N2 Proem. The Goal in Architecture

G¡a N.2 Proem

This 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, especially 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. I am an architect, so my thinking is spatial. It is training and hard work to express values and ideas in a strictly linear mode. As an architect I am better at proximities and multiple simultaneous relationships in space and time. In text, this mode can appear vague and undisciplined.

One of these substacks may click, the next may not. Nevertheless, I apologize for my limited abilities.

This 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 almost equals, where spirituality comes first and architecture is its doting, loving sibling.

Personal experience in my career has shown that these are a pair. That pairing is thwarted at every turn in practice. It is not impossible becuase it is true, but our present condition has that relationship reaching toward estrangement. As crazy as that seems, it is fitting for our crazy 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 the Earth that it is part of,

to catch all the fragments and the anomalies,

to unwind layers of complexity and confusion, only to leave them as they are, and

to approach the heart and enliven ultimate values.

Since beginning spiritual practice, more heartfelt human relationships and my relationship to nature have become more important to me. The need for personal harmony with my architectural practice increased. The purpose of practice and business concerns of practicing architecture form a conundrum of facility and opposition to what architecture needs to be. Engaging my individual responsibility to myself, and the value of my life–time is personal. It is a natural impulse for me to attempt to unify all of these values.

Matter and the biosphere and the life of the planet serves my being as I dwell. Architecture is essentially human and has the same relationship to world. This is true for any activity, but I am qualified to address architecture. Here is my big question: Can the conflicts in the profession of architecture be relieved by asserting architecture as fundamentally human brotherly and sisterly activity formed by Nature through humanity 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. Spirituality and architecture are ancient. They are both ‘original’. Architecture has a ‘beginning’ only if human consciousness does. Practices and the objects of both spirituality and architecture document our highest values and the most esteemed elements of our lives. Nature as big concept is the mixing bowl.

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 its whole within any project or locus, if it actually occurs. Architecture exists as a very great field of knowledge that addresses community and collectives, the public sphere and egregores. This project allows the intention for architecture to be realized in a context of thought. We can remember it as building, or as theory, and as the environments where it ‘happens’ in a broad way.

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. The meaning of it all appears as an institution. I feel professional practice to be uncanny with complacent affirmations of wildly disparate positions cushioned within banal daily process. Certain conflicts and anomalies are normalized to confidently present the assertion that the building is architecture. The profession presides over building technology and construction. Architecture’s nominal purpose and goal to provide architecture and the professional mode of executive practice today seem to me obviously disjunct. The daily output and responses to the multi-sides and multi-type environmental crisis has now become operational, making it seem that architects can help.

We remain grossly deficient in the scope that we claim as the profession’s. The narrow questioning of the profession has remained the same for a long time. Nearly two generations of architects have now proposed questions challenging the Modernist Machine Ages profession and answer those 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.

The struggle with issues of management and design that appears to satisfy the rank and file with a flow of new forms of building, process and technology are 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 to the issues that I will address — nor even intending to. The occasional project rises to the call of these questions. They are great, but they are very few now.

The need to for questioning the profession is gaining in intensity. For now, that tends mainly to generate doubling down on current values. The simple and natural original presence of architecture need for what it does for us sustains the profession and keeps it vital with the natural flow of the same energy in human life that makes nature itself inexhaustible. Those who know that architecture is essential to humanity might feel complacent. We are emboldened to continue as is becuase economic and individual success can be put up, like a Potemkin Town. Questioning the profession has not touched the point at which the evolution of architecture is hung up.

Questioning the disconnection understanding what architecture actually is and what architectural value might be today, its education vs. the intents of architects in business, against the output required of architects in daily practice, as ‘management’ in practices, and what the profession expresses comparing its legal and practical structuring — what the professional associations profess to support — and that it is not architecture 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.

This project engages what is concealed in the profession of architectural practice. The suppositions posed in this project bear but supersede the power of the same old questioning of known flaws and anomalies that are reiterated as questions, never to be answered, that we all know ad nauseam. These have brought us as far as they 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. The need in architecture is as in spirituality to include what is beyond the rational, and not objectively measurable in increments. In a project uniting architecture with spirituality one must be prepared to face the threshold where the material, the reasoned and 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 to be discovered as knowledge that is revealed in personal experience in which everyone participates together.

To be part of the world does not require us to express ourselves from within the technological hegemony and thereby to contradict oneself as did Christian Norberg-Schulz to communicate. 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, and spiritual practice itself, in secular and non-secular loci, according to certain terms belonging to human Being that dwells that is superordinate to what is materially ‘constructed’ in dwelling. There is no escape, but it is so often in concealed in the techno-legal terms of the profession.

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. So gaining an exterior view for objectivity is kind of nuts. Yet, no activity of dwelling in the world can be exclusively material. This express inclusivity of realms and ‘worlds’ that are not material nor having any sensible evidence is accepted in this project of G¡a, and it is addressed concretely.

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

But this is no philosophical work. It engages that kind of thing where it is culturally stable, like Heidegger’s work, which is widely accepted and backed up by a vast industry of Heidegger scholarship. This project does not require the ragged ends of philosophical digging into obscure corners. However, an open mind is requested because the juxtaposition of some elements that are traditionally or popularly opposed.

There are seeming great leaps involved in questioning materialism and current technology. 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 (e.g. engineering, technology, and their sciences). Breaking from that dependence will add responsibility for architects that is tremendously important to humanity, to conscious wellbeing and to nature. 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. Architecture is something that we can ascertain beyond the material sensible life, with no defining data of measure.

Spirituality is hardly developed in the sphere of contemporary professional architectural practice and often treated with distaste. New terms are needed. 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 as part of dwelling, and it is spiritual practice to deal with them. 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. 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. So we should unconceal architecture from within technology.

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 to represent the activities of the divine convened in the name of a ruler, a religion, spirituality or direct claim to be divine. They may not have been, but the intentional value for that was very high. Architecture had to do with life that transcends material life that we can touch feel and cognize directly through the senses. Every heart can experience this 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.

Critical thinking will not be lost where spirituality is in play. I aspire a foundation of faith and trust and hope, rather than skepticism, whereby analysis and material pragmatism remain necessary. 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 thinking, and that I need to train and struggle for whatever it is, and however subtle it may be, there is no way to seriously deny it is there. Architectural practice can be 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 step toward 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 works and scholarship.

This about building the superordinate program of architecture anew. I have turned the corner to completing my calling in this life in this way.

Revised. 20260302. MK.

Postscript: This project remains a prototype. 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, it will get more efficient.

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.