G¡a PART.I.0 — Supposition

The Goal in Architecture — Spirituality and Architecture

This article begins G¡a. This beginning describes our approach to this project to generate grounds for practice of architecture and the value of its outcomes.

Architecture is not experienced in a specific order like a written work, in which every letter and word attains its intended meaning through a linear relationship with time. We can freely engage each element, usually physically and visually, in any temporal order. The PARTS of G¡a presence the architecture of the profession like a carousel. We begin the textual presentation as if we could jump on anywhere. But we do not; we jump on ‘just here’. We take up discussion of architecture in context of the work that needs to happen.

To respond to the natural need to find a way forward we must strike down the hold on our evolution that the profession has created through its responses over the past century. As the carousel of influences and effects spins, changes in all aspects of our cultures and change in the environment, the biosphere and the climate accelerate, making it harder to find an opening to jump on. Historicity, narrative, pop culture and socio-political intensity did not work. Post-modernism was not it. Some of us hung on for a wild ride. But the effort was deflected. The profession remains stuck, although there is very important practical theory in postmodernism that has not yet been properly understood.

G¡a questions that original value of a professional architect’s service is to provide for buildings and the execution of their realization. The profession of architecture names its members as ‘of good character’. G¡a questions what this might actually be, and to whom or what it is, and that if character can evolve infinitely, what is ‘good character’? Good character implies the ‘greater good’ that has cultural breadth in one dimension, and individual growth or evolution in the other. The ‘greater good’ of architecture includes all creatures and all life in any way that it may exist, as well as the wholeness created by all together, and our role in it in light of how we aspire to health, wellbeing and evolution. ‘Greater good’ is a function of every individual. Harmony with individual growth, with inner feeling and what we are as humans within our environment, is where I jump up onto the carousel ‘to suppose’ a starting point of this work.

Architects belong to the only profession that is responsible for the world as a whole in terms of the wellbeing of people who dwell in it (i.e. not just its scientific and technical measurables). Cultural change can be influenced and supported, but we cannot design that. The inclusion of maximal factors to provide for architecture in practice has been claimed by architects for millennia. The means to include all is more than any individual or team can do. How can the architect include ALL?

PART.I.Goal

The aims and objects of life conceived in terms of worldly ends are almost meaningless.

I.0.1 Supposition

Addressing architectural practice with spiritual practice can inspire the basis of a profession of architecture to provide effective transformational outcomes according to our human role in dwelling. G¡a contributes to architectural practice by demonstrating this in architecture’s Verknüpfung¹ with spirituality. Conscious awareness of this Verknüpfung is not necessary for architecture to exist. G¡a develops the supposition of the Verknüpfung of architecture with spirituality, as a path, or a goal at infinity, which architectural practice serves. We will verify this by showing that architectural practice is as essential to dwelling as spirituality. Architecture will continue to exist if spirituality is ignored, even as architecture is essential to human dwelling in the world. However, the profession of architecture will continue to be a shadow of itself without the redevelopment of this intimate factor.

The relationship of architectural practice with spirituality may seem obvious to some of us and impossible nonsense to others. I find a deep peace in engaging this as a feeling of need that is being attended to. Facing that need by providing the utility of form for knowledge of transformative aspiration is at the root of this project.

The support for this goal is a superordinate program.² That program is architecture, and the value of architect’s work is there. The structure is the forms and lines of connection and energy that are given measure to manifest materially at loci. This may not be most efficient approach according to technological or engineering values. Architects fully respect and engage such things, but never stop short with those parameters. Architecture’s ‘rightness’ takes efficiency to another level.

This project contributes to developing a more fully formed practice of architecture through revealing and making functional the essential characteristics of architectural practice via this Verknüpfung as its fulcrum. As architects we know about ‘the program’. Here, we are taking the understanding of ‘program’ to the level of architectural practice as a superordinate program.

I.0.2 Aspiring a Goal of Life in Dwelling

Spirituality is action on the intention to aspire a goal of life; that goal is the evolution of conscious awareness. It is related to divinity,³ and to matters of life that we must better harmonize with and improve upon. We are naturally drawn into the future as we dwell, while holding that back will only generate its demand. Basic physical needs, such as food, shelter, health, community, culture, and expression and communication, are means for this aspiration to take form.

Growth and betterment are unlimited in evolution if we include life beyond the physical body. If this is also true for interventions in our environment, then architecture is implied. There are many levels and stages by which we recognize this, and what it may manifest through. But it is also just ‘one’ that encompasses all. The principle that humanity is one is the same, and that we are of a single Nature is also the same. The worldly effect of this aspiration on our environments is architecture.

The world is a joyful experience when we find a new type of butterfly or scale a mountain, or work out a new more subtle attribute of matter, surpass a personal best, find synergy, compassion or love with another person, or help improve the society we are a part of. We might wonder at the beauty, bounty and opportunity of Nature. Or, we feel pain when we have no water to drink or to water our crops with; when Nature appears as neediness when we are lonely, sick or suffer injustice. These are Nature acting through us.

The gorilla, the whale, the rhino, or a newt, the bees and thousands upon thousands of flowers are expunged due to destruction through human exploitation of the world, and we do not stop. We create neediness, and the utter devastation of places. Such places may even be at the heart of our cities. This is the knowledge with a negative form that is called ignorance. The knowledge we tend to prioritize is a function of ignorance. That ignorance invokes pain and suffering. Our traditions claim that we need to discover knowledge to lessen ignorance. This approach has the effect of maintaining ignorance. We build ignorance into our intentional environments.

Ignorance has an evolved form. Ignorance is our pure innocent selves that is responsive to ‘what is’. Ignorance of this kind is natural, there is a Natural way to make it serve us. Architecture can presence our awareness as what we might be — as our nascent inherent capacity that waits for us to evolve; as this kind of pure Ignorance — through what we built. We gain access to everything around us, and we may utilize it all to its highest purpose in this condition of Ignorance. It is to discover and to act on having attained higher purpose.

The possibility of this evinces that there is a goal of life. Whatever it may be, there are limitations to perception in principle and in our individual experience, in our cultural and social knowledge, and by the limitations in our human body. This is rational. But that rational truth is often turned to negate the importance or value of such a goal. We have no easy access to this goal’s origin nor to its full scope. It is beyond life, beyond Nature, and beyond what is perceptible to humanity. It is something that we can know, and as we grow to know it, we evolve and expand. We already have a lot of evidence that such a goal exists. Its challenging name is ‘nothingness’. How can architecture be nothingness?

Spirituality is implicated in dwelling in this way. Its immeasurable potential point relentlessly at architecture as the programming of our loci as material means for the experience of aspiration. Architecture is what dwelling loci presence where architects succeed in supporting humane capacity the role of humanity within Nature, which includes infinity and Nothingness. It is a twin of of spirituality. Spirituality is practice that allows us to question the current profession of architectural practice as to how it may aspire humanely, presencing our awareness.

Note: The subtitle for PART.I is a quote. Ram Chandra (Shajahanpur). Reality at Dawn. Spiritual Hierarchy Publication Trust, Kolkata, 2010. Originally published in 1954. Accessible here.

1. See G¡a N.4 — Defined Terms for the G¡a project’s definition of ‘Verknüpfung’.

2. See G¡a N.4 — Defined Terms for the G¡a project’s definition of ‘superordinate program’.

3. “Divinity is the way, and divine (merely) a play.” “So that purity which is quality-less, nameless, attributeless — you cannot say even that it is God — it is. There is no what is it, why is it, where is it, how is it? There is no such thing. That being the problem that faces us, what is our goal?” From a talk by Parthasarathi Rajagopalachari on October 12, 2012. http://www.sahajmarg.org/literature/online/speeches/chennai-20121012, between 5:13-7:30.