Mondaugen's Miscellany

The Future of Beauty

(Though distracted by Hand Craftsmanship in the Digital Age and my Handmade Purpose book project, purposeful whining about contemporary architecture and design is still close to my heart... so...)

Beauty is not appreciated through reason—it is enjoyed through feelings. There is no objective beauty; it goes directly to the heart—a glowing rainbow over a field of ripe wheat needs no explanation. The program of the modern movement made it impossible to express feelings. Following its principles, the designs of the last century have lost emotional appeal.

-Eva ZeiseL, 2004

Man’s capacity for aesthetic enjoyment may have been his most practical characteristic, for nearly all the industrially useful properties of matter and ways of shaping materials had their origins in the playful search for beauty. Beauty is at the root of man’s discovery of the world around him, and makes him want to live.

-Cyril Smith (of MIT), via Zeisel

I can feel the way the conversation begins. The young architect/designer, awed by the heights of glass and steel design in the 20th century, and having studied the aesthetics to the point of being conversant in their language and logic, will be eager to offer counterarguments to Smith and Zeisel. The older architect/designer, however, having heard such accusations before, will likely smile in the knowledge that they are paper arrows. If Tom Wolfe's critique could be dismissed out of hand, and with no more than a ripple in the industry, then Zeisel can be tolerated, a gadfly. An acknowledging nod to Smith is also enough to move on... for, in the end, the smaller, nostalgic minds that cling to the naive concept of beauty and don't "get" modernism are not worth engaging. Perhaps, in a good mood we might get a patronizing acceptance that yes, people do like beauty, and there are some unsuccessful modernist buildings, but no more.

Leaving us where...?

...in a world of built environments that are far uglier than we realize, as we have been sold on playful, intellectual, clever artistry in steel, glass and concrete. While some of our sharper minds may be stimulated by the triumphs of modernism, our bodies(with their confusing, even feminine, emotions, their disgusting needs, their low appeal), have been left behind. And with our bodies goes beauty, a concept that strongly resists being intellectualized.

--

A case in point is the James R. Thompson Center in downtown Chicago. Built in 1985, it was never well-adapted to hosting human beings (unless you enjoy 90 degree interior temps in summer and interior ice on your windows in winter). The original bright red and blue panels faded from UV long ago. Rust and corrosion appear everywhere. The exterior is always filthy with uncleaned (uncleanable?) walls and windows. To me, the building says Dystopian Japanese Cityscape from Akira. As a work of art, I think it is fascinating. But not a place I want to live or work. One visit of an hour or two is enough for a lifetime.

I wonder what kind of mind I'd have after years of working in the Thompson Center? A mind of metal and wheels?

--

What happens if we respect Zeisel's assessment, and explore it? Asking our built environments to have an emotional appeal and place beauty among important values does not end with shag carpeting everywhere. Instead I think we would end with the pursuit that Smith describes -- the pursuit of the utility found in beauty.

This is an idea worth considering beyond merely acknowledgement. If beauty drives understanding, and understanding drives invention and creation, then we lose everything that makes us human when we decide beauty is not worth pursuing. We will no longer have a reason to engage and understand the material world. We will be left with the despair of purposelessness (which frankly, is what spaces such as the Thompson Center leave me feeling as neither my flesh-and-blood body, nor my squishy feelings have a place or role in a world of mathematical interactions of glass, metal, and steel).

If we've decided that the rates of depression and anxiety in in the developed world are an issue, then maybe we can build our ways out of them by acknowledging beauty as a worthwhile goal.

--

I wonder how Smith and Zeisel came to their understanding of the importance of beauty. Experience? or Argument? In The Descent of Man, Darwin argues for a second evolutionary pressure, that of beauty, as natural selection in itself had trouble explaining the peacock's tail. The idea is that it's the peahen's aesthetic preference for, and pleasure in, male mates with more and more beautiful displays that drives the creation of the tail display. Aesthetic pleasure is thus universal among animals that choose mates, and the driving force for natural beauty across the animal world. Of course, this concept of beauty is relative-- only a male star-nosed mole would find a female star-nosed mole beautiful.... but perhaps there is some fundamental and universal concept of beauty and pleasure that can be found in all animals, and maybe plants too. (I came across the idea in Richard Prum's book The Evolution of Beauty, and have not read all of Darwin to see how far into living things he extends the pursuit of aesthetic pleasure--do algae share a primitive version of this drive?).  

If beauty is an evolutionary and biological force driving us to pursue aesthetic pleasure in our mates, how does this drive translate to everything else? Would we want/need/crave beauty in everything else? Does the peahen want an equally beautiful house to live in with her beautiful man? I wonder if any given woman's concept of beauty in a man drives her concept of general beauty. Do heterosexual men and women have, by definition, a different concept of beauty? Or is the nature of beauty more fundamental than the specifics of curving hips or strong shoulders?

Smith's idea of the utility of beauty is simple--that it makes us want to get out of bed and find it (or make it), because it makes us feel good. Thus, beauty gives us purpose in life. This feels as elegant and simple an answer to the meaning of life as E=MC2 is to mathematics and physics.

--

But then... if beauty is in our evolutionary heritage, and woven into our instincts, how is it that modern designers convinced to live and work in manifestly threatening, intellectually challenging, clean, plain and angular design? One can say many things about the Thompson Center, but "it's beautiful" is not one of them, except perhaps in the way Apocalypse Now's Colonel Kilgore says he loves the smell of napalm in the morning.

Why do any of us like the smell of napalm? I think the answer lies, in part, in another part of our biological evolution--Dawkin's selfish gene. If given a choice, we prefer more over better. Thus it is better to have as many children as possible than raise fewer to be more successful (why we have 7+ billion on the planet now), even though the quality of life for us, and for our children, will likely be lower than if we had chosen fewer. As they say, No Pain, No Gain, and the Gain is in having More of Less.

The other reason lies in our cultural evolution. Ugly, intellectual architecture is a step child of industrialization. As we painted factory smoke across out skies, so we built bridges from bare iron beams. Making metal and wheels in turn shaped our minds to metal and wheels.

The First and Second World Wars added fuel to this fire. We simply don't deserve beauty any more because there can be no laughter after Auschwitz. Beauty became naive in light of the evil that progressive minds thought we had grown out of.

--

An approach to architecture that includes beauty as a primary value would have to shake off the social mind of metal and wheels that we grew through centuries of industrialization. We would need to embrace who we are as humans to once again include it in our built environments. The complexities and contradictions in how we understand ourselves culturally, socially, and individually would have to be unwound and reassembled. The peacock does not wear jeans and a t-shirt to cover his naturally-evolved beauty, but we humans do. We make our clothes to be beautiful, as well as functional. Why not our houses too? The future of beauty could include every aspect of our lives.

 

 

A Meditation on Glass

I watched The Hateful Eight last night, a masochistic exercise of tedium crossed with ultraviolence alleviated by Samuel Jackson's charisma and Kurt Russell's comic bluster.

The takeaway? How glass has transformed our lives.

What lingered was how the six-horse stagecoach had no glass in the windows.

It's winter! In a blizzard! Aren't they super-duper cold????

Now, it's a movie. We need to see the faces of Kurt Russell and whatsername with the black eye because they're being paid millions to be in it. They likely didn't ride around like that in the Real Old West. They probably at least lowered curtains (shown rolled up in the movie).

Or maybe they did leave the shades up. I dunno. I wasn't there.

But they sure as heck didn't have glass windows in those carriages, or heated interiors, such that they could in comfort watch the mountains glide by. Glass was, once upon a time, a whole lot less common than it is now.

Now, I'm no expert, and I'm not going to pretend to write Glass: A History of the First 5000 Years. Such a book might exist, and if it did, I'd at least skim the thing for the cocktail party high points. Fascinating material glass.

To the modern architect, they are The Material. Light! Lightness! Transparency! Blurring the boundary between inside and outside! More choice adjectives! All the good ones apply to glass!

Glass keeps the outside air out, and the inside air in. It keeps the bugs out and the dogs in. It keeps the sound out. It keeps the smells and tastes of the natural world out. But it lets the light in. The light. And so windows frame the outside world into a TV-like realm of vision isolated from all our other senses. Glass allows us to experience the world with just our sense of sight, our other senses disengaged and coddled by the the interior environment over which we have some control. This capacity to experience without risk is a curious property of glass. It changes the mental calculus of experience in every way.

It makes me wonder how glass has changed us. I have always lived and worked in buildings (and vehicles) with glass windows. I've always been able to see outside from the relative comfort of inside. Had I lived in the old West, I might have only experienced environments enclosed in glass windows when I visited big cities or banks. What would my understanding of inside v. outside be in world without glass?

Next time I go camping, I'll ask that question.

 

 

A Wheel Not a Ladder

"I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time."

Paraphrased from Voltaire, it's a lovely encapsulation of how often we write to understand what we want to say, and rarely edit for the convenience of our reader. As my writing tends more towards the siphonophoric, in which each sentence, even parts of them, are more like individual complex animals, connected loosely in an endless, undulating chain of ideas, than they tend towards efficient transmission of succinct ideas, I wholly own Voltaire's self-critique. It's on purpose.

Who am I to explain architecture to anybody? I am a student, green about the ears. I bring the complaints of a life-time user to the desire to practice an art brut, aiming to change a few bricks at the profession's foundation. Empathy is my touchstone. I am here to wander and think aloud in this cavern-complex of words-before works.

I understand concision and its benefits to the impatient, practical reader. As a woodworking magazine editor, I spent years soaked in the wisdom of Strunk and White: the clearest words, the fewest words, the shortest sentences, death to adverbs. How-to writing has a single goal: to help people understand how to do something. Meandering, complex and unresolved thoughts just make readers angry, frustrating their attainment of the goal of understanding.

Wander in a forest of words, and it's easy to get lost, encumbered, frustrated; but stand in an open field the sky broad above, and we feel free. Much great fiction, from Hemingway to King, tends to the sparse.

And yet we keep Proust, Henry James, Robert Burton on our shelves, among so many others. They take our time, whereas Hemingway gives us time. Each is a taste, a preference.

My writing here is yet different. The meandering incompleteness of my process is not to test your patience, but to invite you to slow down and create your own. I write towards insights, knowing many blind spots go undisturbed, many terms used loosely, many aspects forgotten, following digressions as they come up. I don't write to explain anything to you. If I make a definitive statement, how simple or complex is your response? As much as I use these essays to understand something, I hope that you can create your own internal essay about the same topic, as rich and subtle as you have the time and interest to make. I'm not after your approval so much as your engagement with these ideas.

So, here is a summary of my thinking about the Architecture of Empathy, no more concise than before, but a bit more distilled in time and space:

Through the Architecture of Empathy we can live and work in buildings that contribute to our lives and help us thrive in ways we cannot now imagine.

It is not a new direction, or a school of thought, or a design concept, but a process. The Architecture of Empathy cannot be designed, it must be crafted.

The Architecture of Empathy is not an artistic creation. It does not originate in the highly educated mind of an individual. It does not prioritize the aesthetic and cultural statement of the building over practical, or human, needs or considerations. Its aesthetics and functions are not intellectually challenging. Its process does not depend on a hierarchical organization with the paying client at the top, and power/influence moving down through the architect, engineer, contractor, tradesmen, and laborers. It is not impersonal, or international, or regional.

The architecture of empathy is the result of the mastery of architecture as craft, which is necessarily beautiful. It originates in the synthesis of design thought with hand-making. It grows from the traditions and approaches developed across many individual practitioners. It prioritizes practical human needs and considerations, letting the beauty and art of the project take care of themselves. It's spaces and structures are easily intelligible. It is not beholden to the past, nor to any idealism of what humanity should or could be. It is personal, in that each role understands the end user intimately, respecting them for who they are. It depends on a heterarchy of contributions, in which the roles of client, architect, engineer and tradesmen are arranged like spokes on a wheel of which the project is the hub.

The Architecture of Empathy is a process not an end. It will lead to as many different forms as there are people and needs. It requires practice, repetition, listening, adapting, understanding, and selflessness. The Architecture of Empathy is nameless, and does not strive for fame, rather competence.

For it to work, grow, and lead to actual buildings, each member of the project must think unconsciously in these terms. If not, the result becomes intentional art, and a performance, a strutting about a stage.

The closest I've seen to this process is when friends or communities gather to build something none could do on his or her own.  When "you just need a shed," and friends gather to help put it up, its success depends in part on your collective knowledge, mastery and craftsmanship, but also in how well you now one another, what need the shed serves, and what works in your lives. The design vocabulary consists of what you know, what you like, and what you can build from the mix of competence and economy. I think Emmanuel Pratt practices something akin to this in Chicago.

It's hard to be empathetic with a total stranger: a generic client, businessman or factory worker. Factory design rarely involves the architect spending a year on the floor with the manual laborers to understand how they work, what they need, what would help them thrive. Human thriving should be relevant to the building's brief.

If you disagree categorically with everything hee, will you still admit our buildings are not what they could be?

And if so, what is your path forward?

Art is for Visiting and Craft is for Living

I don't think I could live in Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial in Washington.

 

First, there's no roof. Secondly, well, everything else. I need rooms, heating, windows, lots of things in my home. Maya Lin's memorial offers none of these amenities.

But it sure is a powerful, beautiful, even necessary artistic statement. Though I was 5 years old when the Vietnam war ended, and none of my family served there, when I watched a vet stare at the wall, his red eyes brimming with tears, I nearly cried with him. I felt the named gash in the earth with him.

--

Now consider the intellectual idea that

The application of individual artistic approaches and goals

are the means by which

the built environment can become better.

Isn't this essentially right? Don't you agree?

What? You don't like this pretentious, awkward, and-yet-precise academic-speak? Then let's rephrase it in a more intuitive manner:

Building + Art = Better Building

Right?

Yes for monuments and other places we merely visit. No for every type of building that we live in. Art is for visiting. Craft is for living.

--

If the last 150 years of modernist architectural design, with its cacophony of schools, practitioners, movements, reactions, anti-reactions, and theory has any single thread, it is that great architecture comes from great artists who can articulate an idea. Craft is lower on the hierarchy, a question of details. The Beaux-art undercurrent, or the continuation of the forms of the past, offer some respite, but these new-old buildings are consciously designed reinterpretations of less-consciously designed originals, and their inherent dissipation is the motive for the modern movement.

In my albeit limited reading in general histories of architecture, I have not found a single voice within the profession to take this equation to task and ask, why is a habitable structure better if it is an original work of art? Why is craft a secondary consideration? If anyone is asking this, they are restricted to the kiddie's table and not important to the history of great modern architecture.

For without art, what would we have? Without the visionary architect, what would we be living in? Bricks piled haphazardly on bricks for mere economic or practical ends? Living in the past? This would be soulless living, no?

In part, possibly yes.

But--

-- by abandoning the pursuit of art in our dwellings, we could create so much more beauty in our lives -- this is the idea I've explored earlier, from Soetsu Yanagi, that the greatest beauty and usefulness are an unconscious byproduct of the mastery of craftsmanship. This is th spirit, I believe, that also fueled the creation of the greatest ancient architecture, what has endured from the past from the Pyramids to the Taj Mahal. If we try and name the artist or architect responsible, the answer is diffuse, and in short, we can't.

--

How architecture, of one of the most practical of all human fields--concerned with protecting us from the elements and wild beasts, helping us work better, store things better, socialize more easily, and even think better--wiggled its way into the realms of "pure" art such as painting and sculpture and music, boggles my mind. Architecture concerns the buildings and environments in which we work and live, sleep, socialize and worship. The practical considerations should be no less important than they are in transportation -- architectural practice should dwell in the same realm as car, bicycle and airplane manufacturing -- the tools by which we move from place to place, whereas architecture is the tool of abiding in one place.

Of course, the NHTSA and the IBC both do pretty good jobs of setting practical and safety standards for their respective industries. But when it comes to comfort and use, even the cheapest cars are far more adapted to serving human needs than most buildings. Transportation seems to have the customer in mind, whereas architecture has the aesthetic critic in mind.

Even cheap cars have heaters and air vents, windows that roll down, door seals that keep the rain out, trunks to carry things, windshield wipers so you can see outside while driving. More expensive cars have far more of these features, and they are a priority in the design. How many tall buildings have I lived in with windows that don't open? (I was once told it was to cut down on suicide attempts). Rooms with no closets? heating systems that make the ceilings above my head hot and the floors I'm standing on cold. How many HVAC systems bring smells from one part of the house to all the others? What basements in wet climates do not flood? In rocky areas that do not fill with radon gas? The flat roof in a wet climate creates leaks by design.

Consider how advanced today's cars and airplanes are compared to ones built 100 years ago. Consider our current flush toilets are pretty much the same as they were 150 years ago. We really can't do better?

Why is our architecture so blindingly incompetent to the basic functions of a building and human living? We would never stand the same levels of practical deign incompetence in our cars or airplanes.

I argue that most luxury homes are nowhere near as comfortable or useful or beautiful as they could be, if we prioritized their design towards living, not art. The design focus has been elsewhere, on statement and expression, on the purity of the line and resolution and rationale. Practical considerations are treated as minor and somewhat inconsequential add-ons -- leave the material of the countertops to the interior designer, and the drawer sizes to the cabinetmaker.

The successful built environment, for me, is a place we want to live, not just visit.

--

For a truly successful built environment, let's ask a different set of questions, and pose a different set of ideas.

What is the realm of Art, and what does it give us?

Art is of the special, the unique and individual.

What is the realm of Craft, and what does it give us?

Craft is of the everyday, of the common and of community.

Art is aesthetic and beautiful. Craft is purposeful and useful.

Craft is for living. Art is for visiting.

 

These realms overlap, almost entirely, and are better thought of as a continuum from a near pure art at one extreme and near pure craft at the other. No man-made object is either purely useful, or purely artistic, but some of each.

Art is the application of skill to subjects of taste, the perfection of workmanship, the perfection of execution as an object in itself (thank you OED). I will add that all art is an aesthetic exploration of how the human soul and mind engages the experience of reality.

The value and meaning of art is mediated by a caste of intellectual critics, without which there is only expression. We all can say something and claim it is valuable and meaningful, but it is not art unless an audience agrees. The role of the critic is to learn the skills necessary to understanding art better than the rest of us (who are not paying as much attention), then point us to what is good, and perhaps help us understand and appreciate it. That modern critics mostly talk among themselves is a tragedy.

Art at its most pure extreme is deeply engaging, exhilarating, and therefore exhausting. We should come away from the experience of art deeply moved, perhaps changed.

We all have art in our lives, and while we enjoy it, the more powerful it is, the smaller the dose we can take at any given time. This is often simple enough, for we can look at the painting on our wall, or not. We can listen to a symphony, or shut it off. We can get up from our seat in the movie theater and leave.

We visit art the way we visit memorials, for the experience of a moment.

At the opposite end of this continuum is Craft.

Again turning to the OED, craft is simply a branch of skilled work; ingenuity in constructing; and a trade or profession. Craft is the work that goes into everyday objects, the products of the full range of trades that create the tools of our living. We build and make these objects primarily with usefulness in mind, from forks and knives to cars and space rockets. I will add that craft is the practical exploration of how the human soul and body engages the experience of reality, and shapes it to our needs, thereby integrating us with the world.

Tainted by its lowly status association with the common, everyday, and usefulness, the meaning and power of craft is not mediated by intellectual critics. Tradesmen and craftsmen, you could say, are not artists, because the products of craft are not "subjects of taste", e.g. music, poetry, sculpture, painting, and other objects created as objects-in-themselves, not with any particular "use" other than existing for our contemplation and pleasure. Craft is instead mediated by the markets: its value and success based in what people will pay for it, based on what they get out of it, without any special training or guidance to understand it better. It appeals to something untrained and universally human.

We engage with craft differently than with art. In well-made craft, there is no sublimity, no mental exhilaration and no exhaustion of the mind. There is simply pleasure in the use. The well-made fork gets food to our mouth, the well-made car gets us to our destination. Successfully crafted items all have some art, but it never interferes with or distracts from the object's function. Because craft is integral with our everyday, we do not really have the option to look away. We must get back into that car to go somewhere. We must return to our house.

But designer forks? I recall trying unsuccessfully to balance peas on a $300 designer fork, and giving up. Cool-looking fork, however. It has its place -- in a frame on a wall, in a critic's book of "Best Design", just not next to my dinner plate or in my hand.

--

How much art is too much art in the buildings we spend our lives in?

The trouble is: I know what I like, but not what you like.

Posed as a question of degree, and depending on the opinions of some imaginary "people", we create a horrible seesaw, in which Mrs. Farnsworth loves the glass house she alternately sweats and freezes in, while another person is appalled that a modern building can be less comfortable than a Neanderthal cave. Who is the architect supposed to please? The client of today? The client of tomorrow?

The vast majority of architects would rightly claim to be perfectly "sensitive" and "responsive" to client "needs", that they design with human comforts and amenities in mind, and that this division between art and craft is artificial. I would in turn argue that the majority of components in modern homes are strongly influenced by the artist-architects past and present, and their comforts and discomforts simply taken for granted. We simply don't ask how much more comfortable, or useful a building can be, because it doesn't seem to be a pressing question. We don't lose our jobs if we fail to consider it.

If an architect has ambition today, it is likely towards making an artistic statement, and not questioning why we have the elements we have, from flat walls to rectangular box rooms, rectangular flat windows, utilities hidden in walls, and so on. Questioning these things is crazy. They're just the best solutions we have today, so let's work with them....

This question of how much art is best in architecture becomes less slippery, though, when we pose it an entirely different way.

Provided we desire architecture that accomplishes all we want of a building-- accommodating all levels of Maslow's pyramid -- and thereby reflecting all that's good in our hearts and spirits, and not forcing us to accommodate the building, what can we change in the current process that would lead to this outcome.

In the 1920's, Walter Gropius wondered if craftsmen couldn't be "initiated into the needs and means of the modern era", couldn't then manage on their own, without the oversight of "self-conscious designers", produce honest buildings reflective of the age. This is similar to Yanagi's concept of the unknown craftsman who attains beautiful production largely because he is un-selfconscious. But a tea bowl is not the same as a skyscraper, and many hands must somehow be coordinated at some level towards some common goal. The approach sounds an awful lot like herding blindfolded cats.

What if we redefine the job of building, NOT to represent any age, NOT to be all things or anything, but as true craft -- no "initiating" craftsmen into the burden of understanding the age, but just let them be a part of their age, which they already are.

Give a craftsman the tools, they'll finish the job. Or more often, give the craftsman a job, and they'll finish the tools. They will still want guidance. Whaddya want? Craftsmen can make a lot of different things. Is it the client's desire? Maybe they don't know what they want until they see and live it. The answer is in the process, to avoid conscious design guidance. If this is unsatisfactory as an answer, it is because I intend to ask questions, and make statements that lead to questions.

--

All architecture should be thought of as building for someone -- creating a tool for them to accomplish specific tasks. Making tools for other people to work with. The built environment is a tool for the business of living.

Maya Lin created the greatest of war memorials in Washington. I thank her for it. The craftsmanship was perfectly good as well. The walkway to the memorial is flat and does not cause tripping. The names on the wall are legible. However, I would not want to live in something of equal power and artistic representation. I would spend all my days crying. I have work to do. I need a quiet space with even lighting, not too cold or hot. Then I can focus on things other than the architecture I'm in.

I don't want my buildings to capture anyone's imagination, but to allow it.

Beyond Design Rationale, Does Craftsmanship Have Anything to Say?

Years ago, when I began teaching woodworking, an old friend tried to pass along some wisdom.

"When I was starting out, a year or two in, I could teach anyone how to use a jointer. I knew three rules, and that's what a jointer was, what everybody needed to know, and all there was to know. The tool was simple."

"But now, after using one for forty years, I scarcely know where to begin. The process feels complex and beyond words. Every board gets a different treatment -- where I hold my hands, and why, seems to depend on a range of factors I can't even point to.

When students ask why I did one board one way, and another another way, I feel I can only tell them a small fraction about my decision process. So I say cryptic things to the kids, such as 'listen to the board, and feel it. You'll know when your hands are in the right place.' And they can't understand, because they don't have the experience or the feel yet."

"I was a much better teacher when I didn't know anything about craftsmanship."

I see a common pattern in all craftsmanship, whether considered handwork or mindwork. Learning begins with verbal instructions, the conscious mind guiding what to do. Over time, much becomes ingrained, habit, and unconscious, and the conscious, verbal mind has a lesser role. In some arts -- consider juggling -- you might argue very little is controlled consciously.

"The more we learn, the less we know" is an old, but perceptive joke.

Please ask any professional sports player to tell you "how they do it." Please attempt to master any discipline, from business to medicine, by just reading the book. Learning by verbal instruction simply introduces the elements, while mastery comes from practice. Mastery is a hands-on phenomenon. Books are for the school children of every discipline.

The questions I draw from this concern how relevant language and conscious thought are in our lives. The older I get, the more they seem to be a tiny, though privileged, part of our complete engagement, and survival and thriving in the world. They are doorways, but they are not the realms beyond. They are tools, but not the work.

This is no insight on my part: religion maps it, philosophy names it, psychology charts it. Fate. Genes. We think, but our thinking is not as free nor as powerful as we imagine or hope. Only a very small part of our brains is devoted to the production and maintenance of conscious thought and language. It is a deep illusion to think they are the omniscient and omnipotent controllers of a perfectly responding mechanical body and self.

We admire and revere the ivory tower of academic institutions, and only the uneducated denigrate them. Still, we also denigrate the application of learning if that application cannot be articulated consciously, and verbally. The design rationale is everything to the career of the aspiring creative spirit, whether the artist can articulate it, or a critic in his or her stead.

The scientist without data is a crank. The philosopher without learning is a mystic. The artist without learning is a folk artist. The psychologist without learning is a hippie.

My old friend didn't do much teaching because he couldn't address our collective need (lust?) for educated, verbal rationale. So, he left the door open for others who could, so to speak. But their mastery is, by definition, more verbal. While they can teach what they can put to words, and much of that is valuable to the beginner, I wonder if that capacity blinds them to the true nature of mastery, which resides in our unconscious, in our hands, in the habit of our actions. And, to be clear, I'm not sure there are words to address the mastery of creation, both practical and aesthetic except to point a finger outside the door and beyond our acceptable, rational intellectual discourses of the matter by any discipline.

For me, the interesting question is simple:

By removing the privilege of language, conscious thought, and design rationale, while privileging non-verbal craftsmanship and mastery, do we gain anything towards a better living in our made objects?

The Arts-and-Crafts movement was nostalgic, trying to preserve a prelapsarian vision of the quaint craftsman's shop in a quixotic fight against the industrialization that has brought us our modern prosperity of things and inventions. It was helpful to a privileged few to hide away in their cleverly-appointed bungalows and pretend the smokestacks did not blur the horizon. While I admire the aesthetics of many arts-and-crafts designers, putting cats back into bags has worked precisely never in any way in human history in any enduring way. So I don't see an erasing of what we have accomplished in design to be a way forward. I wonder towards a breaking of the hierarchy, a disassembly of the privilege of the consciously designed aesthetic, and a heterarchy with craftsmanship and mastery.

As some famous Roman thinker once suggested, there nothing is new under the sun. Where can we find an architect like my old friend? One who has no conscious, intentional, aesthetic design rationale? One who creates towards something infinitely more complex and fully human--design that doesn't search for and use concepts governed by language, whether verbal or mathematical, but derive from the practice and knowledge of a life lived intentionally well?

By definition the word isn't out on this kind of builder. They must exist, and we have all seen their work. Can we understand it? Can we feel it? Can we appreciate it? Do we denigrate it, and prefer the work that the critics can study and perceive endless symbols, references, aesthetic and social commentary and even beauty?

--

Not many architects work with their hands, and more do than build the buildings they design. It's simply not practical in the modern world with our specializations, divisions of labor, and the sheer scale of the things we build.

It is nostalgic, mythic and utopian thinking (fun for dreams and books, but enters in the real world only with violence) to imagine a world in which the rationale of the head and the mastery of hands are united in all we do. It is useful only as a great and naive question to ask. Where it takes us, and what other questions it raises, are the point.

Few of us study, but we all learn. We simply get better at what we do. By dint of repetition, ability quietly develops, sometimes quickly for 'the naturals', but eventually for all of us.

But a paper designer becomes better at paper design after a lifetime of designing on paper. So with Autocad or Rhinoceros. But nobody lives in Autocad or in Rhinoceros.

So what non-verbal mastery would lead to the creation of truly great built-environments? What head do we remove to reveal what hand? And would that work?

Today, single building projects involve a cacophony of siloed professionals, each bringing a shard of mastery to a collective effort. A rough hierarchy of architects, clients, structural engineers, interior designers, general contractors, project managers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, gardeners, roofers, painters, drywallers, and laborers each contribute. Each can master what they do in a lifetime of work; but none are professional masters the art of living in the spaces they create.

And isn't that the point of a built environment? That it's an environment? Where people work and live?

This is perhaps the collective responsibility of each professional and tradesman, but it is rarely part of the conscious rationale of their work. Whether a building is enjoyable, easy or even appropriate for its use is too often a secondary consideration to its expression, it's concept, its aesthetic design. Some may argue the aesthetics are key to the enjoyment and ease of use. But please ask the Mrs. Farnsworths of the world whether fogging glass walls, unbearable heat, and a canoe to get to her front door are key to their enjoyment and use of their built environments.

Much of a building's design already comes from the professional's and tradesman's personal, amateur, non-paid (and private) lives, is relevant to the lives of the future occupants. It comes though the assumptions and habits we each have. The electrician with OCD might lay out wires in the basement with such symmetry and perfection of installation as to greatly please the homeowner with OCD, but puzzle and terrify one without. Haphazardly installed wiring could be irrelevant to one homeowner, and cause for great anxiety in another, lying awake at night wondering if the building will burn down due to sloppy work.

No interior designer is hired for their pure connection with client desires, spoken and unspoken. They are hired the way all others are: through connections, locality, chance, price, etc. So the designer will impose their vision to some extent, from the limits of their experience and training. If they like comfortable chairs, they will recommend them. If they prefer the aesthetic statement of an uncomfortable chair, they will recommend them. The easy client will go along with whatever. The difficult one may challenge the price. The client may not be able to articulate what they prefer in any rational way, even to themselves. So they buy what other people half-guess they will accept, with little regard to the day after they move in, perhaps assuring them they will learn to love it.

And so many of us have learned to love the built environments we have--for a wide range of reasons that rarely touch on how we could live our lives.

We might decide that professional "mastery of creative or work disciplines" from architecture to carpentry and roofing are all professionally desirable. Then we might decide that "mastery of living life" is entirely separate, and something that only monks and other sages are capable of, or really wise people in private. But do we yoke the professionally creative disciplines to the art of living?

--

That our environments contribute to the quality of our lives goes without saying. We may not chose a palace over a prison, but we still would not chose the prison. Over a hundred years ago, the writer of speculative fiction and fan of architect Bruno Taunt, Paul Scheerbart wrote:

We live for the most part in closed rooms. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is to a certain extent the product of our architecture. If we want our culture to rise to a higher level, we are obliged, for better or worse, to change our architecture. And this only becomes possible if we take away the closed character of the rooms in which we live. We can only do that by introducing glass architecture, which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass -- of coloured glass. The new environment which we thus create must bring us a new culture.

I love that he desires a better life for all of us. I admire that he feels the power of our environment over us, and that we have, in turn, the power to choose how we create our environment. Here we have a prescriptive vision of Better Life Through Plastics, I mean Architecture, from a man has thought things through.

I do ask, though, if he proposes rose-colored glass, through which we should always see the outdoors when inside. Or different colors for different rooms? I marvel at the idea of glass walls everywhere. Where would we hang our pictures, and could I ever read a book, what with all the distractions of the ever-changing weather outside?

I then imagine Paul sitting at a desk in a small flat in Berlin, window closed to the street noise below, writing these ideas. It works. he finishes them. He is published.

I then imagine Paul trying to work at a desk in Mrs. Farnsworth's house. I imagine him leaping to his feet in frustration, his manuscript incomplete, complaining that he is endlessly distracted by every change in the weather he sees through the glass walls,

at the lack of privacy as Mrs. Farnsworth, whether inside or outside, can always see him, as there are no separate rooms. I hear him complain that the bright sunlight makes him unbearably hot at his desk, and that the condensation from the windows pools on his desk and makes the ink run on his papers. wind in trees, of lightning, or passing cars, or shooting stars. I imagine Paul Scheerbart in Mrs. Farnsworth's house losing his temper over how he can't possibly get any work done with no privacy! The hot sun on his neck unbearable as he tries o

An architecture that fits all our intellectual dreaming, and its desires and needs, into its appropriate place, while also fitting all our Maslowian bodily needs and desires, can't come just from the conscious, verbal mind alone. It has to come from a certain empathy, and from an understanding of the art of living as we each, privately experience it.

If that impulse already informs the work of designers at every level of the built environment, we are fooling ourselves as designers.

But what would an architecture of empathy look like? No one thing, I think, or even a defined set of outcomes. It is rather the product of a different process, a different approach, a heterarchical one from all hands that contribute to it, towards all that a built environment can be to a full human life, within the limits of materials and their context.

Like all good design, when it is good, it does not call attention to itself as anything. It simply fulfills its intended role.

The empathetically designed and built environment would be a joy in every way, no matter who uses it.

Now, that's utopian, isn't it?

But maybe progress in this direction can be made just by loving a little more what our hands know, and lessen our reverence for what our brains can do.

 

Living in Art

(Somehow the title of this essay reminds me of The Rutles song Living in Hope. They sound alike and pose equally absurd questions.)

I don't think any human being can live without art. For that would mean to live without beauty or emotion. Yes, this requires extending the definition of "art" to include things that do not hang on the walls of museums. In every way a human being has created beauty, there is art. Even the gaze at, and simple caress of a loved one's cheek is a moment of art. Consider how many artists have attempted to recreate such moments in a painting, and our emotional response to them. How much more beautiful is the actual moment created by our lover?

So I would never say we should not live in art. The question I have is at what price? And cannot we create better, so the price is as low as possible?

I'll argue that we all want, at a basic level, to live with beauty. And, to my immediate point, we want our built environments to be beautiful. While we many want to pursue every other emotion in our lives, from the thrills of climbing mountains to the sustained stresses of pursuing a career, we want our homes to be places of beauty and nothing but, because we want them to seem perfect in every way--without challenges of any kind. We want our homes to meet all of our needs (whether they stay constant or change). To never be inadequate, useless, or annoying. Our homes should never be cold or hot, always just right. Our feet should never ache. Our heads never hit a thing, what we store in our house should always be right at hand, never needing a search. We should be able to perform all bodily functions in our house with ease, from eating and drinking to sleeping and shitting. What we want to be public in our house should be public, and what we want private should be private. It should be secure and safe, and never cause us anxiety in any way. Every aspect should please, no aspect should distract. The utopian house... for I know of none that are beautiful in this way. We can spend a lifetime feathering our next, striving towards the completion that is beauty.

Now, many contemporary artist have turned their backs on beauty, considering it a naive representation, and have preferred to explore other ideas and emotions. And so we get rotting sharks floating in tanks and the like. It's all enormously expressive, but it's not beautiful in any but the most extended sense of the word. Call me a conservative, but at the core of human joy, happiness and creativity is beauty, the experience of an intuitively harmonious perfection. But apparently I am in a strong minority these days.

To my point: the famous Farnsworth House designed and built by Mies can der Rohe, the colossus of 20th century architectural design. He considered it perfect in every way, perfectly designed, perfectly built. His client, Dr. Farnsworth thought otherwise, and sued him, primarily for cost overruns, but also, according to her attorney, because the house was "unlivable."

What made it unlivable? Mies sited it on the flood plain of the Fox River, just a few feet above the last known maximum flood. His attitude apparently was that Dr. Farnsworth could use a canoe to get to her house, if need be. And she did need to, because, of course, the house has been flooded many times over the years. Then there was the greenhouse effect from the all-glass walls, creating an oven of the place in summer. And the fogging of the uninsulated glass, making it impossible to see outside. And, and, and...

Mies called his work baukunst, which can be translated as architecture, but more accurately as building art. His work was cutting edge, experimental, novel, and his clients were (mostly) willing pilgrims into the unknown. What's a canoe trip or two to get groceries when you get to "live in art"? And Dr. Farnsworth agreed. All the positives did seem to outweigh the negatives. After she lost the lawsuit, she lived in the house for something like 30 years, if memory serves. 

Would you put up with a house that turned into an oven on a sunny day? That flooded every couple of years? Where you had nowhere to hang a picture? No door to your bedroom? Dr. Farnsworth did, adapting to an environment that was nowhere near as comfortable as other contemporary houses, as no compromise was made for mundane living to achieve his aesthetic artistic masterpiece, his baukunst.

How have you consciously and unconsciously adapted to the compromises of your home? This isn't to inspire a sudden malcontent attitude towards your living arrangements, however satisfied or not you already are. It is to inspire questioning towards awareness that we can do better tomorrow than we have done today. 

Return to the question: would you live in this kind of art? What sacrifices would you make for mundane comforts and the simpler beauties of daily life to dwell in the conceptual realms of genius?

That depends. For all of us. We will all have different answers. I would say few of us would suffer sleeping on stone floors to have the opportunity to live in the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. Much better to visit for a few hours. Same with the Farnsworth House, now a museum. A great place to visit, but....

If art is to be appreciated primarily for creative beauty and emotional response, what emotional responses do we want to have in our homes.

Each of us will have a different reply, of course. Some of us love advanced camping. Some of us have a comfort zone between 71.5 and 72.5 degrees, otherwise are intolerably Too Cold or Too Hot.

The built environments we have today are all compromises of economy, competence and coordination. They (almost) always have been. To achieve a higher level of living, in which we both get to live in high art, as well as mundane art-- in a Farnsworth House that doesn't flood or bake our bones, that inspires our minds as well as satisfies our guts--what do we need to do? What new, or old, approach can we take to have our cake and eat it to?

I think the answer lies in the idea of the Unknown Architect who pursues empathy and respect as foundational qualities of craftsmanship and artistry in the creative process. For that to happen, we must value empathy and respect as a universal good, not a trivial feminine emotion found mostly in California and Sedona.

Currently, our society is trending away from these values, toward the adulation of bullies. They can be impressive to watch while they destroy people and institutions, as the show satisfies our inner anger, hurt, and impotence. But destruction, well, only has a positive value when it is creative, which is to say the first step in making room for for something better -- which is to say that destruction is only valuable when it is empathetic, and respectful, in a conscious process toward a better future.

We can live in our art, I think, when we learn to create art that we want to live in.

A Modern Skyscraper meets Maslow's Pyramid

A thought experiment.

What happens if we mashup Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" with a modern glass-and-steel skyscraper?

Please, this is not a controlled scientific experiment, so let's have fun with it to find interesting questions.

If you're unfamiliar, Maslow's core idea is that certain basic needs must be satisfied before the needs that are higher up in his hierarchy can be satisfied. Though not proof that it's correct, it's intuitive -- in short, you can't think about your career self-actualization if you're hungry, or don't know where you're going to sleep that night. First, you must secure food and shelter. Only when those issues are no longer an issue, can you think about tomorrow, or the tomorrows after tomorrow. Remove one brick from below, and the upper parts don't work too well.
A skyscraper is a specific subset of the built environment, an intentionally designed place for people to do things. Skyscrapers are particular solutions to particular problems of urban density and the price of land. As all built environments, a skyscraper is a tool. We make them to solve problems. 

So, do skyscrapers help, hinder, or are irrelevant to our pursuit of Maslovian self-actualization? The intuitive answer might be Yes, Of Course. They allow the offices of large companies to be sited in the same space, near other companies, near a wide range of skilled people. The resulting synergies, from talent pool to the services of other companies, are manifold.

But let's ask naive questions to complicate the matter.

What can we ask of the skyscraper? What should we ask? Can a skyscraper be a "total environment," serving the pursuit and attainment of the full range of human needs? Or is it much more like a can opener-- good at one job only, and left in the drawer when not needed? Is it simply a tool that allows large companies to grow and thrive, at the expense of much else?

Let's start at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid.

Physiological Needs

Most skyscrapers do satisfy these needs. If it's raining, you can stay dry inside one. If it's hot, skyscrapers are air conditioned. Some have restaurants, hotels, apartments inside. So yes, every basic physiological need from a glass of water when you're thirsty to protection from freezing in winter and sleeping at night can be satisfied in a skyscraper, in good working order. The quality of this satisfaction, however, is another question entirely, and for another day, for modern skyscrapers have a long history of malfunctions due to bad design,, quality control, poor maintenance and other factors. Some leak. Some tilt. Some don't have power. But these are not intended in the design.

Safety Needs

Here the question gets a bit slippery. There are many aspects to our sense of safety.

Do you worry about being in a tall building? That it might fall down for any number of reasons, from poorly-enfoced building codes, to earthquake or terrorist attack? Or simply a fear of heights? Fear of tall buildings is real, if not universal. While only a tiny number of people refuse to go up in one, I will guess there is some relative level of additional stress for the rest of us. They are not as "safe" in our minds as other types of buildings. However, during a lightning storm I would feel safer in a skyscraper than in a tin shed on a golf course. Whether statistically true or not, skyscrapers have a lower association with violent crime than other types of buildings, such as gas stations or motels, though this is more a question of location than building type. Relatively few skyscrapers are built in a "bad area", though the case of Ponte City in Johannesburg is an exception that illustrates much about how we interact with them.

In short, why would we build structures that scare a large proportion of the population to some degree? For the moment, let's say it's a compromise for other benefits.

A compromise-- thinking back, are there any compromises to our physiological needs? As for safety, none in the design per se, but in our reactions to them, yes. If you've ever been working on a high floor of a skyscraper, and got hungry, and knew the closest place to get food was 50 floors down, then you know that feeling of being kind of trapped by the economics of the situation. Should you spend the time to go all the way down, or should you wait? It's a tiny "compromise", but still one that isn't part of working in another type of building.

Belongingness and Love Needs

Here the question becomes kind of funny. Skyscrapers help me find friends is the kind of phrase one expects to hear at a party from an incredibly drunk stranger. We could start an answer here by suggesting that a building is irrelevant to our need for friends and love. And yet. And yet.

Jeanne Gang says she designed her Aqua tower with curved and unique balconies in part that residents would have the opportunity to meet and socialize outside, hundreds of feet above the street.... that maybe skyscrapers can and should be intentionally designed to foster "belongingness."

Consider the modern skyscraper elevator experience. Nobody talks to anyone else. Consider the long windowless interior hallways. Who stops to chat with a stranger in them? In fact, stopped people can block circulation. One might ask if those hallways and elevators have traditionally discouraged socializing, even intentionally to keep the modern office worker on-task. But are we any more gregarious on the street in a big city? Eyes to the pavement -- only tourists look up, that makes you a mark -- I was told when young and 1970's New York was a far more dangerous place than now. We have to hit a village or small town before, it seems, we find strangers a bit more comfortable to talk to one another. In fact, country folk have the reputation of being curious about strangers. They want to know who you are, and what you're doing here. And if you're all right, then come by for a cup of coffee and a slice of pie on the porch.

Not too many porches, those intermediate private-public spaces, in skyscrapers. The city lends itself to anonymity, and isolation, whether we like it or not.

I come away from this question thinking that Jeanne Gang's design efforts are precisely to push back against skyscraper tendencies to prevent, not encourage, belongingness. Duh?

With a half-strike against safety, and another against belongingness, can they foster anything higher in the hierarchy? Are people who work or live in skyscrapers consumed with their worries and isolation in ways that country folk, feet on the ground, are not? Or do people adapt? Another huge question, to address in a moment.

Esteem Needs

Now this is a fascinating question. Don't skyscrapers foster this? Isn't a skyscraper a prestige address for work and living? If you're fresh out of college, and your first job is in Manhattan, on the 75th floor of any building, isn't that a point of boasting? Skyscrapers are associated with wealth and financial success. 111 W 57th is not a high rise project for the poor. It is a skyscraper for the wealthy. But Maslow did not deem wealth as the sure sign of the achievement of potential. In the New World, explored and founded largely by confidence men determined to reap its riches then scuttle back home to Europe, riches are still often confounded with achievement.

But would a skyscraper, say, have helped or hindered Einstein in the development of his theories? My intuition says it would have hindered him through distraction. The amazing views, the mild frisson every time you look down, is all very consuming in a peculiar way. Then there's the peculiar kind of isolation that is found in the concentration of many people within a single company. Taking a stroll to collect one's thoughts is not so easy from a skyscraper.

At least at first. The Lumiere Brothers L'Arivee d'un train is supposed to have scared audiences. Among the first films, no one was used to seeing objects coming at you from the screen. Nowadays, nobody leaps from their seats as entire metropolises crumble under alien invasions in a summer blockbuster.

So, does the shaky middle of Malow's Skyscraper suggests the environment is not conducive to self-actualization? That they are an "experience", more than a home for our sensitive human natures?

What modern day Einsteins have been born and raised at the top of our skyscrapers?

Do our built environments propel us forward, hinder us, or are largely irrelevant to our life goals? The solution that is a skyscraper certainly had many economic and social and aesthetic factors in its conception and design. How much did empathy for human nature play?

We get used to our built environments. We adapt to them. But do they change us? And if so, how? I don't believe in a better v worse argument, for this is based on the fear of the unknown, and conservatism will always be the knee-jerk reaction, and if that always wins, we would still be living in trees (for better and worse). But we should consider, when we design, the effects, the compromises, and the potential results, and beyond consider them, we should integrate them. To me, this is the core of the architecture of empathy, a simple foundational respect for who we are at a general, not individual level, as humans.

Time to read more architectural history to find it, for it must be there.

An Architecture of Thriving Life

 

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.

The Unknown Architect

About a month ago, while lying in a tent in Montana, listening to wind through cottonwood and maple, a train rumbling in the distance, a particular thought wandered into my head and sat down.

It said: “What are the things that you have refused to let yourself desire?”

And in that quiet moment, I didn’t laugh at the playful fortune-cookie language, or give the thought a joke-answer involving porn, or comment that it’s a good question at heart and I should think about it seriously. Instead, I let it stay. Then I answered it:

“To practice architecture.”

The simplicity and crystal clarity of the thought was a gut punch. Of course I do. And have for a long time.

I love furniture. I love teaching. I love writing. I’ll never fully leave them. But now I will pursue the study, then the practice, of architecture. (For the necessary credentials, I’ve been accepted to an M Arch program and can start next month, provided I can secure the funding to pay for it. If not, I will take my resume and hunt for a job in the profession, aim for a guerilla education, and leave the M Arch for later.)

In fairness, I had not answered the question properly. Nothing had been denied. Architecture has been an amateur interest all my life, and I’ve worked at its periphery. I have simply chosen other professional interests before it.

What I had denied was the possibility of doing anything else with my life. What you do is good, so keep doing it. If you enjoy it, why change? You’re 53 years old. It’s time to slow down and think about fishing in those lovely Montana mountain streams….

Yes, but...

One advantage to reading is that some singularly beautiful, seeking minds have captured complex insights into human nature, and set them down with simplicity and clarity. These thoughts are not available anywhere else, so not to read them risks the possibility of not knowing them, unless we come up with them ourselves. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is one such insight into the restless spirit that drives us. It ends:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

It’s the last four verbs that strike me to the core. Four intertwined actions. This is the spirit of all life, not just old age raging against the dying of the light. Their renewal at every age is key to just that: living. (And architecture is all about living. Or should be. But more of that anon.)

Our fate is certainly guided, but not determined, by what we have done and who we have been. My furniture work is not alien to architecture, and a rather good foundation. Each step can be away from the past, or to confirm it. It really is our choice, though a choice embedded in kairos, not kronos. I could not have made this transition earlier. I don’t want to wait to do it later.

Eventually, I should sit down and consider my original question, if there is anything I’ve denied myself to desire, and if so, why, etc. But asking the question, I found, was quite helpful. Again, it is always the questions that have value, and rarely the answers.

When you listen to the wind (available to us all, I hope, who live above ground), what questions find their way in? Which ones do you let sit down and stay a while? Which ones inspire new and better questions? I let an unknown architect wander into my head and sit down. Who will you let in?

--

This is a time of the most powerful public debates that I can recall in my lifetime -- whether we want to continue tolerating a society that divides and prefers on the basis of race, or imagine and develop an intentional community of all humans in America, whether we want to smash the rule of law and government by the people for the people in favor of membership on, tenuous, populist political teams, whether we want to discount the benefits of rational science in favor of emotional needs, and what we truly owe our neighbors. An old friend has a saying of all crisis: that our situation is critical, but not serious. Gloria Gaynor might also be helpful: we will survive. Let's keep building the future.