One word of caution. This pattern is easy to understand; and perhaps it is easy to agree with. But it is quite a subtle matter to actually create functioning pools of light in the environment. We know of many failures: for example, places where small lights do break down even illumination, but do not correspond in any real way with the places where people tend to gather in the space.
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| Light fools at odds with social space. |
Therefore:
Place the lights low, and apart, to form individual pools of light which encompass chairs and tables like bubbles to reinforce the social character of the spaces which they form. Remember that you can’t have pools of light without the darker places in between.
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| pools of light |
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Color the lampshades and the hangings near the lights to make the light which bounces off them warm in color—warm colors (250). . . .
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253 THINGS from
YOUR LIFE*
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. . . lastly, when you have taken care of everything, and you start living in the places you have made, you may wonder what kinds of things to pin up on the walls.
“Decor” and the conception of “interior design” have spread so widely, that very often people forget their instinct for the things they really want to keep around them.
There are two ways of looking at this simple fact. We may look at it from the point of view of the person who owns the space, and from the point of view of the people who come to it. From the owner’s point of view, it is obvious that the things around you should be the things which mean most to you, which have the power to play a part in the continuous process of selftransformation, which is your life. That much is clear.
But this function has been eroded, gradually, in modern times because people have begun to look outward, to others, and over their shoulders, at the people who are coming to visit them, and have replaced their natural instinctive decorations with the things which they believe will please and impress their visitors. This is the motive behind all the interior design and decor in the women’s magazines. And designers play on these anxieties by making total designs, telling people they have no right to move anything, paint the walls, or add a plant, because they are not party to the mysteries of Good Design.
But the irony is, that the visitors who come into a room don’t want this nonsense any more than the people who live there. It is far more fascinating to come into a room which is the living expression of a person, or a group of people, so that you can see their lives, their histories, their inclinations, displayed in manifest form around the walls, in the furniture, on the shelves. Beside such experience—and it is as ordinary as the grass—the artificial scene-making of “modern decor” is totally bankrupt.
Jung describes the room that was his study, how he filled the stone walls with paintings that he made each day directly on
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13 SUBCULTURE BOUNDARY
very different in style from another one next to it. People will be afraid that the neighboring area is going to “encroach” on their own area, upset their land values, undermine their children, send the “nice” people away, and so forth, and they will do everything they can to make the next door area like their own.
Carl Werthman, Jerry Mandel, and Ted Dienstfrey (Planning and the Purchase Decision: Why People Buy in Planned Communities, University of California, Berkeley, July 1965) have noticed the same phenomenon even among very similar subcultures. In a study of people living in tract developments, they found that the tension created by adjacencies between dissimilar social groups disappeared when there was enough open land, unused land, freeway, or water between them. In short, a physical barrier between the adjacent subcultures, if big enough, took the heat off.
Obviously, a rich mix of subcultures will not be possible if each subculture is being inhibited by pressure from its neighbors. The subcultures must therefore be separated by land, which is not residential land, and by as much of it as possible.
There is another kind of empirical observation which supports this last statement. If we look around a metropolitan area, and pinpoint the strongly differentiated subcultures, those with character, we shall always find that they are near boundaries and hardly ever close to other communities. For example, in San Francisco the two most distinctive areas are Telegraph Hill and Chinatown. Telegraph Hill is surrounded on two sides by the docks. Chinatown is bounded on two sides by the city’s banking area. The same is true in the larger Bay Area. Point Richmond and Sausalito,
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| Subculture boundaries. |
CONSTRUCTION
the stones—mandalas, dream images, preoccupations—and he tells us that the room came gradually to be a living thing to him—the outward counterpart to his unconscious.
Examples we know: A motel run by a Frenchman, mementos of the Resistance all around the lounge, the letter from Charles de Gaulle. An outdoor market on the highway, where the proprietor has mounted his collection of old bottles all over the walls; hundreds of bottles, all shapes and colors; some of them are down for cleaning; there is an especially beautiful one up at the counter by the cash register. An anarchist runs the hot dog stand, he plasters the walls with literature, proclamations, manifestoes against the State.
A hunting glove, a blind man’s cane, the collar of a favorite dog, a panel of pressed flowers from the time when we were children, oval pictures of grandma, a candlestick, the dust from a volcano carefully kept in a bottle, a picture from the news of prison convicts at Attica in charge of the prison, not knowing that they were about to die, an old photo, the wind blowing in the grass and a church steeple in the distance, spiked sea shells with the hum of the sea still in them.
Therefore:
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| old adventures |
Do not be tricked into believing that modern decor must be slick or psychedelic, or “natural” or “modern art,” or “plants” or anything else that current taste-makers claim. It is most beautiful when it comes straight from your life —the things you care for, the things that tell your story.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We have had a great deal of help and support over the eight years it has taken us to conceive and create this work. And we should here like to express our feelings of gratitude to everyone who helped us.
The Center has always been a small workgroup, fluctuating in size from 3 to 8, according to the demands of the work. Since the Center was incorporated in 1967, a number of people have worked with us, for different lengths of time, and helped in many ways. Denny Abrams was financial manager of the Center for three years. He played a critical role in the early days of the Center, helping to shape our nature as a work group. He also helped with layout and photographic experiments in the early drafts of the book and worked with us on the Oregon experiment. Ron Walkey spent two years at the Center, and helped especially to develop the patterns and the overall conception of the city portrayed in the first section of the book. The two of them were very close to the development of the pattern language, from the beginning; and above all, their music, after lunch, made unforgettable times together for all of us.
In more general terms, both Sim Van der Ryn and Roslyn Lindheim gave us help and encouragement when we first began the project, years ago. Christie Coffin, Jim Jones, and Barbara Schreiner all helped us develop the contents of the earliest versions of the language.