David Rauschenbach ("Leader by default")

This thought for the day comes from a famous and enlightening book titled “A Pattern Language: Towns • Buildings • Construction” (1977).

“Even in medium and high density areas where buildings are very close to each other and where there are strong reasons to connect them in a single fabric, people still insist on building isolated structures, with little bits of useless space around them.

These buildings pretend to be independent of one another —
and this pretense leads to useless space around them.

Indeed, in our time, isolated, free-standing buildings are so common, that we have learned to take them for granted, without realizing that all the psycho-social disintegration of society is embodied in the fact of their existence.

This is easiest to understand at the emotional level. The house, in dreams, most often means the self or person of the dreamer. A town of disconnected buildings, in a dream, would be a picture of society, made up of disconnected, isolated selves. And the real towns which have this form, like dreams, embody just this meaning: they perpetuate the arrogant assumption that people stand alone and exist independently of one another.”

“When buildings are isolated and free standing, it is of course not necessary for the people who own them, use them, and repair them to interact with one another at all. By contrast, in a town where buildings lean against each other physically, the sheer fact of their adjacency forces people to confront their neighbors, forces them to solve the myriad of little problems which occur between them, forces them to learn how to adapt to other people's foibles, forces them to learn how to adapt to the realities outside them, which are greater, and more impenetrable than they are.

Not only is it true that connected buildings have these healthy consequences and that isolated buildings have unhealthy ones. It seems very likely — though we have no evidence to prove it — that, in fact, isolated buildings have become so popular, so automatic, so taken for granted in our time, because people seek refuge from the need to confront their neighbors, refuge from the need to work out common problems. In this sense, the isolated buildings are not only symptoms of withdrawal, but they also perpetuate and nurture the sickness.

If this is so, it is literally not too much to say that in those parts of town where densities are relatively high, isolated buildings, and the laws which create and enforce them, are undermining the fabric of society as forcibly and as persistently as any other social evil of our time.”