“Gradients must arise in the world when the world is in harmony with itself simply because conditions vary.”  

“Gradients play a very large role throughout nature. Any time that a quantity varies systematically, through space, a gradient is established .”

Christopher Alexander p. 275, Book One, The Nature of Order

I find it interesting to look back at photos taken many years ago and recall why a particular setting was attractive enough to capture. In the 70’s we were shooting Kodachrome, expensive to buy and expensive to process, especially on a student budget. Unlike today’s low cost of digital image making, when we took a photo in 1971 we had to be selective. It took me a few rolls of very mediocre slides to learn not to be seduced by my own assumed importance of the subject matter. The Palace of Versailles, Montmartre, etc. were all special places, but that fact in my head didn’t make my photos any better. Things changed when I started seeing what was actually happening in the view finder. At first I saw light, shape, color, and contrast. Upon reflection, a long-term study of Christopher Alexander and a good deal of experience, I began to see more subtle properties emerge. Among them is the idea of ‘gradients’, which is a property expressed as a gradual shift or change occurring across a surface or field. In the natural world, gradients are everywhere, since no place in space is exactly like any other. With practice we can see and feel when gradients abound and when they don’t.

Back to the photo above. Let’s just think about how the selection of plaster allows a beautiful gradient to become realized. The wall in our photograph is most likely constructed with a lime plaster over rough masonry, finished with a lime render and maintained with an occasional lime wash. The chemical properties of lime allow it to gracefully respond to subtle changes in sunlight, humidity, human interaction and rainfall across the wall’s entire surface. The visual gradient of color and value is a manifestation of the actual conditions playing out on the wall, a more accurate expression than if the wall had been painted with acrylic paint. Such a monolithic finish can mask the true nature of a place, rendering it sterile, cartoonish, cold or hard. A building that not only recognizes but also celebrates the ever-changing, dynamic quality of life has a resonance tuned to our ability to appreciate it.

Where gradients occur, a kind of softness arises.

Unity can only be created from distinctness.  This means, that every center is made from discernible opposites, and intensified when the not center, against which it is opposed, is clarified, and itself becomes a center.”

“On a biological level, we see it in the contrast of male and female which exists in almost every kind of organism.  It appears in the cycle of day and night, formed by a rotating earth in sunlight.  It appears in the contrast of solid and liquid phase which provides the action and catalysis in chemical reactions.”

Christopher Alexander, p. 272, Book One, The Nature of Order

My TKWA colleague, Allen Washatko took this image in 1972 while we were architecture students in a year abroad program with the University of Illinois.  What is obvious to an excellent photographer like Allen is often lost on the rest of us.  Contrast plays a fundamental role in our ability to perceive the world.  It might seem obvious that contrast is necessary to see anything, but if one pays attention to both the quality and diversity of that contrast, what we see becomes richer and more meaningful.

Allen’s photo first reveals how the contrast of light and dark reinforce the open and closed rooms of the building. Beyond tonal values, contrast also defines the alternation between massiveness and spaciousness.  Looking closer, one can also observe contrast where dark, soft and textured carpets are hung on  cold and smoothly whitewashed walls.  During the day, the contrast is created by sunlight entering through openings in the ceiling, at night a whole new structure of contrast is created with candles and oil lamps placed in niches carved out of massive walls.

Clearly, we are not only talking about the visual contrast of light and dark, but many aspects of the physical world that can be expressed in contrasting terms…warm and cool, busy and tranquil, loud and quiet, sharp and dull, textured and smooth, blue and orange, and on and on.

Once one’s awareness is sensitized to the presence of contrast in its many forms, its pervasiveness is overwhelming.  As architects, we are constantly managing the many ways contrast participates in the life of a building.

The Wright Spirit Award is the highest honor given by the Conservancy and recognizes organizations or individuals who have “advanced the knowledge and increased the appreciation of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright through architectural, scholarly or other endeavors”. Past award recipients have included Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Guggenheim Museum, architects Vin Scully and E. Fay Jones, photographer Ezra Stoller, Architectural Digest magazine, and Blair Kamin, architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune.

In recognizing TKWA, the Conservancy stated, “The sensitivity and expertise demonstrated in the realization of the addition to the First Unitarian Society Meeting House has brought the combined structure into the national spotlight while continuing the legacy of Wright’s building as one of the most innovative examples of church architecture in the country. By creating this elegant addition in concert with Wright’s original principles and achieving LEED status at the same time, the Unitarian Meeting House can continue to be used for its original purpose, meeting the needs of the congregation for years to come. Your work truly exemplifies the Wright Spirit.”

TKWA principals Tom Kubala and Allen Washatko accepted the award during the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy annual conference in Philadelphia on September 24, 2011.

“In a surprisingly large number of cases, living structures contain some form of interlock: situations where centers are “hooked” into their surroundings. This has the effect of making it difficult to disentangle the center from its surroundings. It becomes more deeply unified with the world and with other centers near it.”

“Ambiguity…comes about when a subsystem belongs simultaneously to two different overlapping larger systems.”

Christopher Alexander, p. 270, Book One, The Nature of Order

Charles Reid is one of my favorite contemporary watercolor painters. I am drawn to his ability to give life to a sheet of paper utilizing seemingly cavalier strokes of his pen and brush. But as an amateur watercolorist myself, I find Reid’s writing about painting to be equally as instructive. Reid clearly articulates the foundational properties that support his work.

“Technically, everything we draw and paint should have lost-and-found edges. The idea is that you can stress or emphasize some boundaries with a found or hard boundary while minimizing other areas with a lost or soft boundary. Soft or lost edges help you to connect and mass together adjacent objects and shapes, avoiding the cut-out-and-pasted-down look of a painting done entirely with hard, found edges.”

Charles Reid, p. 42, Pulling Your Paintings Together

A few years ago, I realized that Reid and Alexander were speaking the same language. Where Alexander said ‘make space whole’, Reid was saying ‘pull the painting together’. Alexander says that anything alive exhibits the property of Deep Interlock and Ambiguity, where distinct centers are brought into coherence by an ambiguous shared boundary zone, or where small bits of one center find themselves embedded in an adjoining center. Reid speaks of the lost edge, where an area of color can become connected to the paper and/or other areas of color through an ambiguous, soft or lost boundary. In a manner of speaking, both are commenting on the nature of life-quality, that it has difficulty manifesting itself when each component is too distinct, too separate.

Whenever these properties of wholeness tend to show up through a wide cross section of the making arts, I am confirmed that there is a bit of truth there.

“Observe, first, that overall symmetry in a system, by itself, is not a strong source of life or wholeness.”

“…the Alhambra…a marvel of living wholeness. It has no overall symmetry at all, but an amazing number of minor symmetries, which hold within limited pieces of the design, leaving the whole to be organic, flexible, adapted to the site.”

Christopher Alexander, p. 187, Book One, The Nature of Order

What holds space together? What makes it memorable? Often, these two questions are considered to dwell in separate realms of thought, not so in the mind of Christopher Alexander. Throughout nature and in the very best architecture, an interwoven field of local symmetries is often pervasive. On the other hand, a global symmetry of the kind found in certain neoclassical buildings or in structures produced by top down organizations like the Pentagon produce a deadly, mind numbing kind of order. Often, globally symmetric structures are produced at the cost of neutralizing the natural asymmetry of existing conditions. Rather than holding space together, global symmetry tends to create a separation between itself and everything else.

Local symmetry is the result of a bond of sorts, a geometrical relationship between two or more related parts or centers, as Alexander is apt to say. Nature is replete with this geometry, often the result of the act of an incremental symmetrical cell division process known as morphogenesis. Apparently, humans resonate with and more easily remember the density of overlapping local symmetries even though they may be unaware of their presence. This effect was illustrated in an experiment conducted by Alexander while working at the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies. In 1971, when, as an architecture student, I visited the Alhambra in Granada Spain, little did I know that my utter wonderment of the place had mostly to do with how it manifested local symmetries.

A recent invitation for TKWA staff to speak at the 2011 EDRA (Environmental Design Research Association) conference in Chicago offered our firm the opportunity to reflect on Alexander and on our success, and failures, with patterns as a design tool. What we found is that, while we have come a long way, we still have much to learn and improve upon. Our first attempts at pattern writing began in the mid-1990′s with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and in 1999 with the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center. While our early efforts at using patterns as a tool for guiding physical design decisions remained in its infancy, we discovered flashes of their potential. Our pattern describing “Parking Pockets” at Schlitz Audubon, for instance, helped the design team – as well as the client – better visualize a more sustainable approach to parking layout within a sensitive natural environment. Writing patterns for Schlitz Audubon also helped our design team understand daily life at the Center. By more intuitively understanding the way people worked and lived together as a human organization we were better able to make meaningful decisions about the physical form of the building. We were learning to rely less on abstract ideas about form.

For the EDRA conference TKWA co-founder, Tom Kubala, along with TKWA designers Chris Socha and Ethan Bartos, reviewed six recent firm projects that incorporated some degree of pattern integration in the design. The projects represented a spectrum of our studio experience – from a master plan for an 1100-acre environmental center to a prominent new administrative building for a major university, from a highly sustainable new addition to a National Historic Landmark to an unbuilt speculative office building. We tried to demonstrate that patterns can be used for planning and design at many levels of scale, under a variety of budget and schedule constraints, and for a diverse set of client needs and expectations.

Successful integration of pattern writing into design, we told our EDRA audience, requires more than a theoretical or passing commitment. This approach takes sustained effort over time. It requires a way of thinking and seeing that one must master. Our real-world experience with pattern writing has convinced us that this design approach has much to offer. Striving to integrate Alexander’s ideas into our daily practice has made all the difference.

“The Shack was everything, and it was nothing.”

Today we honor the life and inspiration of Nina Leopold Bradley, a graceful and eloquent voice for scientific environmentalism, and daughter of conservationist Aldo Leopold.

The following is an excerpt from remarks given by TKWA Co-Founder, Allen Washatko, at the dedication ceremony for the new Leopold Legacy Center in Baraboo, Wisconsin on April 20, 2007. It was our great pleasure to work with Nina on this important project. We will miss her gracious personality, her intelligence, and her humility.

As we dedicate the Leopold Legacy Center and the vision that it represents I would like to bring you back to a moment in time about four years ago. TKWA had just been selected for the task of giving form to an idea. We were gathered in a small group with Buddy Huffaker (Leopold Foundation Director) and Nina Leopold at her house near the historic Leopold Shack. We found ourselves in a simple and unpretentious home, full of daylight and the warmth of natural materials. Birds of all variety were feeding in the trees near an open expanse of living-room windows, and their sounds filled the house. Nina had baked homemade cookies for all to share. As visitors, we could sense something deeper at work here, something unfamiliar in our contemporary world. It was evidence of a life lived deeply connected to the land and its natural rhythms.

The goal for the new Legacy Center, Nina and Buddy shared, was to introduce a particular quality of understanding. To illustrate their meaning, they described the typical tourist center, which is structured to briefly entertain many visitors in a “high-volume, low-intensity” experience. Their vision, Nina and Buddy contrasted, was to reinforce a “low-volume, high-intensity” experience. They wanted a place that would more deeply engage, a place that afforded an individual the means to more fully consider what Aldo Leopold described as a “land ethic”. For Aldo Leopold, this understanding was both personal and universal; in the words of his daughter Nina, it was “a sense of belonging to something greater than himself, a continuity with all life through time.”

As architects we took inspiration from the Shack and all that it implies. But we did not seek to copy it – for the Shack represents everything that is not superficial. Perhaps most influential was Nina’s offhand comment, “The Shack was everything, and it was nothing.” What we understood her to mean was that while this humble building served as a functional outpost for the family’s land restoration activities, the physical nature of the building was less important than the work that took place here, less important than the ideas and understanding gained. At TKWA, we concluded that the end-all of the Leopold Legacy can never be simply a building. A building alone would quietly emphasize a mechanical solution over ecological wisdom. Thus, our design efforts always strove to shift focus from buildings onto spaces and the activities associated with them.

The process of creating the Leopold Legacy Center was, ultimately, about finding real solutions to large scale problems that otherwise may seem insurmountable, about finding hope and a larger sense of community, about understanding what it means to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.

Opening Remarks, Leopold Legacy Center Dedication, April 20, 2007

The First Unitarian Society Meeting House Addition has been selected for one of AIA Wisconsin’s 2011 Design Awards! We are so proud to have been a part of this project – thank you and congratulations to the entire team:

• J.H. Findorff & Son: General Contractor
• Affiliated Engineers: MEP Engineering, Fire Protection, Lighting, and Technology
• Arnold & O’Sheridan: Structural and Civil Engineering
• Ken Saiki Design: Landscape Architecture
• Kirkegaard Associates: Acoustical Design
• AVI Midwest: Video Projection
• Boelter: Kitchen Design
• Mark Heffron and Zane Williams: Photography
• and of course, the First Unitarian Society of Madison design committee!

As we celebrate Earth Day 2011, we encourage you to stop for a moment to think about the food you eat. Where does it come from? What are the consequences of our food choices? Modern industrial farming practices have long been credited with providing cheap, abundant food to the world. But at what true cost? Loss of ecosystem diversity, topsoil erosion, subsurface and surface water contamination, the death of soil, a reliance on pesticides and herbicides for fertility, and an uprooting of the social fabric of small, rural family farms are all directly related to our ‘modern’ energy-intensive and monoculture methods of food production.

Industrial monoculture farming. Image credit: Beyond Revolution

Food From Thought

Can a shift in the way we think about food offer a viable alternative to the current resource intensive model? Will Allen thinks so. And so do the folks at Sweet Water Organics. These are food endeavors that see the beginning in the end. These are people who have shifted their awareness from fragmented or isolated production toward an inclusive awareness. They say, ‘I think the making of food should be a healthy, life giving and beneficial process from beginning to end, from top to bottom’. No bad side effects, nothing left over for the grandkids to clean up. These are thoughts that are gracious, beneficent and regenerative. And the best part, food from these thoughts tastes better.

Will Allen in one of Growing Power’s greenhouses. Image credit: Growing Power

The American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment announced its 2011 Top Ten Green Projects today, and we are honored that our First Unitarian Society Meeting House Addition made the list.

The 20,000 square foot Meeting House is approximately 40% more efficient than a comparable base-case facility, and the building design features extensive use of locally-sourced materials and recycled content. 91% of regularly occupied areas receive natural daylighting, and the ventilation system uses CO2 sensors to trigger only when spaces are occupied. The addition nearly doubles the footprint of Wright’s original Meeting House, but a vegetated roof on the addition and a reduction in parking spaces actually increases the percentage of pervious vegetated surface on the property.

The COTE Top Ten site includes a detailed case study of the First Unitarian Society’s sustainable features and metrics. In addition, our publication detailing the building’s sustainable features and LEED points can be viewed in full here.