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WORDS THAT BUILD: Emphasize Words with Lasting Resonance Tip #14: Cluster symbolic and mythically-charged keywords in communication with clients. By Norman Weinstein May 6, 2009 In a felicitous description of staying overnight in the master bedroom at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Ada Louise Huxtable concisely summarized her experience with: “Here are Wright’s eternal themes: fire, earth, and water, in perfect equilibrium.” The power of that single sentence in articulating this architectural experience stems from focusing upon three commonplace words raised to a level of mythical grandeur through clustering. At bottom, is there any architecture not potentially offering the experience of fire, earth, and water in some sort of exquisite, or less than perfect, equilibrium?
Forgive the obvious pun, but writing and talking about architecture in such elemental terms establishes a symbolic and mythic set of associations. Look at a dictionary of symbols, say 1000 Symbols: What Shapes Mean in Art & Myth or The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, and you’ll see scores of symbolically charged words that have survived cross-cultural and cross-generational transitions. Arguably, the history of effective writing about architecture has been partially a history of word clusters signifying the elements, and elemental realities of nature, that architects bend and reconfigure to their own purposes. Consider Huxtable’s shorthand for Wright: fire, earth, and water. Le Corbusier adds to this elemental vocabulary two others: “air” and “light.”
How can awareness of the weight of these symbolic words help practically when you’re involved with client communication? I would suggest putting the words “fire,” “earth,” “water,” “air,” and “light” as a heading at the top of a page. Start writing (or speaking into a voice recorder) how one of your designs both literally and symbolically brings each word into play. For example, “fire” conjures up the meaning of building to Code (or better) in order to avoid fire hazards. But “fire” can also refer to your building’s heating system. And “fire” can refer to how often a facilities manager in a high-rise building you’re designing might have to “put out fires” if you haven’t properly thought through serious building maintenance issues created by your design. “Fire” can be in the burning gaze of dissatisfied clients. But “fire” can positively communicate the enthusiasm felt by your team, including distant outside consultants and contractors, when your project really seems to “take off,” another symbolic term suggesting artistry defying divine gravity.
While marketing language often has a short shelf life – look at the blissfully short-lived use of “traditional ways” in New Urbanist project advertising – elemental symbolic words transmit perennially potent emotional and intellectual appeal. By using these clustered words as springboards for inspiration, you cut through faddish marketing palaver and TheorySpeak, and address the heart of the matter. Architects are trained to design with earth, air, fire, and water constantly in imaginative flux. Let your client communication convey that fact by using words that ground your ideas in the earth, that communicate a sense of airiness and lightness, that glow with fiery yet sustainable enthusiasm, and that are responsive to change as water falling.
Norman Weinstein writes about architecture and design for Architectural Record and The Christian Science Monitor. He consults with architects and engineers interested in communicating more profitably. You can reach him at nweinste@mindspring.com.
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