How big is bad? (Theory).

Bigness, it seems, is one of the unavoidable characteristics of modern culture: the global market and ever-increasing populations seem to demand bigger and bigger buildings. Charles Jencks argues that bigness almost inevitably leads to boredom and anomie.

Norman Foster enjoys running a big firm of architects, and designing what might have been the biggest building in the world, the Millennium Tower for Japan. New York City has enjoyed five of the world's biggest skyscrapers: the Flatiron building, Woolworths, Chrysler, Empire State and WTC. Le Corbusier did not like the idea of political parties, but he did admire one meaning of the word Bolshevik 'bigness'. Rem Koolhaas has also made a virtue, and partial theory, from this concept and it is the rare architect who does not search for big commissions. 'Make no small plans', they whisper to themselves, recalling the Modernist injunction of Daniel Burnham as he devised the grand layout for Chicago by the lake.

Small may be beautiful, as E. F. Schumacher opined in the 1970s (or 'quite beautiful' as Ian Hamilton Finlay rephrased it in one of his ironic concrete poems) but it is hard to live up to the ideal. Richard Rogers confessed in a New Yorker profile that he did not want, or intend, to grow his office over 29 people, but like all the other architects trying to grapple with big issues, production realities soon pushed him over the limit. For the country as a whole, it is very hard to resist the economic pressure to become bigger, to grow one's way out of social problems, most obviously the immiseration of the poor. Zero population growth is a very sensible policy as far as ecology is concerned, but no government will pursue it for political reasons.

Moreover, there is the Modernist ideological commitment to bigness. Big government, big labour unions, big economics of scale have many justifications, but consider only one, the paradigm of the razon blade. As modern designers liked to point out, the more razor blade. As modern designers liked to point out, the more razor blades manufactured, the better each one gets. Before Gillette proved this paradigm, the quality of a blade was determined, roughly, by precision-cutting and constant sharpening. A rich man could tell his barber to hone and grind away until his razor achieved maximum sharpness. The mass production of blades, however, completely reversed this equation. If enough razors were manufactured to justify the investment in new tooling equipment, then all the poor could shave more quickly, cheaply and closer to the skin than the richest man in the world. QED, the bigger the production-run, the better the quality of each razor blade. The same was true of the Model A Ford, the mass-produced house (so L e Corbusier said), and free teeth on the health service (as Cedric Price used to say).

Yet a moment's thought about the actual state of national health gives one pause. There are limits to growth and economies of size, a point reached when bigger means worse. Think of a jet faster than the Concorde, or a building taller than 120 storeys. The paradigm of the razor blade is not a model for all productive systems, especially artistic and complex social ones. But who can say when this point is reached, when big becomes too big?

Law of diminishing architecture

In the mid-'70s, I tried to wrestle with this question and formulated a law of architecture that explains why the bigger corporate modernism gets, the more boring it usually gets. I called this 'the Ivan Illich Law of Diminishing Architecture', after the man who discovered counter-productive growth in other fields, and framed it as follows: 'for any building type there is an upper limit to the number of people who can be served before the quality of the environment falls'. With hotels sprouting up in London it was quite obvious. When 3000 tourists swarmed together for lunch, or sight-seeing, as they did in some large Moscow hotels, then the quality of the food, or the experience of Red Square, was somewhat diminished; that is, when compared with ten or twenty travelling in a group. (1) In 1975 it appeared that this decline of quality, or law of increasing ennui, was caused by the conformity inherent in large numbers. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, that stereotype of '50s sociologists, dramatized a truth. With large impersonal offices filling up the cities, ennui might be caused by corporate drones asking for mirrorplate boxes that matched their taste (also a cliche, of journalism at the time). Or, perhaps, boredom was caused by the speed at which mega-buildings were dropped onto a rich, unsuspecting site. Either force might freeze architecture into what was called the dumb box.

But 25 years later other reasons, including economic determinants, seem more compelling than psychological ones. The evidence of this unfortunate rule is obvious to anyone flying over a growing downtown, or walking down Sixth Avenue in New York, or boating past Hong Kong's waterfront proof too positive to deny. But why should big usually mean boring, why shouldn't the Modernist hope, that mass-production can increase quality, be true?

With most large buildings there appears to be a king of Richter Scale measuring tedium. Over a threshold of about a half-a-million square feet, every skyscraper ten floors higher than the next is likely to be twice as uninspired, and the same goes, beyond a certain point, for every extra $10 million dollars spent on a building. So the $60 million dollar, 60-storey skyscraper, compared to a $20 million 20-storied one, is likely to be 16 times as dull. There are exceptions, and these figures are ridiculously precise, in order to make a point: money and size are measurable, dullness is not. But, the idea behind the law is that, given enough computer time, you could calculate the numbing repetition of elements in a building, and whether they were yesterday's cliches, and thus produce a rough measure of boredom. If you graph these tendencies they produce a curve similar to many distributions found in nature and culture, called the power law.

Power laws

For instance, the curve showing the small number of large stock market crashes shading into the large number of small ones. Or the graph depicting the few large asteroid impacts on the moon versus the many tiny ones that hit every day; or the few large mass-extinctions in carth's long history versus the many tiny extinction events, and soon. (2) Those acquainted with such statistics, or earthquakes and the Richter scale, that is the maths of 'power laws', will recognize the normal curve, the trade-off that swings from top left to low right. It is true the rule is not absolute. On the graph of increasing boredom are also found exceptions to the rule -- company headquarters and a few prestige buildings where clients are willing to take a chance, and also spend more money. These exemplars, such as the Hongkong Bank, or the tallest building in the world (at any moment) are exceptions. Yet they only prove the general truth all the more: they are very rare.

After a certain size, about a half-a-million square feet I would argue (half the size of the Chrysler Building), the bigger the building the less the architecture. One reason for this, as the skyscraper-architect Cesar Pelli pointed out in discussing these issues, is the way inefficiencies and costs are multiplied by size. An extra floor added to a 40-storey skyscraper is not just one more at the same price, but extra costs for every floor. 'In effect', he said, 'you add the floor not at the top, where you imagine it, but at the bottom; because its weight and services have an impact throughout the building'. One developer pointed out to him the extra floor added 15-25 cents per square foot to the whole, and usually no one wants to pay for the extra premium. In similar manner, when a developer builds very high, or in great volume, there will be several multiplier effects, and thus the client will try to optimize every square inch of usable space. Soon this economic rationalization will dominate other concerns. That is unless the client seeks the 'Bilbao Effect', or tries to erect the largest building in the world, and thereby suspend the law of diminishing architecture. Or there may be a unique building condition: for instance, where it pays to turn a skyscraper into a pencil-thin media station with radio, telephone and tv stations at the top. These might justify extra expense and more considered architecture. There are exceptions. But, if most large buildings are put up to make investors money, quickly and predictably, then when more money is at stake, lawyers, accountants, developers and clients will optimize repetition -- demand predictability -- and reduce all the multiplying costs that are not strictly necessary.

These extras include the very things that define the art of architecture; a new concept, light and space dynamics, ornament and structural expression, sculptural gesture, and innovation. Since big buildings must get a return on their investment, with zero risk, there will be zero creative architecture. No risk, no creativity and therefore in critical terms, no architecture. To adopt an old distinction, one might call such zero-rated creativity and architecture, but building.

Supermodernism so dull

Thus it becomes clearer why so much Supermodernism (as the Dutch call it) or generic architecture (as Koolhaas terms it) is so dull. Consider the Postdamer Platz built in Berlin from 1995-2001 (AR January 1998). Although some of the best architects, such as Arata Isozaki, Rafael Moneo, and Richard Rogers, were led by a very good one, Renzo Piano, they produced some of their worst work (an opinion I share with Joseph Rykwert). This has happened, in spite of some good ecological intentions and contextual theory, some pleasant urban spaces and detailing. Even the fine idea of dividing a large commission between several good architects did not reverse the law of diminishing architecture. The results are, at the same time, both stereotyped and overblown. The Daimler-Benz Tower is clad in dirty orange terracotta meant to fit into the Berlin context; but the colour and material, at this scale, merely insults the idea of contextualism and provides no parsing at different scales. The slab block with the rotating Merce des symbol is equally inept in its massing and endless repetition.

Why does the whole development seem so cliched and inflated? Mainly because of its size, the 6.5 million square feet of development, that is, six and a half times the amount of the Chrysler Building. I am not arguing that the architecture had to be as bland and inarticulate as it has turned out, only that at this scale of building, with this much corporate money at stake, it was likely to be a collection of uninspired boxes. Big Corporate Modernism, the style and approach that dominates global architecture, works within the severe constraints of the behemoth. It is worth recalling that the World Trade Center, those two corporate boxes of 110 storeys, was 13 million square feet big, the largest commercial facility in the world. It was an independent city with the city, of 55 000 people at peak time, a district with its own zip code. Architecturally is bigness was exaggerated by the close spacing of the aluminium structure shooting upwards from the Gothic arches at the base. These created the vibrating optical effects that made it hard to focus on anything but the monolith itself, thus creating a symbol for bigness.

From an abstract point of view it is impossible to say when big becomes too big, when the law of diminishing architecture sets in. Size and scaling are matters of structural and social invention as well as urban transport and a host of other things. All one can say with surety is that there are always limits to size. Biologists make this point with respect to the dimensions of animals, to brain size and leg length. They formulate laws, or rather measurable hypotheses, of why most animals are about the size of a rabbit, why not too many dinosaurs evolve and so forth. Aviation engineers have come up with equations that optimize the size/speed ratios of passenger jets like Concorde. Maybe the angle and measurement of my graph (p67) is off by a factor of two, but that some power law of diminishing architecture sets in a certain point I have no doubt, nor that my figures can be much improved.

(1.) Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture Academy Editions. London. 1997. p13.

(2.) Power Laws have been studied by many at the Same Fe Institute. See For instance Murray Gell-Mann. The Quwk and the Jaguar. Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. Little Brown & Co. London 1994. pp93-95.