Chances are that you live in an apartment or a house, and not a grass hut, right? Please tell me why.
It must be a disgust with dirt floors. Or lack of screens on the windows. Maybe an issue of the absence of hot and cold running water. Or indoor bathroom.
You prefer flat wood floors, plaster walls, brick exteriors, shingled roofs, and the rain-free, bug-free, relatively dirt-free interiors they produce.
Nearly every culture loves nature -- walking through forests and fields, even camping in it. But we love our homes and the comforts they offer better. And essentially what a home offers is an escape from the natural world and all its, er, discomforts. Such as disease.
On Monday I start classes at IIT. I've already tried to start trouble by asking my studio professor "Why do we love the straight line? The flat surface? Why do we live in boxes? And because she doesn't know me well, I got a polite response. Euclid, and by inference, the whole kit and kaboodle of the foundations of Western Civilization are apparently responsible.
Well. That's a mountain to thought to consider. We live in rectilinear boxes and not grass huts because of an ancient toga-wearing dude curious to distill mathematical truths out of the natural world and drive them into the practice of conscious human choice. Fair enough. Plane geometry is fascinating stuff. If the Pythagorean theorem doesn't blow your mind, it should. It's truly mystical shit. Maybe all things really are numbers. Ones and zeros and the virtual realities they create today certain suggest as much, if you toss Baudrillard into the mix. Let's sit down over beers and discuss.
When did we decide to apply those mathematical truths to our daily lives by entrusting our buildings to their mystical truths? I dunno. That's why I'm going to architecture school.
But to read Vitruvius, it seems pretty obvious:
Without symmetry and proportion there can be no principles in the design of any temple; that is, if there is no precise relation between its members, as in the case of those of a well shaped man.
It was a long time ago. Those Greeks did it in their temples. So many cool proportions! symmetries! And we can find them in the body too! But to my mind (here I play my hand), they seem like the connections of conspiracy theories. Or astrology. Or the Great Chain of Being. These can be beautiful (or sinister) understandings of the connections and between all things, but as a basis for living well, leave something to be desired.
The building comes back to the body, and the body comes back to the mystical truths of numbers. Leonardo puts his Vitruvian man into a square inside a circle.
Cool!
This is why we live in box-shaped rooms in box-shaped apartments stacked on top of other box-shaped apartments in the modern apartment building (receiving things in cardboard Amazon boxes from box trucks and box stores). It's all very economical and speaks to our bodies.
Mystical numbers and shapes--a form of astrology-- still rules architecture to this day. The purity of the line...
We need an architecture of the proportions of mankind’s living and based on mankind’s thriving -- not on who we imagine we are in a numerical way, but on what we do.
If I have Euclid's theorems in my head, then perhaps I can appreciate the aesthetic triumphs of the last 3000 years of Western architecture better than someone who does not. But if I don't all I see is the door handle I can't find, the step I trip on, the fucking cold granite countertop that I hate to touch in winter. Neanderthal me rebels.
An architecture based on the the proportions of living and thriving, not on abstract natural truth? What would that look like, and has anyone tried it before? I dunno. This is why I'm going to architecture school. This is my burning question.
I will be sad to find only hippies living in sod homes as an answer. I don't like disease. I much enjoy hot and cold running water. Euclid has brought us much.
But so did the Great Chain of Being.
Let us be thankful and move on. What is next? What can be the true science of designing buildings that are better than what we have? Do more for us? Make us happier? Allow us to thrive in ways that we can't imagine yet?
What could a 20th century doctor say to an Elizabethan era doctor to convince them that the theory of four humors, black and green bile etc.) was helpful, but actually the germ theory has proved more effective in understanding and preventing disease?
What could a 24th-century architect say to a Modernist today, who believes in the purity of the line, that Less is More, that glass and light are everything, and that there is another architecture that is better?
An architecture based on the proportions of our living, not the distilled mathematical truths of our bodies, seems worthwhile exploring.
What do humans do? We work and create. We build and make. We make families and live together. We play. We teach. We eat. We sleep. We crave company. We crave solitude. We argue. We fight. Oh golly, the list is too long.
We have grown into the economies of the straight line and flat surface. They have shaped our souls in good and bad ways. We can grow beyond them, though. To what? I don't know. Perhaps new technologies will break the economic advantages of the straight, flat and square, and give us other shapes we like better. Or not. Perhaps we will discover in 400 years, that we really still do love geometrical purity as the greatest magical ward against the horror of death, as the best way to keep (bacterial, viral, savage) life out of our dwellings to keep us safe. Those white walls and ceilings were the merest speck of dirt is visible fifty feet away. Those flat floors that reveal themselves entirely unlike a rocky hilltop where snakes hide, or undulating grassy plains where wild beasts lurk.
Then again, the enemies lurk within. We have more gut bacteria than human dna cells in our bodies. But we are omnibuses of life already. To live we need life. We just want to get the best of it. I'm on that page. No commune living in a peat hut for me, especially in Covid times.
An architecture based on the proportions of our living. OUR living. I remain fascinated by the basic structure of one person (an architect) designing a building for another person (client, class of people, what have you).
BUT
"Nothing about us, without us, is for us."
Our built environments are all about who we are and who we want to be, not just as architects, engineers, interior designers, tradesmen, and clients, but mainly the people who simply use them knowing nothing else about them. I heard this phrase from Maurice Cox concerning the rebuilding of Chicago.
Is there a way to hear every voice, our collected conscious, unconscious and as-yet-unimagined desires and needs for our created environments—then incorporate them in the design? Such a childlike question.
Can architectural design be so democratized as to include the real (not imagined) desires of the people who use them?
The art of listening would be key to this direction, but not of the words. I have yet to meet a furniture client who can articulate precisely what they want, their real desires. Watching how they live helps toward a better understanding, but is also incomplete. I imagine cities beyond stacked rectangular boxes, beyond grids, beyond and better. What of our ancient wild lives in forests and fields prepares human experience for environments based on the distilled concepts of abstract geometry? What have we gained? What have we lost? What do we risk? What can we reclaim from the compromises our materials and limited technologies have imposed on our living?
On Monday, I begin the job of finding out, testing my straw men (straw people), finding out who has solved these problems before, and then charting a contribution.
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