Republic Square, Yerevan, Armenia. Painted by
the Armenian-Swiss artist Agnes Avagyan [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Bill Kleinsasser’s singular contribution to architectural education may be his
career-long crusade on behalf of designing with experiential considerations
first and foremost in mind, as opposed to willful form-making. He fundamentally
believed emphasizing how people interacted with their environment—how architecture
could provide a stage for lives well-lived—should take precedence over matters
of style or aesthetics, and even programmatic exigencies. In Bill’s mind, style,
aesthetics, and poetic impact would take care of themselves if we first anticipate
the quality of the experiences our places support. The excerpt below from Bill’s
textbook Synthesis makes this case.
As I’ve mentioned previously, Bill’s writing style was uniquely his own. It certainly
betrayed his passion for and conviction in his beliefs. It could at once also
be exasperating. He did have an irksome tendency toward employing rhetorical
turns, rather than specifying or prescribing the exact means for achieving the
outcomes he believed most desirable. Realizing how old the passage below is, I
can attribute some of its shortcomings to Bill’s relative youth at the time of
its writing (he was 38). Certainly, no one can doubt the earnestness of Bill’s
prose.
Like
many of us, I want to learn more about how architects can help to make a really
better physical environment; not just competent and clever buildings, which may
be ingenious and stylish, but richly appropriate physical surroundings for
people that measure up to the best we can imagine and hope for.
There
are many human characteristics and conditions. People have predictable size and
shape, identifiable activities, institutions, movement patterns, biological
structure and order, sensitivity and responsiveness, need for engagement or
involvement, need for diversity of experience and self-identity, and the
ability to change with changed position and accumulated experience. When people
with all of these characteristics and conditions come together with that which
exists and that which tends to exist (whether manmade or natural, place or
institution) there is, if we can see it, a resulting “order-pattern” which
suggests that buildings and places for people be made in specific, disciplined
ways (rather than “any-old-way” or according to the dictates of the current
fashion). In this sense, buildings and places for people can be thought of as
being generated by forces, and these forces can be placed into two basic
groups. They are both operational (having to do with sizes and
quantities: the physical and measurable requirements of people and their
actions) and experiential (having to do with how things and places are
experienced by people, and the experiential characteristics which these
buildings and places have).
Operational
forces are perhaps the easiest to understand and therefore we are familiar with
them. They are measurable and observable. To respond to or not respond to them
cause an immediate and obvious result. Experiential forces are more obscure.
They often seem too personal to be studied, too intangible to be controlled.
But the ability to be responsive to these forces is exactly what sets an
exceptional designer apart from the rest. To be able to touch that which is
meaningful to people—to inspire them, to involve them, to turn them on, to
increase their awareness of life and themselves—these are the motives that are
probably basic in us all, and why we were interested in architecture in the
first place.
It is
certainly necessary to have concern for particular situations, for real actions
of people, for particular people, individual people and their experiences, and
for the differences among people. But it is also necessary to be responsible
for more general aspects of the human condition, especially the human capacity
and need for expanded experience, and expanding the experience until it is a
new and different scene, or scene within a scene, and then perhaps back again
to what it was before.
It
seems true that we are more alive (regardless of age) if we are able to make
meaningful (strongly felt) patterns out of our experiences. This is made
evident by our need to laugh, love, celebrate, ceremonialize, dramatize, have
special places and things, swing, turn on, influence others, communicate with
others, withdraw, abstract, identify, imagine, reflect, dream of better things,
be in it and with it—not out of it.
We
could ask what or how much should be particular (closed), what or how much
should be ambiguous (open), what should be explicit, what should be implicit,
how necessary are dualities (together/alone, in/out, large/small, dark/light),
what is the nature of ambivalence?
We can
make places instead of objects. We can select their elements and shape them. We
can determine combinations, juxtapositions, transitions, repetitions, rhythms,
moods. We can differentiate and thereby establish order. We can add to or
subtract from. We can recall.
We
could make places that can be possessed by people—changed and made more
responsive to particular needs or patterns—made different more than once, in
more ways than one.
We
could make places that include the possibility of variety and diversity of
experience over time—different frames which would invite different
interpretations of reality—magic and mystery as well as logic and clarity.
In so
doing, we could make places that evoke (but not dictate), help (but not limit),
are powerful (but not overpowering), are exact (but not too particular), are
particular (but not closed). They could be precisely and significantly
ambiguous, intensifiers of life experiences for others and ourselves,
developers of our capacities to respond, feel, and wonder.
We
could go beyond the current habit of designing buildings which are fixed by naïve
preconceptions long before designers are even considered.
We
could go beyond configurations generated by the careful and thorough study of
particular needs and activities.
WK/1967
