G¡a PART.I Goal.1A The Useless, the Wasteful and the Necessary
The Goal in Architecture — Garbage
Section I.1 is in two parts, A and B. It locates the trouble that we are in to place it like the drone in Indian music. This article represents our status quo as a tanpura or tonal anchor. It does not always harmonize.
It is one thing to be ignorant. Many of our brothers and sisters willfully continue to make things worse. Willful ignorance is complex. We seem to cultivate ignorance of Nature’s greater value as known harm calculated against economic or financial benefit and loss, a very human transactional relationship. We are dealing with ego and compassion issues, and the capacity to be humane. Therefore, I have brought spirituality to this project as the mode to evolve this capacity.
Calculating Ignorance
G¡a naturally begins with where we are. Everywhere and everyone is in Nature. We must always be within Nature. We interprete it as ecosystem, as wealth, as source of discovery, as mother, as resource, as park, as scary unknown, as dangerous, as infinite bounty, as the destroyed, as partner, as trespasser and as owner who is generous and sensitive, and we may feel it as the drawer of the line. We have no choice but to work with our awareness of Nature. Our awareness is our significant baseline.
Our typical valuations of Nature, according to current theory and actions, define components of Nature as objects and processes in isolation from their context. These components appear to be kind of ‘just there’ and ‘up for grabs’ before they are engaged in some process or other cultural value to get human purpose. That we may take what we need is natural, beginning with food. That is original to life on earth. However, the vast majority of our resource acquisitions and interventions proceed without consideration for the integrated life of Nature in which the sought resource is embedded.
The human perspective says that apples are for us to eat. We tend not to feel thankful for the tree. The tree will produce apples no matter what anyone does anyway. The apple will only fall on the ground and rot if someone does not take it. It becomes useless and can then be thought of as garbage or compost. We like to ‘make’ more apple trees that produce ‘better’ apples that last longer, travel better or don’t turn brown when sliced.
More generously, one might feel that apples are also for black bears, worms, wasps and birds, mold and mycelium, and many more. Farmers often see these as enemies. We generally deflect, punish or kill creatures for spoiling our apples. The wider flow of Nature is blocked in those ways on many fronts. These actions and their reasons deflect the feeling of gratitude: We take the apple, feeling entitled to possession.
We prospect for ore in this same way. It is seemingly doing nothing at all there, embedded in the soil or rock, still and quiet for millennia. There is rarely a thought given to these atoms’ purpose in being precisely there for so long. We take it, often destroying vast areas of surface life in the process. Is the ground a body?
We find wood in the forest. The tree will not stop us from logging. That seems to justify not asking for permission and for not feeling gratitude. Is the tree alive and aware? Is it a body? Is it part of a community?
All kinds of life, including layers of life that remain concealed or invisible to most of us, partially or wholly known to a few of us, a supposition for others, and un–valued to most of us, nevertheless, supports us. We feel the influence of Nature on a walk for a ‘breath of fresh air’ when we go out in the afternoon before tea or while forest bathing. We feel our condition change. Why? With what do we interact?
What is imperceptible, undocumented and immeasurable to science is devalued. Generosity of gratitude is missing. The devaluation and that absence documents an unknown scope of lack.
Human Capacity
However far it reaches, our perception cannot be taken as a limit for what is true in Nature. Anyone’s awareness can be expanded. One level or depth of awareness can be evolved to attain a superior awareness. We can work on our awareness to see what happens if we rise above our current condition and feelings. Increasing the depth and heights of awareness is unlimited according to thousands of years of written testimony and living practices.
We are also subject to losing a state of awareness if we cycle to heavy psychological and emotional conditions such as greed, anger, hate and other confusion, that overwhelms it with a cruder state. We can spiral down and down as one negation pushes down to the next, increasing our heaviness.
Most of us feel that we would not gladly allow changes made to our minds or feelings, even when for the better, when it is ‘forced’ upon us. The world often seems to pressure us relentlessly from outside. Situations come from Nature, such as the rain, floods or an earthquake, to which we must respond viscerally. But the situations that we share with our brothers and sisters are of another order, while our brothers and sisters are also part of Nature. We often struggle with each other as we strive to tolerate, accommodate and to respect and love each other.
Personal sanctity is optional in our cultural practice, dependent on context and managed according to things like social standing, wealth and bodily characteristics among many others. The personal experience of, and feeling for, the sanctity of the inner being is widely ignored in children, education, society, contracts and common relationships about town, city and in the workplace. These pressures influence our character and demand responses from us toward change. Can that freedom actually be taken, or can it only be given away? We need our freedom. How fully to grasp this?
We benefit from our human perspective and we have our individual strengths. We are loath to give up whatever advantages that each of us has, often even when the sum of effects is misery. Ultimately, we must agree to what comes into us within our awareness. There is no other ‘doer’ within. There can never be intervention within me, I am the only actor here. I may generate will, strength, compassion, courage and clarity. Or, I may capitulate to influences, depending on my strength and training.
Humanity’s approach to climate, destruction of the biosphere and even how we abuse each other, is as our troubling relationships with each other, disallowing in others what we know to be true in ourselves. We treat ourselves as we do all of Nature. These aspects of being human trouble Nature everywhere. Whether one is filled with aspiration, desperate to improve their lot, blithely fulfilling petty desires, or trapped in quiet desperation, our social and cultural values retain characteristics inherent to the suffering all around us due to our present approach to Nature.
The architectural professional does not directly aim for people’s wellness, and certainly not the environment, despite the architect speaking of right action and being of ‘good character’. Perhaps there is a slight bias to the betterment indirectly that is circumstantial and collateral to the projects’ outcomes. The source of this seemingly systemic disregard for the wellbeing of life in the world, including human life and its quality, is tied to how we value ourselves and our awareness of our inner condition and our state of being. All of us are by nature willing members of a unity that has collective action in the body of humanity.
Architecture arises from this collective capacity and is beholden to our individuality as we dwell. Our capacity allows us to change ourselves within and to create environments around us. The meaningfulness of architecture is in belonging to our brother and sisters, to the Earth, and to All that this universe is based in our lives as we dwell. The struggle and sweetness of each path to our destination makes the field of meaning that environments glow with when they are made so that they provide for architecture.
Mitigation
Technological process and outcomes, and scientifically initiated and guided processes, are vague and unclear about, love and life itself, as well as the meaningfulness of our activity, and the whole living entity of Nature. Life, and love for Nature, including human nature, is contradicted in our technological system. They are stony and aloof to Nature. Its values for are arbitrary to Nature.
Technology and its sciences do not recognize Nature’s terms in principle. Components of lives, bodies and metabolisms of Nature are taken as ‘discovered’ in terms of a process or value. The power and material that we extract from Nature is certainly helpful in fulfilling our direct physical issues. The net result is not necessarily wellbeing. According to the evidence in the living world, it is clearly often not.[1]
Technological parameters that we use are a functional attribute of human awareness, reflecting an unhappy malaise in much of our environment. This is taken up in architecture, where the specific means are technological, including architect’s professional regimes, are expressive and representative of the same. Current architectural value includes technology with much destructive quality.
Sustainability is the utilization of technology to mitigate the harm of technological practices. It is all under the same paradigm. Sustainability is only indirectly about reducing our exploitation of Nature. The model on which technology and its science are thought is not in question. Although the talk of the ‘dynamic whole’ as ‘systems’ of Nature has been popular. That is not bringing significant reduction to the choices that destroy, waste and to take actions that purposefully treat as useless elements of Nature that have no engineered, commercial or other value. Nature does not have ‘systems’ and ‘process’; these are people’s ideas. Other superseding values and needs than taking the proper approach to Nature are at play. Sustainability and other forms of mitigation cannot supersede the factors causing trouble.
Governments, businesses and individuals’ cultural roles often imply or state that no response to harm is justified when there is no proof of harm’s cause. ‘Proof’ that nothing bad happens is arbitrary, self–referential, with subjective parameters and duration that are created by humanity without due concern with Nature’s life: We set the parameters that do not show harm while issues that harm people are ‘resolved’ for a ‘reasonable’ cost to cultural systems and capital. This may sound cynical, but it is in most cases a statement of fact. Especially in the high capital value corporate regimes. We proceed based on the proven production of advantages that we seek. This is a very difficult issue to untangle in all its nuance and influences, and G¡a does not become shorter in working through the complexities of this.
Respect for Science
Just as unmeasured harm is made equal to no harm, the ways that life extends beyond awareness and knowledge are treated as absent or not real. We commonly discount scientific outcomes and the inclusion of mysterious irrational forces and facts are increasing. Nature’s utter availability to serve humanity is made to justify that the so-called ‘useless’ and ‘extra’ things are idly awaiting human purpose deemed free to take.
This behavior makes all that we do seem small. Any individual harvest, even a million tons, can seem small. Even a mountain, a continent or the earth itself must be insignificant if we think things are randomly located to be taken at will, small enough to be guided by governmental regulation, scientific calculations, market value, commercial outcomes, personal value or political lobbying.
The loss of respect for science begins with this. Even high quality scientific results are, nevertheless, essentially complicit in that devaluation of Nature, and thus the sanctity of life. That includes people. Science as objectively verified materialistic singular truth is unable to make an acknowledgement of the sanctity of life and has destructive dimensions as it is used. Our social and cultural usage of it is too broad, colonizing what we do. The internet, social media, government and corporate process and client interfaces, all of this trends to devaluing humane living. The sought science is not wrong, but the resulting values may end up untrue because of the parameters of application.
Technology and its sciences are not the culprit. They are not guilty. They are merely limited. The issue is how we use it. This is part of technology now. It reflects science as disrespect to Nature and everyone because of what we exclude. We apply scientific results through technology, not only by excluding significant knowledge, but also saying that it does not exist, reenforcing a negative approach to defining value in our lives.
If we know that we reenforce this behaviour against Nature’s function and its life with how we have made and use technology, then we are willful if we do not question technology’s place and role in architectural practice.
Unconcealing Nature
Each needle on a conifer belongs exactly there where it is for the tree and its context. We feel that to be true, even when it is not understood. Every drop of water in a stream running through a forest is precisely that drop in that place, moving in exactly that way. The iron, the gallium, the gold or the mineral oil are exactly there where they are and accords with the whole, just like every atom in a person’s body.
After food or materials are extracted, the exact disposition has gained the meaning of our dwelling in the world as individuals and humanity. That includes our scientific measure and values, but also our aspiration. Each bit still has inclusive exactitude, as exact as the planet’s orbit around the sun, and the biosphere and its climate, and the energetic symphony that allows the environment to be exactly as it is, but now with human intention and aspiration added. How we take what we need matters, as many past cultures have demonstrated.
Everything is part of an inconceivable immeasurable vastness. That is not foreign to anyone. We all participate in it with our bodies and our mind because we dwell in Nature. We, are Nature.
What we feel to be true, despite or in addition to limited evidence, points to ‘other’ forms of knowledge. While we add the inherent aspiration of human awareness and human dwelling to its completeness, our current science and technology deny it. This is central to preparing the future of architectural professional practice.
All this implies paradigmatic change for the profession of architecture is needed. Architecture’s extent is like Nature’s. Architecture bears Nature’s complexity and it too demands gratitude in action. It is beyond science and technology, and may bear any dimension of people’s awareness. Architecture is, therefore, greater than the science and technology that it employs as its means.
[1] I cover how Nature’s life and body are isolated and exploited for production of selected values in detail in PART.III technology.