Michael Lissack becomes a architecture system, a coalition of actors, individual or insti- tutional. Interactions within the architecture system may be, in varying degrees, cooperative or antagonistic. Second, the architecture system sends its object out into a larger environment where other actors see, interpret, and respond to it. The social design process now becomes a drama enacted in an arena-an image that captures policy design as well as the collective design of such artifacts as buildings or industrial products. Social design is necessarily communicative. Because the actors shape the object through their more-or-less organized interactions, they must communicate with one another, sending and receiving messages in the form of words and actions. These messages include design moves and responses to the object in situations of use. Although vagueness and ambiguity may at times serve useful purposes-for example, by softening disagreement or deferring conflict the architects cannot effectively make something to- gether unless their communications achieve at least minimal reliability. Communications work reliably only if participants are able to test the mean- ings of the messages they receive, and anticipate and test how others will interpret the meanings of their messages. Social design process is inevitably political. The architecture system is a coalition of actors who have their own interests, freedoms, and powers. If that coalition fragments, as the state actor fragmented in the later stages of the early retirement case, the archi- tecture system becomes an array of antagonistic parties whose interactions no longer qualify as architecture. Architectural structures consist of massive elements, like columns, beams, arches. and domes, and their own load, the so-called dead load, is most of the time the heaviest they must support. It depends on the volume of the element and the unit weight of its material. The evaluation of the dead load of a structure presents the engineer with a paradox: It cannot be computed until the structure is designed, but the structure cannot be designed until the dead load is computed and added to all the other .loads.. Only long practice will teach the engineer -to make a good first guess of the size of a structural element, but you can be sure that the dead load will never· be ignored because it is always there: it is a perma- nent load. Actually we include in the dead load the weight of whatever is
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