#6 Practical Approach
The Goal in Architecture PART.I Goal — 4.1/3
PART.I Goal — 4 has 3 parts. The first develops aspiration in architectural practice and the relationship of the goal to spiritual practice. The second part focuses on defining the link to technology and materialism that hinders our approach and introduces phenomenology. The third combines these to introduce yogic practice and a specific practice's elements that give form to the stages of our approach and its important points. Five statements form the outline of the 5 PARTs that organize upcoming, building a way into future practice that responds to the current profession and its technicist approach, pointing to paradigmatic evolutionary change for the profession.
For this project to link the working supposition of the Verknüpfung of spirituality with architectural practice, a practical way to work with the goal in life is needed. The approach to answering to questioning professional practice toward what it must be/come must allow that there is more than what we know perceptually, factually and even abstractly or circumstantially, and that we can influence objects, people and systems external to us in multiple dimensions. We must knowingly include the unknown that may be.
Architecture does not exist without humankind. An individual alone is not possible. We are not merely a unity, we are whole. Whatever a person does participates in the whole of everyone and every other life form in Nature. It is a matter of developing awareness. Therefore, two facets of the approach are,
1) a specific and/or individual approach to revealing more of ‘what is’, and
2) that it be impersonal, or as Einstein (allegedly) once said, 'To rise above the merely personal'.
Working with one's individual self to inquire into one's own nature is very old. The aim of spirituality is to recognize working with one’s self as one drop in the ‘ocean’ of humanity and beyond to the whole universe, whatever one's awareness of it or limitations within a culture. Both spirituality and architecture function in light of our dwelling. Spiritual practices have attributes that connect at points to dwelling and to practice in architecture. Architecture is meaningful in the public sphere that we make, and it is an egregore of meaning at a level that is broad and deep, so that any person can be aware of its values.
Spiritual practice is for attaining a better personal condition and approach to life as an end. Architecture is born of that same aspiration. Architecture serves spirituality. A spiritual paths' approach can teach us about practice to provide for architecture's presencing if architecture is to support the goal of life and to presence that as we dwell. The spiritual practice to hold adjacent architectural practice will bear value through its specific components that are in relationship with architecture.
Aspiration in spiritual practice and architecture.
The ongoing practical approach needs a structure that includes spirituality and architecture. Architecture in this case is both its nature and its purpose according of its service to spirituality and wellbeing. It includes the activity of the architect in practice who is an individual upon who's knowledge and awareness the work depends, and who is part of the public sphere and the egregore of architecture and a representative of the profession. Spiritual practice can name and organize the characteristics of the practitioner.
Knowledge of the goal in life is attained in dependency on living life and needs to be got in life’s living. That does not mean that everyone first needs to be completely aware of that intention. If aspiration comes with consciousness, it is not a matter of having the intention, but of awareness. Need for awareness must at least spark for practice to begin.
What we experience is dependent upon emotions, feeling and what is thought and intended. A step in living life cannot be revoked. Going back a step identically will not be a reversion to an earlier position. The nuance of past action is a permanent component. Adam and Eve may have ‘left’ the Garden of Eden, but they might have gotten ‘outside’ the garden without moving at all. The ‘dream’ changes according to personal awareness. As my dream changes, my needs also change. Theory says that getting nearer to infinity is not a thing. That is apparently not the set of rules at play. It feels as if we do get nearer. These all allude to process that has multiple levels or stages of knowldedge that change them.
Changing of definitions like of 'infinity' is about broadening understanding by removing assumptions and loosening emotional attachments to remove hindrances. This is essential for spiritual evolution. I am not questioning that science has right answers for us. Perhaps the crazy assertions against scientific facts are rooted in that there are multiple modes at work in a variety of realms that exist to us, in our minds and hearts. We are in a battle against narrowness and dogmas that are forms of ignorance posing often with authoritarian characteristics, formed as institutions and other modes of power. Each has a halo of derived power, that for example, assert institutions of science beyond their remit.
There is no doubt that scientific facts are true. Social and political power may dispense with actual facts, and more importantly, exclude more models and broader or more nuanced understanding. It is clear that the garbage we produce, our myth of garbage, is integral to a lot of what we feel is scientific fact. Evidence is clear that our answers do not work in many ways so that opinion and denial of scientific fact for our individual life experience and values has entered the mainstream.
In architectural projects we are not looking for scientific answers or even solutions. An environment must refer to scientific and technological facts and include solutions,
but not for the whole project. Experience in practice shows that it is a matter of making it work and making it true. Such truth depends on facts and on people's feeling and understanding to be true. It is dependent on how it works physically in its myriad parts and the role that the particular environment serves. The architecture that these 'working' elements are part of is then set up through project work of the team or individual to be true. Architecture is 'true' as people's values. These change, yet we have a lot of evidence of architecture of other cultures in other times that remain true.
The seed's form encompasses nothingness, and there is nothing inside.[1] The seed is a finite thing with measure. A seed may sprout in a particular place that will define how it grows and how it propagates. The variations in its growth are infinite, yet it is one thing. A seed extends toward immeasurable characteristics with infinite variability from an unknown origin, going back to an 'ultimate' origin, anchored in a material being, like a tree. Everything is measurable and infinite in this way with parameters that have extensions, ramifications and further vectors, on and on toward infinity. Our consciousness aspires and grows like a seed.
Material measure must be put on probation and left un–judged to follow our freedom and to move on up the path to the goal for one’s inner condition that we are referring to as spirituality. Anything may represent that inner being, but nothing defines it, for it is not ‘in there'. It is everywhere, while its centre is each person. I can strive for an action that is appropriate to allow the maximum further attainment in the next moment. An approach to such paths comprehends all possibilities, just as the winning strategy of a chess match must comprehend all other ways and strategies at that moment. There is no need to play them all. All such positive influences are generative of more opportunity. This is true for an architectural project as well.
The ways that anyone interacts and benefits each other within Nature's infinite unity is vast but finite information of personal spiritual condition. That personal condition reflects all of us. We dwell ‘here’, ‘now’ and as all of that. Nature relates to every choice we make in this way. Our choices are akin to the variations in growth. That is 'design'. It is within the scope of consciousness. Design is a technological institution of thought for making choices. Choices do not exclude the immeasurable or the unmeasurable. Making choices beyond design provides for architecture. Architecture and spiritual practices meet here.
Architecture communicates.
Communication of what is happening within us is part of dwelling. Communication informs how we form the environments where we live. Human oneness has a long history that is documented in spiritual practice, as well as in religion, in philosophy and in histories of how we have tumbled forward through time, making our history. These communicate. Architecture is accepted across the Earth through millennia, across far–flung cultures and time. It may be of many eras and in many places; we know it when we experience it. This communication documents our oneness in spaces, over time and in realms that we cannot measure.
Unity is less evident as the ease of accessing everywhere on Earth physically and virtually increases and as our recorded history expands and lengthens. Life's events, as they slip by, big and small, fast and slow, high and low etc., are more readily available to us through technology. More information demands greater skills and knowledge. Many differences seem clearer, yet relevance to us and our inner condition tends toward meaningless –ness in this surfeit interconnected information. Or its vastness seems banal, while new forms and more intense dis-unity arise. Difference seems to increase as we see and know more of all that humanity is up to. Better skill in discrimination is demanded. Discrimination is a double edged sword when it is taken as an end. We need to move beyond critical thinking toward knowledge of similarity, fraternity and the 'heart'. Anyone can find a criticism of anything, it takes genius of mind and heart to find the good in anything. Machine Age Modernist practice presences concealing architecture as it presences wildly increasing virtual material communication and information, concealing our inner voice and its corresponding aspirationl.
Intentions that host disjunction, disharmony and destruction in dwelling are not precluded in architecture. They are always part of human being. They serve as learnings. This is the dross of spiritual practice. That is part of spirituality and must also be architecture. This does not always eliminate architectural presence. It is most often concealing architecture. Architecture is manifested levels and stages at which disjunction, disharmony and destruction cohere in essence and act in concert. Architecture’s materiality and its measure are in coherence with the subtlety of the individual’s awareness, where it is experienced, so buildings tend to be called architecture. That is why the distinction between concealing architecture and unconcealing architecture is made.
Although wealth and size can make things easier to do or more difficult, depending on context, acceptance and intentions, no such parameters appear to be definitive for personal aspiration for better spiritual quality of life. That is not about gaining the world. A wealthy person can achieve the same as a poor person, in the way that a tall person can achieve the same as the small person, there are many ways. Form affects how we gain what we aspire, but materiality is not definitive to what we aspire spirituality. Aspiration is not material and it is the same in all people dwelling. It is worlding in resonance with the heart of an individual who is experiencing at a locus. But that locus is conspicuously the whole world in all its complexity as it is communicated through the vast variations of humanity.
When more and less are the same.
The statement of ‘less is more’, which is commonly attributed to Mies van der Rohe, can be taken with righteous or moral weightiness. ‘How much–ness’ is valued in conjunction with a feeling, in terms of one’s condition. Less or more can be more. If there is too little, then more is more. If it is excessive, then less is more. It is only superficially a quantitative statement. ‘Less is more’ evokes that value is always relative in inner meaning for whoever is dwelling.
Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Tower is a complex expression that uses very expensive elements to communicate 'lessness'. Less was originally thought as less ornament, less decoration. Less is now ever less definitive of architecture, while more is also a bore as we suffer from too much information and all manner of effects demanding more discipline. Architecture is the whole of human life as we dwell in the world as the completeness of Self. Architecture presences inward human quality when less is more, spirituality, while more of less is beneficial materially. 'Less is more' ultimately alludes to the refinement of value and discrimination in awareness.
The Seagram Building (with the slightly older Lever House in the foreground). The detail of the skin of the building is definitive accomplishment, given that it was invented rather than taken out of the catalogue of possible configurations that we have now. It is bronze with custom bronze 'I' sections. This does not evoke 'less' definitively. It is an elegant, specific 'less'.
Mies van der Rohe is not known to express that he had taken a spiritual path, yet his most famous statement reflects a principle that ties architecture to aspiration and spirituality. That there is an essential relationship between architecture and spirituality means that they cannot be the same thing, nor do the same thing.
Mies van der Rohe evolved Modernism as a movement, and he evolved with it, over many decades. The dream has changed. It seems that it was a utopia. Utopias are not meant to exist. The term translates as 'no place'. It was created by Sir Thomas More to express a visionary society with ideals that are unfit to maintain or that humanity is unfit to maintain. Perhaps it is that this vision is unfit for its isolation from nature and the myth of garbage. The Seagram Building does not presence architecture of the full scope of our issues and the discriminative skill that we need now. It joins the great buildings in history.
Spiritual practice is courage to attempt to regain a pure origin. Architecture must essentially serve that. Less/more presences as architecture and is like poetry in light of the pure origin.
The next discussion relates spirituality to technology, phenomenology …
Note that the diagram used in the icon is Sri Ram Chandra’s 'March to Freedom' diagram from Reality at Dawn. p. 14.
[1] Nothingness. Definitions. 1. the state of being nothing. 2. something that is nonexistent: a view of humanity as suspended between infinity and nothingness. 3. lack of being; nonexistence: The sound faded into nothingness. 4. unconsciousness or death: She remembered a dizzy feeling, then nothingness. 5. utter insignificance, emptiness, or worthlessness; triviality: The days followed one another in an endless procession of nothingness. 6. something insignificant or without value.
7. What is really the substratum of existence? The molecule says, “I am”. The atom says, “Without us, you could not exist.” The nucleus says, “I am the one around which you electrons are rotating. I am the substrata.” And from the nucleus comes so many voices - the proton and neutron, for example. And from them come voices - particles of matter. Ultimately, if you keep going back to the sub-stratum of the universe, somewhere you will come to a particle in which there is nothingness. And that is the substratum, which is God forming the base.
P. Rajagopalachcari. Revealing the Personality. 1993. p. 144.