Generally Supportive Housing

Rosenbaum House, Florence, AL. Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect (Photo by Courtney Pickens on Unsplash)

Bill Kleinsasser’s interest in housing was a constant throughout his teaching career. That said, he did not focus upon housing typologies, such as the different categories or styles of dwellings (whether single-family residences, apartments, or condominiums). Instead, his goal was to ensure his students generally understood how to design settings for living that are precise, generous, and evocative—liberating and inspiring, as well as accommodating. For Bill, this meant providing supportive conditions and important opportunities for people—especially in their homes—so they may enjoy life within genuinely good places.   

The following excerpt from an early iteration of Bill’s self-published textbook SYNTHESIS concisely enumerates the qualities Bill believed are characteristic of generally supportive housing:

Generally Supportive Housing

Significant, lastingly meaningful, generally supportive places contain, in their uninhabited state, the following (usually extra-programmatic) qualities:

1. Sensory richness.
2. Many parts (complexity).
3. Evocativeness and suggestiveness (they are, in themselves, precisely incomplete).
4. Many levels of meaning and many interpretive possibilities (they are precisely ambiguous). 
5. Surprise (novelty or humor, or both). 
6. Perplexity (contradiction or conflict, or both). 
7. Eccentricity and strangeness (the inexplicable). 
8. Re-discoverability (ever-changing qualities). 
9. Symbolic associations (remembrance and allegory). 
10. Evidence of sincere effort. 
11. Precision and the sense of inevitability. 
12. Simplicity (complete integration of parts into a whole). 
13. Poetic impact (tension generated by the extraordinary and transcendent).

Many barns have these qualities, as do Henry Mercer’s buildings most of Corbusier’s buildings, some of Kahn’s and Aalto’s buildings, Scott Wylie’s old house in Eugene (now demolished), and some other houses in Eugene. 

The qualities may be understood as consequences of the following sequence of actions (recycled many times by designers before construction or users over time):
 
Contextual Responses:

1. Preserve old traces and old elements (but not necessarily all) and add on to them or build within them. 
2. Identify the universal values that may have been embodied in the old place and preserve and strengthen them. 
3. Know why the context is the way it is and respect this, building accordingly. 
4. Try to identify the essential spirit of the context and embody it. 
5. Respond to and dramatize the outstanding features and natural phenomena of the context (the views, the geography and topography, the wind, water, sky, and light).
6. Protect the life that already exists and try and improve the place.

Responses to Present Purposes and Needs 

(especially designated actions and spaces for designated actions): 

1. Determine necessary spaces and develop them. 
2. Determine patterns of activity and space use and provide for them. 
3. Determine priorities and provide for them.

Response to Future Needs 

(establishing future opportunities by means of organizational structure): 

1. Establish a broad range of space types and spatial qualities (choices of paths to take, places to be, and combinations of places) using dualities (especially the dualities designated/undesignated, public/private, large/small, stop in/pass through, etc.—those which form the multiple whole) to define and recall spatial ranges. 
2. Make the place clear and make it vivid (to enlist the enthusiasm and imaginations of future users; to make the place undisguised, unconfused, forthright, and lucid; to show the care and spirit of the effort. 
3. Develop and express subspaces and sub-elements (large and small). 
4. Develop unity, that is, integrate the parts (dominance, hierarchies, answerability, appropriate gestalt. 
5. Make the construction and the construction process evident. 
6. Celebrate certain elements (make them memorable). 
7. Clarify movement systems. 
8. Establish previews, multi-views, and reinforcing views. 
9. Develop and express spatiality (celebrated three-dimensionality). 
10. Establish layering and axial overlapping of events, spaces, parts. 
11. Establish imprintability and changeability (opportunity for continuous acts of personalization). 
12. Make many kinds of movable (and removable) parts. 
13. Create an abundance of area and space (but not wastefulness). 
14. Make surfaces that are receptive to adjustment and change. 
15. Let in an abundance of natural light but make it controllable. 
16. Establish acoustical separation, but controllable separation. 
17. Make many opportunities for the collection and display of possessions and symbols.
18. Make precisely incomplete spaces that invite completion by the users.

(WK/1975)