#5 Goal in Life
The Goal in Architecture PART.I Goal — 3
Focus on the Goal
The Goal of life is proposed as an orientation toward the attainment of what life offers to us in the most meaningful and valuable way possible. This goal could be within life, whereby life ends. Or it could be transcendent of physical life, extending beyond this one lifetime we can perceive. There are all manner of arguments over hundreds of years on this topic. Architecture does not 'argue' this. It presents our environment as how that is lived.
Two scenarios help to illuminate the issue accordingly:
1) Our life today is as result of evolution that built up from rock and elements, through primeval slime, single cell life, marine life, amphibians and vertebrates, arriving at humanity.
2) The big bang in science or kshob in Indian traditional knowledge descended from a purely subtle and pre-material quality as a swirl of movement, which in turn generated the energy for all life, forming ever more solidly until the heavy energy of matter resulted. The cascading impulses formed entities that Nature embodies, and entities that embody Nature. Humanity originated in that beginning and now appears embodied with Nature's elements that we may quantify.
The first model orientates to humanity arising from the ‘mud' and focusses on our bodies and the physical properties of life, the other on consciousness animating the universe and Nature. The latter model is by far the older. The model that brings our bodies and brain up out of primaeval mud cannot account for consciousness. The ancient model that describes the Big Bang as kshobdoes. Science has created proof for the former and evidence for both models.
We need to work with consciousness because architecture is not building. It is what we become aware of or presence at places that are prepared for dwelling. It is consciousness experienced. There is no need to deny either model, but architecture orientates to consciousness. This project takes the supposition that the purpose of human life in its highest form achieves nearness or identicality with ‘Reality’, and that we live for this Goal in essence. By Reality1 is meant existence uncovered and free of ignorance in principle, which is not limited to what may be sense-perceived and attainable by anyone. Reality reflects the original, still and pure condition of consciousness. If we life for this Goal, how we dwell is very important. There is close correspondence with our individual condition, individual evolution, transformation and growth as revealing what is ‘true’, or the truth of ‘what is’, and where we live. We suppose that awareness and Reality are linked, as architecture and spirituality.
A Goal of life is conceptually conceivable even if its ultimate character is inconceivable. No doubt it is a very high aim, and it is rarely attempted, so far. Even as an intention, the aim harmonizes doing with Nature and provides for rightness in anyone's life. We are also limited by what is sense perceptible, while limitations posed by the quality of our awareness can be transcended in the course of life with practice. Practice becomes is a path, a way, and a vector, as the point of view changes with evolving awareness and the advance of consciousness through the experience of self–transformation. This form of flow may be called spirituality.
Discrimination (viveka) is called for in refining our path to point toward the Goal in all experience. Meditation is an example of a practice for such refinement. Speculative orientations on this path can be envisioned as stages that we evolve through and leave behind. In this sense spirituality demands that the unknown be held with certainty, but in unknowing. The Goal is an ever present, as yet unknown constant, that we must respond to. Spirituality cannot exist when the unknown is denied while the aspiration generated in consciousness implies that the unknown is always beaconing. This is a facet of humility's utility.
Our profession of architecture, tradition or style does not include such a Goal or spirituality. Yet, qualification as a practicing architect allows the engagement of potential that cannot be measured and is infinite beyond the matter of building. This can be considered to be within architects' freedom. The possibility to go beyond materiality is ever present, which is proven in our environments as architecture’s presence. Everyone is consciously aware and is granted aspiration. Taking on value beyond material quantity in intentional constructed environment may be provided as good will and is assumed by many of us, especially in newly aspiring students.
An architect grows in experience and leaves stages behind, constantly feeling change in what that programme of dwelling appears to be as these stages are crossed. The architect and the work done changes the characteristics of architecture when the attributes of harmony and unity are ever better achieved. This evolves the whole through every one of us. Architecture's meaning comes of the whole, while it is verified by personal experience.
This evolutionary change is influenced by economic machines and traditional patterns or habits. The globalized commercial commodification juggernaut and issues of internationalization, trade and borders oppose such qualities in light of their technological ground. G¡a covers the relationship between architecture and our institutions, systems and technology extensively. Current technology is in principle opposed to architecture in this way.
Traditions and vernacular forms are often wielded as bearing higher values and to oppose change toward technological economic opposing force, as well as against architecture that eschews traditional form.
Local and indigenous cultures struggle to remain alive to the degree that modernism, and technicism, consumerism and commercialism leverage wealth from social culture and leverage historic structures of injustice. Traditional vernacular and local cultural elements and architecture often bear elements that represent those values hold values and bear remembrance of the immeasurable values ‘beyond the material, technological objective form of values that anchor us in our Machine Ages. These are values and qualities that do not drive contemporary architectural practice. These traditions remain a record of ways even if these the cultures within which they were made are no longer functioning.
An older house in Budapest surrounded by newer ‘Gründerzeit’ housing in the late 19th century in one of that time's wealthiest areas that included Vienna and Prague. On the right is Kauerhof in Vienna as it was in the 1990s about 100 years after it was built. The need was to provide housing for a quickly increasing population with better quality building. In this case that included a public toilet and a public source of potable water on every floor. New methods and better technology does not, however, require mechanical repetitiveness and the style change visible here. Repetition and mechanical production implies order and cleanliness through mass broadcast as betterment, which we still maintain today. That also defined imperial control and possession of economic outcomes. The erasure of characteristic local expression was a factor of control. It was the erasure of old limiting characteristics for architects. It is clear to see what was lost now. 'Gründerzeit’ housing is arguably early pre-modern architecture that has concealing quality.
Plan Voisin. Le Corbusier. 1924. For a long time I considered this project to be a commentary and not an actual proposal to wipe out the 3rd Arrondissement and more in Paris. I and my colleagues read it that way in the 1980s because Le Corbusier is held up to be great. He is. But I am sure now that it was absolutely his intention to do build Plan Voisin. It continues in the spirit of the rebuilding that took place in all the main cities of Europe from the end of the 19th century. Modernist development took this to heart. A clean sweep of the past is essential. In India, Le Corbusier got his chance to create the new vision of Modern architecture in the cultural space of rebuilding a new India that erased both the ineffectual past that allowed colonizers access, the colonizer's remains, and to engage the new technological values of the world at speed.
Our antecedent cultures were not technological in the Modern sense of the Machine Ages.2 Our contemporary building technic is a historical necessity that conceals the expression of that infinity ‘beyond' that a Goal of life implies within the Machine Age technological reference set. But consciousness and its aspirational capacity and potential is borne in contemporary architectural practice even if the constructions and objects conceal it because architecture is our awareness — each one of us. Even where nothing remains of what came before, the infinite possibility to go beyond is in all environments and is verknüpft with that same aspect in all of us and remains within our built environment through us. Architecture must have these properties of the path to the Goal and include participation in our relationship with Nature. It seems that our antecedents often knew this.
Acceptable Terms
Everyone has their own viewpoint in which this is revealed or remains untouched. It will always be different for each of us. But all of us participate in architecture, even if it is behind high walls. The high walls, forest, or other barrier will still make present to whoever may experience them. Everyone's own viewpoint is always subject to the public sphere's egregore of values that must include architecture.
This refers to what we define as the ultimate value that is always present in all cultures and takes on characteristics of conscious being, love and harmony. It is not entropic, and is not death and destruction. It does not have the value of garbage, only decomposition and re-appointment of energy. Consciousness creates that aspiration that is summarized as the value of knowing one's capacity more fully as expanded awareness, realizing the potential of human consciousness. If consciousness is taken in hand, then it becomes spirituality — a path — where the Goal of life is a value.
There are highly refined approaches to developing understanding of what God might be that have been developed over a few thousand years that go beyond catch-all terms, images and dogma. ‘Belief’ is not required if there is personal experience. Belief is a necessity. It is part of the passage to greater knowledge. The discussion hinges on experience. The absence of something is also experience. But that absence does not define that it is not there. It is a personal reality, i.e. if I do not find the chocolate egg in the garden on Easter, it may still be there. Scientific method allows experiments that prove absence as the failure of a hypothesis. A true scientist will say that any result is temporary information that awaits future research.
Modernist3 architecture contributes to ongoing iterations over centuries of knowledge 'acquisition' made concrete as Machine Ages technology. This can be carefully examined for clues. The link to Nature is not far back, when scientists fought free of Natural Philosophy, which imbibes questions that science cannot, in the 18th century. The trim succinct character of scientific inquiry has its other. Our overall activity is exterior to Nature through the use of mechanisms that are bulwarks against knowing what Nature is. Even if architecture creates embalmed built entities of succinct scientific Machine Ages technology, architecture bears the wider 'other'.4
Knowingly Knowing the Known Unknown
Over 90% of the universe is proven to be ‘dark matter’ and dark ‘energy’, Dark matter and energy are not only ‘out there’, they are throughout everything, including our mind and bodies. The major part of us is concealed! Architecture includes this. Our activities do not add up with this vast unknown, which is the larger part of us. We assert that what we call knowledge is true ‘because it works’. Incrementally, and accelerating, this is not fully true. We are being overwhelmed with garbage.
The Goal as path is in this sense inclusive of intentionality and ego, and utilization of the felt, intuited and the unknown, enlivening the wholeness we can feel. The objects that physics and science provide us with do not help us to provide architecture without an approach to that unknown that expresses and engages that path. We are always within the threshold of doing that, on that path. That path is the expression of aspiring full awareness and the transformation of everyone as we dwell. A Goal of life includes presencing architecture in this way, as we dwell. Architectural practice has evolved as component to making such a path over millennia. This project with its supposition of the Verknüpfung of spirituality and architecture through a specific structure of spiritual practice is part of that project too.
Reality, the root cause or base of the universe. Realization is to be orientated absolutely to Reality. The
[...] vast circle of material manifestation, the direct result of maya, is unlimited.
Our only hope lies in pushing our way right across towards the centre or the root cause crossing the finer regions one after the other. That is the essence of spiritual science.
Reality is not a thing to be perceived through physical organs of sense but it can only be realized in the innermost core of the heart. We have, therefore, to go deep into it to solve our problem in life.[1]
See Ram Chandra (Shajahanpur). Reality at Dawn. 1954 (2008). p. 80-82.
This project refers to the Machine Ages as including the entire age of Modern and Post-Modern architecture. This is as Rayner Banham defined in The First Machine Age. 1960.
Modernism in architecture is considered to be part of technicism in this project. See ‘technicism’ in #4 Defining some terms that support G¡a's intentions.
Brian Green states that dark matter and energy are either a number of times greater in terms of mass or force (which may be irrelevant) than matter, or orders of magnitude greater than what we can measure. Human experience is that this must be integral to what allows the universe to exist and that everywhere is full of life and meaning. Brian Green. The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and the quest for the ultimate theory. 1999.