Hey there,

I've followed Derek Sivers for years. He's not an architect, but he's acting as one for a house he's building in New Zealand (read his short post here). It's been fun to read about his "discoveries" along the way.

And, as an architect, I find the whole thing cool + slightly maddening at once.

His experiment begins with an idea from Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn: all buildings are predictions, and all predictions are wrong. Sivers has taken that idea to an extreme. Rather than designing for what he thinks he'll need, he's living there first and letting experience dictate what gets built.

He spent two years getting to know the land before building anything, including sleeping outside before deciding he needed a roof over his head. He lived without electricity before deciding an Internet connection and power were probably useful. He went without hot water at the sink for a year and found a tea kettle to heat water for dishes was good enough.

At least that's the theory: let experience prove the need, then design for it.

There's something incredibly appealing about that rigor and something about it that makes the architect in me crazy.

Sivers says he designs for maintenance, not appearances. Pipes and conduit remain exposed. At the very end of the piece he casually mentions that he hasn't taken a single photograph because, "I don't care how the place looks."

No discussion of material, nothing about proportion, form or light.

Really?

Architecture has always meant more to me than making a building perfectly fit the things we already know we want it to do.

But here's where his experiment gets interesting: his first major move violates his own rule!

Before he knew exactly what he needed, he bought four small prefab shells (on clearance, apparently) and placed them on the site.

Think about what a consequential decision that is. Four structures rather than one... separation rather than consolidation... outdoor circulation rather than hallways. A collection of places rather than a singular building.

The result is wonderfully inefficient.

To move through his day, he has to go outside. He feels the weather and notices the trees. At dusk, he hears the owls in the forest. His outdoor shower puts him under the stars at night. He even describes how nice the (semi-enclosed!) bathroom is during a rainstorm.

And there's the paradox: the architecture created the experience he set out to discover.

Had he followed his own maxim to its logical conclusion, none of this would have revealed itself.

I've come to embrace that kind of inefficiency in my own work. Dividing the program among separate structures creates places to escape to, places to congregate, spaces between, and somewhere to hunker down during a storm. The relationship to + distance between structures changes your experience of a place.

But Sivers is right about something important: we're terrible at predicting how buildings will actually be used.

I've experienced this with my own studio. I couldn't have predicted everything I'd eventually do there when I designed it a decade ago. It's been an architecture office, workshop, video set, impromptu bar + dining room and plenty of other things I never anticipated.

Had I optimized it around exactly what I needed back in 2013, it might be far less useful to me today. There's a cost to making something perfectly fit its intended use: it becomes less capable of becoming something else.

But I made plenty of other predictions.

I bet on natural light... and material... and proportion. On the woods outside my window. On the value of the small journey from my house nearby to the studio.

A decade later, the uses have been the least predictable part of the building.

The things I was willing to bet on are the things that have endured.

Maybe that's why I find Sivers' experiment both cool and maddening. He's right to question what a building needs to do. I'm just not willing to stop there.

Function can tell us what we need. Architecture can show us what else is possible.

Speak soon,
Eric @30X40

P.S. - here's a link to Derek's blog post if you're curious.​

Useful Tools

Construction
Cost Tracker

This structured, multi-tab spreadsheet (summary, tracking, + invoice log) helps you set and manage project budgets, update estimates as costs change, and maintain a clear financial baseline for you and your clients. It includes a dedicated invoice log to track payments, shows invoiced amounts as percent complete, and reconciles costs against your Executive Schedule of Values (ESV) for real-time tracking.

The tracker is fully-customizable and organized using standard pre-2004 CSI divisions (for simplicity), includes preset filters for all columns and works in Excel or Google Sheets, and can be implemented without specialized software or training. My video walk-through will get you setup quickly.

​Download here →​

Field Notes

Have you seen...

Summer trip to Norway I traveled to Norway with my parents recently strictly following an itinerary I'd spent many months planning. This is a photo essay documenting it, my compulsion to over-plan, and leaving enough room to discover the things I didn't know I was looking for. ​ ​Read it here.​