Buildings and their Genotypes

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson

Bill Hillier, best known for his research on 'spatial syntax', and academic Julienne Hanson scrutinise the internal structure of cells using a method of gamma-analysis. They surmise that interior spaces are potentially separate events providing segregated spatial experience, a 'transpatial system' characterised by analogy and difference. For Hillier and Hanson, this system defines boundaries as distinct thresholds that sever the interior space from surrounding space. It differs from a system founded on spatial continuity between inside and outside. To overcome the duality of inside and outside, they suggest a shift from segregated interiors emblematic of social solidarity to encountering interiors suggestive of spatial solidarity, and contingent upon movement and interaction of inhabitants across the boundary.

Insides and Outsides: The Reversal Effect

A settlement, as we have seen, is at least an assemblage of primary cells, such that the exterior relations of those cells, by virtue of their spatial arrangement, generate and modulate a system of encounters. But this only accounts for a proportion of the total spatial order in the system, namely the proportion that lies between the boundary of the primary cell and the global structure of the settlement. No reference has yet been made to the internal structure of the primary cells, nor to how such structures would relate to the rest of the system. This section concerns the internal structures of cells: it introduces a method of syntactic analysis of interior structures, which we will call gamma-analysis; it develops a number of hypotheses about the relation between the principal syntactic parameters and social variables; and it offers a theory of the relations between the internal and external relations of the cell as part of a general theory of the social logic of space. Since the shape of the general theory is not at all obvious from what has gone before, some theoretical problems must be explored before questions of analysis and quantification can be opened.

One of the most common assumptions about space, sometimes explicit, more often implicit, is that human spatial organisation is the working out of common behavioural principles through a hierarchy of different levels. Thus from the domestic interior, or even

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from the individual space, through to the city or region, it is assumed that similar social or psychological forces shape space, differing only in involving larger numbers of people and larger physical aggregates.¹ The assumption is so common that it deserves a name: we might call it the 'continuum' assumption. If the continuum assumption were true, the analysis of interiors would simply be a matter of taking the principles and techniques for the analysis of aggregates and applying them on smaller scale. Unfortunately, this would lead us to overlook a very fundamental fact, one which when taken account of adds a whole new dimension to the system. We might call it the fact of the boundary.

A settlement presents itself to our experience as a continuous object by virtue of the spatial relations connecting the outsides of boundaries. By moving about the settlement we build up knowledge of these exterior relations until we have a picture of some kind of the settlement structure. The spaces inside the boundaries have a quite contrary property: they are a series of – potentially at least – separate events, not a continuous system. The same drawing of boundaries that constructs a settlement as a continuous spatial aggregate with respect to the outsides of cells creates a set of discontinuous spaces on the insides of those cells, which do not normally present themselves to experience as a continuous spatial system with a global form, but as a series of discrete events, expressly and explicitly disconnected from the global system. They are experienced one by one as individuals, not as a single entity sustained by physical connections. This property lies in the very nature of a boundary, which is to create a disconnection between an interior space and the global system around, of which it would otherwise be a part.

By virtue of this fact of disconnection, the set of spaces interior to boundaries creates a different kind of system, one whose basic properties have already been discussed at some length: a transpatial system. A transpatial system, we may remember, is a class of spatially independent but comparable entities which have global affiliations, not by virtue of continuity and proximity but by virtue of analogy and difference. In such a system the nature of our spatial experience is different from our experience of a spatially continuous system. We enter a domain which is related to others not by virtue of spatial continuity, but of structural comparability to others of its type. We experience it as a member of a class of such interiors, and we comment on it accordingly. The relations between interiors are experienced as conceptual rather than as spatial entities, and the mode of organising global experience out of local observations is transpatial rather than spatial.

This is the fundamental fact of the boundary. There is no homogeneous continuum of spatial principles from the very large to the very small. In the transition from large to small there is a fundamental discontinuity where the system in effect reverses its mode of articulation of global experience out of local events. In moving from outside to inside, we move from the arena of encounter probabilities to a domain of social knowledge, in the sense that what is realised in every interior is already a certain mode

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of organising experience, and a certain way of representing in space the idiosyncrasies of a cultural identity.

Even the continuous scale of spatial organisation is shown to be illusory by the reversal effect of the boundary. Behind the boundary, the reference points of space do not become correspondingly smaller. On the contrary they expand through their primarily transpatial reference. As a consequence of the nature of the boundary, the most localised scale of spatial organisation tends to become the most global in its reference. The boundary refers to the principles of a culture.

The duality of inside and outside adds a new dimension to the relation between social solidarity and space. A solidarity will be transpatial to the extent that it develops a stronger and more homogeneous interior structuring of space and, in parallel, emphasises the discreteness of the interior by strong control of the boundary. The emphasis in such a case will be on the internal reproduction of a relatively elaborate model. Words like ritualised and conformist might well be applied to such types of organisation. The essence of a transpatial solidarity lies in the local reproduction of a structure recognisably identical to that of other members of the group. The stronger and more complex the structure, therefore, and the more exactly it is adhered to, the stronger will be the solidarity. Such a solidarity requires the segregating effect of the boundary to preserve the interior structure from uncontrolled incursion. Solidarity means in this case the reproduction of an identical pattern by individuals who remain spatially separated from each other, as well as from the surrounding world. A transpatial solidarity is a solidarity of analogy and isolation: that is of analogous structures realised in controlled isolation by discrete individuals.

In contrast, a spatial solidarity works on the contrary principle. It builds links with other members of the group not by analogy and isolation, but by contiguity and encounter. To realise this it must stress not the separateness of the interior but the continuity of interior and exterior. Movement across the boundary, which would undermine a transpatial solidarity, is the fundamental condition of existence for a spatial solidarity. In such circumstances an elaborate and controlled interior cannot be sustained, but nor is it necessary. Encounters are to be generated, not limited, and this implies the weakening of restrictions at and within the boundary. A spatial solidarity will be undermined, not strengthened, by isolation. In a spatial solidarity, therefore, the weakening of the boundary is associated with a weaker structuring of the interior. Informality rather than ritual must prevail if the principles of the system are to be sustained.

Thus the reversal of space that occurs naturally at the boundary of the primary cell generates a dualism in the principles of solidarity that can relate society to space. An analysis of spatial patterns internal to the cell, and those relating the interior to the

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exterior, must therefore aim to capture the spatial correlates of these bifurcating principles. This will be possible because the dualism reflects only the dual nature of the boundary, which at one and the same time creates a category of space – the interior – and a form of control – the boundary itself. This dualism is invariably present in spatial patterns within buildings. The method of analysis to be outlined in this section on gamma-analysis will centre on these two dimensions and their interrelations. It will turn out that category and control are closely related to the basic parameters of alpha-analysis. Relative asymmetry in gamma-analysis will articulate the relations of the space, that is, of the category embodied by the space; and ringiness – i.e. distributedness – in gamma will articulate the relations of the boundary, that is the relations of control on the category.

A building is therefore at least a domain of knowledge, in the sense that it is a certain spatial ordering of categories, and a domain of control, in the sense that it is a certain ordering of boundaries. Sociologically speaking, a building relates this dualism to the universe of inhabitants and strangers by reversing the spatial and transpatial relations that were identified in alpha. Every building, even a single cell, identifies at least one ‘inhabitant,’ in the sense of a person with special access to and control of the category of space created by the boundary. An inhabitant is, if not a permanent occupant of the cell, at least an individual whose social existence is mapped into the category of space within that cell: more an inhabitant of the social knowledge defined by the cell than of the cell itself. Inhabitant is thus a categoric concept, and therefore a transpatial entity, and in that sense the inhabitant is part of a global categoric reality as a result of being mapped into the local bounded space of the cell, as well as being a member of a local spatial reality.

With strangers the effect is the opposite. Every building selects from the set of possible strangers a subset of ‘visitors’ who are persons who may enter the building temporarily, but may not control it. Pupils in a school, patients in a hospital, guests in a house, and prisoners in a prison all fall within this category of being more than strangers, in that they have a legitimate reason to cross the boundary of a building, but less than inhabitants, in that they have no control over that building and their social individuality is not mapped into the structure of space within that building. In this sense a building also localises the global world of strangers, by the same means as it globalises the local world of inhabitants. It realises a categoric order locally, then uses the boundary to interface this categoric order with the rest of the social world.

A building may therefore be defined abstractly as a certain ordering of categories, to which is added a certain system of controls, the two conjointly constructing an interface between the inhabitants of the social knowledge embedded in the categories and the visitors whose relations with them are controlled by the building. All buildings, of whatever kind, have this abstract structure in common; and each characteristic pattern that we would call a building type typically takes these fundamental relations and, by

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varying the syntactic parameters and the interface between them, bends the fundamental model in one direction or another, depending on the nature of the categories and relations to be constructed by the ordering of space.

In the sense that it is some ordering of space, then, a building is at least some domain of unitary control, that 'unitariness' being expressed through two properties: a continuous outer boundary, such that all parts of the external world are subject to some form of control; and continuous internal permeability, such that every part of the building is accessible to every other part without going outside the boundary. To express this set of relations, and to avoid confusion with definitions of a building that depend on it being, for example, under a single roof, the term 'premises' will in future be used instead of 'building.' Premises are a domain of unitary control with the boundary and permeability properties given above, whose internal relations are developed by syntactic means into a certain kind of interface between inhabitant and visitors. Gamma-analysis is therefore the analysis of these spatial relations and controls realised though the permeability patterns of the subdivided cell. (… p 147)

Note

1 See for example, Oscar Newman, Defensible Space; Crime Prevention Through Urban Design, Macmillan (New York), 1972; Christopher Alexander, et al., A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, Oxford University Press (New York), 1977. The most common form in which these ideas appear, however, is as assumptions, as for example in HMSO, Housing the Family, MTP Construction (Lancaster), 1974.

Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, 'Buildings and their Genotypes', The Social Logic of Space, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge), 1984.

© 1984 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.

(Excerpt pp 143–7)

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