Why Presencing?

A-03 This is not rebel architecture.

This piece is about why The Office for Presencing Architecture uses presencing in its name rather than words representing building, design or planning, (or metropolitan, for that matter). These represent practical aspects that are included in making of environments and in the architectural profession. The Office for Presencing Architecture is going to work with real environments in real places.

‘Presencing’ refers to the heart of all the work and the consumed resources at the issue of why we build what we build. Questioning a made environment's value, its meaningfulness and harmony, to name a few keywords among many approaches, has begun anew.

Architecture presencing is an outcome of the magical relationship between the things we do in the world and to the world, in the environment and to the environments we live in, and how we feel, how we are, and what we may be and become within ourselves. Architecture is attained when our actions in the world realize environmental form with intentionality toward our betterment. That action includes Mind and how we feel. How we perceive and feel is at the base of how we act. 

Human Being in the world is part of nature. Nature wants our consciousness to be here. Nature supports us and facilitates that we want what we want and do what we do. Architecture is unified with nature through human consciousness. With human conscious awareness, we gain the freedom to make the choices for where we go, how we might change where we go and what for. It must have been this way since the onset of our conscious awareness. We may intend changes for our inner and outer worlds. Questioning is original to human consciousness and sibling with spirituality. We know it or must re-realize it. Making architecture is something that can do much more for our lives than it is currently made responsible for.

Magic expresses the relationship of architecture to an environment by humanity that is like Nature, like life and love, immeasurable. I will capitalize Nature from here on. It is important. We can see it as a being, as many have over millennia, like a profound Mother of all mothers. We have come to expect Nature to be systems and process because we have discovered many aspects that we can portray in a technological way. But the depth and meaning of Nature to our lives and to our consciousness, with 90% is invisible to us — namely the Dark Matter and Dark Energy — remains as a wakeup call.

The third law of Arthur C. Clarke's Three Laws is:  

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

As the many variants on this third law attest, this statement functions around differences in knowledge, which includes awareness, and not only technology.

I could propose that we don't know Nature at all, since knowing only 10% of something is quite limited, 

... except that every one of us is wholly and fully inclusive of all that we know about Nature, and all that we do not know about Nature, and everything that is invisible as well. We are each our own living example. We are free to explore within ourselves the fullness of that mystery. That is the realm of spirituality. Intent to engage this mystery is inherent in conscious awareness, and architecture.

What we call architecture is, therefore, taken in this Office as an awareness that comes in those environments where we have made certain preparations for the betterment of our lives. We provide architecture as part of Nature. Anyone of us is able to 'make' the architecture by presencing it in ourselves. It presences there in us, as our awareness. It is the condition where we feel a connectivity with ourselves as beings of Nature, embodied by Nature, and nurtured lovingly, without anything left out by Nature, for a purpose that is at that time, in that place, enabled by ourselves. 

Places that have this characteristic over time and in many people are called architecture. Sometimes this is so profound that it this happens not only over time and in many many people, but across cultures, across the planet and in places made long ago.

It is often not possible to cognize or intellectualize architecture when it presences, even if intellectuality is a central resource for its creation. It has its effect and we are happy to say that a place is a great place to be, if not to say or even recognize that it is architecture. In this way architecture is magical and our approach to it is largely by feeling through many many assumptions.

In the many upcoming posts I would like to approach architecture as such an experience and take the position that architects who attain places and objects that are called architecture are making environments where anyone may presence this condition in themselves. So, we are all architects. Architecture is presenced (made) by each of us at any time as a personal condition.

Yet, something must also be made to bring the necessary level of design, planning, construction as we understand them now, and other methods to come, to change a place. Some of us commit to making these preparations. We typically call those people architects. People who ‘practice’ architecture have taken up the role of integrating human consciousness in environments to prepare such environments that architecture may presence in anyone.

Many architects will find what I am saying preposterous. Yet, it is a thing.

It becomes very hard to simply categorize buildings generally as architecture when this approach is taken. On the other hand, it will be easier to clarify what in city planning and urban design is architecture, since by refining our sensibility this way, we can begin to distinguish and articulate architecture’s presencing better. And finally, the relationship of Nature to human Being through our built and otherwise directed environments seems to gain a default position of benevolence and harmony in principle; it puts in question even great buildings that are made with excessive destructive forces — which is almost always currently. 

Architecture as a function of Nature through our consciousness highlights that there is a big difference between 'design' and architecture. The current western profession likes to use the word 'design' as synonym for architecture. Our relationship to Nature says that they are not synonymous.

Architecture presences with a much more exciting and potent relationship to the environment or the objects we build than Modernist tropes provide for. At one time Machine Ages Modernism was utterly exciting. No more. Now we are ready to engage this heartfelt relationship.

The Office for Presencing Architecture will explore this and expand it for some time to come.