Brooklyn Brainery get into things ✁

I have this awesome little book called Pattern Language, which is sort of a 1200 page choose-you-own-adventure about urban planning, architecture, furniture and anything else that takes physical form in your life.  The end of each section leads you to about 5 more connected chapters and there are lots of little charming hand-drawn diagrams, very Berkeley in the 70s. (which is a good thing!)

This book rules because it doesn't require my short attention span to stay active for more than 5 minutes at once, they bold all the important things, and they illustrate all the really, really important things, which is kind of like the author giving up straight from the get go and never even once thinking you will read the whole thing. 

So this book is full of these great little nuggets of information and I happened to stumble on one today about decentralizing education that seemed kind of pertinent.  The general argument is this: destroy centralized educational systems and physically disperse the act of learning throughout the city, to houses, workshops, museums, shops, everywhere.  Everyone should be constantly engaged in both learning from those around them to the point where there are 100 home classes for 10,000 people. (The best parts of this book are the ways they assign very specific numbers to everything--it is a pattern book, after all).  The shape of education transforms from a pyramid to a grid-like web, with connections being made all over the place.

This last bit, about the web, made me think about this cool tidbit from the Times' Year in Ideas section, about the pretty near banning of cul-de-sacs in Virginia and a bunch of other places around the country, because they're inefficient, cause all kinds of traffic issues, make kids fatter since they can't walk anywhere, and pretty much make life miserable. 

And so, if there's one lesson to learn from all this rambling, it's that grids are the way to go, even when they're six grids all patched together that really make no sense and cause people who live in South Brooklyn to be utterly confused every time they venture up the G to Metropolitan, but I guess that's another story.