Not Necessarily a Design Methodology

If you stand anyplace and block out the noise for a minute you can feel a sort of tug that suggests a best orientation, a best direction to face. And if you walk around with this kind of attention you will notice that some places and orientations are better than others. It is hard to explain why. There are some easy explanations of the social-evolutionary kind: we stand most comfortably with our backs to walls, facing open space, maybe responding to a survival instinct that co-evolved with our forward-facing vision; we enter dark enclosed places with some trepidation, maybe because apes who didn't didn't live long enough to sire our line. But why is a chair on a porch best oriented just so? I've noticed that if I pay attention closely I feel very small tugs right and left, up and down, sunward and shadeward, and that if I don't heed them I feel slightly off, maybe slightly misaligned, and this sense of wrongness grows until I feel agitated. And I've noticed that people tend to place themselves more or less predictably, given the chance. These subtle forces are not purely spatial, they are also social. If you're sitting on the porch oriented comfortably and a friend [or an enemy] comes out and sits down, near or far, the forces respond as a planet responds to the orbit of a moon. Everything, actually, has its own gravity. We sit with our back to the wall, but if the wall is plaster or wood or stone we notice a gravity that has qualities that are very hard to describe.

When I have the luxury of designing for myself, I try to take the most direct route to rightness, and this involves very detailed, complete, three-dimensional mental images of a place, to which I return over and over until everything feels right from every point in space. Then I take this mental image and transpose it to paper. Sometimes I have new clarity as I draw, but mostly the drawing is just a record of what is already clear in my mind. This process takes concentration in the form of disciplined day-dreaming, in which I mentally enact many daily activities inside my mental model: I walk down a passage with my hand dragging on the wall, I cook, I sit by a window, I reach for a book, etc. And as I do these things I make adjustments: I roughen the stone of the passage wall, I raise a table-top and thicken it, I lower a windowsill and move a stack of books onto it. As the image evolves and solidifies it becomes less and less conceptual, more and more tangible. Architectural ideas, no matter how dearly I hold them, tend to weaken, compromise, and dissemble. The house becomes an aggregate of many small local decisions based on what I can feel about their rightness. I loosen my grip and symmetries, symbolism, fashion, and all the other forms of conceptual prejudice tend to fall away, leaving an artifact that is in many ways accommodated to its site, the way worn shoes accommodate to the wearer's foot. These mental models are intensely dynamic. Every time I put something in a place, the place changes, and the object responds to the change that its initial presence precipitated. There is a kind of diminishing echo of influence between the place and the objects I place in it, and the echo finally dies in perfect accommodation between place and object. Following this metaphor, an object that is placed without regard for the site creates an undiminishing noise, and will always feel incongruent and wrong.

Everything in a place has its own gravity. Even small things can be set at odds with their place, as noticeable as a thorn. This is not to say that meticulous design and thematic integration create right places. In fact, the best places seem to be more or less provisional and hodgepodge and contingent. There are so many reasons we can love a thing that things that are supposedly unmatched can be beautiful together. I have a beautiful Japanese rectangular bonsai pot, glazed pale green, sitting on a very rough Burmese sideboard which sits in front of an almost chartreuse wall. This serendipitous arrangement seems about right, and I like it, but recently I set down an orange bag on the sideboard and noticed that the whole room seemed to have found a new center, as though these beautiful objects had been waiting for something. It's hard to come up with a social-evolutionary explanation for this. Maybe we primates love to see an orange fruit in the green canopy of a tree? So why don't I get the same sense or rightness when I place my orange highlighter on this green sticky note? No idea.

It is good to be right at the edge of what I have words for. The words like a wall at my back, and the open space of not knowing spread out before me.