Process Over Preciousness

Early in my studies at the University of Oregon, I learned a lesson I carried through my life in architecture. It came from Bill Kleinsasser, whose design studios were equal parts instruction, exploration, and gentle provocation. Bill believed deeply in process, in the idea that early design moves were not precious artifacts but simply commitments meant to evoke response.

One afternoon during a final review, a student presented her carefully crafted chipboard model. Without warning, Bill reached into his pocket, pulled out an X-Acto knife, and began cutting the model apart. He did so calmly, without malice or theatrics, as if he were demonstrating how to sharpen a pencil. The student was in tears. The rest of us were stunned.

But Bill’s point was neither cruel nor dismissive. He wanted us to understand that he regarded physical models as tools—temporary expressions of an idea, not something to cling to. Moreover, he used the act to reveal a design possibility the student hadn’t considered. By taking the model apart, he revealed an alternative way to approach the problem, one that was latent in the work but obscured by its completeness.

I don’t remember how that student ultimately felt about the moment. I only know that I’ve never forgotten it. And I’m not sure how I would have reacted if it had been my model on the table. But the lesson stayed with me: in design, as in much else, holding on too tightly to early ideas can keep you from discovering better ones, especially when letting go opens the door to something new.

Henry Chapman Mercer’s Quixotic Castles and Caves

Fonthill Castle (all photos by me)

During my recent trip to Pennsylvania, I visited three remarkable buildings in Doylestown, Bucks County: the Mercer Museum, the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, and Fonthill Castle. Archaeologist, artifact collector, and tilemaker Henry Chapman Mercer (1856–1930) designed and built the buildings to embody his interests in history, craft, and storytelling, innovatively employing reinforced, cast-in-place concrete throughout.
 
I’ve previously written on Mercer’s architecture, particularly drawing from University of Oregon professor Bill Kleinsasser’s insights. Like Mercer, Bill critiqued the effects of modernization and industrialization on design, especially the rise of standardization and the loss of diversity found in historical buildings. As a figure associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, Mercer championed vernacular architecture, nature-inspired motifs, and the craftsman-designer’s role. He stood out for his ability to weave legend, literature, Americana, and archaeology into his work. His three buildings are not only unique but also deeply personal and evocative. Bill appreciated their visual qualities, the lessons they offer, and their creator’s eccentricity.
 

The Mercer Museum rises an imposing six stories, housing Mercer’s immense collection of pre-industrial tools. The central atrium is crammed with objects, many of which are hung vertiginously from the ceiling above. Narrow staircases and abrupt transitions shape the experience. The building doesn’t guide visitors through a clear sequence; instead, it asks them to navigate on their own terms. The density of artifacts and the verticality of the atrium create a kind of spatial compression. It may lack legibility, but it is undeniably absorbing.

 

The Mercer Museum.

Inside the museum.

The Tile Works operates to this day. Its architecture is low-slung, with thick concrete walls, a ground-level loggia bordering a central courtyard, and a roofline punctuated by numerous kiln chimneys—each one slightly different in shape and tile adornment. Inside, the layout follows the logic of production, with workspaces, kilns, and drying rooms arranged in a straightforward manner. The building extends the tradition of Pennsylvania German potters and continues to produce tiles using Mercer’s original molds and methods. Mercer drew inspiration from Spanish Mission-style architecture when designing the Tile Works—an unusual reference for Bucks County, but one that lends the structure a sense of restraint and clarity. That restraint stands in contrast to the more elusive formal logic of the Mercer Museum and Fonthill, where spatial organization feels less tied to function.

The Moravian Pottery and Tile Works.

Courtyard.

Reception Hall.

 

Fonthill served as Mercer’s home. The labyrinthine building sprawls across the site, fully enveloping an older stone farmhouse. It holds forty-four rooms of varying shapes and sizes, eighteen fireplaces, and thirty-two staircases. Mercer embedded tiles, inscriptions, and found objects throughout. The stairs shift direction, ceilings rise and fall, and windows frame fragments of landscape. Bill remarked on Mercer’s fascination with caves, castles, and literary imagery. That influence is evident in the building’s spatial unpredictability and whimsical turns.
 

Fonthill roofscape. The separate garage building (now the visitor center) is in the background.

Windows.

Fonthill's saloon (living room). Every one of the irregularly spaced columns is unique.

Section through a digital model of Fonthill. Click on the image to view an enlarged version. The complexity and level of detail evident in this section are remarkable. Big thanks to Jim Givens for allowing me to share this image here.

Now that I’ve been to all three of Mercer's buildings, I’ve thought again about Bill’s interest in them and their broader relevance to today’s architectural discourse: He clearly wasn’t asking us to emulate their forms; rather, he saw them as (pardon the pun) concrete expressions of personal conviction and lived experience. That was the takeaway. He noted their complexity and resistance to straightforward interpretation. In Bill’s words, each Mercer edifice emerges from “images, first recalled and then carefully developed, from his travels and studies . . . places real, and places imaginary.”

Bill recognized that an architect’s internal landscape—the memory, narrative, and inquiry it might encompass—can shape architectural form in ways that are both personal and coherent. Mercer drew inspiration from his extensive travels and the archaeological sites he explored. I certainly considered how his subjective preferences translated into the spatial and material decisions I experienced as I moved through each building. As Mercer did, we can all reflect upon our own memories, values, or narratives when designing. Such an approach can foster buildings that carry individual significance and sensory richness, shaped by our own story and those for whom we design.
 
Ultimately, I left Doylestown with impressions of buildings that resist easy interpretation but richly reward one’s attention. Mercer’s buildings don’t yield readily transferable design strategies. They resist reductive generalization, yet they epitomize what’s possible when architecture is inspired by memory and shaped by craft and conviction. The Mercer Museum, Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, and Fonthill each convey Henry Mercer’s personal inspiration, improvisation, and principles. That’s what Bill saw in them, and what I tried to keep in view at each site.

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)

A Splendid Torch: Henry Mercer’s Historical Connections (Part 2)

 

Moravian Pottery and Tile Works (photo by Concord, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

The following is the second of two posts devoted to a lengthy passage from Bill Kleinsasser’s 1981 edition of his self-published textbook, SYNTHESIS. (Read Part 1 here). His fascination with the work and interests of Henry Chapman Mercer is perhaps no more evident than in this reading. Like Mercer, Bill disdained the downsides of modernization and industrialization upon design and construction, particularly the primacy of standardization and the loss of rich diversity associated with many historical buildings. Like other followers of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Mercer sought to extol the virtues of vernacular architecture, patterns inspired by nature, and the work of the craftsman-designer; however, what sets Mercer apart is the extent to which legend, literature, Americana, and archaeology influenced his approach to architecture.

Henry Mercer’s three major building designs—Fonthill Castle, the Mercer Museum, and the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works—are peculiar and idiosyncratic, but they are also distinctive, evocative, and highly personal. In this regard, it’s not surprising Bill would be fascinated by their appearance, the lessons to be learned from them, and their eccentric author.

Part 2:  Layering, Light, and Caves

Layering

The second kind of imagery appearing in Mercer’s stories concerns the layering of places and objects in space, the effect of this visual complexity, and how that effect is heightened under certain circumstances.

He wrote in Castle Valley:

“The boughs frame the picture. Look under them. They give distance to the meadow, the bridge, and the hill yonder. The scene has a curious effect on me. I hardly know how to describe it.

“When I awoke I found myself lying upon a pile of straw on the floor of a barn, through the open door of which I saw a red glow, with clouds of smoke, and moving figures of men.”

In The Blackbirds:

“He was standing by an open window, looking out across the city roofs and river at the magnificent up-rolled clouds that deepened the distant blue and cast their majestic shadows over the far-off suburb of Fairfield.

“There, on mounting to the top of a flat rock, the trees opened upon an enchanting view of distant meadow, cliffs, and a village, seen across an expanse of water. The eastern sky had changed to rose color. The water’s shimmer was broken by the breeze into deep-blue paths of ripples. Clouds, more gorgeous than ever, robed in white, gold, and lavender, floated overhead.”

Descriptions similar to these appear many times in the seven stories and all of Mercer’s buildings show his response to this interest: in the deliberate creation of vistas and spatial layering inside the buildings, by preserving and emphasizing the same phenomena outside, and by uniting inside and outside through the device of in-between elements and spaces.

Mercer Museum (photo by Bestbudbrian, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Light

The third kind of imagery brought to mind by Mercer’s short stories is about light and the effects of light, particularly on things and spatial organizations whose meaning the mystery are magnified by it, such as forms and spaces within other spaces, forms juxtaposed against other forms (layering again), ruins, junk, metal, textures, colors, water, landscape, and distance.

In North Ferry Bridge:

“The place I got into showed a vast roof space, with overhanging floors and galleries, extending back into the darkness, and looked as if it might be one of the wings of a deserted foundry.

“By the light of a hanging lamp I saw piles of lumber, rusty machinery, and casters’ flasks. Another lamp, with a half-barrel and some bottles and dishes, stood on a workbench behind me. Across the floor, near a pile of boxes stuffed with straw and close to a cupboard, I saw a long wire cage, built against a wall.

“A platform leading backwards brought us to a rotting staircase choked with rubbish, and thence upward into a long, narrow yard between high walls. Passing piles of waste iron and then a labyrinth of ruinous sheds faintly lit by the moon, we reached a gate at the end of a paved alley and pulled back its rusty bolt.”

In The Blackbirds:

“As they hurried down Merchant Street to the ferry, a lurid glare had suddenly caught the eastern house fronts. Against the deep shadows in the cross streets, it gave the city a threatening, unfamiliar look, as if the lights were out of order.

“Near a rusty derrick and some blocks of stone they stopped before a black, rotting shed, with a partly collapsed roof, built close against the rock. The dismal ruin had lost its lower wall of boards, a pile of which lay along its open front in the high grass. Its dark interior, half concealed by weeds and poison ivy, revealed faint outlines of rusting machinery and contending with the glare of an opening in the rear, the flicker of a fire.”

In The Wolf Book:

“Moments passed as he looked outward upon the evening lights that streamed across the tree tops and inward beyond the borderland of dreams. The place seemed confused with things astonishing, contradictory, casual, human feet floating in the air, a cave lit by glowworm, an ash tree, the Castle of Golubacz.

“The professor pointed at the darkening sky. ‘I believe in that, no beginning, no end. What are miracles to that?”

Descriptions similar to these appear sixteen times in seven stories. Views of Mercer’s buildings, showing elements defined by light, organization in response to light, and the consequent sensorial complexity of the buildings show his embodiment of this imagery.

Caves

As pervasive and intriguing as the imagery of light, layering, and castles in Mercer’s work, and perhaps combining all of these, is the imager of caves. This imagery is obvious in the labyrinthian arrangement of Fonthill and reappears in all three buildings. Mercer visited many caves during his archaeological days, and he was alert to literary descriptions of them. His construction notebooks contain references to the “cave temples” of Ellora and Elphanta in India, and there are photographs of caves and cave-like places from his journey along the three rivers in France.

Ellora Caves, India (photo © Vyacheslav Argenberg / http://www.vascoplanet.com/, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

But the cave image of greatest importance to Mercer was of a gigantic chamber in Yucatan, near the Mayan ruins of Uxmal and Chichen Itza. He saw it while on an archaeological search in 1885. The Mayans call it “Loltun,” which means “rock of flowers.” Because sunlight and water come in through ground-surface openings in its roof, the cave is alive with luxuriant plants, oversized butterflies, bats and bees, and schools of birds flying fish-like in the moist, hazy air. The main room is pierced with dozens of water-seeking tree roots which drop, column-like, through the entire hundred and eighty feet of the space. Mercer was astounded by this cave. He made drawings of it. He took many photographs of it. Over 14 years he wrote several descriptions of it, each richer than the last. There is no proof, but these descriptions suggest that he found the memory of this cave to be a perfect framework for the spatial arrangements of his Museum, whose many separate exhibit spaces presented a difficult organizational problem. Here is his final description of Loltun, written in 1914 just as the museum was under construction:

“. . . the third garden of my story remains in my memory rather than as a work of enchantment than a fact, a thing as far beyond the reach of our efforts at imitation as a coral grows in the depths of ocean. I saw it as an unexpected wonder in the underground world of Yucatan, when we were searching in a maze of tropical caverns for geological proof of the presence and antiquity of the ancient people who had built the ruins of Uxmal and Chichen Itza.

“No one had told us of the sight, which we saw after a dark walk underground. It came upon us a surprise, for here at first the unfathomed cave with its white stalactites revealed by candlelight, was not more remarkable than the Wyandotte or Mammoth Caves, or Luray, or any other of the underground labyrinths of North America. But suddenly as we proceeded through the eternal gloom of a long gallery, the resemblances ceased. A brilliant expanding spot of light appeared in the distance, which for some moments seemed like a round glass aquarium full of goldfish, hanging in a dark room, upon which a ray of bright sunlight had been focused. As we came nearer, the fish turned to trees and flowers, birds and plants. We saw before us, as if looking through blue water, a vast domed room, lit only from above by a window in its ceiling, down which came the light and air of the upper world.

“Here, incomprehensible sight! Underground, out of place, was a garden, where from the subterranean soil, externally moist in a parched land, sprang a floral paradise, watered by the dripping of stalactites which unlike those other caverns, because exposed light and air, had lost their pallor and taken on rainbow hues. But stranger still, the trees of the upper forest, whose roots clasped the edge of the skylight, swung loose in mid-air like cables, or shooting down many feet, took root gain in the floor of the cave. Sounds had lost their reality by the dark doorways of this underworld. We heard the murmur of approaching voices, as of spied who had dogged our footsteps. But no one came. It was the rustling of the palm trees that reverberated in unnatural echoes, when cooled gusts of the tropical air below down from above. More real was the sight of birds that flew in and out and of butterflies that fluttered from plant to plant, while behind the light and color was a blue blackness of cave walls in fantastic shadow, as of indistinct monstrous forms of animals and reptiles sculptured in the rock. Undecipherable hieroglyphics and the massive stone bowls which stood in damp spots full of dripping water, showed that the ancient people of Yucatan had been there, perhaps as worshipers. But their hands had not made the garden. That was hewn from living rock and planted by the vast forces which make the sea and sky and roll the Earth in space.

“For many days we worked in sight of it, while it wrought its spell upon us, until at last our task was done. Then looking upon it for the last time, a feeling like regret or longing seized us, as if we might have preferred to sit down in the unearthly light forever gazing. As we hesitated, the smoke of one of the perfumed woods, which the Indians burn in the evening floated down the skylight, while it seemed that the realities of the future were slipping from our grasp. Had we, like the fabled Lotus Eaters, tasted some enchanted fruit, which lured us to forget the way home? Had the refreshing water in the stone bowls enervated us, as still waiting, knowing not why we strove as it were against an occult force, to yield at last only to the necessity, which dragged us unwillingly away.”

Loltun Cave, Yucatan (lostpylon, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Found attached to page four of Mercer’s construction notebook for Fonthill was this poem written in longhand by Mercer’s friend and fellow archaeologist, Dr. Charles C. Abbott, dated August 14, 1910:

“Reincarnation of the storied past,

Skyward in majesty thy walls arise;

In strength assuring us that they shall last,

Not crumble as the common structure dies.

They tower mantled with the morning light

Proudly acclaims the past still alive,

Where Prose, grim visaged (O, the sorry sight)

Would have the world in soulless fashion thrive.

All honor then to him who raised the pile

Where daydreams wander through each classic room,

Where honest speech is never brought to trial

Nor trustful candor hears its certain doom.

Defying critics, faithfully thou wrought,

Thou Master Builder of a fruitful thought.”

Proudly acclaims the past still alive, indeed. Mercer’s historical connections were many and clear. Written with the poem was the notation, “. . . for HCM . . .in recollections of a pleasant day.”

(WK/1981)

A Splendid Torch: Henry Mercer’s Historical Connections (Part 1)

Fonthill, the home of Henry Chapman Mercer, Doylestown, Pennsylvania (photo by Concord - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40253187)

The following is the first of two posts devoted to a lengthy passage from Bill Kleinsasser’s 1981 edition of his self-published textbook, SYNTHESIS. His fascination with the work and interests of Henry Chapman Mercer is perhaps no more evident than in this reading. Like Mercer, Bill disdained the downsides of modernization and industrialization upon design and construction, particularly the primacy of standardization and the loss of rich diversity associated with many historical buildings. Like other followers of the Arts and Crafts movement, Mercer sought to extol the virtues of vernacular architecture, patterns inspired by nature, and the work of the craftsman-designer; however, what sets Mercer apart is the extent to which legend, literature, Americana, and archaeology influenced his approach to architecture.
 
Henry Mercer’s three major building designs—Fonthill Castle, the Mercer Museum, and the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works—are peculiar and idiosyncratic, but they are also distinctive, evocative, and highly personal. In this regard, it’s not surprising Bill would be fascinated by their appearance, the lessons to be learned from them, and their eccentric author.
 
Part 1:  Imagery of Many Times and Many Places
Henry Mercer believed in knowledge as a means of establishing historical connections. He often repeated the verse:
 
Happy the man who sees in things
Their causes gone before
All fear he spurns beneath his feet
Nor dreads inexorable fate
And Acheron’s hungry roar.
 
Mercer knew and respected what had existed before. Not only was he a great student of his place, but also an active archaeologist and ethnologist for many years before he built his buildings. His Museum extended and expanded an earlier one. Fonthill gave new life to the colonial farmhouse it joined. The Tileworks made possible the preservation and development of the art of the Pennsylvania German potters. The Museum contained thousands of artifacts that portray history from the standpoint of toil by human hands, and on its grounds Mercer reconstructed a pioneer log cabin so that its eloquent example would not be lost. Fonthill preserves and displays native trees and plants, and contains another colonial farmhouse, repaired and given to the local nature club to be used. His buildings look old and feel old. They contain many old things, and they evoke old forms and old places. Made on the strength of knowledge and respect, they continue the past rather than destroy it.
 
Mercer was devoted to the study of all manifestations of life, and he argued that:

“We are here to protect humanity from mistakes, and if we do nothing better, we thoroughly justify our existence:  research, discovery, investigation, and longing to open a new door and to find out something never known before. What a burning fire it is and how it seizes upon us. I do hope that some of you have this fire lit within you. If so, add fuel, get hold of the splendid torch of knowledge and wave it about.”
 

Moravian Pottery & Tile Works, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, by Henry Mercer (photo by Bestbudbrian, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Mercer’s historical awareness was an inspiration and a great source of ideas. Consequently, his buildings have a kinship with many places and different lives. Drawings and notations in his notebooks, written descriptions from his stories and papers, and photographs and drawings from his library all confirm that much of the character of his buildings resulted from images, first recalled and then carefully developed, from his travels and studies. These images include dimensions of spaces and small details, special qualities and entire places, places known only by literary descriptions, places real, and places imaginary. In The Building of Fonthill, Mercer wrote that:  
 
“The plan of the whole house was an interweaving of my own fancies blending with memories of my travels and suggestions from several engravings, in particular The Dutch Houskeeper by Gerard Dow, The Great Barn by Wovermans, and a lithograph now in my morning room, also a woodcut illustrating a story called Haunted in a book published about 1865 by Tinsleys magazine named A Stable for Nightmares. This picture gives me the night lighting of the morning room. The first interior imagined and clearly seen was that of the west side of the saloon seen when standing near the large window about eight feet from the door to the library. The arrangement of the rooms at different levels seen over the gallery in the saloon is a memory of a Turkish house seen by me from a rear garden in Salonica in 1886.”
 
Mercer did not write directly again of the inspiration of images and memories, but their importance is strongly suggested by mention in his notebooks, writings, and travel photographs of many places, imaginary and real. Included among these are:

• The cave temples of Ellora and Elephants in India.
• The sunken city of Epidaurus near the Pelloponesus.
• The home of Carabas (in The Book of Fools by Thackery).
• The chapels of San Luis Rey, San Juan Capistrano, and San Miguel in California (which reappear in the elements and shape of the Tileworks.
• The imaginary cities of Avalon, Antiglia, Montezuma, Huitzilo-Pochtli, and Manoa (in the tiles of Fonthill).
• Several caves of France and the southern United States.

Two years before his death in 1930, Henry Mercer wrote seven strange short stories described as “tales of wonder, in which the inexplicable is made to seem the probable, beyond heaven and earth, whose imaginative settings seemed to have appealed to his fancy as much as the threads upon which they are strung.” These seven stories reveal much about Mercer: his interest in coincidence and coincidental experience, his interest in crime, misfortune, pestilence; his interest in legends and the supernatural.

Burg Vichtenstein, a 12th century castle in Austria (photo by C.Stadler/Bwag, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Castles
They (Mercer's stories) also contain repeated references to important memories and images, especially castles. In the story Castle Valley, Mercer recalls the often-told Bucks County legend of James Meredith, who tried to build a castle overlooking Castle Valley, failed in the attempt, and went mad. It is said that some of the castle stones are still in the foundation of a nearby bridge, which itself has long been a ruin. Henry Mercer was in fact a relative of the legendary James Meredith, and as Joseph Sandford writes in Mercer as Seen in His Fiction, “. . . we may wonder how much the family tradition may have contributed to the building of Fonthill and the Museum, or whether its architect has ever toyed with the idea of placing it on that hilltop overlooking the Neshaminy. It needs such a setting, but the hard practicality which had permitted its builder to dare without destruction must have forbidden it. Yet we cannot help but feel that in his successful accomplishment he has built a memorial to the vision of his thwarted kinsman.”
 
Here are Mercer’s words from Castle Valley (the first speaker is the character, Charles Meredith, representing Mercer himself):

“Very delightful,” I said, “but I don’t quite understand. You have idealized things, not too much perhaps, but why the castle on the hill? Isn’t that going a little too far?

“I expected you to say that” he returned, laughing.

“The legend,” I continued, “is somewhat vague and hardly justifies you in deliberately putting it on canvas.”

“What legend?” he asked. “I know of no legend.”

“Do you mean to say,” I returned, “that you have painted a castle on that hill, without knowing that there was a castle there at one time, or the beginning of one, at least?”

“Never heard a word of it,” said he in astonishment.

“Why, the place is called Castle Valley,” I exclaimed, “from that fact, and I ought to know something of it, as the builder is supposed to be one of my ancestors. But it’s all gone long ago, the stones were used to build the bridge yonder.”

Pryor listened in surprise as I went on to explain that my ancestor in question, according to family tradition, had been in some way thwarted in the singular project of building a castle on the hill before us. Whether because of the hostility of his father and friends, or his own mental derangement, his architectural dream had never been realized. The walls had hardly risen above their foundations when the poor fellow died.

“I always felt very sorry for this,” I added. “But it is one of hose unfortunate memories that lose their tragedy and blend into folklore as time goes on. What strikes me as very remarkable though is the fact that you should be ignorant of the castle story and yet paint the castle one hundred and fifty years later. The castle became an ideal that we hold on to, in spite of the Devil and all his angels.”

“Just as I thought it was from the first, without knowing why.“ said Pryor.

“Now that the stone is gone, it is fortunate that I have seen your castle, thunderstorm included,” I continued, “or I should never have known what you were talking about. So much for hypnotism. But how wonderful, how astonishing it is, merely as a picture! Don’t you think so? Those unearthly pinnacles that pierce the clouds! If I were a painter, as you are, and saw a thing like that, I would feel that I had got hold of my ladder of fortune and only need to climb up, up, up.”

“But the ladder is yours as well as mine.”

“Why” I am not the painter, and never could be.”

“What are you?”

I got up, seized his hand, and looked deep into his glowing eyes. “I didn’t know, till just now,” said I. “I thought I was a politician. But I have decided that I am an architect!”
 
Though without the same ecstasy, castle imagery appears again and again in Mercer’s notes and records of travels. He photographed many real castles in France, Germany, and Austria; he drew them floating in the air and emerging half-hidden from forests. He collected etchings and engravings of them, and he wrote of them in several other short stories. He was also most interested in hose buildings bearing the greatest resemblance to castles: factories, coal breakers, grain elevators, blast furnaces, and, at least in form, skyscrapers. (WK/1981)

To be continued . . .

*    *    *    *    *    *

Next:  Part 2: Layering, Light, Caves

 

Integrating Services and Environmental Control

Richards Medical Research Laboratories – Louis I. Kahn, Architect. The brick shafts on the periphery of the Richards labs hold stairwells and HVAC ducts, providing an effect reminiscent of the ancient towers of San Gimignano, Italy that Kahn admired. (photo by Smallbones)

Consistent throughout Bill Kleinsasser’s many iterations of his self-published textbook SYNTHESIS are his reminders about how the architects’ work reveals what they have considered and whether they have accounted for everything necessary to create good places for people. Certainly, the successful integration of the technical systems that support a building’s purpose is essential to a thorough consideration of its design. 

Neglecting to adequately account for and integrate these systems can lead to inefficient and problematic buildings. This neglect can be a result of a misalignment of priorities, poor communication among the members of the design team (architects and their engineers too often work in separate silos), or simply a lack of knowledge and experience on the part of the architects.
 
In the following, somewhat wanting excerpt from SYNTHESIS, Bill strove to succinctly express the importance of considering the needs of a building’s technical systems. In my opinion, Bill could and should have written more to expand upon the necessity of aligning aesthetics, spatial design, and fundamentally the project’s organizational structure with the technical demands of a building’s service and environmental control systems. He certainly could have utilized a case study to illustrate how exemplary projects successfully integrated a myriad of technical systems. Nevertheless, his fundamental premise is clear: Design synthesis requires consideration of many essential concerns if a building’s design is to be unified, eloquent, and complete.
 
Technical Systems
Select and design environmental control and other systems that will appropriately serve required spaces without waste or confusion by:

• Determining spatial intent and the kind of services needed.
• Selecting appropriate systems.
• Diagramming the essential disciplines of each system; that is, diagramming their controlling characteristics vis-à-vis organization of spaces.
• Integrating the requirements of the spatial system with the essential disciplines of the service/environmental control systems. Service/environmental control systems may include those for heating, cooling, ventilating, lighting, water supply, waste disposal, drainage, electrical service, communication (television, radio, TV, computer), special circulation (elevator, escalator), fire protection (sprinklers, smoke detection), and special laboratory services.

 *    *    *    *    *    *

As I’ve mentioned previously, Bill never hesitated to use the words of others to illuminate the frames of reference he defined as essential to the creation of truly good architecture. He included the following quotations from Louis Kahn in his fifth edition of SYNTHESIS to better convey the necessity of respecting the technical systems as organizational decisions are made:
 
“I do not like ducts, I do not like pipes. I hate them really thoroughly, but because I hate them so thoroughly, I feel they have to be given their place. If I just hated them and took no care, I think they would invade the building and completely destroy it. I want to correct any notion you may have that I am in love with that kind of thing.”
 
“CLIENT:  Well, now that we have the general form, we have to put in all the guts and see if we can fit them in.
 
ARCHITECT:  If they don’t all fit in easily and properly, then we have the wrong form.”
 
“Engineering is not one thing and design another. They must be one and the same thing.” (Louis I. Kahn)

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