N.1 Preface to The Goal in Architecture
G¡a — The Goal in Architecture
The G¡a series presents my research for the future of the profession of architecture. There will be quite a lot of articles, keeping to readable Substack portions, modifying the research to make it appropriate in this form. The articles published up until now are being substantially revised and I am completing the rest. The total will reach 50 or more articles. The introductory N –Series articles will remain available to all. You can read all of G¡a using a paid subscription until you are done.
The project is titled,
The Goal in Architecture
The mutual claiming of one another of spirituality and architecture.
This Preface is revised, and the following articles, including the rest of the N – Series introductory articles through #17 will be revised.
This Preface introduces key points that we will be crossing over the course of G¡a. Expectations and traditions will be challenged. The terms I use are meant to be descriptive. Typical nomenclature often invokes packaged assumptions that are anachronistic. For example, architects in North America are using the term ‘design’ to imply everything that an architect might do, yet it truly is only one technique in the process of project production. To use the term this way implies a belonging to the current process, so I do not use ‘design’ like that.
You are forewarned that this will bring new concepts in combinations that may be unexpected.
The whole of The Goal in Architecture addresses the weakening architectural profession. It approaches architecture as serving the highest purpose of human life. It is initiated with a supposition of a Verknüpfung of architecture and spirituality. I use the following definition for Verknüpfung, a German term: connectedness and a combinatory linking operation that joins at a nexus. You and I are that nexus individually, but all of us together form that nexus within the earth’s life and its ‘nature’. This supposition is taken, similar to a hypothesis, as a way to bring spirituality into the space of the architect’s work functionally. It is developed to address the problem of making a more suitable model for the profession of architectural practice. It is for a strong profession that is representative of architecture.
I define architecture as awareness within a person of their evolving aspiration at a particular locus of the world that has been prepared by people, for people. From this fact, all else unfolds. Architecture is not buildings and is superordinate to building and all of the programs that may derive that building, its construction and the use of its means. Architecture is internal as our experience and is not the building. It is part of nature, including conscious intentionality in humanity’s purpose and thus serves and is served in unity with nature. It is the need to (re)discover our connection to the source of life, to love, to evolve and aspire our highest value. Value is taken here are multi-faceted and for you to expand on as your own. Architecture’s benefit to our societies has to do with the goal of life, while the fortunes of the architect are bound up today with long term anomalous conditions that form the need to re–discover practice of architecture that is superordinate to its means.
As such, architecture is an entirely distinct element, as stated in OPA moves ahead with G¡a, The Serial, from building, and originates in consciousness rather than the materiality of the world. Thus, the need to rediscover architecture at multiple levels, from the individual architect to the profession and within our cultures.
Lack of Architecture
The profession is at an end stage. Architecture in practice comprehends this. How? Current architecture in practice is structured around realizing buildings. We have ended up today with a profession that represents this as creating the architecture of concealing architecture. Buildings are called architecture, and the profession that organizes itself around this, but the results are not necessarilly nor often architecture. Architecture is not required, and how can it be? The education of professional degrees often still attempts to inculcate that requirement at a personal level, and more successfully develop it in those who natively know it. I have heard more than once the frustration of firm’s management telling a room that what new graduate architects bring to the firm is a lot of impractical unrealistic bullshit. They are often angry. The unpleasant truth of everyday experience is that a project is not architecture because an architect worked on it.
However, what we do as conscious beings always implies that architecture would be realized. This is where this project finds its footing. Whenever humans alter the environment, the potential for architecture is enlivened. If that potential is built as forms of the factors that stop it, while still calling it architecture, I call that concealed. Concealing architecture, as opposed to architecture, is my way of expressing that whatever humanity builds, our active presence means architectural potential is a priori present.
It is so difficult to differentiate that potential for architecture from its realization when our current profession imbibes so deeply in exploiting that assumption. This is core of why the profession is losing value. Defining concealing architecture is my way of expressing this potential when it is thwarted, but nevertheless represents human intent and aspiration, as failing to provide architecture.
The method of this research is based on verifying that architectural practice and spirituality (i.e. spiritual practice) are in close coherence, or Verknüpft. The study of knowledge borne in the practice of rajayoga and its antecedents, in conjunction with, phenomenology, architects and their work, and the form of professional practice, shows that contemporary architectural practice is a symptomatology, not merely characteristic issues to overcome in practice. It develops this symptomatology in light of the architectural profession as being a superordinate program of our natural environment.
Current practice as posed by Dana Cuff’s evaluative conclusions in The Practice of Architecture1 are reframed as the basis of this symptomatology. Her project is almost a generation back, yet it represents the conditions at which the profession remains stuck.
Conflict
This project approaches its intention through human conflict with endemic processes that operate negatively within humanity and against the ‘world’. While this conflict is inevitable, and our culture resolutely attributes conflict to the character of the universe, it has its inherent salutary end. G¡a builds on this as temporary outcomes on humanity’s path toward emancipation from this conflict in mind and action. When the conditions are of this conflict, there is no architecture. Our technology is a key issue to eliminating conflict as its own self-elimination … this is introduced above and is deeply engaged in PART.II of G¡a.
Heidegger’s questioning of technology develops the issue in terms of technology and a critical ‘turning’ from concealed or denied danger (i.e. conflict as normative) within the phenomenological approach. Technology, like the mind’s troublesome characteristics, are the solution to the conundrums that we face. We can link technology to the human condition. We all know when our thoughts are not under control and our wishes get the better of us, against our, hopefully present, better judgement. This is the ancient schism within us that divides intent between pleasure and doing right.
J. Krishnamurthi and Dr. David Bohm develop a basis for anyone to work with the natural tendency of conflict to be eliminated within themselves, implicating spiritual practice as alternate knowledge of awareness. They use the term conflict, but it has many facets that all access that same need in consciousness. Study of mind over millennia has shown how evolution of conscious awareness will bring a moment where conflict is ended. J. Krishnamurthi and Dr. David Bohm link the condition of time where interval is interiorized in mind to conflict, which divides the purpose of what we might be doing from the ends we intend. Increment and measure in our minds, programming it that way, form our ideas about science and the technology it serves. These imply monumentality, which we project onto ancient buildings, but which we have made today. Understanding as expereince to eliminate this condition is the path toward our humane nature, and onward. It is a component of architecture’s essence, and is part of how G¡a expresses the outcomes of its project.
J. Krishnamurthi is resolute that the ‘ending of time’ in this way is sudden and needs, only readiness. Process for its preparation is avoidance. Heidegger’s ‘turn’ or Die Kehre mirrors this. This project engages Heidegger’s ‘turning’ (kehre) in finding the ending of humanity’s condition in this epoch of Machine Ages architecture,2 which architecture is held conflict with, until that is put to its end. These G¡a articles will describe these elements and more to show how they link and together form the essence of the symtomatology that it develops. G¡a develops an approach to architecture through interrelating thought, technology and phenomenology in terms of the knowledge that spiritual practice as yoga can bring, to make that turn beyond technology. Rajayoga as a highly evolved practical knowledge system can function to relate spiritual practice to the practice of architecture.
Technology is a form of techné that bears the ‘wrong turn’ of our human interiorized measure. I relate these and other cross-cultural modes to provide the fullness of our technological culture that lacks a deep spiritual approach. The Technology can be ported to spirituality today, as Aristotle did it so long ago.
Knowledge of consciousness and its evolution is brought near architectural practice to explore the profession’s anachronistic state and its inherent progress. This system and all systems of spiritual growth have long histories with the issues that architectural practice faces today. This approach faces the issues that all contemporary architectural professional associations around the world share by developing the distinction between architectural value and the technology that serves it.
Results
The project is structured in five parts that are outlined in N 3.1 Defining the profession’s disjunction and a path forward in 5 PARTS.
The conclusion in PART.V uses Dana Cuff’s work. Cuff’s work stands the test of time as a register of current practice. It stands the test of time arguably because the profession has become anachronistic. She provides a clarity around various issues that make current practice difficult. Theses hurdles have become symptoms of the lack in the paradigm. Rather than a series of items of concern for the practicing architect, her work thus now serves us as a scaffold for professional practice taken as a symptomatology. Taking these problems and conflicts to stand for the characteristics of professional practice that remain unsolved for generations as a symptomatology informs the needed paradigm change. This brings G¡a to salient practical conclusions that locate us at the threshold of professionally engaging the superordinate programme that is called architecture again, and to point to ‘after–technology’ architecture.
The intent of G¡a is to facilitate a base upon which this profession that supports architectural practice as environments that are prepared to allow each of us to presence architecture.
G¡a describes our current profession as a symptomatology and implies a path toward understanding architectural practice as an original service for human spiritual growth, evolution and emancipation as the salutary result of dwelling. We discriminate what architectural value is, turning from the facile approach of expressing technological value as buildings that we call architecture. In doing so, we will transform the profession to support a public sphere of humane life, contributing to reuniting us with nature, moving beyond sustainability, mitigation, and adaptation, merging in the needs implied by the cluster of social, economic and natural crises that we face now.
Modified from the original 20260307. Originally published 20241010.
I use this term like Reyner Banham, referencing Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, which is also a history. The Machine Age is often considered to end after WWII. I feel that considering computing, based on the on/off digital switch as the ‘mechanics’ that it works with and creates in our cultures to be part of the machine ages — and so plural. Our profession today is absolutely a product of the First Machine Age that is sort of adapting to the further permutations. It is not changing, i.e it is stuck, because it is a non-sequitur to think architecture as machine.