G¡a PART.I Goal.1B The Role of Our Original Freedom in Architecture
The Goal in Architecture — The Myth of Garbage Part 2
This is the second part of The Myth of Garbage. Some of this article relates directly to PART.I Goal — 1A.
Humanity and Choices
The process and progress that is available to all as a birthright is born of Nature and includes our willfulness, flawedness and our wrongs. Fun and accomplishment, harm, pain and even death, have a reality different from the appearances that our perception provides. If humanity exists according to Nature’s principles, to make right choices, and to be ‘wrong’, when we do so, is granted us in our role. What we make that wastes and destroys must ultimately have a purpose within Nature.
How is a wrong right? Our aspirations are concealed within ‘wrongness’. Destruction is painful. Pain moves us to change. Need will necessarily be developed, have its outcomes, and drive evolution. The potential to destroy, to choose worthlessness, or to be ignorant forms the basis for human excellence and its transcendence. The pressure of a wrong, one that might be felt to be a ‘mistake’ as a factor of our power to learn, points to our evolution. How we define value within ourselves has a relationship with what we choose to do in the world. How we work in the architectural profession is based on this accordingly. We assert values that we create individually that form our cultures and our public sphere together.
Disrupting and enhancing human and not–human interconnections in Nature are not fully perceptible for anyone. There is enough evidence, however, to at least assume that everything in Nature is infinitely inter-connected. But what we feel tends to get a low value against what we can measure, while a grand spectrum of subjective personal and cultural views have come into being. If the vast intricate interdependence of life down to every last atom were taken as being true, could we go on as we are?
The power that we generate and consume today is enabled with an invented component that we call ‘garbage’. There is no such thing as garbage in Nature. This will be the defining myth of our epoch. Consider much of NASA’s work and the others like SpaceX, and the materiality of our great Modernist architecture, such as the Seagram Building in New York, but also your own home or car. All are based on the myth of garbage. Everyone is familiar with garbage dumps, the way the mining, forestry and ocean harvesting treat their respective environments. It appears natural through industrial and traditional modes of production in our cultures and socialization. Although willfulness and flawedness demand the refinement of perception, awareness and response, a powerful force at play seemingly defies logic, good will, and self-preservation, as well as thousands of years of learning.
We operate along vectors of power and conflict. We feel free to take and to discard as we move through life. Our activity in extractive processes is based on our perception that there are things in the world that have no valuable role. Included in our capacity to make choices is support for the useless and the wasteful part of a spectrum of values. Our freedom of choice, and the responsibility that goes with it is salient. Intention, will and the freedom to take action is the ground of aspiration in life: It is what we as individuals and humankind all of us together can do to use our life to its greatest fulfillment. The myth of garbage and its production express our lacking personal development.
A Weakened Profession
The myth of garbage points to an essential quality of technology. It represents a powerful slight of hand in our gathering of power and resources. Extracting kilograms of bauxite from tons of displaced earth, after claiming ownership and removing the biosphere (in the case of an open–cast mine), while creating a lake of toxic fluid, is an exchange of garbage production to gain power and wealth. ‘Garbage’ is usually taken as an incidental un– or under–costed component of the process. It is slight of hand in how we absent the remainder, not unlike how the experience of architecture is absented.
We have had a steady erosion of the scope of work and the number of projects relative to the growth of the built world. The weakness of the profession is evinced by this lack of increase in size and scope of architectural practice, and loss of influence, against the rate at which humanity is expanding, increasing its capacity to extract, store and use power. The competent and proactive uptake of sustainability and mitigation of our methods’ destruction to human life and the life of the planet has not helped. Architects remain near the bottom of professionally educated high earning professions. Leveraging the myth of garbage according to advancements in science and technology has not served the architectural profession well.
In the face of the immense importance of architecture the evidence of failure is clear, while it is cloaked in an attitude of banal aloofness. Fear of change and rigidity have taken hold as we face this mainly unspoken demise. This is my approach to deepen the foundations of work toward change out of the ‘wrong’ that is concealing within. What causes the lack of growth in the profession inspires this project. The goal of this project is to describe a way forward. PART.I is to set the tanpura surrounding us from which we launch our evolution beyond the current conditions and the myth of garbage is part of it.
The architectural profession is infected by the integration of garbage that comes with technology. That empowering component of technology is the ‘cost’ of participation. Technology includes how we program for use at loci, planning, design and construction, as well as managing business and the governance of the profession. Architecture is weak because the myth of garbage harms it in the same way it harms Nature. I am claiming that architecture is a part of Nature in the form of human conscious awareness. As part of Nature, architecture is damaged through humanity, just as is all of Nature, which includes ourselves, by the activities our concept of garbage–making allows. Architecture loss are self-consumption as if the forest would try to grow by burning trees. This apparent poverty of humanity is an essential to what drives us to spirituality. I will examine this in much more detail later on.
Technological terms of achievement define technological quality, even to describe the natural and local human context. This was codified in Modernist architecture that was to harness the power of technology. Powerful technological means based on scientific knowledge have come to define architecture. A project is defined by traffic studies, statistical analysis of behavior, physiological parameters, zoning, national codes, real estate values, and banks all use algorithms to evaluate according to spreadsheets and policy that define values according to undeniable facts, a priori to any architectural valuation. I am quite sure that this was not the intent of such founders as Hermann Muthusius, Gerd Rietveld, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, not to mention characters like Johannes Itten and the original goals of the Bauhaus or the Futurists. They all wanted the freedom that technology appeared to offer. There were many more who worked to bring architecture safely into the modernity of industrialised society and the transformation of building technology. The founders intended to ‘save’ architecture from the jaws of industrialization.
Early in the 1960s the architects began to question the abstract and non-contextual production of the International Style and the general influence on architecture. The Seagram Building is a marvel of architecture, while the legions of similar structures are not. Architects knew this. There was movement to address this. Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction, and MOMA’s Architecture without Architecture1 exhibition can be said to mark a beginning. Its end as far as MOMA's activist contributions go (or maybe with Philip Johnson's role) was heralded by the Deconstructivist Architecture2 exhibit in 1988. These were not successful in dislodging the paradigm that has come to define architecture as technological value. Now technology defines how a project’s quality and the architectural profession do not provide architecture. But architecture circumscribes all of this and is superordinate.
Even as the myth of garbage enables technology, while the power of technology puts us into a sleep of complacency. To bring that superordinate value forward requires courage. The coming paradigmatic change will feel like a disruptive quake because of the lack of evolution.
Between an Education for Architects and a Profession for Building Technologists
Decades of effort to integrate the construction industry, technology, commerce and associated markets are not considered to be positive by enough of the architectural community so that there is now a polarity between education and much of the working profession.
We may read in John Ruskin’s work, as well as in much of architectural writing, teaching and history, all the way back to the Roman architect Vituvius and to the Mānasāra,3that architects have a lofty reputation because they must comprehend a wide field of knowledge that includes the means of building and planning, philosophy, music, nature, science and technology, and beauty, human life and culture and so on, with the special characteristic of being of good character. The reality of the business of today’s techno–profession reduces this to a conceit. If a student of architecture takes on that traditional value, they might not make it to graduation, depending on the school, and it will often have put pressure on their employment prospects.
The professionals of architecture have embraced ecological and environmentalist concerns for decades, pushing clients more than they are being driven to it by their clients. The profession’s relatively proactive response to climate drives income and is driven by a real need. Yet, this change has not produced significant betterment through sustainability or other schemes for mitigation of harm. It has not been an important growth factor for architects, even as it becomes mainstream. We need to dig deeper to consider a more fundamental approach. There must be a process, a direction that Nature offers that is not being engaged. Its form must be paradigmatically different than it has been in the past. Architecture is more in sync with Nature than with technology, leaving the stagnating techno-profession lagging ever further on its evolutionary path.
This is where I reconnect to our choosing of values, and right or wrong action, as place-holders for our evolutionary aspiration, where I began. Whatever available paths there may be, the potential based upon the certainty that we are always within Nature remains. This intensive relationship with the full spectrum of all life that includes our natural consciousness and its inherent aspiration must be essential to architects in practice. We can only base our work as architects on whatever quality our inward awareness has to provide for good judgement of needs and outcomes. So we need to develop that part of ourselves.
We are awareness of this, but there is passivity and lack of courage and engagement to answer questions that have been asked now for decades; so much so that they are proposed as outcomes. The profession and its education often propose such questioning as renewal itself. No doubt questioning in a timely and wise way is essential. Questioning, however, taps too timidly and too intellectually at the door of change to allow us to evolve the architectural profession that will far supersede today’s technocratic profession.
Questioning in the Profession
Through much of our culture we do not know how to accept people with greater attainments than ourselves. The expression of truth in our cultural context requires objective definition of such attainments as ‘knowledge’ and as facts. Being rich in money and assets is one of a few mainstream signs of attainment, also fame; these are measurable and verifiable in data. We discount such shows of success nearly as often as we take them seriously. There is a scarcity of examples of people who attain evolved knowledge. The need to verify objectively creates efforts to refute attainments in evolutionary aspiration that often have no material wealth associated with them. This is complicated by personal freedom that our egos need and develops movement against an overarching goal of life. Humility makes us better at being quiet, at acceptance and at integrating locally. Few have interest in propagating and mediating it. We ask for proof, but forming factual evidence of the experience is a facsimile that conceals. This is similar to our culturally common concept of buildings that only signify architecture.
The value given to the discoveries of science and the resulting technology supports undisciplined willful and subjective action that imbibe material definitions of success. Giant institutions and gatherings of wealth function as authority due to their power. All of them support the myth of garbage since our current system of production depends on it. Financial and commercial wealth and power generation operates with such egotistical force that whole lives are absorbed, handing away their time and value.
Wealth, cultural status, power and control, health and body image are manifestations of the powerful urge in all of us to attain betterment. Such physical attainments are jewels, like diamond teardrops; shiny baubles that must eventually leave us craving something more. Evolving out of a lesser personal condition: What are the highest value applications of it? Aspiration for something better may enter a realm that is unmeasurable, and a goal to rise above ourselves can be still set and be given the form of one’s life. Some of us crave wealth and do keep getting more becoming ultra–rich and powerful.
Seekers of growth and transformative evolution are provided with a wide variety of practices for seeking advancement. Their validity is affirmed, however, only in each one of us, no one else can know one’s real attainment and its value. Only each one of us can accept their influence as a personal experience. ‘Exact’ or objective scientific methods and outcomes do not satisfy personal evolutionary transformative growth.
We try for security during our lives, but a life must end. Is there transcendent security? What is a yearning to gain ground on what will supersede all other possibilities? A goal for life is activated by yearning, one’s own personal yearning, to know ever more subtle aspects of being, loving, of nearness to the truth that is ever more subtle, that cannot be lost but must be found. The cultural and social values that operate architectural value can be treated only by the individuals who are working for the subtle inner transformation. That cannot be decoded into factual documentation, but it informs.
Our natural place in the world informs the role of architects and architectural practice. That is where we find architecture. It waits concealed in the wrongs that will lead us there. That we all think that we make garbage is the result of a need that we all have.
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3459
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1813
The Architecture of Mānasāra, 7 Volumes. Translated by P. K. Acharya, Originally published in 1933. Reprint, Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1995. <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.31240/page/n3/mode/2up>