This post begins a series that will present my research. There will be quite a lot of them, keeping to readable substack portions, modified to make it appropriate to substack in a serial form.
The original project is titled The Goal in Architecture. The mutual claiming of one another of spirituality and architecture (G¡a). In the text I often avoid typical descriptions or nomenclature and describe things to avoid assumptions. Why? This project is an(other) attempt to slip out of the current hegemonic ideas about architecture, especially the processes required by professional action. No doubt these remain necessary and cannot be undermined.. The project focuses on the practice of providing for architecture, leveraged through spiritual practice, using its concealed raison d’etré as means in light of our future. This is done according to components of the Indian (Traditional) Knowledge System rajayoga, specifically Sahaj Marg of Heartfulness, and Vāstu, the architectural limb of the system.
We begin with the Preface, which was originally double tasked as the abstract.
This project approaches architecture as serving the highest purpose of human life. Its means is the supposition of a Verknüpfung1 of architecture and spirituality. The supposition is developed to address the problem of making a more suitable model for the profession of architectural practice. We are all inexorably moving forward in time and that means change. Taking change into our hands is part of our capacity. Architects make environments, so we could easily remake our professional environment as it needs to be in the public sphere, and to take our capacity to form our environment even in terms of the profession that ‘houses’ our work.
Architecture’s benefit to our societies and the fortunes of the architect are bound up with long term anomalous conditions and the need to re–discover practice of architecture that is superordinate to its means. It is superordinate and drives the implementation and use of means. Can terms that express and verify the essential Verknüpfung of architecture and spirituality in practice initiate that superordinate programme as its ground anew?
The method of this research is based on verifying that architectural practice and spirituality (i.e. spiritual practice) are in close coherence. The study of the practice of rajayoga conjunct with architectural practice shows that what appear today as characteristic issues of architecture practice in modern times are a symptomatology of humanity’s evolution. It develops this symptomatology in light of the architectural profession against a superordinate program. Current practice as posed by Dana Cuff’s evaluative conclusions in The Practice of Architecture2 are reframed as the basis of a symptomatology of current professional practice. Her project is almost a generation back, but it represents the conditions at which the profession remains stuck.
The stage we are in is at the end of (what has become) a limiting condition. Architecture in practice comprehends this in its superordinate programme of the environments that architects in practice form as loci that presence the purpose or Goal of life in serving the aspiration of human consciousness. We have ended up with a profession that seems to support us creating the architecture of concealing architecture.
This project’s approach is to describe the implicit interaction of human conflict and its endemic processes that operate negatively within humanity and against the world are in the profession as representing what we all do and intend. While this is inevitable, is it not without its inherent end. Our technology is a key issue to eliminating conflict as its own self-elimination … I will get to that. Heidegger’s questioning of technology develops the issue in terms of technology and a ‘turning’ from concealed or denied danger (i.e. conflict as normative) with a phenomenological approach.
J. Krishnamurthi and Dr. David Bohm develop a basis for working with this conflict within anyone, with spiritual practice as alternate knowledge of experience. The development of time as interiorized interval that divides far more than the doing from its end, and the increments of measure, indicate monumentality as a form of architecture’s essence, allowing that to express part of this project. Technology bears the ‘wrong turn’ of our human interiorized measure. The ‘turning’ in the epoch of Machine Ages architecture is the ending of humanity’s condition in this period, which architecture serves but is in conflict with. Heidegger’s ‘turn’ or Die Kehre mirrors this.
An approach to this in architecture is developed through thought, technology and phenomenology in terms of the knowledge that spiritual practice, as yoga, can bring. Rajayoga as a highly advanced practice is brought near architectural practice. The Verknüpfung of architecture and spirituality is orientated through this salient rajayogic system of spiritual practice and the knowledge system it belongs to. This has long dealt with the issues that architectural practice faces. The distinction between architectural value and the technology that serves it is developed.
Through these and other steps an approach is formed to face the issues that our globally contemporary architectural professional associations share. The conclusion in PART.V uses Cuff’s work to orientate and as scaffold for the issues of professional practice taken as a symptomatology. The symptomatology, rather than this and that symptom of conflicts in practice, is our approach to reveal the superordinate programme that is called architecture, which points to an ‘after–technology’ architecture that is initiated in response to that symptomatology.
The key intent of G¡a is to ground the unconcealing of architecture in practice as providing environments that support the superordinate programme of all intentional environments, so that architecture presences in each of us as our awareness and not as objects, in as much of the world as we can achieve.
Architectural practice is service to human emancipation as the salutary result of dwelling. The future of architecture at this time means to support ‘after-technology’ architectural practice, which is to assert architectural value, rather than technological value. In doing so, that evolutionary transformation will support a public sphere of humane human life and become the dissolver of the schism between us and nature, merge with the needs implied with the cluster of crises we face and the myriad illness that we bear now, moving beyond mitigation, adaptation and entering our next paradigm.
Postscript. This text points to three items. That architecture and spirituality are essentially linked. That technology is the pivot point in our transition through the end of the current paradigm. That technology in its current form relates to an ever more acute need for humanity to reach a quorum of humane consciousness, which transcends the merely animal–human, and realizes the inherent capacity of anyone to evolve themselves. Architecture has behaves beautifully like nature, absorbing all manner of happenings with equanimity, generosity and simplicity, always pointing toward balance. Hurricanes that relentlessly increase in power, and glaciers that one day vanish, halving the water in this or that river are like decades of the waning presence of architecture, leading to crisis in human wellbeing, very naturally. At some point due our activity, nature cannot retain its function and its natural processes and seems to vanish — picture a vast shopping mall parking lot. At some point the profession began losing its real meaning … or is architecture only now about to gain a new set of prospects?
I use the following definition for Verknüpfung in G¡a. German. A connection that is a combinatory linking operation which joins at a nexus, which in architecture is always awareness in at person at a locus of the world within and without.