October 31st, 2006
Children make sand-castles.
I make sand-castles.
When I am at the beach, it is compulsory. Why? Because it is raw, because it is tender.
There is wind, there is wave, there is scavenger foul and crustation, there is vegetation holding on for dear life, and there are the bone-like remains of things eaten by the sea and then regurgitated.
It is raw.
You are vulnerable, small, and mortal. Yet you persist, exist. The tide recedes and leaves behind a blank slate for you to draw upon. The rock of ages, pummeled into minute particles of sand, holds the trace of your finger, the imprint of your hand, the shape of your palm. You marvel and wonder at the immensity of this circle, of which you are a tiny part. You dwell. That you can bend part of it to your will gives your hand purpose.
You build.
Anticipating the rising tide, you make the decision to proceed with building, despite its futility.
You think.
You look over your work with great satisfaction. You measure the incoming tide against your castle. Your heart swells with pride: your imagination incarnate, through your own will, dared to express its own authority. You know time and tide are the true masters. They will erode your castle.
It is tender.
You return again and again, admiring your efforts, hoping to witness the moment your castle ceases to be. The following day, all evidence of construction is obliterated: the beach is smooth. Nearby a child is digging in the sand, consumed by purpose, oblivious to anything but the work at hand.
I can think of no place where awareness of the world and the place of humans in it is more evident than the beach.
Hanna Arendt wrote that, “The human condition of work is worldliness. Within its borders (world) each individual life is housed while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all.” According to her, our work, “by virtue of being the precondition for the reification of the world as the space of human appearance is by definition static, public, and permanent.” When we build, be it sand-castles or homes, we seek to reify the world because, as thinking beings, we attempt to compensate for our mortality.
This seems like a miserable pursuit, yet it is that worldliness and our mortality which makes the beach, the sand, and our hand such a marvel. Marvelous to be alive: marvelous to dwell on earth. Heidegger said, “The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.” Though we live in the world, our awareness of worldliness has diminished and our denial of our own mortality has increased. Our dwellings reflect that lack of awareness, and our denial of our own mortality has diminished the enjoyment we can gather by living.
The architectural profession, if it is truly interested in promoting well-being, needs to increase its awareness of mortality and not immortality.
We need to go to the beach.
We need to build sand-castles.
October 30th, 2006
I just wanted to get this in writing for the record, before my co-worker co-opts it. (He wants to open a firm and use my term as the firm name!)
Federation of Egos is the term I’ve coined, which sarcastically describes what architects call collaboration.
All Architecture projects are “collaborative” but it is a misnomer - collaboration really only means more than one person worked on the project, which is almost always the case. Instead, most built projects are what’s left of the struggle for ego supremacy - kind of like a battlefield. The more successful projects are more like a federation of egos, working together with guarded ease and secret loathing. ESSENTIALLY, it’s all about ego…
October 29th, 2006
(reprint of college essay)
We use our bodies to understand/relate to other bodies.
Architecture, as a theatre of life’s rich pageant, becomes animated through use. We understand / relate to the physicall structure of architecture as we do to other animate bodies. This exchange between the human body and the body of architecture is a sensual one, communicated on the most basic level.
What sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is our extraordinary power to reason, coupled with the ability to use our hands as tools. It is that interplay between the physical use of our hands, guided by the powers of our reason, that forms architecture: an animate body of our own construction, for our own use.
Beauty is the result when the exchange between both these bodies becomes a dynamic one: when the build body transcends exchange on the sensual level to awaken our intelect and arouse our imaginations.
There is no higher compliment to human intellect than the provision for exercise of our imaginations. Such opportunities seem scarce to human-kind, preoccupied as they are with the struggles of existence. How we appreciate these opportunities to loosen the shackles of our corporeal existence and soar free! It is this boundless appreciation which defines beauty.
It would be a mistake, however, to ascribe this definition of beauty to mere escapism. Architecture, our pagent for life, requires physical interaction: we cannot sustain removal from its presence, its reality. The dynamic exchange previously mentioned feeds on our boundless appreciation by becoming further animated, stimulating further interaction. The body of architecture takes on a life of its own; comes to possess a soul, a spirit.
I would argue that beauty is an experience. We are moved by beauty, and to experience beauty we must happen upon it. The discovery of beauty is the result of a progression whose transcendence occurs at a moment in time. Alliterate these moments and you have poetry.
In the panoply of human existence, experiences are not discriminating: they touch all who venture out into the world, crossing all cultural, sexual, and socio-economic boundaries. Similarly, beauty is non-discriminating. Transcendent moments occur in the palaces of kings and the hhumble abodes of paupers. We all experience beauty because we all inhabit bodies.
Architects, then, are providers of opportunities. It is the architect’s challenge to understand human progression and provide moments of exchange, moments of trranscendence, moments of appreciation, moments of beauty.