The Goal in Architecture — Defining some terms that support G¡a's intentions.
G¡a N.3.2 Introduction — A selection of definitions.
This is the part two of the introduction. It is a selection of definitions that will be used in the ongoing publication of The Goal in Architecture (G¡a). These are revised from the original G¡an and I will continue to change them (probably editing this post on occasion). The changes are to clarify how the language conveys the intended meaning. The terms are architect, architectural presencing, architecture, spirituality, aspiration, superordinate program, technicism, disjunct (architectural practice), idea (of) architecture, vastu/vāstu and Verknüpfung. There are more definitions in the original G¡a. I will add those where necessary in the following publications.
architect
Architecture may presence within anyone; the experience is to presence it. As such, everyone is an architect. The practicing architect provides for the creation of intentional (built) environments which provide for this presencing. While all of us are ‘probably’ architects probably presencing that experience, an architect who practices has taken up the role of preparing such environments, practicing the production of those environments.
An architect creates these environments at loci that any individual may interact with, primarily by being in it, so that those individuals may presence architecture. The architect serves our conscious awareness that destines humane dwelling in terms of humanity’s role in Nature in this way.
architectural presencing
Architecture is presencing of aspiration in awareness that we experience at or in an environment that is prepared for that. Humanity naturally changes the loci where we live. Architecture is presenced in any environment prepared by people, intentionally or not, when our learning and intentions include our fully conscious aspiration. Architecture is the superordinate programme of prepared environments. This is a matter of how we feel and maximize life's value.
Architecture is recognized within each individual by each individual as they experience such a place. Architecture is matter touched by human dwelling and can only be verified by each individual personally through personal experience. This is our capacity to feel that potential as we aspire with our consciousness. This capacity is granted for our role within Nature. Architecture is like life the realization of life’s potential or the goal of life personally. Architecture is a condition of our awareness harmony with(in) Nature is thus as a person’s own self utilizing their capacity.
Architecture is a superordinate value of dwelling. It is inherently not located in a material attribute, whether matter, system or space. A brick, an arch, or an assembly are never automatically architecture and, if they are deemed to be architecture, there is no empirical way to define exactly how that is so. How then to account for assertion of an object or environment as architecture? It is expedient in our Machine Ages technicist architecture that we assert that architecture ‘does’, or that we express that a built environment ‘is’ architecture. We actively make architecture present, hence ‘presencing’ is action. It is we who are constantly doing, and so architecture is also 'doing', but the objects we call architecture do not 'do' in that way. Unity is never away from identity so that even if I alone presence architecture in a place, it is architecture as revelation of the play of identity and unity in the ‘public sphere’. The literature, history and criticism, as well as presentations in any other media, merely reside well within a collective iterated human experience of a locus. We tend to transfer that sense of 'architecture' to the object because this is made possible at a locus, with a specific form.
The term 'architectural presencing' is a tool developed within the course of the G¡a project, mainly in PART.II.4 and PART.IV.2.
architecture
Architecture arises from the individuality that we all live and the meaningfulness of anything we do out of the belonging that we have to our brother and sisters, most directly, and to the Earth and to all that this universe is. Each of us is in a silo of our destination, and the struggle and sweetness of it makes the field of meaning that environments glow with when they provide architecture.
1. A project that is developed with a superordinate program for intentional environments as a prepared locus that (...potentially) allows anyone to presence their aspiration as they dwell. That can be defined as architecture according to the following two definitions:
2. Conventionally, ‘architecture’ is accepted as a poorly defined quality of a locus such as a building or environment that is known as architecture because many people assert that it is architecture, beginning with the practicing architect. Or,
3. Architecture takes place in human conscious awareness in dwelling, whereby conscious Mind is awakened to ‘questioning’ aspiration toward the infinite (see architectural presencing). It is the personal experience in dwelling that rises to the inevitable questioning of one’s condition in answer to the raison d’être of life as goal of life's highest or most evolved aspired condition.
spirituality
Spirituality is the practical engagement of anyone's potential for personal evolution as the aspiration that every individual has taken up in human life for which everyone has the capacity. Spirituality is expression of a capacity to approach infinite potential. Spirituality is conscious willed intent through thought and process to transcend one’s current condition. Being in a mode of overcoming one’s current condition of self and/or to accelerate personal evolution is inclusive of all aspects of incarnate life and all that there may be beyond human life. Spirituality is to engage the goal of life. One may begin at any time — but one must always be somewhere on the path. The approaches to spirituality are as many as there are people, although many types of practice can support a wide selections of this range.
Although it is the purview and responsibility of each person, it also includes the totality of humanity and it is our responsibility to humanity. It does not oppose the material world; the opposite in fact. Spirituality is operated by anyone for the ends each individual finds appropriate.
Spirituality effects architectural presencing at two facets:
1) Intention as an instrumentality of spirituality or will is exteriorized in making our environment.
2) The superordinate programme of architecture in support of the goal of life, which is the aim of spirituality, is applied to the environments that we change for our wellbeing. The superordinate programme defines the architect's preparation of loci that serve to ‘presence’ as awareness, in support of the evolutionary force that takes place in each if us as spirituality.
aspiration
Aspiration is taken up with its full breadth of meaning. In light of spirituality that includes hope, as well as ‘yearning’, ‘longing’ and ‘goal’, and is superior to ambition. The specific realization of aspiration in environments within the context of architecture is added. Aspiration is an inherent intent that anyone has, based on their attainment within the capacity borne in their particular attainment of conscious awareness. This necessarily includes anything, or ‘nothingness’, ranging beyond what is mensurable and material, toward infinity. Aspiration is in a sense an automatic result of our capacity. It is essential to architecture’s superordinate program and to what forms architecture's presencing and informs practice.
superordinate program
The superordinate program supports human aspiration and the goal of life. The superordinate program is not kitchens, public spaces and such lower order programming of rooms, spaces or functions, nor is it planning or urbanism. It is super ordinate to these in service to humanity as part of the world as we dwell. The superordinate program intends experience that presences this state of awareness that is always already in our capacity, that appears even without intent because we cannot escape consciousness. That experience is architecture.
The superordinate programme exists because of our capacity through thought and the knowledge beyond ‘all this’ that reaches deeper into the foundation of our Selves. It has no attributes and collapses into a not-point as a field that could be said to be devotion (bhakti), it is content–less, it is faith and it is ‘nothingness’. The condition of content–less awareness that begins when freedom-of-choice transforms to duty and ends in merger and love. Every architect has felt this at that special moment when feeling a ‘solution’ appears. It overlights the environment in which we work. Its essence is stillness and its nature is contentedness. It references the state of samadhi.1 Architects in practice prepare loci with this superordinate programme to support humanity’s destining to realize our granted aspiration. The superordinate programme is a science that will be discovered anew and transform the practice of architecture.
technicism
This word is found in the dictionary and is used accordingly. In light of architecture, technicism is the value of technology superseding the value of architecture. There is a fine line between the way a place or a building is made and the intention to rise to the level of architecture in the experience of that place. It is this nexus at which the profound magic of the architectural practice is active.
Some projects are like a stage, where the materials and the substance behind the surface can be anything. In the ideology for 'purity' in Modernism, the material and the space and structure should be honest and direct, forming the architecture, where the building's necessary materiality forms the architecture. Modernists such as Mies van der Rohe claimed this purity, but it is similar and perhaps inspired by the purity of ancient Greek temples. Lack of contextuality is a strong criticism of this kind of Modernist project, yet in principle contextuality is always possible. Lack of direct contextual references is not technicism. Architecture can presence in environments with contextual aloofness.
Technicism is projects that are driven by technological values of financial efficiency (which is also a technology), other systems and technology that define results, which can also be constructional orthodoxy in current trends, and that they are formally defined for the machinery and technology that holds them up, forms them and fills them, resulting in layers of value that define a building. These leave the actual physical space that humans occupy as a kind of apology, justified by technical factors, and a form of mitigation that replicates general and systematic modes of providing physical comfort. The support of human beings is reduced to the needs of the body based on a catalogue of institutional quantities and systems that signify quality. This is the majority of our built world today. This relationship of our aspiration to the life and the materiality of the environment is complex. Providing for that seems a lost art, and it is one where we need new words that come of cultural knowledge.
Post-technicism no longer has technology as ground for architectural meaning, and the technologies of building are subordinate and in the service of providing for architecture. Post-technicism is the prioritization of the value of architecture over technic. Technicism will at some time not any longer be contemporary as after-technology architecture defines architectural by the architecture it presences in us, putting building technology in the background. Techic in its ancient meaning will remain antecedent to its new form.
disjunct (architectural practice)
Disjunct architectural practice locates the value of practice in the measure and matter of building or urban environments. This is generally today’s professional orientation and the valuation of architectural practice. Technology valued as architecture's ends forms the technicist proxy of the profession that formalizes this disjunction. A disjunct relationship between architecture and its superordinate programme is projected on buildings in terms of technology.
Disjunct practice conceals that architecture takes place as form of awareness by valuing itself according to technological and materialist frame of measure, systems and process. (See also technicism above.) Human conscious mind's quality and intensity of the individual’s attention to ‘questioning’, which is also called aspiration, is essential as the raison d’être of life and humane purpose of dwelling. Disjunct practice creates experiences that support concealing this (which is akin to architecture) or supporting its negation. This concealing is, nevertheless, an essential contribution to the world and to human being's evolution. It is part of life that does not accept the whole of life. Disjunct practice destines the unconcealing of those goals and purposes.
'idea (of) architecture'
‘Idea (of) architecture’ is this project’s term for signs of architecture as shapes, details or images that are attached to an environment that is taken as being architecture through them. ‘Idea (of) architecture’ is a formal and aesthetic technological 'standing reserve',2 i.e like a catalogue, of cultural meaning creating objects of systems of measured elements. ‘Idea (of) architecture’ is tools concealing what would be infinite and immeasureable. This includes architecture thought to be shelter and programming for physical needs, with institutional quantities and systems representing human comfort through the body. ‘Idea (of) architecture’ is the absenting of the superordinate program by technical factors. Humane questioning is abandoned, and dwelling in aspiration is in ‘oblivion’.
Post-Modernism originated in the 1960s to employ forms that we traditionally associate with architecture and any literal signifying form to bring greater meaningfulness to International Style and other related modernist architecture had become abstracted to its own logic, often criticized as elitist or unintelligible by many people. There are classicist and abstract tendencies in post–modernism. The former came up in the 1970s and is typically called Post-Modernism. Deconstructivism came about in the late 1980s. The former imbibes traditional or cultural/symbolic form, while the latter typically eschews traditional formal assumptions. Architects in both camps filter technology's influence to retain control of the architecture. Post–modernism was intended to strengthen architecture beyond contextless 'pure' form, but it is very often at the cost of concealing architecture when technic serves as a proxy and as measure as architecture. It is a double–edged sword either as idea (of) architecture or mitigation of the current architectural profession's technicist orientation.
vastu/vāstu
Sanskrit.
… it is the science of Vastu and Vāstu — It is the science of Nishkala and Sakala — It is the science of Vishwa Brahman and Vishwakarman … It is the science of Anu and Andam — It is the science of Brahamajnānam and Pratimajnānam — It is the science of Jivātman and Paramātman — it is the science of the Unmanifest (avyakta) and the Manifest (vyakta).
Vāstu then arises not from within Being as human but from the source of all things including what is humanity, the planet, the universe. It is the architect’s work (sthāpati) to bring that into form. The reference to Vishwakarman is, as in the Mānasāra, to the one who is connected to divine being. As Dr. Ganapathi Sthāpati states over and over again in his writing, the architecture makes the universe again in every project. The architect is then effectively the bridging element to the unmanifest, un- and immeasurable, which makes the architect necessarily a ‘seer’.
Vāstu Shāstra, as seen from the traditional angle, would mean to be a treatise which deals with the science of Brahmjnāna and the technology of Brahma srishti — the former being expressed through the science underlying Vāstu principles and the latter, through the related technology leading into the realm of ‘spirit–centric’ (spiritual) creations.
… all built forms are Vāstus or embodied energies. But they are considered and equated to Vastus since they enclose or contain vastu, the energy. Hence they are denoted by another term prāsāda puruśa, meaning ‘embodied energy’ or ‘built space’. The traditional designers and builders have therefore, come to be called Vaastu Vedins or Sthāpatya Vedins and their technological treatises as Vaastu Vidya, Vaastu Shastra or Vaastu Tantra, where tantra is closest to today’s ‘technology’.3
Verknüpfung
German. A combinatory connection or link. In architecture this is at a nexus in the awareness of an individual experiencing a locus in the environment.
Samadhi. Sanskrit. "Just as unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there is another work which is above consciousness, and which also is not accompanied with the feeling of egoism. The feeling of egoism is only on the middle plane. When the mind is above or below that line, there is no feeling of ‘I’, and yet the mind works. When the mind goes beyond this line of self consciousness, it is called Samadhi or superconsciousness." Swami Vivekananda. Excerpt from Chapter 7 of Raja Yoga. https://beta.heartfulness.org/magazine/samadhi-and-superconsciouness
'Standing reserve' represents the German word Bestand in English as translated by William Lovitt in Die Frage nach der Technik/The question concerning technology by Martin Heidegger. It refers to the way that we experience the world technologically as quantities of energy and material. This term is used in PART.III in service of linking technology and human consciousness and its relationship to conflict and spirituality and for linking phenomenology and spiritual practice.
Brahmjnāna is “Knowledge of Primal existence” and Brahma srishti is “creative functions of primal existence/ Primal Being” according to Ganapati Sthapati. Ganapati. Sthāpatya Vidya. 2005. p. 3-4.