Precise-General Frames

 

Jeune homme à la fenêtre (1876 painting by Gustave Caillebotte, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Bill Kleinsasser was fundamentally a humanist, someone who believed in everyone’s inherent value, agency, and dignity. In architectural terms, he espoused the creation of buildings and spaces that are not only functional, but also responsive, welcoming, warm, and inviting. Bill believed we should design architecture with a person’s comfort and well-being in mind, in harmony with the surrounding environment. A phenomenological focus on the human experience was additionally central to his design philosophy. Like his Princeton University classmate Charles Moore, and others including Peter Zumthor and Juhani Pallasmaa, Bill understood the power of architecture to shape and influence our feelings, emotions, and behavior.  

Bill wrote the following in 1972, specifically about designing multifamily housing. His description of precise-general frames acknowledges an essential nature of our humanness and being in this world. Each of us is uniquely individual, and yet we share traits and behaviors in common. Now more than a half-century on, his words remind us today that we design for the physical, emotional, social, cultural, and spiritual aspects of the human condition.  

Precise-General Frames

In designing housing, it is very hard to know for whom we design . . . conditions and circumstances change, people change, they leave, others come, and it is necessary to avoid determining or designating too much as we try to be as responsive s possible. It is necessary to make environmental conditions that are somewhat GENERAL.

At the same time, we obviously must support certain recurring actions (such as going in and out, preparing and consuming food, resting and sleeping, retreating and coming together) and we must respond to certain decisive and highly particular circumstances (such as the immobility and dependency of old people and children, or the qualities of different lifestyles and social systems). Also, people need environments where they can be themselves, find themselves—where they can achieve their own potentialities as human beings. It seems that, as well as making general environmental conditions, we must also make conditions that are supportive, inviting, evocative, PRECISE.

As we try to understand the nature of making PRECISE-GENERAL places we must study particular, real places and situations:

• To find out what exists there (at all scales) and why.
• To identify patterns of use, of human circumstances, and of conditions, actions, activities.
• To assess how long those patterns have been and will be valid.

We must also study general, shared, or comprehensive design theory:

• To learn about universal or shared human needs.
• To identify universal or recurring reference frames.
• To track situational variations in the needs and frames.

The action of design can be used as a primary method in this study, if design probes are made early and frequently, if each probe is analyzed using broadly based criteria, if new criteria is sought out and allowed to redirect or affect the designers’ thinking, if a wide variety of design study media are used to inspect and test response to various considerations.

The result of our work should be spaces and places that are more supportive for more people, and therefore more significant.

WK / 1972