#16 PART.II.thought — Releasing the Advancement of Practice.
The Goal in Architecture PART.II.3.0 Ending Thought-time and Process.
It is important to understand this project as one way to defeat the current approach to architecture through questioning the hegemonic thought that holds us in our current paradigm. Our professional processes for practice are deeply entrenched, magnetizing us within common assumptions and values at every turn.
All of us work to solve issues within a paradigm that we feel to be true, that we were raised to understand, and which comes up through hundreds of years of evolving culture and technology. What we have been working on for 100+ years is not a complete picture, maybe it never is. For example, Newton considered himself to be primarily an alchemist. How are those values and avenues are actually valuable? They contributed to the scientific facts and approaches that he founded.
Colonizing cultures, such as the British in India, have created histories that are sometimes ignorant, but were often targeted at undermining values that did not support British power and wealth making intentions and veneration for their own culture. The truth in modern history was often hijacked by the concurrent colonizing activities of European entities.
The approach that I am developing here is a way to connect with conscious awareness and values that sprout from humanity to find our way to more advanced awareness of reality and to bring that into the sphere of practice.
This project is targeted to address architectural practice through technology via how we think. The relationship of how we think and spirituality is part of this. In one sense this can seem academic, but if you are working with your mind, and challenging the values that you tend to automatically use as part of how you work, then it is practical. These articles intend produce content to be acted on through questioning, creative process and professional practice.
Krishnamurthi expresses that in giving up psychological–time and its effects that limit the mind, the only possibility is doing it at once with no process. We have discussed what the 'ending of time means.1 Supposing that this is true, I am taking a look at the implications to develop what those limitations are, and steps toward what it is that is released in terms of architecture, architectural practice and its programme.
Achieving ‘the ending of time’ as a goal is an effect of spiritual practice. It is a profound and profoundly personal experience. It is circumstantial to the individual. Architecture is also presenced only in each of us individually, but we know that we experience it together. Architecture is not only personal, even as it only occurs personally. We are generally ready to accept this, but less so for spirituality, although it is of the same essential human need.
If architecture is necessary to dwelling but not thought psychological time, it is also not what is achieved in ‘the ending of time’. It is a prior and an a priori condition— before and after — always available in anyone. This is also the nature of spirituality. Even as it exists now, architecture's presencing its absence, if it is concealed, is always part of the environment. The absence of psychological time is more ‘real’. Spiritual practice and architecture can exist because this is true. Psychological time is a critical limit to our current human condition. Ending (psychological) time is a transition that transforms architecture in dwelling that is inherent within us and is, therefore, component to practice. We will get to better describing this 'revealed' of architecture as this project proceeds. But I have been referring to it often and in many ways.
The purposefulness that the (always) pending 'ending of time' implies creates an enigmatic relationship between architectural practice and our current construction, design and planning business. It relates to my use of the term aspiration as core to architecture’s presencing. Architects feel that all the time as a strange incompatibility with the wider components and partners of our work. It is expressed in our constant reassertion of the compatibility and integration of architectural services with AEC components over decades. Who are we trying to convince? What does this evince?
In seeking to provide architecture, the architect developing a project partakes in questioning the immeasurable aspects of the people, the object, and the environment, even if unaware of it. That enigmatic aspect takes place beyond the scope of construction and the technical support services and functions of making projects physically real. This timelessness and measurelessness is an impulse for our tasks that form environments. Architects present professionally accordingly, while we confront that concealed and concealing demand every day.
We function as architects even as many people do not experience it. The solid technical reality of the built object or environment is seemingly across the fictitious ‘gap’ from architecture that I developed in article #7 Practical Approach 2/3. This gap is a limit that is sanctioned by modern cultures. Architecture seems to produce and maintain this gap where proceeding with the mandate to serve with industry production. While our societies expect this, it does not serve to produce architecture — even as architecture may presence. (Confusing? Read on.) This is not exclusive to architecture. It broadly marks this period, and each profession forms it accordingly. It is revealingly concealed in current professional architectural practice.
'I' and Desire
The discussion in The Ending of Time includes the ‘I’ of the individual that is in conflict with what is wished (to be) as constructs about oneself. This is one way to name what we try to clear up on our path in life. Our identity includes these. They may be essential to identity. Some of this is what we call desires. We often feel them as our expression of freedom. They may seem to be needs and well earned, and they often include unnecessary stuff. Desires are so flexible that they have the characteristic of seeming effectively infinite; an infinity that becomes infinitely limiting.
