Writing / Tamer Tageldin
The network effect (another thought)
The network effect (another thought)
I keep coming back to the idea that things in design rarely have a fixed value on their own.
A building can be the main character, but much of its value comes from what surrounds it. The street it meets, the public space it defines, the landscape it frames, the transport it connects to and the buildings beside it.
Ordinary buildings can make an extraordinary neighbourhood, while an exceptional building alone cannot elevate a poor piece of city.
A café is partly made by the pavement outside it. The pavement is made better by the shops along it. The shops depend on people living and working nearby. None has to dominate for the whole to become valuable.
The same thought follows you indoors.
A chair can be a beautiful object and still be completely wrong for a room. Perhaps furniture should never be judged only as furniture, but by what it does to the space around it. The proportions it settles, the material it sits beside, the light it catches, the conversation it creates with everything else.
A lobby is not only a room either. It is arrival, orientation, landscape, circulation and whatever comes next. A stair is not only a way up. A window is not only an opening.
Maybe this is what Christopher Alexander was getting at with wholeness: the parts becoming stronger because of the parts around them.
And perhaps experience works in exactly the same way.
One project gives you a detail. Another gives you a mistake. Another gives you a consultant, a contractor, an approval, a conversation or something you would never do again.
Years later, two unrelated pieces suddenly meet and solve something new.
The value was never only in collecting them.
It was in the connections between them.
Perhaps that is the architectural version of the network effect.
Not how good each thing is on its own, but how much better it makes everything around it.