Root Post

A-02 The beginning of how we steward the environment as architecture.

This is a root post. The riddle of whether the tree or the seed comes first is resolved here as the tree. The architecture proposed in these publications is to be like the growth of a tree that is somehow evolved from how it began as a seedling. This tree is not only evolved, but it is evolving as it grows. This tree is striving to be evolutionary growth right from its roots.

There is a lot of rotting wood, decayed bits in this place that are very good nutrients to work from. The sun is showing through a canopy that has a lot of room for new trees to fill it. Some may say that there is no forest. I don't want to be negative, and although it seems to me to be a sparse decadent forest, I am not going to call it dead or a pasture. It needs to be a forest. This is the re-emergence of a tree in a forest that needs it in the natural process where the ecosystem of the forest reverts to decay and rebuilds itself.

I hope that you can tell that I mean that the functioning of the 'archi–sphere' is weak. No one will deny that architecture has significant meaning and history. But people have too little interest in it, while almost anyone will call just about anything that is built architecture. Most professionals would agree that architecture is for building only. The profession is organized around monetizing its work as a proportion of the value of building. The architect cannot afford to work with straw and mud on this basis, or for the poor or humanity’s conscious wellbeing.

The horror inflicted on the animal and plant world over the last century is now going to be lived by us, naturally, since we are part of it. Architects and everyone involved in forming our environments bear a tremendous responsibility for these events. We can now expect that more and more of the things we hold for true and that we depend on will change or fall away with the conviction and the force of nature keeping its order within its laws with orders of power that dwarf us. We are nevertheless part of that power.

Architecture is currently the architecture of concealing that, concealing itself in the process. Architecture carries forward its full power concealed in vast efforts to build and to remake the world as we humans see fit. I want to take action because I feel that it is not fitting that the biosphere is badly broken and the climate is now changing rapidly in ways that we would not choose. Carbon mitigation is not enough.

The environments we make or use are intended to benefit us. The issue is of who is benefitted and at what strata these benefits accrue, as well as what creating benefits in one place cost (at) another place. What we consider to be (bene)fitting is often strongly influenced by un-reconsidered convenience and habit that cost far more than what we actually get, if the whole equation is taken into account. Architecture emerges from this wholeness.

Architecture is going to move forward and be more fully architecture.

This office intends to contribute to the development of a wider architectural remit than the profession currently supports. The work of the Office for Presenting Architecture will start with our roots in the Modern Machine Ages concept of the profession that educates and certifies most architects to practice.

I can feel an evolutionary force. If we are less honest we feel erosion and increasing difficulties. We can be more honest so that growth and change can be embraced and made into a great adventure. How do we become more honest?

The Office for Presencing Architecture is for finding out what that means. Architecture is for people and for nature, not buildings. There are lots of people who take human responsibility for stewarding the environment seriously. We dare to feel that architecture as a profession is part of humanity, and of human consciousness and its spirituality, which has always been the venue for human aspiration expressed in the environment. This Office aspires to be the document of the emergence of an architecture out of the fertile ground of the world as is; out of the architectural profession as it is. We can create a profession as caring to people as medicine intends to be.

We are now at the equivalent moment to mid–19thC Europe, when steam power was taking hold in Europe, they were mainly oblivious or in denial, also angry, (like John Ruskin), over the vast changes that modern science and technology would bring. The needs of society were clear, while the means were not yet clear and hardly formed, and there was as yet little movement ...

I feel that it is possible to turn our approach to a view based on adding what we are not doing, evolving what we have and do to serve us better there.