G¡a N.4 — A Constellation of Terms

The Goal in Architecture — Definitions of terms according to G¡a.

Apr 18, 2026

This is a selection of terms used in G¡a. These definitions convey expanded and shifted meaning. Each is referenced in these N.x introductions the first instance. I will update some of these terms or add more terms where necessary as I publish more articles, noting the updates at the bottom.

This collection is a constellation that represents an overview of G¡a’s orientation to architecture in practice. These terms may be away from the common understanding/meaning of architecture. They may also open a door toward representing what architecture actually is to you, and you find yourself closer to your own understanding of what architecture is, or what it should be. That is my hope. If you are not a practicing architect, the definitions will orientate you to how a practicing architect perceives the issues.

The ordering of the terms can be understood in three groups. First are terms around architecture, then terms relating to spirituality, and finally, terms relating to technology and to practice. They are:

Architect, sthāpati, architectural presencing, architecture, vastu/vāstu, and Entwurf.
Aspiration, Verknüpfung, spirituality, Liberation, Realization and Reality, nothingness, puruśa, and prakṛti.
Technicism, standing reserve (Ge-stell), disjunct (architectural practice), ‘idea (of) architecture’, space of differentiation, ‘pure phenomenology’, and superordinate program.

architect

Architecture may presence within anyone; the experience of architecture is to presence it. As such, everyone is an architect. Some of us who choose the responsibility of taking the part to physically alter the environment, and to know why and how to do it. The practicing architect provides for the creation of intentional (built) environments that provide for this presencing and has taken up the responsibility for the knowledge needed in preparing those environments. The practicing architect serves our conscious awareness that destines humane dwelling in terms of humanity’s role in Nature at places they prepare so that our experience there presences that destining state in awareness.

sthāpati

Sanskrit.

… the sthāpati is one who has been initiated into the application of an unique mathematical formula or mathematical order which is none other than the one that is applied to the creative activities that take place in Nature. All such creations of the sthāpati are tangible, tridimensional, measurable and charged with life. They are therefore considered as living organisms. Hence, this science of creation of manifestation is glorified and elevated to the status of a Veda— the Sthāpatya Veda. In tune with this, the sthāpati’s concepts, designs, and constructions go parallel to God’s design and construction.1

There are four architects in the Vedic system. Their antecedent is the subtle space, the founder, or ‘nature’s functionary’ named Viśwakarma. Each has their role. They are, along with the sthāpati, the sūtra-grāhin, vardhaki and takshaka. (I will reference these from the later articles.) The sthāpati is the chief or master. Most architecture schools train the sūtra-grāhin and vardhaki, who are the ‘draftsman’ and project architect.

architectural presencing

Architectural presencing occurs at an environment that was prepared by people for the individual to experience their aspiration in life. Architecture takes place in human conscious awareness, whereby conscious Mind is awakened to ‘questioning’ aspiration toward the infinite. (See more on architectural presencing in PART.I Goal.)

Architecture is a condition of our awareness in harmony with(in) Nature as a person’s own self aspiring for their evolution. These loci are prepared to resonate with us as personal experience in dwelling that rises to the inevitable questioning of one’s condition in answer to the raison d’être of life as an individual’s highest or most evolved consciousness. A locus where architecture may be presenced is a project that is prepared with a superordinate program that (...potentially) allows anyone to presence their conscious aspiration as they dwell.

A brick, an arch, or an assembly are never automatically architecture and, if they are deemed to be architecture, there is no empirical way to define exactly how that is so. It is expedient that we assert that architecture ‘does’, especially in intellectual discourses, yet we express that a built environment ‘is’ architecture. We actively make architecture present, hence, ‘presencing’ is activity. The objects that we call architecture do not ‘do’ that. We typically reflect that architecture is (also) ‘doing’, but it is we who are doing. We are presencing something in us that we are aware of.

architecture

Architecture arises from our individual lives as part of the whole. The meaningfulness of anything we experience arises out of our belonging with our brother and sisters, and to the Earth and to all else. Each of us aspires a destination, and the struggle and sweetness of advancing onward as we dwell enlivens the field of meaning that environments glow with when they are prepared such that they provide for architecture’s presencing.

The locus that allows us to presence architecture is a lived key to our amazingly inspiring asymmetrical relationship, perhaps a quantum interactivity, in dwelling in the world. Each of our selves is part of Nature. It is asymmetrical inspiration because we work in the world with what is not manifest. The capacity granted us for our role within Nature is powered by more than we can know. Our role is a function of Nature for which we are responsible through our human/e response. It is what humanity is to do here.

‘Architecture’ is commonly accepted with a very poorly defined quality of a building or place. Edifices and places are known as architecture because many people assert that they are architecture. There are many conventional grounds to the confusion of buildings as architecture, from historical qualities to high quality, and current professions’ definitions, to having been designed with an architect.

The literature, history and criticism, as well as presentations in representational media of loci defined as architecture, merely reside well within a collective iterated human experience of it as instances of architecture’s presencing. When architecture is felt by many people at a place, that place is deemed special, as architecture. We tend to transfer that sense of ‘architecture’ to the object because it is only made possible at a particular locus, with a specific form. Unity is never away from our identity so that even if I alone presence architecture in a place, it is architecture as revelation of the play of identity and unity in the ‘public sphere’ and a part of Mind.

The definition of an object as architecture, rather than an experience, is sincere if it is bestowed on those that have been experienced as such by many people over time. Architecture is, nevertheless, an experience.

vastu/vāstu

Originally sanskrit.

… the science of Vastu and Vāstu— is the science of Nishkala and Sakala. It is the science of Vishwa Brahman and Vishwakarman … It is the science of Anu and Andam. It is the science of Brahamajnānam and Pratimajnānam. It is the science of Jivātman and Paramātman. It is the science of the Unmanifest (avyakta) and the Manifest (vyakta).2

Vāstu arises not from within being human but from the source of all things that include humanity, the planet, and the universe. It is the architect’s or sthāpati’s work to give it form and measure. Vishwakarman is nature’s functionary who is connected to divine Being and oversees architecture. As Dr. Ganapathi Sthāpati stated repeatedly in his writing, ‘architecture makes the universe again in every project’. The architect bridges from the unmanifest, from the un- and immeasurable, to the seen and felt manifested form as they work, which makes the architect necessarily a ‘seer’. The practicing architect prepares such places, but anyone does the same as they presence architecture at such places.

Vāstu Shāstra, as seen from the traditional angle, would mean to be a treatise which deals with the science of Brahmjnāna [i.e. knowledge of God] and the technology of Brahma srishti — the former being expressed through the science underlying Vāstu principles and the latter, through the related technology leading into the realm of ‘spirit–centric’ (spiritual) creations.
… all built forms are Vāstus or embodied energies. But they are considered and equated to Vastus since they enclose or contain vastu, the energy. Hence they are denoted by another term prāsāda puruśa, meaning ‘embodied energy’ or ‘built space’. The traditional designers and builders have therefore, come to be called Vaastu Vedins or Sthāpatya Vedins and their technological treatises as Vaastu Vidya,Vaastu Shastra or Vaastu Tantra, where tantra is closest to today’s ‘technology’.3

Entwurf

(German). Ent: Prefix that expresses the beginning of something. (drückt in Bildungen mit Verben den Beginn von etw. aus:) Wurf: Successful (artwork), something meaningful, also successful or prospering. ‘Werfen’ also means to throw, or throwing.

(2. gelungenes [künstlerisches] Werk, etw. Bedeutendes, Erfolgreiches: mit dieser Erfindung ist ihm ein [neuer] Werk gelungen; das Werk ist kein großer Werk )

There is no single English word that represents the meaning of this German word. This is not a concept that is culturally German. We are missing such a term in English. In the case the practicing architect, it is an instance of the character, intents, and the formality of ‘an’ architecture with all the intentions and needs meshed as a singular representative mediation. It is an object–idea. Entwurf in architecture expresses a singularity of matter, knowledge and doing/action that forms a path in the service of preparations that architecture presences.

aspiration

When taken up with its full meaning, aspiration is other and arguably superior to ambition. In light of spirituality it includes hope, as well as yearning, longing and a goal. Aspiration is part of anyone. It is formed according to their attained capacity of conscious awareness. Aspiration is an automatic result of our conscious capacity. It includes anything, ranging beyond what is mensurable and material, and on toward infinity. The specific realization of aspiration in environments within the context of architecture is essential. Architecture’s superordinate program forms environments that presence aspiration.

Verknüpfung

German. A combinatory connection or link. In architecture this is at a nexus in the awareness of an individual experiencing a locus in the environment.

spirituality

Spirituality is practical activity to evolve one’s consciousness with conscious willed intent to transcend one’s current condition. Spirituality is the expression of one’s capacity to move toward their conscious potential. Every individual has taken this up in human life, and everyone has the capacity. Being in a mode of overcoming one’s current condition of self and/or to accelerate personal evolution is inclusive of all aspects of incarnate life. One may begin at any time — but one is always somewhere on the path. Spirituality is operated by anyone for the ends each individual finds appropriate. Although there are many types of practice formed from leaders’ paths that can support a wide range of people, the approach to spirituality individual.

Although spirituality is the purview and responsibility of each person, it also includes the totality of humanity and it is our responsibility to humanity. It does not oppose the material world; the opposite in fact.

Intention and will as instrumentalities of spirituality can be exteriorized to make our environment better serve our wellbeing. This is true because we can do that. The superordinate programme of architecture is applied to the environments that we change for our wellbeing in support of spirituality. As with spirituality, architecture may be felt by anyone.

Liberation

A term commonly used to denote the freedom from the necessity to (re)incarnate. This represents the Sanskrit term kailvalya. Some translators term it ‘isolation’.4 That means to clarify and consciously realize individual being from the matters of its incarnate self.

Nature’s task is done, this unselfish task which our sweet nurse, nature, had imposed upon herself. She gently took the self–forgetting soul by the hand, as it were, and showed him all the experiences in the universe, all manifestations, bringing him higher and higher through the various bodies, till his lost glory came back, and he remembered his own nature. Then the kind mother came back the same way she came, for others who also have lost their way in the trackless desert of life. And thus she is working, without beginning and without end. And thus through pleasure and pain, through good and evil, the infinite river of souls is flowing into the ocean of perfection, of self realization.5

Realization and Reality

Reality, the root cause or base of the universe, or 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.6

Realization is generally taken as a greater step beyond Liberation.

nothingness

Definitions:

the state of (being) nothing.
something that is non–present, e.g. a view of humanity as suspended between infinity and nothingness.
lack of being; nonexistence, e.g. the sound faded into nothingness.
unconsciousness, e.g. she remembered a dizzy feeling, then nothingness.
utter insignificance, emptiness, or worthlessness; triviality, ‘The days followed one another in an endless procession of nothingness.’
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.8

prakṛti

Sanskrit.

“Oh, Arjuna! Prakṛti and puruśa are both without any beginning and all the interplay of the senses is the result of prakṛti. In short, prakṛti is that out of which all forms of and qualities come into existence. All changes and modifications belong in the realm of matter.”

Baghvad Gita 13:199

puruśa

Sanskrit.

The term “consciousness” in English is perhaps the best term for this notion of citiśakti (power of awareness) or puruśa. The English term is derived from the Latin “scire”, “to know”, with the prefix “con”, meaning “along with” or “together with”. The term “conscire”, suggests, then, that there is something present along with what is known. The term “awareness” is the best translation for citta, since “an awareness” is from Anglo–Saxon “gewär” and German “gewahr” and refers to what is noticed, discerned, or caught sight of. Consciousness (citiśakti, puruśa) is always present simply as a bare witness, whereas the functioning of ordinary awareness (citta, cittasattva, cittavṛtti, prakṛti)involves the transactions of the subject–object world of everyday experience.10

‘pure phenomenology’ (and Enframing/Ge–stell)

Pure phenomenology is to bring the unmeasured or unspoken entity into a dimension that transmits its truth. That is generally as words or text, but it allows any other media.

The following excerpt from Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology stands for the definition of ‘pure phenomenology’. This definition includes a definition of ‘Enframing’ (Ge–stell), remembering Husserl’s assertion that ‘pure phenomenology’ can never be asserted other than in terms of something. This is a development of technology’s essence in light of ‘Enframing’ (Ge–stell).

William Lovitt, who translated this, adheres to Heidegger’s mode of using words in terms of the totality of their meaning(s), rather than contextualizing them to isolate a particular facet of meaning. Many words are made to vibrate as verb and noun at once. (‘[ ]’ are my additions.)

Thus far we have understood ‘essence’ in its current meaning. In the academic language of philosophy, ‘essence’ means what something is; in Latin, quid. Quiddatas, whatness provides the answer to the question concerning essence. For example, what pertains to all kinds of trees — oaks, beaches, birches, offers — is the same ‘treeness’. Under this inclusive genius — the ‘universal’ — fall all real and possible trees. Is then the essence of technology, Enframing, the common genus for everything technological? If that were the case in the steam turbine, the radio transmitter, and the cyclotron would each be an Enframing. But the word Enframing does not mean here [a] kind of apparatus. Still less, it doesn’t mean the general concept of such resources. The machines and apparatus are no more cases and kind of Enframing as are the man at the switchboard and the engineer in the drafting room. Each of these way indeed, belong as stockpart, available resource, or executor, within in Enframing; but Enframing is never the essence of technology in the sense of a genius.
Enframing is a way of revealing having the character of destining, namely, the way challenges forth. The revealing that brings forth (poīesis) is also a way that has the character of destining. But these ways are not things of that, arrayed beside one another, fall under the concept of revealing. Revealing is that destining which, ever suddenly and inexplicably to all thinking, apportions itself into the revealing that brings forth and that also challenges, which unlocks itself to man[’s awareness]. The challenging revealing has its origin as a destining in bringing–forth. But at the same time Enframing, in a way characteristic of a destining, blocks poīesis. Thus Enframing, as a destining of revealing, is indeed the essence of technology, but never in the sense of genius and essentia. If we pay heed to this, something astounding strikes us: It is technology itself that makes the demand on us to think in another what is usually understood by ‘essence’.

technicism

This word is found in the dictionary and is used accordingly. It has an important role in light of architecture, technicism is the value of technology superseding the value of architecture. This definition specifies that context.

There is a fine line between the way a place or a building is made and to rise to providing for architecture in the experience of that place. It is at this nexus that the profound magic of the architectural practice is active.

Technicism is projects that are driven by technological values, including finance and production systems and flows, that define results. It is constructional orthodoxy that is formally defined for the machinery and technology that makes them, forms them and fills them, resulting in layers of value that define a building or place. These leave the actual physical space that architects propose as a kind of apology for lost potential, justified with those technical factors that integrate financial values, and general systematic modes of providing physical comfort as founding value. The support of human beings is reduced to the needs of the body based on a catalogue of institutional quantities and systems that signify quality. This is the majority of our built world today.

Technicism will at some time not any longer be contemporary as after-technology architecture redefines architecture. Post-technicism would not have technology as its ground for architectural meaning, making the technologies of building subordinate and as the service of providing for architecture. Post-technicist profession would prioritize the value of architecture over technic. Technic in its ancient meaning will remain technology’s antecedent in a new form.

standing-reserve

This concept highlights an essential characteristic of Modernism and Machine Ages technology. This word comes from Lovitt’s translation of Heidegger. I develop this in PART.III technology.

Standing–reserve is an outcome of Enframing (Ge-stell), which is featured in ‘pure phenomenology’ above. It is a principle of how we assert human purpose in extracting and using value. This value is present in colonialism, enslavement, and permeates our form of capitalism. We now understand that in the modes of building; how the materials are got, and of course the economy, all of these imply a relationship to Nature, which includes human conscious being. As at the beginning of Modern Machine Ages technology, architecture is today on the cusp of re-comprehending how to engage within Nature. ‘To build’ comes deeply into question, again.

Modern technology in its essence […] involves a contending with everything that is. For it “sets upon” everything, imposing upon it a demand that seizes and requisitions it for use. Under the dominion of this challenging revealing, nothing is allowed to appear as it is in itself. The rule of such a way of revealing is seen when man becomes subject, when from out of his consciousness he assumes dominion over everything outside himself, when he represents and objectifies and, in objectifying, begins to take control over everything. It comes to its fulfillment when, as is increasingly the case in our time, things are not even regarded as objects, because their only important quality has become their readiness for use. Today all things are being swept together into a vast network in which their only meaning lies in their being available to serve some end that will itself also be directed toward getting everything under control. Heidegger calls this fundamentally undifferentiated supply of the available the “standing-reserve”.

Heidegger, translated by Lovitt. The Questioning Concerning Technology. Introduction by William Lovitt. p. xxix

Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand]. The word expresses here something more, and something more essential, than mere “stock.” The name “standing-reserve” assumes the rank of an inclusive rubric. It designates nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by the challenging revealing. Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object.

Heidegger, translated by Lovitt. The Questioning Concerning Technology. p. 17

Bestand ordinarily denotes a store or supply as “standing by.” It carries the connotation of the verb bestehen with its dual meaning of to last and to undergo. Heidegger uses the word to characterize the manner in which everything commanded into place and ordered according to the challenging demand ruling in modern technology presences as revealed. He wishes to stress here not the permanency, but the orderability and substitutability of objects. Bestand contrasts with Gegenstand (object; that which stands over against). Objects indeed lose their character as objects when they are caught up in the “standing-reserve.”

Heidegger, translated by Lovitt. The Questioning Concerning Technology. fn p. 1711

space of differentiation

Space of differentiation is created by the need to differentiate architecture and technology. It is an essential facet of the superordinate program that architecture, in its concealed condition, demands unconcealment.

disjunct (architectural practice)

Disjunct architectural practice locates the value of practice in the measure and matter of building or of settlement. A disjunct relationship between architecture and its superordinate programme is when technology is valued as architecture’s ends, as the technicist proxy for the value that the architectural profession provides in practice.

Disjunct practice conceals that architecture takes place as experiencing a quality of awareness. Such practice values professional service according to technological and material measure of building systems and the building process and financial value. While conscious mind’s quality and individuals’ aspiration for the essential raison d’être of life is human/e purpose in dwelling, disjunct practice is its negation through technicist valuation. This concealing, nevertheless, has an essential influence on the world for humanity’s evolution to destine the unconcealing of life’s goal.

‘idea (of) architecture’

‘Idea (of) architecture’ is a term for buildings that are taken as architecture because they exhibit signs of architecture that are applied in their design. ‘Idea (of) architecture’ engages a formal and aesthetic technological ‘standing reserve’, like a catalogue, and a language of ‘architecture’. It is the technic of signs of architecture, disjunct from architectural value. This includes various forms of shelter, built shapes, details, images, materials like bricks, programmes like the kitchens or an opera, and institutions and systems representing human comfort that are present in way that signifies architecture. The categories are very broad because everything is implicated as we dwell.

Post-Modernism originated in the 1960s, and is often located at its start by Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture12, to reorientate the profession of architecture to greater meaningfulness from relatively new but established formulae such as, for example, the International Style and related modernist architecture. I agree with Robert Venturi when he said that he was never a postmodernist, and that this book is useful to postmodernism, but was not itself postmodernist.

The issue that Complexity and Contradiction responds to is that architecture had become abstracted within its own Modernist logic, was becoming elitist and unintelligible to the average person, and had become bland and mechanical. Forms that we traditionally associate with architecture such as the classical Greek and Roman styles, as well as programmatic constructional materials or components such as roof or window were abolished leaving. There is brilliant architecture in this mode, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building, and hundreds of mechanical buildings around it. The Seagram building is hard to understand as different from those hundreds for many people.

There are classicist and abstract tendencies in post–modernism. The former that came up in the 1960s is typically called Post-Modernism, spelled in a number of ways. I am spelling it simply as ‘postmodernism’. Deconstructivism came about in the 1980s. Deconstruction typically eschews traditional formal assumptions, hence my preference for differentiating postmodernism as ‘abstract’ postmodernism and ‘classical’ postmodernism. Both were intended to strengthen architecture beyond context-less ‘pure’ technological built form and elitist abstract references, with a technic of language-like signifiers. Deconstructivism took a path that eschewed the past, while orientating to emotion and feelings. These are generally not subtle.

Postmodernist architecture does not necessarily result in architecture. It is a double–edged sword. While these efforts bring in meaning contextually, using antecedents rather than dogmatically ‘leaving the past behind’, it often becomes a form of technic again, nevertheless ‘Enframing’ these signs. The cultural force that conceals architecture easily overcomes that effort and architecture remains mainly concealed in the idea (of) architecture.

superordinate program

The superordinate program that is architecture is to provide for and to support human aspiration and the goal of life. This superordinate programme defines the architect’s service to ‘presence’ our aspiration to evolve spiritually as a particular condition of awareness that is linked to the locus, to support of the evolutionary force that takes place in each of us as spirituality.

It is a singular program that is super ordinate to those that we prepare our projects with, such as kitchens or public spaces, of rooms, spaces or functions, and planning and urbanism. The superordinate program does not serve each and everyone’s individual needs at that level. Those are the programs for buildings, spaces and settlements, and serve as the means for presencing architecture. The superordinate program is for the experience of presencing the state of awareness aspiring in our capacity of consciousness.

The superordinate programme exists because of our capacity through thought and that our knowledge beyond ‘all this’ reaches beyond, deep into consciousness. We might feel it, but it has no attributes and collapses into a not-point zero field of content–less faith that could be said to be devotion (bhakti). The condition of content–less awareness begins when freedom-of-choice transforms to duty and touches love and the possibility of merger with the divine. Architects in practice prepare loci with this superordinate programme to support humanity’s destining to realize our granted aspiration.

The superordinate programme pulls toward us a science that will be discovered anew and transform the practice of architecture.

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