A New Value Base

Photo by Ian Mackey on Unsplash

The following excerpt from Bill Kleinsasser’s rambling, 1981 edition of his self-published textbook Synthesis is a lament that remains as timely now as it was when it was first written. Fundamentally, Bill espoused a humanist approach to designing our built environment, one grounded upon how we experience, identify, and interpret our surroundings. He promoted learning from history, embracing common sense, and designing places first and foremost for people. What concerned him was seeing architects instead too often surrender to financial exigency, flounder with cultural illiteracy, lean upon the crutch of technology, and generally ignore the creation of supportive settings.

As I’ve said before, I’m compelled to feature Bill’s writings here on my blog because his legacy is otherwise non-existent online and risks being lost to time. The audience for Synthesis was essentially limited to his immediate students. An increasing number of us are moving toward the back half of our careers or are already retired, so the opportunities to directly apply the principles he espoused in our work are dwindling. My hope is by publishing his words here that some among the newer generations of designers will also come to appreciate the value base he embraced.

A New Value Base

For many years an unbalanced and limited value base has caused environmental development to be less than satisfactory: often unsupportive, constraining, and rigid. Several prevailing practices have been the instruments of this:

• The man-made environment is usually developed in large chunks and discontinuously, both in time and space, as if each place had to be auspicious and autonomous or, at least, as if each had to be done all at once and once and for all. This practice has caused tremendous, often fatal, impact on what exists, and has spawned the habit of not developing the spaces with the greatest experiential potential—those between buildings. The meaning that can be provided by the undesignated, relatively open character of these spaces is very great and there is no doubt that they have contributed much, not only to the experiential richness of many cities (especially some European cities), but to the places at other, smaller scales as well.
• Economic and technological considerations often dominate the design of the environment instead of facilitating humane development. The experiential character of places is determined by land-value formulae, technical convenience, codes, and arbitrary budgets instead of by the careful, thoughtful consideration of the experiential supports and opportunities that will be needed as time passes and as circumstances change. 
• Very often the eventual users of the environment are not consulted about its design, causing immediate personal and group misfits. 
• Very often available patterns which explain the success or failure of places are not used. 
• Very often the environment is designed for the first purpose and first users only, causing very rapid obsolescence. 
• Very often users who must or wish to stay in places have no way of adjusting, personalizing, or otherwise effecting change to those places. This not only renders the places difficult to possess, but causes them to be, to a degree, out of control. 
• Very often some form of management dictates too much regarding the use of the environment, thereby spoiling potential supportiveness. Consequently, the spaces that people get to live in have many problems:
1. Missing facilities . . . they just aren’t there.
2. Inaccessibility caused by inappropriate relationships among facilities and places of habitation.
3. Misfits caused by sameness or rigidity. Life circumstances of people are often very different; therefore life spaces mush also be different . . . and they must change as people change.
4. Misfits caused by change . . . peoples’ surrounding are often ruined as far as they are concerned, and no one knows.
5. Unsupportiveness caused by inappropriate spatial character.

We need better methods of programming and designing the environment, especially the shared, public environment.

WK / 1981