Bill Kleinsasser restlessly revised and reworked his self-published textbook SYNTHESIS throughout his teaching career. He did so to a fault: In my opinion, the earlier copies are richer, as Bill didn’t hesitate to venture down countless rabbit holes offering him opportunities to present in-depth elucidation of his “frames of reference” for design. With each successive edition, he attempted to distill SYNTHESIS to its essences, paring words in the process but ironically robbing his book of much of its eloquence, depth, and power.
In the excerpt below from my 1981 copy of SYNTHESIS, Bill expounds upon the principle of “Intellectual Stimulation.” He later subsumed this frame of reference under a broader grouping, POETRY before ultimately removing direct use of the term altogether.
Intellectual Stimulation
This frame of reference is
often best understood as the consequence of response to the other frames rather
than as a goal itself. Striving for stimulation, etc. in itself leads to
triteness and confusion.
The first and simplest aspect of this frame of reference is that when people are stimulated and challenged by the physical environment, they in some degree possess it. They do so by means of their intellectual and/or sensorial involvement with it. If the physical environment is surprising, complex, or ambiguous, people are obliged to figure it out, to interpret it, to seek their personal relationship to it; they are in a sense also “possessed by it,” but gradually they make it their own as they reach their own conclusions about it (either consciously or unconsciously). There is of course an implication for precision here regarding how surprising a place can be, how complex, and how ambiguous. If any of these characteristics of a place are situationally out of balance, then confusion replaces meaningful involvement.
But there is another aspect of this frame of reference that is more important than the first. It is that the involvement caused by stimulation maintains or nourishes the pattern-making or combinatorial abilities that are so crucial to human adaptability and creativity. The human ability to extract meaningful patterns from experience is sharpened and strengthened by the constant practice of engaging stimulating, challenging surroundings, and this development may cause the emergence of unexpected potentialities.
This frame of reference seems especially important to children, who in their early lives are forming the basic range of ideas and possibilities from which they will develop and create in later life. It also seems especially important to the aged, who are so often immobilized and in danger [due to the] consequent lack of sensory experience of losing their adaptive and pattern-making abilities through disuse.
This frame of reference then seems to suggest built-conditions and configurations that are challenging and complex, precisely ambiguous (in the sense of having many meanings within a frame of familiar and therefore meaningful cues), novel (in the sense of being a variation on a familiar norm), and which contain some measure of conflict in the arrangement of parts, uncertainty, surprise, unpredictability—even mystery and magic.
Aldo van Eyck said that “if there is no mystery in the ordering of the environment, then to hell with order.”
As a general response to this category, a designer of the built environment could strive to establish the following conditions or opportunities:
- Conditions that are novel and surprising—a departure from the norm—sometimes conflicting or contradictory, thus challenging.
- Conditions that are experientially complex—that contain or are made up of many parts.
- Conditions that have multi-meaning, multi-purpose, multi-dimensions—that are ambiguous in this sense.
Many levels of meaning (therefore mystery, magic, ambiguity, perplexity) may be achieved in the built environment by means of:
- Complexity (the existence of many different parts)
- Multifunctioning places
- Undesignated-ness (“open places”)
- Sensory richness (sensuality of texture, color, shape, space)
- Celebration and eloquent expression (making places that are “more,” making an event of each place, evidence of caring and effort and love)
- Surprise when there is conflict with the “norm”
- Surprise when there is strong conflict with the “more”
- Surprise when there is a strong contrast with setting
- Suggestion when not everything is revealed (selective hinting)
- Suggestion when shapes and volumes are partially obscured
- Suggestion when there is half-light, low light, or changing light
- Connection with the cosmos (an imponderable order)
- Association (connection) with past events
- Combination of archetypes (symbols) of unexpected groups
- The familiar twisted so that it becomes allegorical (having hidden spiritual meaning transcending the literal)
WK / 1981
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