#11 PART.II.thought — Introduction
The Goal in Architecture PART.II.0 thought — Introduction Part 2
This part continues the previous introductory article #10 PART.II. thought. This second half of the introduction moves forward to relate thought to architecture to enable a concept of thought that is related to spirituality, based on our spiritual practice of choice of the Indian Knowledge System. Questioning thought in conjunction with architecture can be framed within such a contextualizing structure. Turning to those faculties of humanity that are not thought knowledge or discovered in thinking can reveal its role relative to its effects in architecture practice
It is difficult to conceive of architectural practice not centred on thought. Architectural practice requires a well-trained faculty of thought. It is common for us to identify with our thinking as is if is ourselves and difficult for most of us to consider ourselves as other than our thoughts. Yet, taking a bit of leap to practicing architecture, most architects will admit that an Entwurf1 cannot come strictly out of thought, thinking is only a part of it and something else is also active.
An Entwurf can be said to be a project's architecture in essence. While that is not the whole of an architect’s work, that initial concept is like the seed and very important to its meaningfulness. Often, much is done inuitively at the start, while this part of a project can be very small. The Entwurf comes together out of effort that is not all within thought process.
I suggest that projects that are majority owned by thought are less humane, tending toward what I call concealing architecture. In such cases a project begins with a lot of calculation, perhaps based on previous projects and models abstracted from experience. We will be examining how thought is essential to the professional while it is not the essence of being an architect. Thought can be used to discriminate2 but a highly refined thinker practicing architecture may not ever achieve a work that provides for architecture.
The condition of architecture that is generated within each of us is not easily communicated other than as architecture as it presences through the formal objects that we call architecture, integrated with measure. We feel it without knowing what it is, which seems paradoxical in our time that is dominated by thought. Our thinking does not encompass this, it is beyond it.
Most of us labour with some anachronistic ideas that are taught in universities and in our places of work. They are accepted because they remain. They are not necessarily justified other than as habits or entrenched systems of value and function. This thinking is justified in part by our intentional environment and the activity formed in the environment that was formed by process and design.
Architecture existed long before our common era. Or, put more precisely, we conceive of what we understand architecture to be today as also present a very long time ago. We have written documentation older than 2000 years in which the architect’s orientation can be found to be quite similar to today’s terms. De Architectura libri decem authored by Vitruvius, most often represented by the more recent derivations by Alberti and Palladio, and the Mānasāra,3 are two examples that are often taken as coherent with current terms.
Thought has always been part of humanity and architecture, but was thought then part of architecture as it is now? It certainly had different cultural weighting. Current thought in design can seem uncanny in association with the past when it is thought to be the same then as we feel it now.
Thought is managed and controlled as an intentional mode of engagement, (i.e. broader than the individual task or project) within the individual practitioner as design in architectural practice. A specific set of choices as a design are only small expressions or symptoms of the values that thought is manifesting. In our current technicist valuation in the Machine Ages and Modernist thinking, this leads to the commonly expressed equivalency of architecture and design where architecture is taken up in terms of equivalent with technology.
The use of the word ‘design’ interchangeably with ‘architecture’ makes apparent that neither design or architecture are easy to define, since it is obvious at least that they are not the same. That these terms are commonly used interchangeably by architects, even in most scholarly work, is meaningful to this project. Discriminating the two will reveal what is collapsing the two into one. This means defining them. Defining architectural practice is what PART.I Goal was about. What is the need for and cause of equating the two? That information is the 'gap' that was discussed in article #7 Practical Approach PART.I.4.2/3. It represents what we have de-valued, concealed and subverted of humanity, what value we have got, and what our intentional environment reflects. This is our approach to gain perspective on the cultural value weighting in context of architectural practice.
