A 9x12 oil version of the earlier posted drawing of the corner of Bergen and Grand in Brooklyn.
Below I have accumulated some quotes from
The Old Way of Seeing:
How Architecture Lost Its Magic (And How to Get It Back) by Jonathan
Hale. The key quote is halfway down, "The loss of the old way..." I am also intrigued with "visual listening."
The designers of the past succeeded easily where most today
fail because they saw something different when they looked at a
building. They saw a pattern in light and shade. When
they let pattern guide them, they opened
their ability to make forms of rich complexity.
The forms they made began to dance.
What we recognize and love is the same kind of pattern we
see in every face, the pattern of our own life form. The
same principles apply to buildings that
apply to mollusks, birds, or trees.
Architecture is the play of patterns derived from nature and
ourselves.
Design is intuitive.
But intuition follows natural laws.
To design intuitively is not to lose control but to guide
unconsciously.
A building is not nature and it is not an imitation of
nature; it is an expression of
our
nature.
Something draws us to imperfection—“that hint of ugliness
without which nothing works,” as Edgar Degas is supposed to have said.
A ruined building has a wildness about it
and, at the same time, an inherent discipline.
An eighteenth-century house that has become rundown can be very
alluring
in its way. It keeps its rhythm, its
form, but it begins to be a little more like an old tree. It
still has its outlines and it still has
the old power, but the civility has been stripped away.
American landscapes often have a kind of scruffy messiness
that has its own appeal. You see it on
secondary highways—the billboards, the motels, the truck stops. We
all know those roads; there is something
tacky but comfortable about them, something a little tough, a little
raw. Such a landscape violates every principle of
design—except, perhaps, one: do something wrong. I do not
refer to the strip. The strip is its own world; it has a
very
different character from the occasional garage or billboard or
roadhouse. The strip is urgent and hostile; it no longer
says it’s okay to relax, it’s okay to be casual.
One can perceive the city and its streets to be
rooms, of
which the building are the
walls, as Louis Kahn said.
It has been typical of the art of our age that it affronts
us. I think we have become overly
accustomed to the idea that if art is to have any value, it should have
that
quality of murder. You must kill the
routine, kill the expectation. You must
kill the normal. This point of view
assumes there can be no magic in life as it is normally lived.
Before the machine age, no one had to make the choice to be
conscious of pattern, to
be
aesthetic. Now, to be in visual touch
requires taking a deliverate step.
Numbness is today offered all around.
We fall into it easily. We do
have to choose to be awake, as people in the past did not.
The loss of the old way of seeing buildings was the reverse
of the transformation Betty Edwards’s students made: it was a closing of
access
to visual competence, brought about by a shift in paradigm. The
old paradigm for design had been pattern;
the new paradigm was use. When the
paradigm changed,
seeing itself
changed. Seeing buildings became a
different process. Around 1830, designers
of buildings made what seemed to be a small change in paradigm, but the
results
were not small. The new design process
was like the “left-mode,” or
symbolic,
drawing of a hand: it was
about its
subject. Such a drawing tries to get “handness”
onto paper, whereas the “right-mode” drawing derives from the pattern of
light
and shade on the hand; the pattern an artist sees is not on the hand at
all but
in the artist’s eye. The right-mode
drawing process explores and plays with the pattern the artist sees.
In intuitive design, one does not think about
the object perceived, one does not think about perception. One
just plays with the light and shadows.
Intuitive seeing is to see, and seem almost to be seen by,
one’s surroundings. It is like silent
visual listening, an awareness in which the listening goes both ways.
The Nothing in the walls, the windows, the
shadows, and the light, listens. One is
master of knowing where one is.
I am walking in the country, thinking about lunch and the
bad thing someone said, or the good thing I will do, ramping along, when
I stop
for a moment…and suddenly it all comes in: yellow tres, fields,
shadows—the country
is full of shadows. The sensation is a
kind of visual listening. In this state,
perception is more vivid, colors are deeper, the world looks at once
more real
and more magical.
The woods and meadows often
bring out this way of seeing. But built
places may evoke it as well…It can come about in the middle of Grand
Central
Station, as Tony Hiss describes it The
Experience of Place: “…a change that
lets us start to see all the things around us at once and yet also look
calmly
and steadily at each one of them…. The experience… is of being overtaken
by a
sense that in the midst of a crowded and confining city you can be
present in
and a part of a serene and endless world.
But what is this openness…? It
strikes me as something like a region, an enchanted region where
everything belonging there returns to that in which it rests.”
After a certain age, a child tends to stop seeing just what
is in front of him—the shadows, the colors—and starts instead to see
what they
signify.
It is o longer a lovely blue and white shape with white speckles
on it,
it is Rest Area This Way. But it
is a lovely blue,
isn’t it? Must we have one or the other, practical
information or intuitive vision? Must
the intuitive experience be childish?
The old way of seeing is a child’s way of seeing. It
is my memory of how I saw when I was five
years old. But it is not childhood I
want, it is the visual experience I remember from childhood.
A designer is a master of playing; master, most of all,
of listening. There can be a moment of
fear just as you let go, when first you become afraid of the modern
silence. The silence is daunting, if you
don’t try to fill it up. But such a
moment passes. The silence is
unreal. It is the voices—of shadow and
light and pattern—that are real.
In the sense of knowing my inborn patterns, I know much
more than I have learned. In listening—visually—I
listen with the force of that self-knowledge.
