PART.I Goal.3 — Spirituality as path. Aligning Architectural Practice.

The Goal in Architecture — The goal of life aspires advancing the profession of architecture.

Jul 25, 2026

We are developing the profession of architecture's alignment with spirituality and how it serves spirituality. This article turns to how architecture supports the goal of spiritual practice as a path that has multiple forms equivalent with our individuality.

Awareness of the Goal

The goal of spirituality and the goal of life must be linked. The goal is proposed as an orientation toward the most meaningful and valuable attainment that life offers. This goal could be within life, whereby a life does end. Or it could be transcendent of physical life, extending beyond this one lifetime and beyond visible and haptic qualities. This has been discussed over hundreds of years, and we have collectively researched it for thousands of years. We argue the validity of this or that view, while not easily acknowledging that some of us may simply have a better vantage point. Acceptance of this is a key value.

A goal of life is conceptually conceivable even if its ultimate character is inconceivable. That is actually inherent in such a goal. Everyone’s knowledge of it is subjective to each point along the path. We are limited by what is perceptible to each of us. While limitations posed by the quality of our awareness and attention can be transcended with practice, we are all in uniquely formed paths at unique points.

Spiritual practice is a path, a way, and a vector toward the goal. We are that path and the destination. Our point of view changes as our awareness evolves. The advance of consciousness through self–transformation requires terms to represent our goal that accept the tremendous variety of knowledge of and stages of awareness.

I can bracket understanding such a goal using two well known approaches to humanity’s origin:

Our life today is as result of evolution that built up from the elements, through single cell life emerging out of primeval slime, marine life, amphibians and vertebrates, traumatic climatic and geological events, arriving at human consciousness relatively recently.
The big bang, which is calledkshobin the Indian Traditional Knowledge System (ITKS), expanded from pure, subtle, pre-temporal and pre-material space. A swirl of intention that set off time and movement. The energy that forms the universe gained solidity until the energy we know as matter resulted. The cascading impulses sincekshobform entities that embody consciousness. Consciousness originated at that beginning and now we appear in Nature as we do.

The big bang is a fact according to science, and it is ancient knowledge in the ITKS, with texts now being dated back as far as before 10000 BCE.1 The model of consciousness evolving from primaeval being focusses on living physical properties of life; our consciousness evolving out of the slime. It accounts for consciousness as a higher form of reasoning. The ancient ITKS model describes consciousness as the original animating principle of the universe and Nature. Science has created proof for the former and evidence for both models.

There is no need to deny either model. But for the purpose of re-discovering architectural practice and its profession, we need to work with consciousness because architecture is not the building. Architecture orientates to consciousness while the human made environment, with matters of shelter and hygiene, are the means for it. Architecture goes beyond material value by harmonizing our doings in human life and its goal, through the problems solved and designed features and forms that harmonize with Nature, which includes consciousness.

A qualified practicing architect has the freedom to engage this potential, while it cannot be measured and costed when it extends beyond the matter of building. Especially talented students of architecture assume that there is value beyond material quantity in our constructed environments. It is here that spirituality meets architecture.

We recognize architecture that is ancient and across the world in all cultures. It is not entropic; architecture always gains value and grows. Although buildings can be made for death (e.g. a crematorium) and destruction (e.g. a war museum or monument), it is not these. It never has the value of garbage. But it might express decomposition and the metabolism of re-appointing energy. Architecture is essentially of properties of the path to the goal. It includes participation in our relationship with Nature. How does it work to support spiritual well being and advancement?

An architect may grow in experience, constantly feeling change in what that programme to provide for architecture appears to be as stages are crossed.If consciousness is taken in hand, then it becomes spirituality — a path — where the goal of life is a value. Consciousness implies its aspiration.Every one of us evolves. Everyone, including the practicing architect, is dependent on the stage of their awareness for the quality of the work they do. The practicing architect evolves architecture as the attributes of harmony and unity are ever better attained, and Nature and Reality is better known. Architecture is verified by personal experienceas it presences thesevalues that arise from the whole of life and our doings. Architecture satisfies the awareness of the goal of life, and thus spirituality, in terms of a local context at a locus, but it transcends culture. Rather than mixing up architectural practice and spiritual practice, there is a special link to everyone through spirituality that facilitates achieving architecture. The implications are for a paradigm change in the profession, but not for architecture.

Finding Acceptable Terms for a Goal

Everyone has their own viewpoint in which spirituality and architecture are revealed or remain untouched. Spirituality is always available, as is architecture, while it is rare today. All of us participate, even if it is behind high walls of ignorance. High walls, a forest between you and the lake, or other barriers do not destroy what we haven’t yet experienced. Everyone’s own viewpoint is subject to the public sphere’s values. Forces that limit and constrain come with our training and education, even as they enlighten and expand our knowledge. There are highly refined approaches to understanding and developing what a goal of life might be. Attainment of that knowledge hinges on experience. Absence is also experience of something, if we don’t get convinced that something is not there at all.

Discrimination (viveka) is called for to refine our experience of the path toward the goal. Meditation is part of yoga. It is practical means to gain the mental refinement and to gain control and capacity for such refinement.

Humility allows an attitude of securing and leaving behind stages that we evolve through. It is also about accepting that everyone is at different stages. It allows us to take on guidance. Humility allows us to benefit from experiences so that we can really absorb them and accept change to gain new stages and apply new knowledge. No terms for the goal will work without humility. Scientific discovery supports humility only narrowly, just as science is a sliver of natural philosophy’s expansive approach.

Modernism throws out elements that link to humane value.

Scientists evolved away from natural philosophers who preferred to be called ‘men of science’. Men of science felt that the empirical methodology that scientists use was a downgrade from their deeper speculative inquiry that imbibes questions that science cannot. Although known as scientists today, Thomas H. Huxley and Lord Kelvin refused to be called scientists. Science eclipsed natural philosophy in the popular view by the end of the 1800s.

Scientific method proves the success or failure of a hypothesis. It is power and results orientated. Positive and negative results both provide new knowledge. Both verify knowledge that is perceived enough to create the hypothesis for testing. A scientist cannot say that something is absent unless the experiment is well designed around defining that absence. A lot of what is absent in our cultures cannot be scientifically defined as an absence.

A true scientist will say that any result is temporary information that awaits more research. Building technological solutions anchor science, making its discoveries solid with a capital value. The next scientific discovery cannot easily change what was already built. Scientific advancement is hindered if the object is to last 50, 100, or 1000 years. The overall effect of our built world is to slow scientific advancement, while it entrenches the current essence of technology in human life very deeply.

We have need of the improved services and comfort that technology provides. But what has happened as qualities that do not have a direct expression in that technology lose our attention? Our antecedent cultures were not technological in the Modern sense of the Machine Ages.2 Our contemporary building technology is solutions for a historical necessity that conceals the expression of the infinity ‘beyond’ that a goal of life implies. Fast technological change based in science that does not know what scientific method cannot ask removes those qualities in essence.

Technology excludes Nature through the use of mechanisms that form bulwarks against Nature’s life. Even experiencing Nature and comprehending its life has become hard for many people. Architects do not generally recognize this.

Architecture built of succinct science–based Machine Ages technology is segregated from Nature. It must still be ‘in’ Nature, and it remains part of humanity’s spiritual path. This is a conundrum for us all. When architects engage technology, it still bears that concealed ‘other’ still within Nature, since we are literally made with it. You see the gap? We are building blindly with shattered parts, yet we must do it in the world that always remains whole, entrenching in every place our grossly limiting environment. Every human being is that whole. And this gap represents our stage of mind.

The qualities borne in our past built world that cannot be borne in our current technology. Love, purpose of life, and humanity within Nature and Nature as a living being, are expressed as functions in scientific inquiry’s narrow outcomes. Hence, our conflicted human nature is, nevertheless, represented as the conundrum of the concealing Machine Age technological building set. This is an important starting point for renewed effort at change.

We may look at the threshold where Modernist ideals began to erase the past to find that which traditional architecture carried and to feel the lines of exclusion of this technological value, borne in the built world forms. Modernist architects’ original change-making, based on centuries of knowledge acquisition, began well before it was made concrete as Machine Ages technology. But the change built in our environments is not far back. Two examples from the early days of Modernism in Europe show this decisive change.

Vienna, Prague and Budapest were three of the late 19th century's wealthiest cities. Massive incoming migration demanded sanitary housing quickly. They included public toilets and a public source of potable water on every floor. In the left image is an older house in Budapest with newer ‘Gründerzeit’ housing just visible on the left side of the image, with more new building behind it. On the right is Kauerhof in Vienna in the 1990s, about 100 years after it was built. The house in Budapest is an image from Pattern Languag,3 a 1970s impulse that resulted from re-assessing what was being lost. The choice of the image is brilliantly expresses a quality of life that Alexander made so clear.

Above right is the 1924 Plan Voisin for the 3rd and 4th Arrondissement in Paris by Le Corbusier. On the left is the area today, and in the middle is an image of a typical street and built fabric. My colleagues and I held Le Corbusier up as a great architect. According to that, we misunderstood this project as commentary. Now I am sure that it was his intention to build Plan Voisin in the spirit of Europe’s Modernist rebuilding in the first half of the 20th century. The early Modernist intent to destroy older limiting cultural characteristics was a salutary erasure for the architectural profession. The Modernists perhaps rightly turned on the past due to obstinate social blockages that the existing urban fabric supported. The intention was to renew architecture, while not responding to technological change put the professional at risk. If architecture presences as awareness, how would awareness be changed from the old fabric of Paris with a development like Plan Voisin?

On a superficial level, new methods and better technology do not require mechanical repetitiveness mimicking industrial mass production. They are there to imply modernity, order and cleanliness. Mass production still implies betterment and we maintain that value and its visual cue today, although these values are now often in question as lowly commodified production.

More subtly, that erasure and the replacement was already creating the AEC industry’s technicist concealing characteristic. The erasure of the form of the soon-to-be past, also removed certain values and qualities that are not replaced. Technology itself brings qualities into architecture in a trojan horse of power and efficiency. Or, perhaps this trojan horse infects us with a lack, shiny powerful outcomes concealing a now all too familiar emptiness of heart. Aspirational capacity is still borne in contemporary architectural practice, but the constructed objects conceal it when it does not provide for architecture.

It seems that humanity is much the same as before, but with more power. We were not able to neutralize our past difficulties and to change because the architects and their clients are themselves not beyond them, even if they felt a powerful force pulling them forward. The positive and negative effects of the profession are the same as is our own character, and our society and culture.

The eradication of past architecture to allow for Modernism was an ambiguous win. Old infrastructure may not be functional any longer and the economics that put them up may be gone, yet they have values that we still recognize and enjoy. Now we know that these are values that our cultures retain for wellbeing. Local indigenous elements now get protection as cultures struggle to remain alive where modernism, its technicism, and its forms of consumerism and commercialism capture wealth. Traditional vernacular and local cultural elements and architecture often bear elements that hold these values and bear remembrance of the immeasurable values beyond the material, technological objective forms that anchor us in our Machine Ages. Traditions and vernacular forms are often wielded to bring values that oppose a culture and economy ever more committed to technological values.

History remains within us as our built environment inflects all that we do; it reflects the past through us. This has two dimensions. Elements of life and Nature were borne in traditional building. Their erasure included the erasure of an essence of what we were trying to save in new forms. But now I am asking what if the ‘new’ Modern technology negates that essence? What is the essence of the humane in the environments of the past? What is it that we retained so easily, and so painfully?

The Bauhaus had its central role in creating the International Style that solidified Modernism across the world. It’s truly new, almost alien, form, colours, light and movement, and Johannes Itten’s first year curriculum pointed to new possibilities, as did Rudolph Steiner and others, while embracing technology fully. This is a lot different than what actually came to be after WWII. But did the Bauhaus really embrace technology fully? The German ruling powers leading to WWII stopped the Bauhaus. What was it that so infuriated them?

Now we are often so confused that even the exact opposite of the stated goal appears to be the goal anyway. Discussion and policy is not necessarily based on fact. What is fact? It can appear as political corruption, but that is only a visible face of what each of us faces now.

Knowingly Knowing the Known Unknown

Over 90% of the universe is proven to be ‘dark matter’ and dark ‘energy’. We speak of that as ‘out there’, somewhere. But it is not only ‘out there’. It is throughout everything, including our mind and bodies. Apparently, the major part of us is concealed! Architecture includes this too.

Our built world does not add up to this larger part of us. We consider knowledge is true when ‘it works.’ Incrementally, and at an accelerating pace, the evidence that this is wrong is growing. The objects that science provides us with do not help us to provide architecture without engaging the unknown of love and life. This parallels difficulties in providing ourselves a peaceful loving home. The issue is no longer technical sanitation and shelter. We are reaching a threshold where turning to this vast wholeness becomes our saving. A place that is prepared to presence architecture brings the experiencer to their capacity for presencing all that cannot be built or measured.

We are always on the threshold of doing that individually. That path we enter or re-enter, if we left it, is our particular threshold on our own particular path; each on of us. A goal of life, thus, yearns for the presencing of architecture as the expression of our aspiration for transformation in this way, as we dwell. We yearn for a natural environment. That yearning includes cities and interiors away from the land and each one of us as as our body and our conscious awareness are Nature. How we live to prepare to transform our consciousness is our nature in Nature.

The supposition is that the purpose of human life in its highest form attains nearness and then identicality with the original source of our existence. This is the goal. The spectrum of what that actually means from every POV begins with denial of its existence and extends through self discovery that appears through history as utterly transformative evolution taking place in each one of us. Architecture shines with that spectrum.

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