Sustainabilities: Eco-oriented | Utopian
Part II: Intellectual History
The Bateson Building fundamentally evokes one of the long-standing missions of modern architecture and urbanism to organically integrate “work, place, and folk.” This was the program laid out by the Scottish urbanist and biologist Patrick Geddes in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, one in effect reinvented and reinvigorated after World War II by the importation into design of second order cybernetics theory and its modeling of ecological behavior “as a heterogeneous collection of interacting processes and transforming behaviors.”1
The building was named after anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, a mentor to Sim van der Ryn, who explained in the building’s dedication ceremony:2
Most of Gregory’s life was spent trying to illuminate the wholeness that is in man and the natural world. We are all part of what Gregory called “the pattern which connects” which is the form of life itself. Gregory’s search led in many directions: the function of language and thought; the nature of human cultures; biology; and the connection among living things. In the last month of his life I asked him what single thing was needed for people to grasp a new way of looking at their world and he told me, “people are mad for quantity, yet what is significant is difference.” And so it is with this building named to honor Gregory Bateson. We found that designing a building to save energy and work with natural flows means designing a building that is sensitive to difference and results in a building that is better for people.
During the previous decade designers like Sim van der Ryn and Calthorpe had been deeply involved in counterculture and its ecological rethinking of human-to-human and human-to-nature relationships, for instance at their Farallones Institute, dedicated to research in Appropriate Technology; Bateson’s influence was marked on a segment of the Bay Region counterculture through the Whole Earth Catalog, a sister enterprise to the Farallones Institute under the umbrella of the Portola Institute nonprofit. Founded in 1968 by Stewart Brand, the Catalog and its associated publication the CoEvolution Quarterly had created a “high-tech vernacular” culture out of ecology’s high-tech/ low-tech, futuristic/ archaic antinomies, preparing the way for what would be articulated, in E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful of 1973, as Appropriate Technology.3
The Catalog began as a sort of homage to the inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller, who read the world as a whole and closed system that could be engineered through a “Design Science” wielded by technocratic elites as though it was a spaceship—Spaceship Earth, as he called it. But the Catalog quickly replaced this closed-systems model (derived from engineering) with models adapted from cybernetics, the science of information flow. The Catalog was particularly attracted to the “second-order cybernetics” of Bateson which, by focusing on the interaction of systems within systems and the delicate patterns of difference that they traced, understood the ecological whole less as a precision machine directly regulated through inputs and outputs and more as a rich, complex, perennial condition of interaction that could be only nudged from within, by multiple inputs, toward greater or lesser coordination. The Bateson Building was correspondingly a “hard,” computer-controlled ecological machine in the mode of Fuller’s Design Science, and also a “soft” ecological machine in the mode of Batesonian anthropology, the atrium not simply an alternative to air-conditioning but also a social space for coeval community. “Our bias is humanistic and universal, rather than behavioristic and particular,” Van der Ryn and Reich insisted in their 1968 report on Behavioral and Systems Approaches to Design.4 The building was something like a giant “diagram,” illustrating the interrelatedness of individuals, societies and ecosystems that Bateson promoted.5
Van der Ryn, a faculty member in architecture at UC Berkeley, had developed his career in the 1960s and '70s through the sort of activism that culminated in Berkeley’s 1969 People’s Park, which was remarkable for at least two reasons: its somewhat bottom-up, self-organized requisitioning and forming of social space, and for the violent showdown with the state that historically closed a chapter of Berkeley’s radical history. So with his ascent into the offices of the state he had earlier opposed, Van der Ryn shifted design from bottom-up to top-down. Jerry Brown appointed Van der Ryn as director of California’s groundbreaking Office of Appropriate Technology from 1977–79, and as State Architect from 1975–78, when he was succeeded by another member of the Bateson Building design team, Barry Wasserman; Stewart Brand made a similar move as the Governor’s consultant from 1975–83.
The appointment by Brown of a dissenting Van der Ryn represented something of a turnaround against another Californian voice of the era, that of a conservative, small government faction led by former Governor Ronald Reagan, who via Oakland Police and the National Guard had confronted the guardians of the People’s Park on May 15 1969. When Reagan’s small-government policy of renting space for government from the private sector proved (ironically) uneconomical, his successor Brown was handed an opportunity to create a new building program, and to provide a new image of government and a new model of the state itself as an ecology. “More than the usual office worker,” Progressive Architecture explained
...the civil servant has been stigmatized as a drone working in a hive. Our image of the faceless bureaucracy is reinforced by its depersonalized, hermetically sealed environment. The miles of corridors and acres of fluorescent-lighted office landscape guarantee that those who feed at the public table cannot be too comfortable doing it.6
In the 1950s and into the '60s the Office of the State Architect in Sacramento was the largest architectural office in the world, and the Bateson Building, we can conjecture, was a bid to capitalize on California’s post-World War II boom by taking a lead in governmental and ecological architecture, just as it led so many other innovations in economy and culture. Part III: A Technical Critique of the Bateson Building
– Simon Sadler
1. Much of the material in this entry has now been published in Simon Sadler, “The Bateson Building, Sacramento, California, 1977–81, and the Design of a New Age State,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians vol. 75, no. 4 (December 2016), pp. 469–489. Regarding cybernetics, see summary provided by M. Christine Boyer, “The two orders of cybernetics in urban form and design,” in Tridib Banerjee and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, eds., Companion to Urban Design (New York: Routledge, 2011), 70-83, 70.
2. Sim van der Ryn, “Gregory Bateson Building,” http://www.vanderryn.com, accessed 11 April 2013.
3. In Small is Beautiful, Schumacher was still using the term “Intermediate Technology,” though an Intermediate Technology Development Group conference of 1968 had already proposed discarded the term “Intermediate Technology” in favor of the term “Appropriate technology.”
4. Van der Ryn and Reich, Notes on Institution Building, 3.
5. On the role of diagramming in countercultural and ecological architecture, see Simon Sadler, “Diagrams of Countercultural Architecture,” Design and Culture, vol. 4, no. 3, November 2012, pp. 345-367.
6. Woodbridge, “Governing Energy: California State Office Buildings,” p. 86.
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