In 2007 I was the teaching assistant on a course at the San Francisco Art Institute. One assignment was a single sentence. Make something interesting using only materials within arm’s reach of where you are sitting.
That meant the desk, the bag under your chair, your pockets. No studio, no budget, no trip to the store. A laptop already open in front of you counted, and so did a recorder you happened to be carrying.
The building was full of materials. Nobody stood over anyone counting. A student could have walked down the hall, picked up what they wanted, carried it back to their chair, and called it within reach. The rule had no enforcement behind it at all. It held until the next class because the room agreed to act as though it did.
That was the interesting part, and it took me a long time to notice it. The assignment said nothing about what to make. It was a rule about distance. A sonnet’s fourteen lines are a rule about poems, and a rule about poems knows what you are doing. This one didn’t. It came in sideways, from geometry, and left the actual work entirely alone.
In 1921 Arnold Schoenberg started writing music in which all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale appear in a fixed order, a row, before any of them can come back. The order can be inverted, reversed, transposed. It cannot be ignored.
The usual story is that tonal harmony had been exhausted and Schoenberg went looking for something new. He had already left tonality behind more than a decade earlier. The problem by 1921 was that music without a tonal center gave him nothing to build long pieces out of. Tonality had been doing structural work, and once it was gone, a piece had no reason to be twenty minutes instead of three. The twelve-tone method was an answer to that.
What it produced is worth listening to before deciding what constraint does to a composer. The Suite for Piano, Op. 25, the first work where every movement uses a row, is a Prelude, a Gavotte, a Musette, an Intermezzo, a Minuet and a Gigue. Baroque dance forms. The most systematic constraint anyone had imposed on Western music came out sounding like a suite from 1720, run through a grinder.
Schoenberg made this rule for himself, which should have made it soft. Private rules get adjusted at two in the morning when they become inconvenient. His didn’t, because he gave it away. He taught it to Berg and Webern, published on it, argued about it in public for thirty years. By the time it might have been convenient to bend, other people were using it and watching him.
Shigeru Ban was working with paper tubes nine years before he had a disaster to use them on. In 1986 he was designing an exhibition of Alvar Aalto furniture in Tokyo with no budget for wood, so he built the ceiling and the partitions and the display stands out of recycled paper tubes. That was a cost problem, solved.
After the Kobe earthquake in 1995 he built the Paper Log House for displaced families in the city. The tubes were already tested. What arrived in 1995 was a constraint hard enough to make them the right answer: shelter now, cheap, light enough to carry, buildable by people with no training.
Sixteen years after that, Christchurch. Ban designed a cathedral to replace the one the 2011 earthquake had taken down, and he wanted the cardboard tubes to carry the building. They don’t. No manufacturer in New Zealand could produce tubes thick enough, and importing them was refused. The ninety-eight tubes in the roof have laminated timber running inside them, and the whole A-frame sits on eight steel shipping containers.
The building is honest about this if you know to look. It also went up, and it is still standing, and the diocese kept it.
The Apollo Guidance Computer had 2,048 words of erasable memory. That number came out of a mass budget. Every gram on the spacecraft was argued over by people who did not care what the software would have to become.
Seven minutes from the lunar surface on Apollo 11, the computer started throwing 1202 alarms. The rendezvous radar had been left in a position that flooded the processor with interrupts nobody had asked for. Every job the machine was running needed its own small block of that erasable memory, and 1202 meant there were none left. It was being asked to do more than it could do, which is the condition it had been designed to expect. The Executive, the priority scheduler J. Halcombe Laning designed for it, shed the low-priority jobs and kept the landing program running. It came back clean instead of hanging because the software team Margaret Hamilton led at MIT had built the restart protection in. Mission control had about fifteen seconds to decide whether to trust that, and did.
The Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM and no frame buffer. Nothing the processor could write to would become a picture by itself. The CPU had to rewrite the graphics registers as the electron beam swept, line by line, sixty times a second, or the screen stayed empty.
David Crane wrote Pitfall! into 4K of cartridge with 255 jungle screens in it. They aren’t stored. An eight-bit shift register generates each one from a single byte, and Crane made it run backwards as well as forwards so you could walk back the way you came and find the same jungle. The world is smaller than a paragraph of this essay and it is the same world every time.
Nobody chose 128 bytes to make that happen. It was a bill of materials.
An earthquake, a mass budget, a chip price, an arm’s length. None of these was designed to be good for the work. That is the property they share, and I think it’s the one doing the work.
A constraint that comes out of your practice knows your practice. It was shaped by what you were already trying to do, which means it has an opinion, and an opinion can be discussed. The ones on this list have nothing to discuss. There is no other side. You can be as good an architect as Shigeru Ban and the tube plant still can’t make the wall thickness.
The advice that falls out of this is thin, and I’d rather say so than pretend otherwise. Give yourself a word limit and you keep the authority to lift it, because you’re the one who set it, and you’ll be there at two in the morning when it becomes inconvenient. What you’d want to import is the indifference, and the indifference is the part that can’t be manufactured. Schoenberg got at it by handing his rule to other people. That’s the only reliable version I know of, and it costs you the ability to change your mind.
The rest of the time it arrives as bad news. Kobe was not a design brief. Nobody arranges an earthquake for a working architect, and what Ban did with it was salvage.
At SFAI the indifference was borrowed. The instructor set a rule with no teeth in it and everyone agreed to be bound by it, which is a fair description of most art school. Someone had missed the day the assignment was set and turned it in late, on the last class of the term. He played a recording of the radiator in the hallway. He had made it from where he was sitting.
Related reading
- The Constant Battle Against Self-Constraints: the visible constraint and the invisible one
- Where the Feet Need to Be: what moves when a constraint stops feeling like one
- The Rope from the Inside: what happens once a constraint has been absorbed completely