Limiting Virtues

William Rawn Associates

Sara Hendren, in her Undefended, Undefeated newsletter, writes about "limiting virtues."  The subtitle of the posting is "freedom to" and "freedom from" in the cafe, church, and library... Here, she writes about the cafe:

Faro café, in Harvard Square, gets its name from the Spanish word for “lighthouse,” and it’s got a no-laptops policy that is gently, but strictly, enforced.

You can look at your phone. You can use a little gaming tablet. But they’ve outlawed laptops — upright and rectangular cognitive anchors that suck all energy toward themselves. Multiplied across a room, laptops erect an office where a café had been. And Faro is trying to keep the office at bay.

But the office-style café is really great, you say. It is! You can go a few doors down in a couple directions and find some good ones. But Faro has their little manifesto printed and hung on one wall — unobtrusive, easy to miss — and they just want something else happening in the space.

I sent my architecture students to Faro and two other nearby sites this spring — a scavenger hunt to find some of the “limiting virtues” embedded in buildings. I got inspired by David McPherson’s The Virtues of Limits, where he lays out humility, reverence, moderation, contentment, neighborliness, and loyalty as virtues that constrain us in order to set us free.

All these virtues are laudable, surely, but not exactly high on the aspirational list in a culture more enamored of the active virtues, like courage and magnanimity. I wanted students to see where a built space takes away some freedoms — enforcing the moderation and contentment that mitigates all-screens-all-the-time, for example — and thereby opens up other freedoms. A no-laptops policy means you can’t get a certain kind of work done, but it does mean everyone present will be a little more eyes-up-and-talking, or maybe absorbed by a book or notebook. The activities will be at the speed of the body, one to another. Is it nostalgic and precious? Maybe. But it’s not the only café in town to make this move, and I think there’s some signal there. Faro started out with no-laptops only on weekends, and the policy was welcome enough to make it a daily norm.