Textures & Architectures

Recently I visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater home in rural Pennsylvania. As many have been, I was struck by the detailed integration of the home into a natural setting, as typified by the repetition of the cantilever motif throughout the house’s design. It was a thrill to see the original Diego Rivera and Picasso artwork on the walls, the original furniture and the original books of the Kaufmann family in the bookcases. The flow of the guided tour was nothing compared to the flow of the house itself in close collaboration with the flow of the creek it rests over. I think this building can be an inspiration not just for architects and interior designers, but for web designers as well.

Though the myriad roles of crafting a website can be and often are delegated to distinct individuals, lets consider for a moment the designer as a renaissance person: architect, colorist, typographer and interior designer. What gives a site the stamp of its designer can be called a signature – a sense of fabric, of texture, of patterning, proportion and harmony that runs holistically throughout the site. The experience of entering into a site that has been crafted in this manner down to the smallest typographic, layout and navigational details can be a truly aesthetic experience, one that grows on repeat visits.

For the business owner, the content must be built too, from often very rough ideas and incomplete documentation – knowledge that hasn’t received full articulation – into coherent statements and presentations. Content development (best based on ethographic discovery), like CSS (the style engine of modern web design), is a key process of progressive crafting and polishing. I like to envision and note instances where the era of ephemeral and expensive marketing glitz finds itself slowly washed clean by the natural forces of craft, just as rocks are smoothed by a river over time.

Web designers have much to learn from both the history of architecture and from the study of nature. When we look at the artistic achievement of the painter Paul Klee, much of the lasting delight of his work, as it plays on our senses and invites revisiting and internalization, lies in listening to nature and channeling its flows, the relations of its many parts, and its proportions. We would like to build sites that attend to nature in the deep manner of Klee or Wright – sites that allow the user to feel at home and thereby arrest, even for a short while, the impulse to click through to some other site, some other fleeting entertainment in the vast landscape of the web. Let’s use texture and architecture to evolve the Internet into a more livable, breathable space. Let’s reach through the screen and touch the stone, feel its surface and ask about its story.

We have seen social connection sweep though the net like a virus, gathering people together under the umbrellas of mega-sites such as Facebook and Twitter. We also need sites for companies that dial back the frenzy level, that present a company or product or idea in a duration suited to its own internal requirements. We’re not talking about sites where you just hang out and meditate; rather, the sites we’re envisioning – and there are beautiful examples out in the wild that we will post on in future – carry the user to a desired action, epiphany or piece of information. They are not static destinations, but a set of interlocking flows. E-commerce is one area where flow is crucial; but successful purchase experiences cannot happen without an element of texture and architecture – without a bit of feng shui, if you will.