January 21, 2012
THE POWER OF A DESIGN CONCEPT
Imagine you are sitting in a dark room. No light is penetrating the space. You can see nothing nor sense nothing. You are without information.
If I say the word “chair,” what happens? You immediately have an image of a chair – in the sense that you most strongly are associated with that word. If you possess vision, your image will be dominated by form. It will be a platform for sitting about 15” off the floor supported by three or more legs and with an upright element for supporting the back. It may be a plain wooden chair or a chair with the seat covered in cloth. It may be an overstuffed chair or a plastic chair. But in all cases, the form is what distinguishes it as a chair.
It is as though a light comes on in the dark room. Your mind goes to something. Your thoughts swirl around something. Those thoughts are what you know of the world and are a product of your past.
If I say, “The chair is ready for the mistress to sit in,” more thoughts enter the picture. Use of the word “mistress” sets up associations. A human being. A young lady. Someone special. Someone to honor. A time that will be special when she gets here. If I say “..sit on” rather than “…sit in” each creates a different picture. Every word and combination of words light the dark room differently.
This same notion is fundamental to an artistic concept. This is true in writing, in sculpting, in architecture, in music, in painting. And, when you get really good, it is true in everything you create: a relationship, a business, a family, an organization of any kind. Or, a game, a Saturday afternoon, a shopping trip, a vacation. Or, your life.
Whenever you create, you bring a light into a dark room. But rather than someone else uttering the word which causes you to associate with that from your past, when you create, you go beyond your past. Through creation it is possible to cause new associations with a word and depending on how good one is at that, he can cause associations that lock in a generation or maybe even more people to the meaning of something. The essence of creation is that one creates new associations, new meaning in a dark room.
In the world of the architectural concept, the dark room is comprised of the collection of stuff that we are used to in the world. We see buildings, walls, doors, windows. We see these in different forms. Mostly we relate to them for their usefulness because we are always wanting to accomplish something that we need for our life.
But, there is another way that we can relate to them. We can relate to them because of the nourishment they give to our consciousness. There are some buildings that provide us something that supports our mind, our spirit. It can provide an especially harmonious picture that has us know that the world is good and ok. It can define something that is iconic – that sticks in our mind as the thing that stands for a whole district or a whole industry or a whole city, even.
This quality does not have to be enormous. It can be small and simple. Yet, it can crystallize something that had never before been crystallized in your mind. It can define for you the essence, the defining characteristic, of what a thing is. An Alvar Aalto door handle can crystallize the relationship between you and the door. A door is a panel that can swing open to let you enter a room or it can swing shut to prevent you from entering a room. The handle to cause the position of the door can be designed in many ways. Aalto looked at the handle in such a way that your human hand fit it perfectly and what using that caused was the realization that the door handle was the interface for the door panel and the human being. It was this object, the door handle, that responded to what the door was to do and to what the human was to do. It was the first time I ever felt taken care of, honored by a door handle. Actually, I felt honored by Alvar Aalto. This was not a Manhattan building which can also express something as quintessential; it was a simple door handle.
So what was the concept that generated this door handle? That the handle should respond to the door and to the human being and both be expressed in its form.
Notice that this is different than a door handle that is delightful. A door handle can express delight too. It can be made in a way that has us think of sensuality or pleasure or cleverness – something that delights our consciousness and has us feel happy.
Or a door handle can express a fantasy world – a world that doesn’t exist normally but which excites our imagination and transports us into an escape from our everyday world. Disney world offers us a lot with this concept for design.
So how does one cause such a definition to occur? First you get clear about what the concept is. It needs to be a simple, straight-forward idea. When one gets his concept reduced to one sentence or phrase, then he has something he can work with. If he cannot do this, he is still muddled. The reason it is so crucial to reduce the concept to one word or phrase is it will not be possible to have all the details of the object line up with this unless you are absolutely clear that you are going to have them line up with this. Without that, you will end up with confusion where all that is wanted is clarity.
I judged an architectural design studio’s final project and the project was to design a building for the garment district in New York. One student’s concept was to have the skin of the building appear as fabric. Once he got this idea, he had to come up with how that was going to be defined.
One way was to set fabric against non-fabric so that a viewer could grasp the nature of fabric. Fabric can undulate and fold, gather and bunch up, be penetrated with pins and such. It can be stitched and woven and we can see it is made up of threads. As to its qualities, it can be as light and airy as the wind or heavy as Persian carpet. It can be sheeny or dull, smooth or bumply, tight or loose. It can be any color. All of these things give us the nature of fabric.
So, what is not-fabric? If fabric is A, what is non-A like? It is non-undulating, rigid, would never gather or bunch up. It would be something that penetrates, not be penetrated. It would not be woven nor its constituent parts be as threads. It could be a steal beam or glass or concrete or wood. It could be metal panel. It could be natural color.
What he chose was to have the structure be rigid and expressed in certain places and have the skin be the fabric which was rather like a drape. It folded in and under the structure at the top of the building and then undulated down across the building face to bunch up like a drape at the street level all in proportions that conveyed elegance. In his hands, it was a powerful concept and it definitely conveyed the idea of fabric and garment.
In the undistinguished collection of buildings of New York City he showed us something that could fuel a lifetime of possibility because he provided clarity so right for it's purpose.
This is the power of the artist. Somehow, someway, he must distinguish something which provides the human psyche fuel to go on and want to live. Art and esthetics is the domain that holds up an example of what can be and in this way provides the moral fuel for a man's future.
To divorce it from the possibility of being moral fuel is to jettison the power of art. To assign it to be tepid moral fuel is almost as bad. I will save that for a future article.
December 1, 2011
SHAPING MY ARCHITECTURE
The real power in architecture is not just playing with form or manipulating materials in clever ways. So you like wood or you like concrete. So you like one roof shape over another. So what? The power is in creating an experience that feeds and nourishes the user’s values so that he can be stronger for living. (It is up to the user to choose an architect in whose work he can see his values expressed because the architect who has any power in his expression can only bring his values to bear in solving the user's particular problem.) Besides providing for material requirements that buildings provide, they are for nourishing a man’s soul. The esthetic aspects of a building take care of his consciousness which needs vindication of values and the worth of working for values day in and day out. And you don’t need me to tell you which buildings or environments do this. You can analyze it later, as I’m doing in this article, but initially it is a powerful experience of life in the moment as it ought, or ought not, be.
The most powerful experience of architecture I ever had was a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was The Gordon House built next to the Willamette River near Wilsonville, Oregon. After traversing the entry sequence, I arrived at the center of the universe, so to speak. FLW had created the form for the activities of the house, the yard, the farm and the natural landscape such that when you sat in a particular place (the main seating area of the living room), you were at the center of concentric rings which put you in a state of equilibrium and harmony with everything you could see and want to do from there - all the way up in scale to climbing a mountain since the outermost ring was the Cascade Mountain range. This was his interpretation of “being home” - being at the center of your universe as displayed before you. Believe me, it was powerful. I felt completely satisfied to just be in that place and never wanted to move again. I said to a friend, “I could sit here all day.” One morning 4 years later while shaving it came to me what FLW had done to cause this experience. (I love Falling Water, but I don’t think it is as powerful as this little house in Oregon was.)
The FLW house near Wilsonville was moved from its site of rolling farm land next to the Willamette River, which you could hear burbling while sitting in the living room, and with the Cascades in view, to save it. Once it left the place it was designed for, it lost its real power. There is no way a person could ever understand what generated the form for that house where it now stands. I cannot believe that the powers that be would not have found a solution for its preservation that would have related to the determinants of its form had they understood what was really going on with this design. It doesn’t surprise me though. I’ve talked to students of Frank Lloyd Wright who do not relate to the fundamental generators which provide the power for his designs. Unless you are aware of how to relate to the basic spiritual components that give a design power, you think it is in the forms, the patterns, the colors or the materials used. No, it isn’t. It is in what is valued and the principles, which also are values at a higher level of abstraction, used to express those values. FLW himself developed and explored three completely different esthetics within his lifetime. Every esthetic had its own set of possibilities, if you know how to use them. FLW’s architecture is pure poetry and once you relate to his work that way, it makes wonderful, very-nourishing sense.
I’ve had three truly profound experiences of architecture. Besides the FLW house in Oregon which is when I first understood the power of architecture, nearby at Mt. Angel Abbey, Alvar Aalto designed a library. (The pictures do not do the experience of this building justice.) When you enter the building, you naturally move toward the checkout desk which is a curved and irregular bubble in plan. Unless you have business at that desk, you want to slip around it which brings you to stand as though on the bow of a ship. Although you are on a level across from much of the library, you see the ends of the rows of shelves which does not provide much information as to where to go. So your eye instead is drawn to look down where you get a better idea of how the library works. Further, the source of natural light illuminating the room is from a hidden skylight. I wanted to find where the light was coming from but when I saw that the skylight was not obvious, (the lip on the bulkhead above blocked the source of the light) I abandoned wanting to look out a window. (Although there are windows you can look out of, none of them are available for that when standing on the “bow.”) So, I was drawn to look down at the books below the “bow of the ship.” The controlled natural light illumines this lower level – but it is removed some from the light source – so that gives it less light. A mystery is created in those depths which are shelves upon shelves of books which lead away from you in a radiating pattern. The organization of the shelves sets up the mystery since the ends, and thus the extent, of those shelves are hidden by the floor level that partially eclipses that section of the stacks. You are clear that you are in the presence of a great amount of knowledge but at the moment it is all unknown. This awing experience causes you to be present to the purpose and power of the library’s value – its widest spiritual value, where I use spiritual to mean “pertaining to consciousness.” (Spiritual values are for the purpose of feeding and nourishing your consciousness in its role of providing values and purpose for your life) (To get Aalto’s full effect requires going to the site and experiencing it under the natural light Aalto played with. Being from Scandinavia, he was a master at using natural light for powerful effect.)
I had the experience of being set to sea where most of what needs to be known is mysteriously in the “deep” of those books on the shelves. It was going to take immersing myself in the water of knowledge if I were to gain what I had come to the library to learn.
I remember the stair taking me down into those depths was lovely. Aalto is very attendant to providing comfort in his railings, door handles and all kinds of details. Every room is shaped for acoustical purposes, even small meeting rooms, so it is easy to hear a speaker. You feel so taken care of by his details.
I remember the stair taking me down into those depths was lovely. Aalto is very attendant to providing comfort in his railings, door handles and all kinds of details. Every room is shaped for acoustical purposes, even small meeting rooms, so it is easy to hear a speaker. You feel so taken care of by his details.
The third really powerful experience of architecture I’ve had was when I came up out of the subway and looked at the Boston City Hall. It is a giant, imposing building set in the shallow dish of a plaza. The gentle slope of the plaza pulls you to the building. The building is like a giant animal on four legs. The image I got was that of the she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. Her teats hung down below her (the center part of the building that descends lowest is where the elected representatives meet) and we, the hungry sucklings were ever so gently seduced into her domain where we then went up the ramp to get between those legs to suck at those teats. When I saw this, I shook with horror. I thought it was the most evil form for a building I’d ever seen. It placed me exactly in a position I hated to be in related to a source of physical force. I realized after I thought about it that it was architecture of the highest order masterfully expressing a form of government that I think evil to this day.
Above the entrance to the building at the right (not the ramp to the teats) is an upside down, squared off W form. Notice how the two vertical concrete members to the right have free ends like the tines of a fork or a portcullis of a castle. Walking under that impaling and crushing form, at least for me being sensitive to the effects of architectural form, was a very threatening experience. This building is sooo not what I think architecture should create - except maybe for Halloween.
The bureaucrats work in the little offices at the top of the whole structure. They are above it all but notice their form is as teeth too. The bottom ends of the verticals are not blunted by horizontals – rather, more of the pointy ends of the tines of a fork. Your access to what they do is beseeching the city council. In other words, you have to fondle the teats.
The Boston City Hall is done in the brutalist style which was popular in the 50s and 60s. Le Corbusier used it. So did Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph. The architectural firm who created City Hall was Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles.
To my right, related to the picture below but out of the picture, were some preserved historic government offices. They were such a relief compared to the City Hall. There you were one on one and of equal status with the people who were in the government. The contrast between these two forms of government could not have been more sharply distinguished.
If I had to sum up the symbolism of Boston City Hall, I would say it is “Force with tits” - a good expression for a fascist, democratic socialist form of government. I cannot imagine a government building designed with the citizen as primary and the government there to serve the citizen by protecting his individual rights being created in this form.
Here is a picture, although on a cloudy day, better showing the ramp up to the underbelly of the beast.
