More Thoughts on Building

Since my last essay I've done some thinking about the questions I've raised.


A friend also helped me to understand what I was trying to articulate.


She suggested that my point was:


To create something, a building, a work of art, we need sufficient space; without space, nothing can be built upon.


Another way of putting this: openness yields creativity.


With a strong desire to create, and to reflect on creating in the process, I am interested in the notion of "building" as a metaphor for life and art.


In my essay I wanted to join the metaphorical idea of building with the literal one.


Recently I have re-discovered an interview I read in Tricycle Magazine (Spring 2008), which deals with a similar topic.


The magazine interviews Christopher Alexander, a renowned architect and author of the book, A Pattern Language.


Here are some original tidbits from that interview:


"It had to do with the Whole and whether things can be aligned with the Whole and unfolded from it. At Harvard, when I was doing research for my Ph.D., I spent a lot of time in the anthropology department, simply trying to find out what it was that people in all the so-called primitive societies had been doing when they built their buildings. Most of these buildings were, at their best, beautiful, and at the very least, harmless. They were building in a way that helped what I call unfolding--that was almost a given. People wanted to revere the earth, revere God, and maintain the Whole. And that is not the motive now."


"Yet it is the Wholeness that binds things together. My own experience as a builder is that you cannot do this unfolding unless you do it as an act of worship. Craftspeople, ancient and modern, know a tremendous about about this. If you're not steeped in that entity, if you really don't think about it or don't believe in a version of it, then when somebody says, Okay, now build me this motel, you've got absolutely nothing to go on."


"If people think something ought to be a certain shape and then they start making it that shape instead of doing what the unfolding tells them to do, they will royally screw it up. Because of concepts! Concepts interfere with this process--indeed, this is the teaching of Zen, isn't it? You can only act appropriately according to Zen teachings, if you are free of concepts. Because human concepts, no matter how cleverly conceived they are, almost always work against the Whole. And that's what we've been witnessing in architecture now for about one hundred years. The world is now prevented from unfolding."


Later in the interview, discussing universal design principles, he says:


"So why are these forms appearing again and again in different ways? That's what essentially led me to believe that the unfolding we're witnessing is a more fundamental process. The space unfolds to form these configurations, and the particular force that we say are responsible are really just examples of a much more general process that's going on."


"The Whole is always taking shape by differentiating itself in a way that is harmonious with what has come before."


Now I'm going to quote my own essay and bring the two ideas together.


Here is what I said in my essay:


"I want to erect buildings. Not concrete ones. But I believe in the architecture of ideas. I believe there is a harmony to life and a harmony to our relations with others. There is perhaps no secret to discover but only a monument that we have been creating for the longest time. The monument contains our history, our meanings, our vast disconnected thoughts and it connects them all through this great edifice of time."


Revisiting Alexander's interview, I wish to make a slight revision to those words of mine.


Alexander would agree with me about the invisible structures, about the harmony of our relations with others, about the Wholeness of our lives, our lives as spiritual edifices, and our individual accomplishments as personal buildings.


But he would also add that we, as individuals, do not create this Wholeness.


As individuals we perhaps allow the Wholeness to unfold. We can build in a way that "helps" the unfolding.


And this is something that Heidegger never thought of because he was too entrenched in concepts, even though he was trying to point to something beyond them.


The history of Western Philosophy is all the same in this sense: conceptual and abstract.


Hear what Lin Yutang has to say about Western Philosophy:


"Philosophy in the Western sense seems to the Chinese eminently idle. In its preoccupation with logic, which concerns itself with the method of arrival at knowledge, and epistemology, which poses the question of the possibility of knowledge, it has forgotten to deal with the knowledge of life itself."


He concludes, using a prodigious metaphor:


"The German philosophers are the most frivolous of all; they court truth like ardent lovers, but seldom propose to marry her."


Perhaps I descended somewhat into abstraction in my first essay, but my purpose wasn't to put forth a single idea so much as to allow the unfolding of my mind.


If I can merely touch the Wholeness in my writing that Alexander talks about in relation to buildings, I will be satisfied.