Posts Tagged ‘steven holl’
killing your darlings
She later remarked that Lowell didn’t teach her what to put in a poem, but what to leave out:
‘What he taught me was taste. Perhaps that’s the only thing a poet can be taught.’
- Biography of Anne Sexton
everyone who has ever taken a writing class – and our numbers are legion – has probably been exposed to that sweet little aphorism, allegedly by William Faulkner, about “killing your darlings.” it means, of course, that you eventually will have to cut out those things you hold most dear in your writing, as you go through the Process. your cleverest turns of praise, your shiningest metaphorical jewels, are probably the very things that ought to go first. you might have done some necessary work in creating them, if only to feel your way through to the thing you really needed to say; but you must be quite ruthless in removing them, when necessary.
in writing, this is a lesson I have only imperfectly learned. but I think I have made a little progress since I was a clever kid, who often wrote like ralph waldo emerson strictly because she could. the desire to display cleverness is a terrible temptation. I really do know quite a lot of words. for the purposes of crossword puzzles and for scrabble, this is a wonderful thing. for writing, sometimes an excess of vocabulary gets in the way of writing the way I would like to write – a straight line between each point and the next, direct as an arrow, clear as glass.
when I got into design school, I had to start learning the lessons of unsentimental discipline all over again. we had a guest speaker on one of our very first days of class, who spoke about the design process and the frequent need to get rid of your favorite ideas along the way. I helpfully raised my hand and blurted something about Faulkner and killing your darlings! the speaker looked a little blank. can it be there are people in the world who haven’t heard that saying? I began to realize that I was now joining a new society.
and I noticed, too, what it was the instructors were trying to get us to do, or rather keep us from doing. we could be forgiven, perhaps, for thinking first of all about the surfaces and textures we would like to put into a landscape, and having no idea how to start with the fundamentals, how to work toward the holy grail of placemaking – the Big Idea.
I had classmates who showed early talent at drawing insanely complicated paving patterns, and others who could come up with the most elaborate metaphorical justifications for an allee of trees or a circular drive – this landscape is a symphony! the orange trees along this walkway are like pulsating drumbeats! but very soon, the instructors come along and tear those tools out of your hands. you start out making circles and squares and lines, not planting trees and paving terraces. they give you white foamcore, and in case you get too attached to the way you glued it together last night, they’ll come at it with a knife right in front of you.
they take away flowers and fountains, and give you geometry. fortunately for me, it was the only kind of math I ever really liked.
when I took rendering classes and was looking for reference images to render from, I quickly wearied of leafing (ha) through the “garden porn” style of landscape book, looking for an image with some clear pattern to reproduce. every picture seemed more cluttered with unnecessary foliage and flowers and frills than the one before it.
by this, I don’t mean to imply that I joined the ranks of aspiring landscape architects whose noses are so stuck in lofty realms of High Design that they can’t be bothered to care about plants. you know, the people being trained up in the finest schools to jet off to international design firms, where presumably their work will happen all over the world, and they’ll hire somebody local to help with the planting. of course, many if not most of us first start being attracted to landscape architecture because we love gardens and plants; if later we begin to chafe at the limiting connotations of being “gardeners” or “landscapers” in the eyes of the world, it is not the fault of gardens.
but those lush photographs of leafy gardens do kind of make me crazy. all those details can get in the way of seeing underlying form, pattern, line. sometimes one longs for the existential pleasures of engineering more than for a vine-draped retreat. at least, I do.
I spent so much time looking for forms and patterns that I may have taken the lessons of stripping down too much to heart. at least, I could excuse some of my shortcomings as a student with noble-sounding reasons: that I had a pure passion for the big gesture, and couldn’t bring myself to muddle it up later by putting in the details. I had a strong tendency, on every project, to stop dead before I completely realized the design. one of our more legendary and irascible teachers, famous for his loud insistence on the Big Idea and his contempt for fussy details, eventually found I was one of the few students he had to push to do more. what’s the system! he used to bark at me. I’d explain it. and eventually, he would have to lean on me to put in the benches, or resolve the grading.
I find, upon having read Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, that so many bits of it stick in my mind. he speaks of how we seek out environments that give us something of what we feel we lack. some people drape and decorate and furbelow everything, perhaps to furnish or obscure some inner emptiness or loneliness. some of us, on the other hand, stop short before adding the rugs or putting much of anything on the walls, feeling exhausted at the number of things and ideas and worries and sensations which which we have already loaded up our heads and our hearts. maybe a blank wall or a bare floor, under those circumstances, is the right thing to look at, to live with.
and one of the very last thoughts in the book is about self-knowledge:
The failure of architects to create congenial environments mirrors our inability to find happiness in other areas of our lives. Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendency which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us…
The places we call beautiful are, by contrast, the work of those rare architects with the humility to interrogate themselves adequately about their desires and the tenacity to translate their fleeting apprehensions of joy into logical plans – a combination that enables them to create environments that satisfy needs we never consciously knew we even had.
I think, perhaps, that part of this humility has to do with getting rid of your favorite notions, your darlings. they may be the very thing that is keeping you from seeing through to the real goal.
seven bottles of light
Originally posted December 1, 2008
I was going to post today about Africa, but couldn’t find the words to go with the pictures. maybe soon.
instead, the Chapel of St. Ignatius on the campus of Seattle University. a necessary stop for architourists in the Northwest. Steven Holl is the architect. the metaphor he used for the design is “seven bottles of light in a stone box.” there is a lot of architectural jargon about “light volumes” that is perhaps not necessary to know: all I know is I have not fully seen this building, because I have only been there twice. one would have to be there at every hour of every day at every time of year to really see it all.
the exterior is not my favorite part (though I understand
it is better at night when the light is shining out):
it’s all the things that light does inside that you need to see. regardless of your religion, or lack thereof, you will see something outside the ordinary plane of existence. photos don’t cover it.
