When grading the earth, our actions hearken back to the telluric, hydrologic, and aeolian forces that originally shaped the place we shape now. Grading engages the human ability to understand, describe, predict, and respond to terrain, climactic conditions, and physical phenomena. We grade terrain so as to isolate dry patches of land from a potential inundation.
Today, there are only a few marginal places on earth where humanity has not controlled and redirected the flow of water across the land. Beginning along the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and Yellow River, humanity has continued to purposefully canalize water and reshape the dry earth to fit human life. We channel water away from the dry places we occupy, drain marshlands, irrigate fertile lands for cultivating crops, and use water to flush away excrement. Human life is bound to the dry and arable spaces between the fountain and the sewer.
Through swales and watersheds, the slope of land defines a place. When we grade the land we must recognize of the flow of water. Gravity’s pull and the unpredictability of water’s actions make the prospect of dry earth a challenge for all ground dwellers. Parched land parts, shrinks, and disintegrates to windblown dust; supersaturated ground can avalanche in disastrous mudslides. An equipoise between wet and dry must be made, a balance that moistens the land enough to retain the vitality and spread of flora, and protects areas leveled flat for human occasions from swift-flowing wash.
The basin of earth rose up from the depths and the waters parted; as the saturation receded, dry land appeared and began to flourish with life. The wrinkled surface of the earth displays eons of hydrologic erosions and deposits of accumulated silts. The cycle of heaven’s clouding, water vapor precipitating into rain, cascading runoff along the rip-rapped ground, collecting in gullies, streams, creeks, rivers, bayous, and basins . . . brought skyward again by God’s solar energies, evaporating in wind drawn wafts, hovering across the shimmering face of the water. So the land rises, distinguishes itself from ocean, and sets into being the unending cyclic flow of water upon which all land-borne life depends.
Whence did our penchant for flat ground emerge? Is it an acculturated preference, a creaturely requirement, a mandate borne by conscious intention, or a reciprocal combination of all the above that has evolved over time? . . . vacillating between the entwined influences of culture, biology, and human will?
We grade the earth into a raised platform; beyond the subtle rise of our miniature plateau, the earth slopes away carrying the rains away. We shape a small area of clemency, and make it fit for human use. Puddles and mudflows drain off in a pattern shaped by human intellect. A thoughtless person is considered to be, “all wet.” When we tell another that we “have it covered,” we suggest that we’ve made secure plans that won’t fall prey to a dousing. High ground and high-minded, humanity seeks a dry place out of the damp to live out their days and store their belongings. The term “dry goods” connotes the preserving benefits and qualities of dryness.
Water, though essential to life, if stagnant and standing, can breed a miasma moribund to human life. As we grade the ground, we must consider how our efforts to slough off water may affect neighboring lands. When we redirect the flow of surface water, we reform ecologies. One person’s runoff is another place’s deluge. Humans try to reside upon a convex crown of ground; when the surface of the earth is bowled and concave in curvature, water mires and floors flood.
All places made fit for humans must be contoured to shed water evenly away and be raised to elevations high enough to avoid submersion in the flow. Within the incline and decline of the land is the difference between livability and a thorough soaking.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
Clearing
For culture to take place, we cultivate, till, and manicure—but first, we clear. The action of clearing occupies a territory and changes verdant nature with the presence of humanity.
The clearing is among the simplest symbols of human presence. Whether bulldozed, mowed with a sickle, chopped down by ax, or control-burned, the clearing constitutes the first act of civilizing a place. When clearing is an abrupt, drastic harvest and abandonment of the remaining land, the result ravages the intricacies of natural systems . . . an anathema to human life.
If enduring, slow, and sensitive, space cleared for human occupation can be mutually sustaining for both the human and the biologic terrain they occupy. Even the lightest nest or tipi leaves a trace of humanity upon the land . . . nomad or settler, our presence alone and not the degree of permanence imprints—or rather, notches humanity’s presence upon the earth.
The clearing seems to say, "forever;" but the jungle closes back in again like a laceration healed over. Archeologists use satellite images to register the millennial changes to terrain and flora in places where humans once reigned. We build each age and again as witnesses to ruins of past human efforts; an entopic cycle, beginning with the ordering power of optimism and later leading into disgregation and abandonment. As with the words of Heraclitus, "What was scattered gathers. What was gathered blows apart." (as translated by Brooks Haxton)
Once made, the clearing fills again with human attention and awareness. Once attentions wane, the place dilapidates to weeds. The clearing must be kept. Maintenance and building form a single, ongoing activity. Our presence is expressed in our routine rituals of renewal . . . clearing and cleansing are kindred habits.
The clearing is among the simplest symbols of human presence. Whether bulldozed, mowed with a sickle, chopped down by ax, or control-burned, the clearing constitutes the first act of civilizing a place. When clearing is an abrupt, drastic harvest and abandonment of the remaining land, the result ravages the intricacies of natural systems . . . an anathema to human life.
If enduring, slow, and sensitive, space cleared for human occupation can be mutually sustaining for both the human and the biologic terrain they occupy. Even the lightest nest or tipi leaves a trace of humanity upon the land . . . nomad or settler, our presence alone and not the degree of permanence imprints—or rather, notches humanity’s presence upon the earth.
The clearing seems to say, "forever;" but the jungle closes back in again like a laceration healed over. Archeologists use satellite images to register the millennial changes to terrain and flora in places where humans once reigned. We build each age and again as witnesses to ruins of past human efforts; an entopic cycle, beginning with the ordering power of optimism and later leading into disgregation and abandonment. As with the words of Heraclitus, "What was scattered gathers. What was gathered blows apart." (as translated by Brooks Haxton)
Once made, the clearing fills again with human attention and awareness. Once attentions wane, the place dilapidates to weeds. The clearing must be kept. Maintenance and building form a single, ongoing activity. Our presence is expressed in our routine rituals of renewal . . . clearing and cleansing are kindred habits.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Rooms within the Soul
"The soul is undiscovered, though explored forever to a depth beyond report." [Heraclitus, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, translated by Brooks Haxton (New York: Penguin Group, 2001) 45.]
In general, phenomenology is the description of lived-experience. Phenomenology is mainly a method, just like science is a method of inquiry and not a thing. Both science and phenomenology are tactically different in their respective approach and ends. Phenomenology is neither a science of objects nor a science of the subject (psychology); it is a method of inquiry into the intentionality of experience. The objective of the phenomenological method is "the direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced without theories about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions," [Encyclopedia Britannica, 1995]. Thus phenomenology seeks to describe how things appear in consciousness, as participating in the fullness of human life, and without any pre-judgment to flatten potentially rich phenomena. As Edmund Husserl maintained, "To the things themselves."
Phenomenology was not founded; it grew. Though presupposed by thinkers like Franz Brentano, its fountainhead was Edmund Husserl, the Moravian born Austrian philosopher. In an effort to express what it is to which this method gives access, Husserl wrote, "In all pure psychic experiences (in perceiving something, judging about something, willing something, enjoying something, hoping for something, etc.) there is found inherently a being-directed-toward . . . . Experiences are intentional." [Edmund Husserl, "Phenomenology," from his 1927 article for the Encyclopedia Britannica, republished in Husserl: Shorter Works, edited by Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).]
So, the thing sensed participates in the mind that senses. In some ways, thought is a continuation of sensing without the matter sensed readily at hand. Physical things, when no longer present, persist as active phenomena in the mulling of mind. There is an inherent vacillation between the thing perceived and its mental presence. In order to sense, something must be sensed . . . in order to wish, something must be wished . . . to love, there must be the thing loved.
Thing and thought are linked via lived-experience. All phenomena we induct shares in an intentional relationship with consciousness. If we can describe the mental brails by which we intuit a given thing, then we might better understand the thing we behold for what it really is.
The significance of the phenomenological method, if fixed upon architecture, is its emphasis on lived-experience. Architecture serves to relate us to the world through the multivalent nature of buildings. For me, phenomenological inquiry relates the making of architecture to our inner lives. The potential is there to describe the built for what it is, a sharpener of human live and place. When focused on the built, phenomenology allows us to describe the conjunction between the human soul and its external counterpart as expressed in building.
The practice of building is a primal impulse. Place-making is one of the earliest acts of human consciousness (along with language and fashioning tools). Since the dawn of humanity, the psyche has required a symbol to have physical presence and thus become an outward, visible complex of the unconscious. Architecture is the largest manifestation of symbol we humans construct. Buildings are artifacts within which meaningful impulses from the unconscious express their presence.
I suppose that there is a connection between the psychical and the physical, in the manner similar to C. G. Jung's later psychological investigations. Many authors overlook Jung's central phenomenological insight: there exists a meaningful relation (an acausal connection) between the activity of the psyche and causality as found in natural science. According to Jung, psychical and physical reality form a cooperative and syncopated whole; a synchronicity exists between the inner actions of the psyche and the outer actions of matter, constituting a manifest sympathy between all things. As a room suffused with a searching awareness, we reside in the cosmic immensity of the soul—a microcosm within a broad macrocosm.
Jung described the psyche as the totality of all psychic processes structured within two complementary states: consciousness and the unconscious. Consciousness constitutes the state of awareness we associate with lucidity and the waking mind; whereas the unconscious constitutes an unfathomable inner-depth. The unconscious is the flip side of consciousness, the part of the self of which we are unaware.
The unconscious is a state of the psyche where primordial images reside as the most ancient, universal, and timeless thought-forms of humanity. Though always at work, the unconscious remains hidden and sublimated. The unconscious can be analogized to a fathomless treasury of principal forms constituting the timeless content of the psyche.
When the unconscious is revealed, it dissolves partially into awareness in the creation of prophecies, myth, and symbols. Citing Martin Buber, "The assumption that the unconscious is body or soul is unfounded. The unconscious is a state out of which two phenomena have not yet evolved and in which the two cannot be at all distinguished from each other." [Martin Buber, "The Unconscious" from A Believing Humanism, translated by Maurice Friedman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967) 155-156.]
The psyche is not an object but continuity in time. Buber amended Jung by adding that that unconscious was a liminal state, a temporally present and active flux between the timeless and humanity. A threshold (or horizon) exists between the soul and the world. What does matter think, if not through us?
In various postings I will meditate on the relation between architecture and its mental presence . . . a search of inner and outer. Buildings are incarnations of the soul to which we only vaguely conscious—or, as it were, also the reverse: buildings are inspirations we fashion into material form.
In general, phenomenology is the description of lived-experience. Phenomenology is mainly a method, just like science is a method of inquiry and not a thing. Both science and phenomenology are tactically different in their respective approach and ends. Phenomenology is neither a science of objects nor a science of the subject (psychology); it is a method of inquiry into the intentionality of experience. The objective of the phenomenological method is "the direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced without theories about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions," [Encyclopedia Britannica, 1995]. Thus phenomenology seeks to describe how things appear in consciousness, as participating in the fullness of human life, and without any pre-judgment to flatten potentially rich phenomena. As Edmund Husserl maintained, "To the things themselves."
Phenomenology was not founded; it grew. Though presupposed by thinkers like Franz Brentano, its fountainhead was Edmund Husserl, the Moravian born Austrian philosopher. In an effort to express what it is to which this method gives access, Husserl wrote, "In all pure psychic experiences (in perceiving something, judging about something, willing something, enjoying something, hoping for something, etc.) there is found inherently a being-directed-toward . . . . Experiences are intentional." [Edmund Husserl, "Phenomenology," from his 1927 article for the Encyclopedia Britannica, republished in Husserl: Shorter Works, edited by Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).]
So, the thing sensed participates in the mind that senses. In some ways, thought is a continuation of sensing without the matter sensed readily at hand. Physical things, when no longer present, persist as active phenomena in the mulling of mind. There is an inherent vacillation between the thing perceived and its mental presence. In order to sense, something must be sensed . . . in order to wish, something must be wished . . . to love, there must be the thing loved.
Thing and thought are linked via lived-experience. All phenomena we induct shares in an intentional relationship with consciousness. If we can describe the mental brails by which we intuit a given thing, then we might better understand the thing we behold for what it really is.
The significance of the phenomenological method, if fixed upon architecture, is its emphasis on lived-experience. Architecture serves to relate us to the world through the multivalent nature of buildings. For me, phenomenological inquiry relates the making of architecture to our inner lives. The potential is there to describe the built for what it is, a sharpener of human live and place. When focused on the built, phenomenology allows us to describe the conjunction between the human soul and its external counterpart as expressed in building.
The practice of building is a primal impulse. Place-making is one of the earliest acts of human consciousness (along with language and fashioning tools). Since the dawn of humanity, the psyche has required a symbol to have physical presence and thus become an outward, visible complex of the unconscious. Architecture is the largest manifestation of symbol we humans construct. Buildings are artifacts within which meaningful impulses from the unconscious express their presence.
I suppose that there is a connection between the psychical and the physical, in the manner similar to C. G. Jung's later psychological investigations. Many authors overlook Jung's central phenomenological insight: there exists a meaningful relation (an acausal connection) between the activity of the psyche and causality as found in natural science. According to Jung, psychical and physical reality form a cooperative and syncopated whole; a synchronicity exists between the inner actions of the psyche and the outer actions of matter, constituting a manifest sympathy between all things. As a room suffused with a searching awareness, we reside in the cosmic immensity of the soul—a microcosm within a broad macrocosm.
Jung described the psyche as the totality of all psychic processes structured within two complementary states: consciousness and the unconscious. Consciousness constitutes the state of awareness we associate with lucidity and the waking mind; whereas the unconscious constitutes an unfathomable inner-depth. The unconscious is the flip side of consciousness, the part of the self of which we are unaware.
The unconscious is a state of the psyche where primordial images reside as the most ancient, universal, and timeless thought-forms of humanity. Though always at work, the unconscious remains hidden and sublimated. The unconscious can be analogized to a fathomless treasury of principal forms constituting the timeless content of the psyche.
When the unconscious is revealed, it dissolves partially into awareness in the creation of prophecies, myth, and symbols. Citing Martin Buber, "The assumption that the unconscious is body or soul is unfounded. The unconscious is a state out of which two phenomena have not yet evolved and in which the two cannot be at all distinguished from each other." [Martin Buber, "The Unconscious" from A Believing Humanism, translated by Maurice Friedman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967) 155-156.]
The psyche is not an object but continuity in time. Buber amended Jung by adding that that unconscious was a liminal state, a temporally present and active flux between the timeless and humanity. A threshold (or horizon) exists between the soul and the world. What does matter think, if not through us?
In various postings I will meditate on the relation between architecture and its mental presence . . . a search of inner and outer. Buildings are incarnations of the soul to which we only vaguely conscious—or, as it were, also the reverse: buildings are inspirations we fashion into material form.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
First Post
Driven firmly into the earth, or tacked to a board, we sink a post and territorialize ourselves. Posting pages or encircling lands are basic acts of humanity. In this blog, I plan to post a description of the built. These descriptions will scour the range of things we build, and in the end, I hope collocate the first gleanings of a phenomenology of the built that will be useful to others.
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