It’s time for another excerpt
from the late Bill Kleinsasser’s self-published textbook SYNTHESIS. In the
selection below he acknowledges the richness, complexity, and indeterminateness
of truly responsive architecture by defining the timeless virtues of "precisely ambiguous" spaces and places.
Like some of the previous
passages I’ve extracted, this excerpt hints at Bill’s restless mind. He had a
tendency to cram too much information into a single sentence. His liberal and
sometimes grammatically improper deployment of parenthetical remarks, ellipses,
quotation marks, and upper case text for the sake of emphasis betrayed a keen interior
monologue. Some of his run-on sentences were epic.
I like to think he simply felt
he had too much to share with us. I sense his enthusiasm, conviction, and
passion whenever I read my various editions of SYNTHESIS (I have three). There
was a stream-of-consciousness urgency to Bill’s writing. No one else I know or
have known writes or wrote like he did. Read on and you’ll see what I mean.
Any building, or “physical accommodation” (a description which
we tend to prefer today because it makes us sound less “object oriented”), will
have a shape, be complete, and determine its own extremities. This is so
because, in the first place, it must be constructed . . . a process which
begins at a point in time, lasts for a period of time, ends at another point in
time and results in something relatively solid and permanent (we are not yet
able to make the construction process self-correcting, self-adapting, and
therefore continuous).
But, since we have already admitted that we don’t like to be
classified as “object-oriented,” we try our best to modify these obvious and
inevitable characteristics of what we make. This has been expressed in
comparisons of the old architecture (with its emphasis on form, shape, objects,
arrangement, and composition) and the emerging architecture which does not even
want to be called architecture but rather “environmental design” (with its
concern for sets, systems, process, frames, and human responsiveness).
Why is this so?
We are in an age of fantastically complex problems. We learn
more and more about these problems (whether we like it or not) through the new
communication media which also, because of the new speed of message
transmission, suggest the interdependence of the problems; how one affects or
changes (or eliminates or intensifies) others, and how it seems impossible to deal
with one without dealing with all. People have never been so aware of this as
they are now. This has given rise to the new sciences of “systems analysis,” “action-feedback
recycling,” “sociological accounting,” “simulation testing,” and “human responsiveness
and behaviorism.”
Out of this context and response has come a compelling sense of
urgency and necessity; a kind of mutually interacting system in itself, which
causes the desire to make places that will permit and cause all people
individually to realize their potentiality as human beings (insofar as physical
environment can contribute to this) . . . and this as a matter of course . . . as
a normal part of daily life. Many designers now have some understanding of how
to deal with complex, interacting, changing systems. They also have some
understanding of non-physical or intangible human needs . . . and their
complexity, their variety, and their vulnerability to shifting values. There is
an increasing concern for particular
situations, for real actions of
people, for particular people, individual people and their experiences
(or lack of them), and for the differences
among people, for varieties of
experience, and for change over
time.
All this has led some environmental designers to conclude that
the shape of what they make is not so important; except insofar as it
contributes to the experiential enclosure for people to use, think about,
modify, and otherwise make part of life. Attention is focused on the range of activities
to be accommodated, the nature of the people who will be engaged in those
activities and, most important of all, their capacity for expanded experience
and expanding the experience until it is a new and different scene, or scene
within a scene (another system), and then perhaps back again to what it was
before. It is clear that environment for this kind of activity should evoke,
but not dictate; help, but not limit; be powerful, but not over-powering; be
exact, but not too particular; particular but not closed; in short, it should
be precisely ambiguous . . . an
intensifier of the experience of life, ourselves, and others, a developer of our
capacities to respond, feel and, as Louis Kahn says, wonder.
This brings us to the realization that what this emerging architecture
is trying to be is a genuine art form for our time (and therefore nothing
really new after all).
