JS: I'm sorry. I lost the connection.
Rob: Are you still here?
JS: I've got it back, yeah. Okay. The way in which you became a master craftsman historically was to work as an apprentice with a master craftsman and gradually little by little by little learn each of the functions that the were involved. The same way, I guess, in the great restaurants, you start as a sous chef, just chopping lettuce or something, and gradually work your way up to more complicated chores. So it's that kind of learning that's interesting. That kind of learning is not something that is much prized or copied in the formal schooling.
I think that we all know that there are large" there are many kinds of intelligences in the world: mechanical intelligence, combinatorial, imaginative intelligence and so on. Schools" formal schooling generally measures only one kind of intelligence and that's why I think many of the people who go to school find that they feel defeated or humiliated because they're not getting great grades. In general, I think it's because they have talents that are not prized or are not used, that are not trained, and so the school is too much of a one product machine just like the German scientific forest was.
Rob: Okay, I'm just moving along, I've got so many questions. I think we could do another two interviews like this frankly. I hope you'll come back.
JS: Sure
Rob: We're getting near the end of the time though. What I like that you describe though is this idea- the centralized, simplified, stupidified, like the German scientific approach to forestry and city planning. It really doesn't work down to all the details and that really what you see is that there, at the edges, you've got people who are supporting by non-conforming, quote "non-conforming, unacknowledged practices at the periphery." This is the kind of thing that Chomsky talks about too. How our economic system does not consider all the factors and all the costs. So this is what the elite do. The elite may set up the system where they live in a protected world, but the only way they do it is by getting the subordinates to support it by breaking the rules by living outside and around the rules, outside of the structure.
JS: Right, right, right. So, my example in the book as you may recall is Brasilia, that kind of new capital of Brazil which, when it was built, the people hated moving there because it didn't have any of the animation and excitement that they associated with what a city should be. In Brasilia, they separated commerce, factory, legislatures and residences and made them all completely separate parts of the city. The result was, of course, a tremendously boring city, true for many, actually, new capitals historically in the last century, or so. There was actually a psychological illness in Brazil diagnosed as Brasiliaitis, which was a sort of depression that came from living in the new city of Brasilia.
So it seems to me that architects ought to be" they ought to be required somehow to spend a lot of time observing the actual use of a city and the use of space. They should never be allowed to design, if you like, something that other people are going to have to live in without that kind of on the ground, careful observation of what people enjoy about space. How they use it creatively and so on.
That's why Jane Jacobs was so observant about how a city actually worked and how it's different from the city as a planned city. I mean, Philadelphia of course is a good city. The enlightenment plan was to make it all right angles, more or less. Of course, the Delaware River got in the way of that to some extent. San Francisco is a good example of a very hilly city, but the streets are all at right angles and so it's kind of insane. You have streets that have a steepness that there's no rational explanation for, except that they just took a ruler and paid no attention to the actual topography of the city when they were designing the streets.
Rob: And so really what you're talking about in terms of the right way to design cities is to take a bottom up approach and look at it from the bottom up.
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