This brought to mind a story--I would guess apocryphal, but it *could* be
true--that I was told some years back:
When San Francisco State University was being planned, Frank Lloyd Wright
thought that the site was interesting, and offered to design the whole
campus for free. The regents thought that it might be nice to have a
showcase campus. Still, Wright was prickly, and his ideas about university
settings might be eccentric; universities were designed for the instruction
of students, not to be looked at. He certainly wasn't a typical architect.
You couldn't be sure that he might not do something improper. And so the
regents turned down Wright. They assigned the task to a State staff
architect, who had just finished his previous assignment--designing Folsom
prison.
One thing I also heard, which may be more reliable, is that the student
union building at SF State, one of the last buildings to be constructed, was
redesigned to be locked down and defended in case of riots--this being the
60's, and SF State a campus with a lot of antiwar protests.
All that aside, just as a species can be marginally adapted to its niche and
yet still function, so a building can afford or constrain, and yet still be
reconstructed in the imaginations of those who use the building and its
space, as a couple of teachers have noted. In a broader sense, we are all
born into a classroom that doesn't quite fit. Humans have been
"redesigning" the classroom before they were human. The *conscious* work to
maintain an ideal space in opposition to the material space is greater--and
perhaps makes the lesson of interactive class behavior one that students
themselves will internalize more readily by the repeated effort to imagine
it. In spite of architecture, the students at SF State in the Sixties still
managed to come together into a community. By contrast, it is the *absence*
of consciousness in the grocery store activity, the *absence* of disruptions
of an unconscious social genre of atomized group behavior (which, I suspect,
was a Taylorism borrowing from "open stacks" library model to replace the
older, social, "closed stack" kitchen pantry model), that makes it possible
for the grocery corporations to subtly guide shoppers' purchases, to
increase profit-margins, to move shoppers through the aisles as cattle are
guided through curved passages designed to keep them calm and moving toward
the mechanical pole-ax....
Thinking about Halloween, as you can see,
Doug