Let me tell you about a secret society which has long operated in the shadows of our world – just out of the corner of your eye, invisible to all but those who know where to look. All these years, this dark brotherhood has fiercely guarded the arcane wisdom and the secret books of know-how and knowledge collected by its members and passed down over many generations; ex-communicating (and even perhaps, you might suspect, executing) those who dare to share the forbidden truths. You might think we'd landed in a cloak-and-dagger Sherlock Holmes story, a Dan Brown novel or one of the darker parts of the conspiracy-washed internet.
As it happens, the society I have in mind is the Magic Circle – the official professional association of stage magicians and illusionists (they also welcome amateur members). Despite being a relatively young body (as far as these things go – it was founded as late as in 1908 in a small Italian restaurant in London's Soho), they seem to hold tight to the basic premises of the masonic world – arcana and oaths and a procession through levels of the organization up and in towards the ‘elect' (the Inner Magic Circle). Each step you take is conditional that the secrets be kept. You must must MUST not tell – hence the motto ‘Indocilis private loquis' (roughly translated as ‘incapable of talking of private matters'). Schtumm! Or else.
Actually this secrecy piece is slightly overplayed: in the first 100 years of the society's existence only one member has been publicly ejected for revealing the precious secrets. American magician John Lenehan agreed to lift the lid on the card trick beloved of street hustlers and hucksters everywhere (‘three card monte' AKA ‘find the lady'). And on a BBC TV show, How Do They Do That? Out he went.
“ The best way to keep something secret is to hide it in plain sight. ”
But as any good illusionist knows, the best way to keep something secret is to hide it in plain sight. This is what the professional that you might more naturally imagine would play by ‘masonic' rules: architects and builders (the original ‘masons').
Architecture still likes to present itself in the familiar language of creativity originality – original (singular) building(s) based on original designs by (singular) creative geniuses such as Ayn Rand's fictional Howard Roark – the truth is that architecture and the whole construction industry has long used the work of others, collated and distributed as ‘pattern books'. But while medieval masons and other historical forefathers of today's architects might have fought to keep these secret books and their know-how hidden from the rest of us, for six centuries and more, architecture's pattern books have been placed firmly in the public domain.
You may, like me, have admired the famous architectural drawings of masters such as the 16th Century Venetian, Andrea Palladio, whose 4 books of detailed illustrations (the ‘Quattro libri') brought not just the style of the classics to Western Europe but also – perhaps more importantly – the ability to reproduce that style. His beautiful drawings and designs – based on his own study and re-incorporation of the surviving Greek and Roman examples into his own projects – now adorn the walls of many a country house hotel and Stately Home. However, for his contemporaries and those who followed immediately, they represented a do-it-yourself kit in classical style: from the proportions, the way a façade or a dome or a window should look to the detail of plaster or other decoration – all of this in easy-to-use, cut-and-paste imagery.
“ Pattern books have long been central to architecture and building. ”
The ‘Quattro Libri' were collected far and wide: for example, both England's Sir Christopher Wren (most famous perhaps for rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666) and Thomas Jefferson, 4th President of the USA and keen amateur architect, both had collections of Palladio's drawings and used them extensively as models in their own constructions. Neither found it at all embarrassing to use someone else's drawings as a start-point (rather than merely vague ‘inspiration'). Jefferson not only built a fabulous mansion, Monticello, in the ‘Palladian' style but also oversaw the competition for building the new nation's signature buildings – the White House and the Capitol – under the heavy influence of the Italian. (Although the current version of the Capitol building is the product of a later rebuild, to an English eye, its dome roof still bears a striking resemblance to that of Wren's St Paul's Cathedral; both to a number of Palladio's Italian Churches).
The longstanding use of pattern books of one sort or another also explains why many historical towns and cities seem to have a particular ‘look' or style. Georgian London, Dublin and Bath enjoy the style they do because Georgian pattern books were particularly well put-together and practical. Some even provided tables to enable the generic floor plan and design to be adjusted according to the plot size, the building height and the target demographic. And yet at the same time, they provided the means for variation in smaller details of decoration so that the whole design remained characteristically harmonious.
“ Georgian London and Dublin look the way they do because of pattern books. ”
In the 18th and 19th Centuries, pattern-booking was hugely popular in the US, too, which explains why American historic city centres often have an internally consistent style ‘Famous pattern books were created by Andrew Jackson Downing, for example, known for his romantic cottage designs; Minard Lafever, who detailed Greek-inspired proportions; and William T. Comstock, who promulgated Victorian patterns.'55 Organizations like Sears, Roebuck & Company made a fortune sharing pattern books to the aspiring American middle classes in the 20th Century, too.
“ In the US, pattern booking shaped how many historic city centres still look. ”
METROLAND
The style of buildings in our much derided suburbs tell the same story. Take for example the archetypal ‘mock Tudor' style of Early and Mid 20th Century British suburbia, with its white washed walls, extruding bay windows, leaded glass lights and – most characteristic of all – the exposed black-stained beams. We children of the suburbs have come to take it for granted that our shops and homes should be dressed so theatrically but I've long thought all of this heavily accented built history must be quite striking to the foreign visitor – evoking the dreams of the Ye Olde World England (‘Shakespearland -just like I pictured it').
Certainly, that was the intention of property developers like the Metropolitan Railway Board, who invented the marketing concept of ‘Metroland' to lure out Londoners from the dark, damp tenements to which they had returned after the first world war. The Board sold the land off in relatively small parcels to small-time developers who copied and reinterpreted what had started as a high-end architectural style of sylvan idyll into a simple-to-repeat recipe that still made the same promise (albeit on a smaller plot and budget to match).
As time went on, and more areas were developed, those doing the building adapted and evolved the pattern book again and again so that the vast estates built in the 1930s and 1940s only bear rudimentary references back to the original pattern books. But each still delivers a version – albeit a somewhat diluted version – of that original promised escape to the country and to a kinder, safer place (‘Merrie England' as Kingsley Amis derided it in Lucky Jim).
PATTERN BOOKS AND ORIGINAL BUILDINGS
Later, as we walked and talked, Alistair underlined the importance of pattern books even for the most celebrated and ‘original' modern architects. Berthold Lubetkin's Grade 1 Listed Highpoint building in Highgate, North London is a modernist dream, built in the International style and thus unlike many of the buildings it is surrounded by. Alistair's students at RIBA imagine that this jewel of London's 20th-Century architecture was conceived as an act of independent creative will. The truth is that Lubetkin worked really closely with the pattern book then in force with Highgate's planning department. He just happened to reinterpret and play with almost all of the details.
“ You don't want to have to rethink every aspect…each time you break ground. ”
Consider this from a purely practical perspective. Why start with having to rethink every aspect of a building from scratch – its design, its function. Its decoration and its relationship with other parts – each time you break ground. Why not make it easy on yourself – as builders and architects have always done – and start with the givens. Copy first, vary second.
PATTERN BOOKS EVERYWHERE
The more you think about pattern books, the more you see pattern books. The more you see pattern books, the more you see pattern-booking behaviour.
What else is our collective obsession with make-over shows, with cooking and recipe books and shows (often conceived together) but pattern-booking? Interior design is the same – with TV shows, magazines, blogs and (yes, indeed) endless room-sets in stores or in the ubiquitous IKEA catalogue.
Since the first fashion plate books spread around Europe and the New World in the 19th Century, pattern-booking has been one of the ways in which we make our choices in this aspect of our life.
Today's fashion and celebrity magazines continue to encourage the same behaviour with their photography and features. Indeed, most don't even shy away from showing us how to put together a particular look, using explicit comparisons of fashion runway and high street versions of the same thing.
“ The more you think about pattern books, the more you see pattern books. ”
When you read that an event or exhibition claims to ‘celebrate excellence', it's odds to evens that the audience for that event is using the examples presented as a pattern book, albeit in walk-through form.
This struck me forcefully when, in the summer of 2013, the esteemed Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show celebrated its centenary. To the organizers it was a showcase for all that's good in British garden design and plantsmanship; to the vast majority of visitors it offered the world's largest walk-through treasure trove of ideas, techniques and plants to make/remake our gardens (‘a water feature, some of those ferny things and a slate-path, maybe?'). Any industry body collecting, judging and displaying the best work of its practitioners is doing the same thing.
Our weekend visits to the great gardens of the National Trust are not merely to explore and celebrate the unique designs of each gardener but also to provide ideas on what to steal next. Not only do you get to buy the souvenir tea towel but take home some planting or landscaping ideas, too. Whatever the intentions of those designing and creating the garden, it's what we visitors do with it that matters – how we use it.
“ Whatever the creator's intentions, it's what we do with the things we use as pattern books that matters. ”
In some cases, the ‘pattern book' purpose of an individual collecting disparate musical work is easier to spot. In the 1980s, at the birth of hip-hop, a New York City cab driver, one DJ Breakbeat Lenny, created a series of illicit albums of drum samples. These became the pattern book for much of hip-hop and contemporary dance music (especially breaks like ‘Amen Break', five seconds of rhythm clipped from the B-side of an obscure R&B single by the Winstons). Not only did hip-hop DJs use the samples on the ‘Breakbeat' albums as their stock in trade, so too did other musicians (the Amen Break itself is the rhythmical basis of the British styles of Drum and Dubstep while at the same time providing colour to songs by artists as far away as Oasis' Gallagher brothers). Jamaican music of the 1970s and 1980s often featured a ‘version' or ‘dubplate' on the flipside – instrumental versions of the featured tune which encourage similar hybridizations.
“ Pattern booking almost guarantees ‘good' (i.e. bad) copying. ”
What's particularly powerful about a pattern book is that it almost guarantees ‘good' (i.e. bad) copying from the audience: my garden is ‘inspired by' a number of places I have visited, including the cool indigo blues of the Yves St Laurent garden in Marrakech and the dark and fern-fringed corners of Heligan and Kew's own glasshouses. By combining bits of each and placing them in a new context, the new thing can't help but become something different from all and any of the things that inspired it.
The internet has provided great scope for those who want to seek ‘inspiration' from others: in many ways, what the internet is all about is pattern-booking. From Piers Fawkes' New York City-based PSFK to William Rowe's supercool Protein network and the fabulous and wonderfully named Rubbishcorp.com curated by Nathan Cooper – the creative industries have an endless supply of interesting stuff to beg, borrow and steal right there on their smartphones (if it's still OK to have a smartphone, now that my Dad has one). Just lean back on the sofa and window shop for inspiration on your iPad or iPhone.
BETTER
Considered choices need better strategies – rooted in real or perceived superiority of your thing over other choices.
SALIENCE
Guesswork choices need salience strategies. Don't make the chooser think and don't worry about the thing being better, but rather make it easier to choose by making it stand out from competing options.
EXPERTISE
Choices based on Copying Expertsor Authorities demand strategies based on expertise or authority. Because he/she likes, endorses, enthuses over the choice, the quality of the choice must be clear.
POPULARITY
Finally, choices shaped by Copying peers demand strategies based on real or perceived popularity. Because everyone's doing it, why don't I do it, too?
