N2 Proem. The Goal in Architecture

G¡a N.2 Proem

The proem is my personal observations on this heartfelt project. It may be more meaningful to some of you after reading PART. I of G¡a if you have not been questioning the current paradigm of architecture or have no experience with spiritual practice.

My language may seem weird. Readers may very well complain about this, or stop reading. I remain sanguine and understand that not every piece of writing is always comprehensible to every person, nor at all times. One of these substacks may click, the next may not. Nevertheless, I apologize for my limited abilities.

The project of architecture straddles two areas of expertise that are almost never united concretely on equal terms. The premise of this project is that architectural practice and spirituality are Verknüpft.¹ They are in a tighter than tight orbit, and more than siblings; born of human consciousness, they both exist within it. Our consciousness is reflected in them in two realms; one inward facing and the other is outward facing. I am considering them as equals.

Personal experience in my career has shown that they meet. That meeting is thwarted at every turn in practice, yet it is not impossible, but our present condition has that reaching toward impossibility. As crazy as that seems, it is fitting for our times.

Layers of experience have built up in me that allow questioning of this relationship while remembering politics and economics and social relationships of all sorts; while understanding heroes and war and the relationship of humanity to its mother, the Earth, and importantly, to catch all the fragments and the anomalies, to undo the layers of complexity and confusion to approach the heart and ultimate values.

Since beginning spiritual practice, more heartfelt human relationships and my relationship to nature have become more important to me. The need for harmony with my architectural practice increases. The purpose of practice and business concerns of practicing architecture are oppressive to what architecture needs to be. That becomes personal, engaging my individual responsibility to myself, and the value of my life–time. So it is a natural impulse for me to attempt to unify all of these values.

Matter serves my being as I dwell. Architecture is essentially human and has the same relationship to matter. I suggest that this is true for any activity, but I am qualified to approach architecture.

Spirituality and architecture are ancient, I call them both ‘original’. Architecture has a beginning only if consciousness does. Practices and objects of both document our highest valuation and the most esteemed elements of our lives. Can the conflicts in the profession of architecture be relieved by asserting architecture as fundamentally human brotherly and sisterly activity brought by Nature and based in unity to serve the conscious evolution we aspire? Architecture requires materiality and needs economic utility as does nature, although nature’s metabolism is infinitely broader than economic and technological efficiency.

This project is to do what a specific project to provide architecture at a locus cannot. A built architectural project has specific limits. It is one instance at a time. Individual projects or loci allow intentions to be realized specific to a moment and a context. Architecture has the whole within, if it really occurs. Architecture exists as the widest field of knowledge that address community and collectives, the public sphere and egregores. Vitruvius said it and all ancient and current professional requirements state that an architect should be broadly knowledgeable. This project allows intentions to be realized specific to a moment and a context as architecture that is not sensible as a building.

Every architect braves the struggle of achieving high value outcomes, while the channels of the current profession’s practical operation, as stable and traditional has they seem, are mainly juxtapositional and unresolved. I feel professional practice to be uncanny with complacent affirmations of wildly disparate positions cushioned within banal daily process, with certain conflicts and anomalies normalized, while the confidently presented assertion is that the building is architecture presides over construction. The disjunction of architecture’s purpose and goals and the professional mode of executive practice today seem to me obvious. We have a layer of concealing architecture based in responses to environmental crisis has now become operational, which makes it seem architects can help where we, nevertheless, remain grossly deficient in the scope that we claim as ours.

The narrow questioning of the profession have remained the same for a long time. They are ever better posed, and stated with ever stronger tradition. The struggle with issues of management and design (which is not architecture) that are seemingly satisfied with a flow of new forms of process and technology are only marginally successful. The skill of proposing ever better questions about the architectural profession and practice make most discussion panels seem tame if not pathetic in not daring to provide answers — nor even intending to. The occasional project rises to the call of these questions, but they are very few now.

The need to for questioning the profession is gaining intensity, while for now this still tends mainly to generate doubling down on current values. The simple and natural original need for architecture sustains practice and keeps it vital with the natural flow of the same energy that makes nature itself inexhaustible. Those who know that architecture is essential to humanity might feel complacent We are emboldened to continue as is, while this questioning has not touched the point at which the evolution of architecture is hung up.

Nearly two generations of architects have now proposed questions challenging the Modernist Machine Ages profession and answer with the same questions. With little change to the issues and no fundamental change this itself must be a source of information about the problem. Questioning programmed as desire and the false humility of only questioning so as not to offend become dishonesty.

Questioning the disconnection between architectural value, its education and the intents of architects in business, against the output required of architects in daily practice, ‘management’ in practices, and what the profession expresses compared to its legal and practical structuring — what the professional associations profess to support — is not easy. It is a shattered field of many facets in light of architectural value, with architects clinging to this and that, flotsam and jetsam. Many projects have dealt with this, but they do little to change the profession where it is stuck.

This project engages what is concealed in the profession of architectural practice. The suppositions posed in this project have the power of the questions stated as answers, the known flaws or anomalies that are reiterated as this questioning, and that we all know ad nauseam. These have a power, but is has brought us as far as it can. This project collects all this into a symptomatology.

This architectural project sparkles with embedded technic and method. It is not merely my habit to ‘think’ like an architect, it is also necessary to avoid the pitfalls of exclusively rational grounding, and pretending that objective scientific results are definitive. It uses the techniques of architectural practice, allowing intuition to take its place. There is a need in architecture as there is in spirituality to include what is not rational, not physical and not measurable. In a project of uniting architecture with spirituality one must be prepared to face the threshold where the material, the reasoned and the extroverted evidence, vanishes from touch into the unmeasurable and the immeasurable, just as any architectural project does. I allow such feelings and insights to remain active to let them brush against what is done — and this is knowledge that can only be borne in personal experience in which everyone participates as is architecture.

To be part of the world does not require to expression from within the technological hegemony and to contradict oneself as an architect in the process as did Christian Norberg-Schulz, John Ruskin and many others. A work of art can be given a value of hundreds of millions. The practice of preparing environments to presence architecture must have terms for operating values that are exterior to technology. Although many architects such as Rem Koolhaas have no intention of expressing spirituality, it is nonetheless possible to treat that work identically with any other, such as Ruskin’s, Christopher Alexander’s or Louis Kahn’s, with spiritual practice itself, in secular and non-secular loci, according to certain terms belonging to Being dwelling that are superordinate to the range of what is seen as ‘constructed’ in dwelling. There is no escape, but it is so often in concealing terms. This is what rajayoga, in concert with indigenous knowledge of many peoples, with its step-child phenomenology, opens up for us through its practical means and documentary evidence of this part of ourselves.

There is no way to work from outside dwelling. It is necessary to state that. We are alive in this life in this form; we are in it until the end. Yet, no activity of dwelling in the world can be exclusively material. This express inclusivity of realms or ‘worlds’ that are not material or possessing sensible evidence in architecture is accepted in this project of G¡a, and it is addressed concretely.

Instead of an approach based in textual linearity or dependent on ‘exact’ extroverted scientific research or the conventions of design/research projects for architectural practice that talk about ‘design’ (which is a science of organizing things), this project absorbs those technologies, those measurables and systems of mensuration and techniques, within a structure that is served by them — as means for presencing architecture. This project can be accepted as true as any work of architecture, according to its holistic preparation as a locus for the experience of the reader.

But this is no philosophical work. It engages that kind of thing where it is culturally stable, like Heidegger’s work that is backed up by a vast industry of scholarship, and does not require the ragged ends of belief or digging into obscure corners. However, an open mind is requested because the juxtaposition of some points are traditionally or popularly opposed or considered oxymoronic. Spirituality is hardly developed in the sphere of contemporary professional architectural practice and often treated with distaste. New terms are needed.

There are seeming great leaps involved in questioning materialism and current technology, not to mention questioning science directly with architectural practice in association with spiritual practice. To question technology’s reign within architecture might itself seem for many to be a breach. Technology is after all the bread and butter of most architects’ business. Architecture was never dependent upon technology; it existed long before. Architectural practice does not need to be this dependent upon its subordinates (engineering, technology, etc.). Breaking from that dependence will add responsibility that is tremendously important to humanity, to conscious wellbeing and to nature, and it is of great scope. It will provide for a huge increase in the fortunes of practicing architects.

What has no answerable questions is not disprovable and is thus not ‘scientific’. This leaves us a lot of opportunity. Objective western science does not touch the inner feelings of human life due to its form. It does not mean that something does not exist, only that science cannot investigate it. Architects can. If a feeling is not something we can prove, then it is also not something that we can disprove. What we can ascertain beyond the material sensible life is as architecture, with no defining data of measure.

Technological requirements can be a way to avoid personal experience of being humane. This is a critical issue in architectural practice, in the structure of projects and their outcome. But we are free to proceed even if a scientist or a technologist is unable to verify spirituality and its parameters, for neither can they define architecture, life, love and feelings, all of which most clearly exist. So we should unconcealed architecture from technology.

The issues that we have with technology and its sciences, and how we use them, are a reflection of the inner human condition. The history of this extends back into the mists of time for us today as part of dwelling and it is spiritual practice to deal with them. Removing the hinderances anyone must face in their inner life (i.e. through spiritual practice) is the same as what architects must do now to reveal the architecture that it may be presented. No matter how irrelevant or nonexistent or not-perceptible or concealed spirituality may seem, it is nevertheless a formidable essence in all areas of human life. No matter how irrelevant or nonexistent or not-perceptible or concealed architecture may seem, it is nevertheless a formidable presence in all areas of human life. The results of experiencing these are as valid as any science.

Evidently, all cultures through history had architecture that was of the divine. This is significant and not primitive. Palaces and the grand secular buildings had nonetheless to represent the activities of the divine through the king, emperor, priest, or religious congregations convened in the name of religion, spirituality or claiming to be divine. They may not have been, but the intentional value for that was very high. Architecture had to do with God and life that transcends the material life that we can touch feel and cognize directly through the sense organs. Every heart can experience the same transcendence. Even if we are ambitious, scientific and objective, and begin with skepticism, the subtle and the stillness in the heart does not go away. We might not feel strong enough or we can have the confidence to look at it.

Skepticism and critical thinking will not be harmed or disrespected, where spirituality is practiced. I aspire a foundation of faith and trust and hope, rather than skepticism, analysis and materialist reductionist pragmatism. I take on the necessity of addressing the problem of architecture, architectural practice and the profession from the point of view that being exists far beyond the five senses and thought, and that I need to train and struggle for whatever it is and however subtle it may be because there is no way to seriously deny it is there. Architectural practice can be radically energetic and is joyous in hopeful provisory totality that absolutely includes all that may be.

The Goal in Architecture is, thus, a project of two commonly accepted children of consciousness that becomes a story of access to their unity, verifying the supposition of the Verknüpfung of architecture with spirituality. This project is necessarily broad; its precision is lateral, describing a field. It is a strategic scaffold that spans the necessary points. It can be built out, verified further and developed. The project is anchored at many points by well known work by Shri Ram Chandra of Shajahanpur, Krishnamurthi and Dr. David Bohm, Heidegger and his building on the work of Edmund Husserl, Heidegger, John Ruskin, Louis I. Kahn, Rem Koolhaas, Rudolph Steiner, Dana Cuff and many others that are embedded with their well developed scholarship.

This about building the superordinate program of architecture anew. The conditions in the architectural profession and in our cultures that are familiar are made in the public sphere by everyone to give orientation and meaning to the Verknüpfung with spirituality. There may be unexpected relationships as the exact contours of the landscape are experienced. I have turned the corner to completing my calling in this life in this way.

Postscript: This project remains a prototype, as is any architectural project. I am reminded of the colossal size of the first functional transistor. Billions of them now fit in any device. Once after-technology architecture is unconcealed in the public sphere, the public and the profession, it will get more efficient. This rewriting is a step in that direction.

1. 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.