Architecture of Jubilation

It is my belief that we are passing through a gate from one age to another perhaps more profound than the changes medieval man faced with the rising of Humanism and the age we call the Renaissance. We have spent the last five hundred years trying to understand the world by dividing it into parts. We are now at the task of putting our world back together. We are seeking a vision of a whole world, with ourselves as part of the whole.

Let me describe to you a world we are entering into, a world where equality is seen not as sameness but as uniqueness. Here time is seen not as ends and goals but as process, with moments to be savored - not separated from past and future. This is a world where matter and energy are understood as inseparable and where God is at home in a cup of coffee as well as in the stars. In our new world, survival will be measured not by control or force but by sympathy and understanding. Technology has made morality no longer an option but the only path away from self-extinction. Architecture - what we build - must now reflect this sympathy and understanding.

Have you ever watched the millions of stars in the sky on a moonless night, or seen the wind waver over a field of grass, or noticed the dust at play in a shaft of light, or felt the warmth of another's hand..someone you cared for? This is where architecture must come from. Architecture must take measure of all that it is to be human in a world that is whole. It must take count of our galaxy and of a smile and somehow learn to interpret and express our new world in walls, doors and roofs.

It is not that economics and function are not important but that they no longer express the whole man. They no longer express who we believe ourselves to be. We must add our love, our history, our metaphysics. We must add the wind, the sun and the call of the hills. Our buildings must learn to express all that we contain, for now we are a whole world.

I have heard astronomers talk about the music of the spheres. I have heard this music described as a song of jubilation. Perhaps this is a word for our coming age, a time of coming together, of coming back to the whole.

We need an Architecture of Jubilation to sing of it!

 

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January 3, 1994

The word "sustainability" has become fashionable in our world. It is a necessary goal if our society is to continue, but what does it mean? Is sustainability a technological problem, a social problem, a spiritual problem, or is it a combination of all of them and more? How do you make a whole out of the many complicated needs?

The best example of sustainability in nature and past cultures, is that they are sustainable because of a profound sensitivity to their surroundings both large and small, and the elegant, beautiful, relationships to their life in a particular world.

The context that sustainability must exist in, is an infinite compassion for the world we live in, and a balance of the many parts. Beauty can be arbiter of the myriad decisions needed to build whole, ecological, truly sustainable solutions, whether it be a building, a sewage system or agricultural plan.

We have lived in a century that has made technology and what we thought were its benefits, God. Technology devoid of a sense of the whole is an attempt to dominate life and nature. Can we build a sustainable world and leave out the mystery of that world?

Beauty can be a guide in helping us put together a complex world and be a tool to help us make changes for the better. Our particular time in history is marked by indecision and misdirected efforts, not only in the technical fields but in such diverse worlds as politics, architecture, philosophy and culture. We are unsure about life and why we are here. How do we fit in, and how do we decide where we wish to go? We are beginning to sense that even those paths laid out by science and logic may not take us to where we wish to be. Beauty may not be "the way" but it can help us in choosing "the how." Einstein wrote that, "The theory that turned out to be true, was also the most beautiful.'

At the present time, we have a great many of the tools and technical know-how to make a new world...everything from stainless steel hipbones to sustainable houses and cities. But how do we relate this know-how to life and each other so that it truly serves life? It is here that a sense of beauty and esthetics can help us give form and meaning to what otherwise would be a scattering of possible solutions. It is as if we had all the parts of a human being laid out before us. How do we put them together into an elegant and sympathetic whole?

There is a connection of Beauty (both inner and outer), to love. Both of these qualities can open within us feelings and sensings that seem to be outside of fear. Putting aside fear even for a moment begins to change things. Somehow Beauty and love awaken the part in us that allows us to be ourselves. I call this, "to give light." It can come through an individual or a work of art. It is very much one human reaching to another and allowing for the wholeness of the other.

I believe we underrate even our traditional concept of Beauty. Why is nature so prolific in endowing its creatures with magic of form, color, and diversity? Is it merely for competition and precreation? Or does the beauty of the flower or an Indian maiden dressed in her beaded buckskin change the rules of the game? For the Hindu woman, to adorn herself is to "decorate the temple of the Lord." Is Beauty perhaps the physical manifestation of love? Does Beauty open the door and allow love in?

It is my hope that we are rediscovering Beauty. Not the pretty of the 19th century or the ugliness of our century, but a robust kind of beauty that accepts the intertwining of chaos and order, and of darkness and light...one that guides and transforms life because it seems life as a whole. We can learn to put a sense of beauty to work for us.

When we treat things, schools, our homes, ourselves as if they have the right to be beautiful, we give these a new and vital life. It makes life special and celebrates the magic of our world.

 

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May, 1993

I find the term "Continuous Architecture" full of challenge and I find it even more interesting that it should be brought up as a serious topic, now in 1993. Why now?

My own formal training was not in architecture but in art and sculpture. When I was a student, action painting was in. It glorified the physicality of paint and the act of painting. So when Anne and I started our home in 1959 it was not unusual to want to be part of the process of building...to feel the cement, to lift the adobe blocks and watch the walls grow. It was still a time when the general culture and the world of Architecture - in capital letters - were deeply into a view of life as: parts of a big machine. This called for understanding your part in the scheme of things, staying within your walls, and barely, if ever, even peeking over the walls. The intellectual, educated world had not yet noticed that to modern astronomers the universe could not be explained any longer as a machine. Astronomers began to use the term...mind. This new vision is still affecting how we perceive life and architecture.

To me, the basis of this question, what Continuous Architecture means, is about the fundamental changes in our evolving myth of who we are and how we fit into the universe. The European-centered belief that life can be understood and controlled by understanding the parts, can no longer be justified. We need to look at the inter-relationships of all the facets of the building process..as a whole!

I have a friend who for many years taught biology at Cambridge University. He told me that so many of the breakthroughs in science have come when disciplines cross and boundaries are no longer held sacred.

For me then, Continuous Architecture is the opposite of an architecture based on a theory or idea, where you can only understand the architecture by learning the theory of, for instance, deconstructivism or post modernism. Continuous Architecture is much more like the growing process of a tree's life, beginning with the earth the seeds and where they came from and their memory, the part that the wind, light and storms played in the development of the tree. The process continues through its interaction with everything around it. In the case of the building, it is also the people who experience it...what they contribute, what they feel or understand and what they take away. If the builder sees the building as part of a continuous web that begins with our ancestors searching for their own shelter, identity, and myth, and continues into the realization of new form, space, and light not yet dreamed of, he or she can give the building a richness and vitality that helps carry us into a world we are again connected to.

The idea of applying the approach of Continuous Architecture to larger more complex projects is possible where computers are fully utilized to help with such things as intricate design, space, construction, materials, engineering, time projection, etc. This should enable the architect to make changes during the building process. The computer could indicate the many necessary adjustments and give advance warning of unforeseen problems ahead of time.

Architecture must take measure of all that it is to be human, and our buildings must learn to express all that we contain in a world that is whole.

 

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