#1 Contributing to architectural practice that serves humanity.

The Goal in Architecture PART.I Goal — 0 Supposition and Spirituality

This begins the body of these publications. This beginning sets up an approach, as I wrote before, to jump on to the whole of what we do as we would a carousel. There are many facets to architecture and the ‘world’ of providing for it, any one of which can be important, so how we begin is contextual to one’s own values and the context of what needs to happen just now. In this case, the intent is to find real meaning in architecture and to do that as a ground for all that may come. For example, it can even be a small architectural project that simply is the answer as a resulting experience. That is how architecture can work, as experience — and I certainly look forward to my ongoing work providing this! But in this case I am responding to finding a way forward that matches the changes that architecture created through the previous century, before the latter half of the 20th century. Changes in all aspects of our cultures and accelerating change in the environments, the biosphere and the climate have been truly gigantic over the past 75 years, yet architecture has essentially stopped evolving since the attempt of the post-modernists to make a foundational shift. Post-modernism was not the ground we needed to access what is required to dislodge architecture from its being stuck, although there is some very important practical theory there that has not yet been properly ‘discovered’ and formed into architectural practical method.

Harmony with our inner feelings and what we are as humans and with our environment is the intent where I jump up onto the carousel; spirituality and the profession. The profession of architecture names its responsibility to clients and to being good people, and this is not in question. The architects who practice belong to the only profession that is responsible for the world taken as a whole (i.e not just its scientific and technical categories) and for the wellbeing of people who live in it in light of how the environment positively supports us as we dwell. Taken as a whole, this means that all creatures and other life in any way that it many exist, as well as the wholeness of whatever our role in it is, relative to human health and wellbeing, is somehow part of professional responsibility. If one dares to ask that question, the role of a professional architect as one who competently provides buildings’ execution seems _______ narrow. You may fill in your own adjective there. That narrowness has created the slow erosion of architecture’s value in human life and culture. Many of us hold up ancient and more recent pre-Enlightenment architecture as models. All of those great edifices were grounded in representation of spirituality and higher purpose and goals. Hopefully, the adventure of making this realm our role again in the new evolved way that we can earn turns more exiting and hopeful and less daunting or ridiculous again.

G¡a contributes to architectural practice as it serves humanity. It demonstrates the Verknüpfung¹ of spirituality and architecture in order to do this. Conscious awareness of this Verknüpfung is not necessary for architecture to exist, and architecture will continue to exist if spirituality is ignored. Although architecture is essential to human being in the world, the profession of architecture and architects in practice will continue to ail and be a shadow of itself without the redevelopment of this relationship. Addressing architectural practice with spiritual practice can create the basis of a profession of architecture that provides such service according to our human role in dwelling. The relationships may seem obvious to some of us and impossible or nonsense to others. I find a deep peace in engaging this as a need. Following that need and seeking to deepen that peace through realizing utility of that knowledge is at the root of this project.