The Little Street (1657-58), by Johannes Vermeer
Bill Kleinsasser 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 liberally sprinkled direct quotations throughout every edition of his
self-published textbook Synthesis
because they not only bolstered his thesis but also because he recognized paraphrasing
these extracts would only diminish their authenticity and authority.
His wellspring was extensive
and eclectic, ranging from renowned authors (Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, Eudora
Welty, Virginia Woolf), to poets (Ford Madox Ford, Wallace Stevens), mathematicians
(Blaise Pascal), activists (Dorothy Canfield Fisher), historians and critics of
art and architecture (Ada Louise Huxtable, John Ruskin, John Summerson, Harold
McCarter Taylor), psychologists and psychiatrists (Jerome Bruner, Kenneth
Craik, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow), and of course architects (including Lou
Kahn, Le Corbusier, Donlyn Lyndon, Charles Moore, Gio Ponti, Demetri
Porphyrios, Augustus Pugin, Aldo Van Ecyk, and Frank Lloyd Wright). There were
many more he also quoted.
Bill clearly was well-read, sharing
with his students his appreciation for the wisdom of great thinkers. He impressed
upon us the value of seeing the world through the eyes of others, those whose
ideas we may have not immediately considered relevant to our work.
The following is a sampling
of just a few of the “related thoughts” Bill mined to illustrate his ideas
about architecture:
On Organizational Structure
“The
first principle of composition is to foresee or determine the shape of what is
to come, and pursue that shape. All forms of composition have skeletons to
which the composer will bring the flesh and blood. The more clearly he perceives
the shape, the better are his chances of success.” (William Strunk Jr.)
“Before
beginning to compose something, gauge the nature and extent of the enterprise
and work from a suitable design. Design informs even the simplest structure,
whether of brick and steel or of prose. You raise a pup tent from one sort of
vision, a cathedral from another. Columbus didn’t just sail, he sailed west,
and the new world took shape from this simple and, we now think, sensible design.”
(E.B. White)
On Supporting Purposes
“Never
cease to identify whatever you construct with the people you are constructing
it for—for those it will accommodate. Identify a building with that same building
entered, and hence with those it shelters, and define space—each space built—simply
as the appreciation of it. This circular definition has a purpose. You see,
whilst excluding all abstract academic abracadabra, it includes what should
never be excluded but paradoxically generally is: I mean those entering it,
appreciating it—PEOPLE.
“Architecture
can do no more, nor than it should it ever do less, than accommodate people
well; assist their homecoming. The rest—those signs and symbols one is worrying
about too much—will either take care of themselves or they just don’t matter.” (Aldo Van Eyck)
On Establishing Longevity
“Once
the designer has made, at least metaphorically, the box or envelope, he must
choose what sorts of clues to place within it. For a box offers little in
itself, except perhaps a defined boundary. A box is not a free place in which
anyone can set up patterns—at least not easily. It is paralyzing—it is too
free. It is possible to do anything, but therefore too little. There are no
points of reference, no places to begin. Posts are needed—points of departure.
Then there would be things to look around, to be next to. The imagination would
be triggered and the act of possessing begun.
“The
responsibility of the architect then is to develop a set of posts (metaphorically):
suggestions which can be considered or ignored, suggestions which hold many
possible interpretations, all sound and promising. But the suggestions must not
be a fixed regulation. There has to be a sort of mystery and a sense that there
is still something to be found out. If all the answers are immediate, there’s
no seeking. Le the user search and discover his own answers and meanings, his
own uses, his own patterns. Let the place be tantalizingly incomplete, even
somewhat obscure. Give duplicity and multiplicity of meaning.” (Ronald R. Lee)
On Responding to Place
"It
seems plain that the art that speaks most clearly, explicitly, directly, and
passionately from its place or origin will remain the longest understood. It is
through place that we put out roots, wherever birth, chance, fate or our traveling
selves set us down; but where these roots reach toward is the deep and running
vein, eternal and consistent and everywhere purely itself, that feeds and is
fed by the human understanding.
“Whatever
is significant and whatever is tragic in a place live as long as the place
does, though they are unseen, and the new life will be built upon these things.”
(Eudora Welty)
On Maintaining Historical Continuity
“Calling
other works to mind allows the present to form links back to past works. Again,
we will have conviction about the conventions of architecture, like the conventions
of law, only when they are in that chain of esteemed instances. Linking forward
and back forges a building and the conventions it displays into that chain.” (William Hubbard)
On Achieving Clarity
“Five
lines where three is enough is always stupidity. Nine pounds where there are
sufficient is obesity. But to eliminate expressive words in speaking or writing—words
that intensify or vivify meaning—is not simplicity. Nor is similar elimination
in architecture simplicity. It may be, and usually is, stupidity.
“Do
not think that simplicity means something like the side of a barn, but
something with graceful sense of beauty in its utility from which discord and
all that is meaningless has been eliminated.
"This
is, I believe, the single secret of simplicity: that we may truly regard nothing
at all as simple in itself. I believe that no one thing is ever so, but must achieve
simplicity—as an artist should use the term—as a perfectly realized part of
some organic whole.
“In
architecture, expressive changes of surface, emphasis of line and especially
textures of material and imaginative pattern, may go to make facts more
eloquent—forms more significant. Elimination, therefore, may be just as
meaningless as elaboration, perhaps more often is so. To know what to leave out
and what to put in; jus where and just how, ah, that is to have been educated
in knowledge of simplicity-toward ultimate freedom of expression.
“Truly
ordered simplicity in the hands of the great artist may flower into a bewildering
profusion, exquisitely exuberant, and render all more clear than ever.
“False
simplicity—simplicity as an affectation, that is, simplicity constructed as a
decorator’s outside upon a complicated, wasteful engineer’s or carpenter’s
structure, outside or inside—is not good enough simplicity. It cannot be simple
at all.” (Frank Lloyd Wright)
On Establishing Vitality
“Architecture,
by virtue of its actual limitations, can exploit our capacity for dramatizing
ourselves, for heightening the action of ordinary life; it can increase man’s psychological
stature to an angel’s. All this it does through its irrevocable attachment to
function. The dramatizing of movements appropriate to architecture (and
impossible without architecture), movements like entering through a door,
looking out of a window, mounting steps or walking on a terrace, is something
with which other forms of art have nothing to do. Here is architecture’s
special province which on the one hand constricts its movement and on the other
intensifies its meaning.” (John
Summerson)
