I’ve previously mentioned how Bill Kleinsasser constantly revised his self-published textbook SYNTHESIS, which served as the foundation for his introductory course on architecture at the University of Oregon. All told, he produced nine editions, of which I have three. He undoubtedly considered each an improvement over its immediately preceding version. Indeed, SYNTHESIS became progressively more concise and clearer with each successive printing, and less and less like the eclectic and shambolic scrapbook it initially resembled. That said, it is those meandering earlier editions that I find more rewarding, rife as they are with illuminating digressions and anecdotes.
The following passage is from one of those earlier volumes, dating from 1981. A constant throughout Bill’s teaching was the essential importance of the connections between buildings and the places in which they occur. Read his words here, keeping in mind the intended audience. Bill’s writing is refreshingly unpretentious and free of academic arrogance, perfectly attuned to the needs of fledging architecture students. The directness of his message effortlessly expounds upon the fundamental association between the context of a place and the character of a design in response to it.
Contextual Character
When buildings and places are made to embody responses to the places in which they are located, they become more vivid, more inevitably right, [and] clear regarding their unique (and sometimes very unusual) character. We understand and appreciate them because they have fixed for us a silent explanation of the nature of where they are and why they are the way they are.
Response to contextual character may cause an internally focused building program to expand. For example, the building program for the old Gerlinger gymnasium was enlarged considerably because of recognition of and response to the adjacent physical circumstances. This response could have been omitted, as it was in the new Gerlinger Gymnasium (Annex) next door. The old building seems exactly suited to its place; the new one could have been located anywhere and looks that way. It is not related to its place.
Many typical spaces today have been made without developed response to surrounding place. The result is often disorienting, always lacking in interest, sometimes surreal.
Every place is full of natural phenomena; therefore, every place is full of opportunity for our response. No two places are alike. All places are full of diversity. Natural phenomena are always changing.
Response to the character of a place is both a way of making places fit in and a way of making them endlessly dynamic. Making buildings and places that focus on natural phenomena, that bring them to our attention, that dramatize them is a very inexpensive way of enriching and extending the meaning of the built environment. Charles Moore has found many examples of responses in built form to one natural phenomenon: water. The number of such responses seems endless. He pointed out how meager responses to the presence of water have ordinarily been.
A room, building, place, or city has the capacity, if it is made right, to affect the way in which its occupants see the world. By providing clarified relationships with context, manmade places can establish (or intensify) one’s consciousness of the greater place one is in, or natural or manmade processes, or moments in time, or other people, and of other people’s values. Thusly, manmade places can establish connections.
We apparently need to sense the connections between ourselves and all things (how we belong to each other and to the world); moreover, as we realize those connections, we expand our experience, we expand our conceptions of reality and life, and we expand our image banks; that is, we grow in our ability to imagine and to make a better world.
WK/1981
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