmental data base. Dr. Philip Lewis, a Wisconsin envi- ronmental scientist, developed the study. The maps shown here are produced by a computer program initially developed for the Wiscon- sin Light and Power Company. The computer program provides a stored data base and a series of computerized maps showing the area distribution of each element in the data bank. The maps shown here isolate the particular catego- ries of environmental data and dis- play it free of the other material found on maps normally. The map and photograph on page 64 show areas the printouts relate to. The effect of the Dallas eco- logical study depends on the ability of planners to influence decisions. The study serves both as a data resource and an instrument of persuasion designed to supplement the other urban studies. Each map is a graph of environ- mental vulnerability, showing in de- tail just where certain stresses can or cannot be withstood. This is as essential in environmental plan- ning as it was essential for Apollo planners to know the physiological stresses the astronauts would be subject to in space. Data were col- lected from such varied sources as geological survey maps, NASA space photographs, bird-watching records, and other field work. Then the data were copied onto a form that could be optically scanned — a service performed by volunteers from the League of Women Voters and other groups. Actually, two sets of maps have been generated. One provides a detailed examination of the 900- square-mile Dallas County area. The other provides a regional over- view covering approximately 40,- 000 square miles. The regional overview takes the form of a series of overlays on a base map. Its pri- mary uses are to monitor regional change in terms of critical re- sources and to display Dallas in its ecological context. Interestingly, neither the Planning and Urban De- velopment Department, nor the City of Dallas itself has any control or much influence over the land use outside the city limits. But, Lu ob- serves, "the political boundary does not relate to the natural fea- tures at all. In order to protect Dallas we have to look beyond." 68 Landscaped Environment Spaces for Recreation The Court of Ideas is a Pitts- burgh, Pennsylvania neigh- borhood center in which de- sign process has become integral to community life. The project was not de- signed for the community, but designed and built by the community, and con- tinues to be. Tyson Park is an economi- cally maintained leisure cen- ter attracting large numbers of Knoxville residents and University of Tennessee students. Funding Agencies: (The Court of Ideas) Office of Economic Opportunity; Pittsburgh Parks and Playgrounds Society; Carnegie-Mellon University (Tyson Park) Department of Housing and Urban Development City of Knoxville (Harlem River Bronx State Park) Department of the Interior Nevj York State Park Commission Designers: (The Court of Ideas) Community Design Associates The Organizers (Tyson Park) Oliphant and Kersey, Incorporated (Harlem River Bronx State Park) M. Paul Friedberg & Associates We need more than one kind of recreational area. The three pic- tured here perform distinct func- tions. What they have in common is their recognition of the design imperative in play for both children and adults. Tyson Park in Knoxville, Ten- nessee, is the most conventional of the three. It was redeveloped in 1970 with $90,000 of local money and $81,000 of an Open Space Grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The heavy wooden playground equipment has been almost main- tenance free, except for the routine replacement of swing hangers and seats. The park is designed for people of all ages and, curiously, the major attraction for all age groups is the playground area. The high intensity of park use since re- development was completed has virtually eliminated vandalism in Tyson Park. Harlem River Bronx State Park is an effort to integrate open-space parkland into the full life of the city, and transform the latter in the process. It is predicated on the de- signer's view that large-scale state and Federal parks cannot serve cities well because people have to leave the cities to get to them. Neither is the city served by small- scale escape parks that provide no more than a breath of fresh air. This park is intended as part of city life, with the park's theaters, swimming pools, sl