Henryk Skolimowski in Conversation and Enjoying Bodmin Moor

Details of how to obtain a copy of this book can be found here

For those of you unfamiliar with Henryk’s works I list below a selection of his books.

Selected Books by Henryk Skolimowski:

• 2010. Let There Be Light: The Mysterious Journey of Cosmic Creativity.     Wisdom Tree.
• 2005. Philosophy for a New Civilization.     Gyan Publishing House.
• 2001. The Dawn of the Ecological Era (with Ashwani Kumar).     Concept Books.
• 1999. Dharma, Ecology and Wisdom in the Third Millennium.     Concept Books.
• 1994. The Participatory Mind: A New Theory of Knowledge and of the Universe.     Penguin/Arkana.
• 1994. Eco-Yoga: Practice and Meditations for Walking in Beauty.     Gaia Books.
• 1993. A Sacred Place to Dwell.     Element Books.
• 1992. Living Philosophy: Eco-Philosophy as a Tree of Life.     Penguin/Arkana.
• 1991. Dancing Shiva in the Ecological Age.     Clarion Books
• 1989. The Other Side, of the Rational Mind.     The Intl Cultural Foundation.
• 1989. Out of the Cosmic Dust.     Vasanta Press.
• 1985. Eco-Theology: Toward a Religion for our Times.     Eco-Philosophy Publications.
• 1984. Theatre of the Mind.     Quest Books.
• 1983. Technology and Human Destiny.     Madras Univ. Press.
• 1981. Eco-Philosophy: Designing New Tactics for Living.     Marion Boyars.
• 1967. Polish Analytical Philosophy.     Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Silent Lion

Tags: Plymouth Architects

“If every sub-atomic particle is on purpose then why not us?”     Wayne Dyer

“Nature is perfect.  Nature orders countless billions of systems within one total organised whole.  Its cosmic dimensions are boundless, its resources abundant and its possibilities infinite.  It is the rock on which we stand; it is the womb from which we were born.  Nature ticks in us as she ticks in every other living creature, every blade of grass, every stone, cloud or planet.  Nature feeds us intravenously with each of our needs.  We do not need to balance our metabolism, watch over our breathing or guide our heartbeat.  The reality of Nature renews our bodies day on day, week on week, year on year,[1] just as regularly and with equal precision to the cycle of the seasons, or the movement of the galaxies.  We could no more separate ourselves from Nature, than deny our own breath or rail against our own birth.

  

MARS The Red Planet :   Diameter 4200miles           Knotweed Pollen    Diam 50 micromillimetres

All this we accept: Nature is what we are.  What we fail to acknowledge however, is that as self aware beings we must also be all that Nature is.  At root the relationship we have with Nature must be reciprocal.  We are part of one integrated organic whole and as such, what is available to one part of the whole must be available to the other.  As self aware beings at some level an awareness of that deeper reality must be accessible to us.  As she is our breath, so we are her infinite capacity, as she is our heartbeat, so we are her boundless reality.  As she orders our metabolism, so we share in the order of her cosmic dimensions.  As we create, we participate in the cosmic plan, we extend the boundaries of Nature’s creation and we play at the table of the Gods.  Inseparable as we are from Nature we have no other fate than to share her perfection and to play within her Divine Order.

   Fetus at three months : Length 5 centimetres

Although this is our reality, this is not what most of us live.  Indeed I already hear some of you denying that this could ever be so.  Yet just a little more thought will make us realise that the perfect reality of Nature, is the only reality available to us.  If the perfect order of Natural Law failed in any way for just a micro-second of reality, the cosmic order that holds creation together would collapse.  How could we conceive an evening in which the moon failed to appear over the horizon at precisely the moment, and in exactly the position it was expected?  Or the sun rise a moment later than it was scheduled?  Indeed how could the natural sciences, or any of the other sciences on which our present society prides itself function at all, if it was not accepted that Nature functioned with rigorous and absolutely consistent order?

Science today does in fact confirm that we are an absolutely inseparable part of Nature.  When we look at ourselves we perceive that our body has distinct limits and its edges are clearly separate from the chair on which we sit or the desk at which we work.  In quantum terms however, the distinction between solid and void is less clear.  At a quantum level the particles that make up our bodies are no more closely packed than the stars and planets in a galaxy and even those particles are just bundles of energy and information emerging from a kind of vacuum state of pure consciousness.  At this ground state particles of energy and information appear as if out of nowhere, whilst others disappear back into the void.  Every part of quantum space is in fact filled with an almost infinite amount of energy which vibrates as an element of the infinitely extending field of vibrations which make up the cosmos.  In a very real sense therefore we realise that our bodies and our environment are inextricably linked.  Indeed they are part of a quantum continuum.  In this context, seen from the outside, our bodies are just a local focused sphere of attention within the non-local extended field of consciousness.  The oxygen around us in the atmosphere is very little different to the oxygen in our bodies.  Some of the atoms in the air that I breathe today will have been taken in by countless millions of people in the past, some, we are told having been breathed by Christ, Aristotle, our colleagues across the desk from us, the whales in mid Atlantic and by everyone and every being from history in between.  Seen from the inside however this local focused sphere of attention is experienced as personal intelligence, my own, your own personal intelligence.  Over the thousands of years of human evolution, this inside view has evolved from the most elemental living organisms, through the instinctual stages of the lower vertebrates, into unselfconscious apes and eventually to the fully self-conscious, ego-centric beings that we are today: ego-centric beings that have claimed ownership of that personal sphere and now read themselves as separate, isolated fragments of the cosmos instead of as a wholly integrated aspect of that reality. 

      

Tuareg Woman: Sahara          Urangutan: Sumatra                                     Pea Leaf Chloroplasts: x 70,000 times

So, if we do accept that Nature functions with perfect order, and also accept ourselves as part of that order, are we not compelled to confirm that our personal and individual realities as well as our social realities are also functioning with the same cosmic perfection?  The logic is undeniable.  If we accept the logic of the argument above, if our reality is a perfect reality, why does the modern world seem so far from being what we might consider perfect?  If for a moment we assume that we are living in the perfect reality of Nature, it must follow that within the terms of that perfect world, our modern world must in those same terms; meet the criteria of that perfection.  But under what circumstances could the criteria of a perfect world be creating what many consider an imperfect modern reality?”

Let us consider for a moment an example within this perfectly functioning universe.  Within the natural world there is a particular species of butterfly that will only lay their eggs on one particular plant species[2], and they plant just one egg on each leaf.  The eggs create a yellow spot on the leaf, rather like a small yellow sticking plaster and thus marked other butterflies avoid laying a second egg on the same leaf.  When the caterpillar hatches it uses the leaf as its source of nutrients, one leaf is just enough to meet its needs, and the butterfly’s natural cycle is maintained for another year.  From the trees perspective however this activity is potentially fatal.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of butterflies intensely laying eggs in a relatively tiny location.  The tree can tolerate the loss of some leaves but not all its foliage, and so to protect itself the tree has developed a small yellow spot on a critical percentage of its leaves.  The yellow spot is the same size, shape and colour as the spot the butterflies create and so the butterflies when laying their eggs avoid the marked leaves and the tree as a consequence is able to retain its integrity. 

  Butterflies Wing: Magnified 860 times

Remarkable as such phenomena are they are not rare and to some, such events are read as being almost miraculous.  How could the tree know that it needs to generate a spot on its leaves the same size and colour as the butterfly egg, and how did it decide to colour only a certain critical percentage of its leaves with such spots?  Why was the tree ready to sacrifice the majority of its leaves to the butterfly?  We are not yet able to answer all of these questions, because they are outside the range of normal experience.  However, no matter how we perceive it, such activity implies communication within the insect and plant worlds and probably between these worlds. 

Although we do not know where, at some point in the development of the butterfly-tree example described above, a communication must have taken place.  Information within a field of awareness was shared, and not only shared but acted upon with perfect effect.  Such a field of awareness which is sharing information is a definition of intelligence, the intelligence of natural law.  Now as we saw earlier the material that goes to make up our bodies is the same material that makes up the whole of the natural world, and is a part of a unified field of energy and information.  Every sub-atomic particle is on purpose and nature goes to the same field of energy and information to create everything from intergalactic space, to trees and butterflies, to our own bodies and thoughts.  The intelligence within nature is a continuous seamless field.  The basic vibrations of nature, the quantum events that structure the flowers, birds, mountains, rivers and stars, also appear in our own awareness as linguistically structured verbal thought.  In other words thought is a quantum event.  It is a fluctuation in the unified field of creation that transforms itself, as all quantum events do, firstly into sub-atomic particles, then into atomic reality, later into molecular reality and ultimately into the material world as we know it.  Out of the intelligence within the quantum field of reality emerges a continuous process of creation, and thought is just an impulse that issues from that field and marks the beginning of human creativity.  Human creativity is therefore contiguous with Nature’s creation.  Whatever form our works may take they emerge as part of Nature’s creation, be it a humble poem or the divine music of Mozart, in each and every case, when we create we co-create with Nature.  When we think thoughts we are actually practising brain chemistry.  Scientists now confirm that all our thoughts, feelings and emotions have chemical reactions within our bodies, so in a very real sense our thoughts are manifesting in exactly the same way as the impulses that engineer and structure the cosmos.  Our thoughts literally bring physical reality into being and those great artists who are able to avoid interference and function directly from the level of pure consciousness perhaps do shine the light of divinity onto our world.

Now although earlier we were not able to locate accurately the position of intelligence within the butterfly-tree relationship, within the human condition we are familiar with where intelligence resides.  The self-referral capacity of humanity means that we are aware of our own thoughts, intentions and actions.  We experience the rising of a thought or intention and can follow it through into action.  The self-awareness developed in humanity means that we are able to observe, participate in, and interfere with the creation and realisation of intentions as they arise from the field of intelligence localised within ourselves. 

So if our thoughts and intentions are realised with the same efficiency that presides elsewhere in Nature, then we have a solution to the dichotomy exposed earlier.  If each of our thoughts are being realised, our negative thoughts along with our positive intentions, then we have reached a position where both the cosmos could be said to be operating with perfect order, whist at the same time, the modern, imperfect world could be seen as a perfect realisation of misguided human intentions.  Our imperfect world is thus perfectly realised within the perfect order of Natural Law.  The implications of this argument are of course huge.” 

But let me leave you now to muse on these thoughts……

Silent Lion

[2] The butterfly is black yellow and red and belongs to the Heliconius species.  The plant commonly known as the Passion Vine is part of the Passiflora Species both of Central and Southern America.  This information was generously provided by Sir David Attenborough in correspondence with the author.

Although all of you will be familiar with the way Frank Lloyd Wright reconciled such opposites in his early domestic work, I have chosen to discuss his designs for Unity Temple, a project for the Unitarian Community of Oak Park, because it was in this building that in 1906 he felt that he had first ‘Broken the Box’ as he put it. It is also interesting to examine this building because unlike the ‘Prairie Houses’ that came later, he was not able to use glass to dissolve the relationship between inside and outside space but was rather forced to confront directly the need to dissolve a solidly massive building into the spaces of its interior. It is rather difficult to condense these arguments into such a short piece as this but I hope you get close to enjoying the power that is released in these works.
   

Unity Temple 1905-06: Oak Park, Chicago

“At the scale of the major building elements we can see that Wright was able to create the impression of mass and space interpenetrating and oscillating with each other, but even when we examine the solid elements in this composition we find the same principles being demonstrated. Internally the major temple space is penetrated by four solid stair towers and the space between these is layered with balconies. When we examine these stair towers we find that their solidity is challenged by the way that Wright has decorated them. Instead of using panels on each surface of the towers as was traditional at that time to reinforce each of the surfaces, the paneling is allowed to frame the corner of the tower thus effectively merging two surfaces into one. The effect that this has is that it breaks down the corners of these elements and seems to bring space into the solidity of the towers. The technique is repeated on the leading edges of the balconies and on the roof-lights above. The overall effect is that mass and space start to blend into one another even within the solid elements of the design. The form of the building thus begins to appear less substantial and one is left wondering where space finishes and where mass begins.

 

Unity Temple: Internal Corners are Dissolved   

What we see happening here in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright in 1905-06 seems to have been exactly paralleled by similar attempts to create a unity between mass and space elsewhere in our culture. In the field of painting it was Picasso and Braque who paved the way in 1905-06, and it is Picasso’s `Demoiselles d’Avignon’ 1906-07 that made the first attempt at the dissolution of the solid, and the unification of Mass and Space. The Cubist work that followed in the wake of ‘Demoiselles d’ Avignon’ developed this concept, writing about Picasso’s painting ‘The Resevoir’ 1909, the art historian Timothy Hilton writes: “In all the houses and in the form of the reservoir at the bottom of the picture, there is no longer any feeling that mass is being represented as mass, but rather that the facts of the visuality of the village are transformed into shifting and merging planes, that everything is being dissolved.”

     

Picasso: Demoiselles d’ Avignon 1906-07              Ambroise Vollard 1910

Again, directly concurrent with this movement in architecture and the arts, in the field of physics, equivalent relationships, this time in the form of equations, were also being used by Einstein in his famous ‘Theories of Relativity’ to relate energy and mass and space and time. Jacob Bronowski’s account of this period is interesting. “So the great paper of 1905 is not just about light, or as the title says, `The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’. It goes on in the same year to a postscript saying energy and mass are equivalent, E=mc2″ …. “To us it is remarkable that the first account of relativity should instantly entail a practical and devastating prediction for atomic physics. To Einstein, it is simply a part of drawing the world together; like Newton and all scientific thinkers, he was in a deep sense a unitarian.” …. “So in a lifetime Einstein joined light to time, and time to space, energy to matter, matter to space, and space to gravitation. At the end of his life he was still working to seek a unity between gravitation and the forces of electricity and magnetism.”

    Albert Einstein

So Einstein, like Frank Lloyd Wright like Picasso were Unitarians, they were using the basic Gestalt tendency of the nervous system to pull together parts of the world that had previously been considered separate, and in these three particular examples, concerned with the unification of mass and space, they quite remarkably did it more or less in the same year.

It therefore follows that if as we have seen, the natural tendency of the nervous system is towards creating gestalt or unified wholes out of the dissimilars that confront us in day to day activity. It seems that part of the solution to the disorder in our societies and in the eco-systems described at the beginning of this paper, lies right here in our own heads, in our own nervous systems. It is quite remarkable, that this basic ability of the nervous system to create gestalt, a phenomenon so well understood for so long, could actually hold the key to such solutions. What we realise when we observe the processes of building languages, and cultural systems, such as the arts, music and architecture, is that it is this gestalt process that is projecting an order onto the world we perceive. It is Frank Lloyd Wright, Picasso and Einstein who are building the order we experience and it is we who extend and develop that order in our work, in our relationships, in our society. Organisation is thus perceived as the glue of the cosmos, and it is all a projection of our nervous systems. The order we perceive is the order we have made. This may seem far-fetched, but this all follows spontaneously from those simple experiments carried out by the Gestalt group at the turn of the century. Order is a creation of our mind.”

Silent Lion

There is very little text with the presetnation but the illustrations are rather self explanatory.  I have always thought that a library is a wonderful student design project, it has many useful dimensions; a relatively complex brief, variously sized spaces from small offices to large reading rooms, a  similar range of structural and constructional challenges, the usual contextual issues and a cultural-historical dimension that cannot be ignored.

Culturally a library might occupy several hundred or even several thousand users but unike theatres, concert halls or other public buildings the users do not approach or use the building as a group but rather enter as individuals engaging the collective knowledge of the culture.  This sets up a challenge for the designer; on the one hand to create an intimate space for the users that is appropriate for them to engage with the cultural contributors that have written the books, the music or websites.  Whilst on the other hand to create a building that some how captures the majesty of collective knowledge.  Knowledge is potentially infinite, starting with the early thoughts of antiquity and stretching into the vast stores of knowledge of the present day and into the future.  Though infinite this knowledge is vulnerable as the destruction of the first library of Alexandria demonstrates.

The examples used to support this talk engage these ideas in a number of differing ways.  There is a wonderful range of library precedents to call on, the selection here is necessarily limited and was selected to present some of the ideas mentioned above.  Others more concerned with the technological and social evolution of the library would have chosen different examples.  Rather immodestly I have slipped in one of my own designs for the new Alexandria Library Compeition.  This scheme sought to capture symultaneoulsy the potentially infiite extension of knowledge on the one hand and on the other the vulnerability of the human condition just described.

I hope that it is of some value, …enjoy.

Silent Lion

Van Gogh: Peasant Woman 1885                 The Potato Eaters 1885

Still Life: Pair of Boots 1886                                              Van Gogh’s Chair 1888

“………..At one level I like to think of architecture as a vessel for humanity, the stage on which subjects live out their lives, in this view of architecture the less it is seen or even noticed the more perfect is its role.  At another level architecture is very much seen and when it is seen it has another role to play, another opportunity to open up Reality.  With regard to the first of these two dimensions, in the second chapter of my book I deal with ordinariness as the ground of architecture and as the ground of what is to follow in the book.  I use the work of Van Gogh as a way into the subject.  Van Gogh’s paintings of field workers are not portraits of individuals but of humanity.  Equally when he paints their shoes, chairs and tables he is able to extend the love, humanity and compassion that he displayed in his portraits to these inanimate objects.  He is able to show how these artefacts extend their humanity.  From these objects I then make the link to the furniture made by the craftsmen of the Arts and Crafts Movement (Contemporary with Van Gogh) and from there to Arts and Crafts architecture.  The point that I make here and made continually in my more mature years as a teacher is the importance of caring for what is being made.  Care introduces humanity even to the inanimate.  Humane architecture can therefore be defined as architecture that displays reverence for life and the environment.  One of the lines that I used to like to quote to my students was from Aalto, he would say that you should design a window as if your beloved were to look through it.  Such a task always seemed to me to call for a potentially Infinite degree of care.  

 

Windows in Villa Mairea: Alvar Aalto 1938-39

Going now to the second of these two dimensions of architecture, architecture when it is seen, brings me to the issues you had difficulty with in my letter.  It was perhaps a mistake on my part to try to summarise my argument in a letter and it has led to some misunderstanding.  My argument is basically this: that meaning is both private to the person and yet we share as a culture.  Viewed in this way it seems to be paradoxical so we need to find another way to view it.  Let me give you an example and then later a metaphor to help me explain.  When a mother is teaching her child to speak she will point at an object and repeat its name.  Things are a little more complex when she wants to communicate about the qualities of an object.  Let us assume that she wants to teach her child about colours, in this process she will point to a blue object and say blue, but the child will not know which quality of the object she is describing, it is the texture she refers to, the shape, the temperature or the colour.  To communicate the idea of blueness she has to point to several blue objects in turn, to a toy, a cup, a sweater, the sky, until eventually the child identifies the similar quality that they share and which mother and child agree to call blue.  Now from this example it is possible to conclude that the mother and the child are able to share the word for blueness.  The mother knows what is blue and the child knows what is blue.  But in the process of discovery has the mother actually communicated her meaning of blue to the child?  From the evidence there is nothing to suggest that such a communication has taken place.  The child has learned to use the word blue, so that his use and his mother’s use are the same, but we have no way of knowing that what the mother perceives as blue and what the child perceives as blue are equal.  All we can be sure of is that the mother and the child both perceived that all the items that she pointed out had a similar quality which they agreed to call blue.  Thus, provided that the mother’s use and the child’s use always coincide, then they will be able to communicate, even though it is possible that the meaning of ‘blue’ may be different for each. 

   The Identification of Similarities aids Communication

Now with this particular example we actually know that some people with a deficiency of blue or red cones in their retina actually do physically see different colours but it may be several years before they realise that they are colour blind.  Perhaps some people never realise at all.  In this example, we are dealing with the uncomplicated meaning of a natural quality, where the difference in meaning, if any, would be due to the discrepancy between different perceptual organs.  When we leave this area, and enter the field of more complicated cultural issues, the possible discrepancies between meanings are infinite, since they are always a product of the individual’s previous experiences.  Buber also makes this point in the first section of his book. 

So we return to the paradox above, if meaning is not the vehicle of communication, how do we communicate?  The answer to this question we have seen in the example above, we communicate by way of the form alone.  But form arranged in similar or equivalent relationships.  It was the child’s ability to recognise similarities or equivalents that led to the communication.  Form is the vehicle of communication and the precision with which the form is organised relative to the contributor’s personal content is what gives ‘definition’(accuracy) to the communication.  The formal organisation of culture is therefore revealed as the basis of communication.  It is interesting that you say that beauty is lost in almost every discipline these days – except perhaps mathematics.  Good artists compose their work with great precision.  I would suggest that great art has a balanced wholeness which is sometimes almost given, at other times strenuously fought for in numerous redraftings.  The balanced organisation of such works seem to me to be not dissimilar to the complex matrixes of balanced equivalent relationships used in mathematics, and in great art perhaps no less precise.  In giving precise expression to these balanced relationships the concept of care discussed earlier returns.  To open up the middle ground of both experience and form the artist needs first to experience and feel the delicacy of the centre between life’s opposites and then balance the artistic form with the same care and delicacy as experienced within the centre.  The real middle ground cannot tolerate any form of grossness or crudity and throws off any attempt to enter that is heavier than the lightest thought.  

 

Balanced Relationships are used in Notre-Dame-du-Haut Ronchamp: Le Corbusier 1950-54

But I must return again to the paradox, how can the formal organisations created by one person deepen the meaning of someone else when these two people never share the same meaning?  An analogy will help to explain the point.  If we are allowed to think of a work of architecture or art as a complex matrix of very carefully balanced relationships we could for a moment allow ourselves to compare it with a much simpler, but similarly equivalent relationship in Mathematics, namely an algebraic equation or series of algebraic equations.  In this set of circumstances, as we have seen each person will have their own meaning for the forms that they experience.  In our example, let us say that the form is ‘x’ as in algebra, and three individuals have their own meaning for this form represented by the numerals 3, 5 and 9.  

Now further, let us assume that the individual with the meaning 9 for the form is an architect, artist, poet or musician, and that she through her life experiences has discovered a relationship with a new symbol ‘y’, that the other two had never experienced.  To communicate this new relationship the discoverer can write it out in an algebraic expression in terms of ‘x’ and ‘y’.  Let us assume that she discovered that ‘3x = y’.  Now since her meaning for ‘x’ is 9, whenever she sees this expression she will see it in terms of her own meaning, her value which is 3 x 9 = y, so when she sees ‘y’ it will mean 27 to her.  However, when the other two individuals see ‘3x = y’ they will see the forms in terms of their meanings, their values for x, namely 3 and 5, so they will see ‘3 x 3 = y’ and ‘3 x 5 = y’, giving values(meanings) of ‘9’ and ‘15’, respectively.  

 

Forms are Empty of Meaning as Algebraic Symbols are Empty of Value

Nevertheless, although the meaning the two perceivers experience is different to the meaning the designer experienced when she created the relationship, they are still able to experience the contribution the designer made.  That is, they are able to experience ‘x’ in terms of their own meaning and be introduced to a meaning for ‘y’.  Hence, without ever sharing the contributor’s meaning, the observers have been introduced to their own new meaning, and an effective communication has taken place.  In a beautiful way therefore the paradox highlighted above is resolved; nature allows individuality to be maintained, whilst simultaneously providing the means for sharing, cultural communication and unification.

 Interestingly it is this quality of culture that allows it to grow.  Because we each live at one level in separate worlds when we enter into a relationship, we enter it with something to share.  For example it was the fact that Einstein’s meaning of light differed from that of his contemporaries that allowed him to open up a new view of reality.  At more modest levels we all have to deal with similar issues almost all the time.  Is this communication with you not just such an example?  To share these ideas, I am having to use metaphors (similar relationships) to find the common ground necessary for communication. 

Well there it is, I hope I have done the idea a little better justice this time.  Having opened up the discussion I did not want to leave the ideas hanging with you limply in mid air.  Many thanks for having taken the trouble to respond with your helpful comments; they will help me to sharpen my text.  In this month’s Resurgence magazine Oliver Letwin has been making a case for beauty, so if politicians are waking up to this need, perhaps there will be a call for this book. ”

Silent Lion

 

Raindrops on Nasturtium Leaves:

In those early days I was pursuing one simple question, ….what constituted good design?  The contemporary architectural world in the late sixties, early seventies was breaking up into a variety of seemingly disparate strands.  Modernism was seen to have failed and post modernism was being heralded as the new way forward.  This must surely be the answer that I had been searching for, but the more I explored the post modern as presented in those early days within the world of architecture the emptier it seemed, it had let go of the reductive certainty of modernism but replaced it with a philosophy that ‘anything goes’.  Wobbly technology, the new vernacular or classical elements were being layered into modern designs, it was presented as a potpourri of form which rendered any piece of work as valid as the next.  Of course in the art world the same thing was happening, bricks could be piled in a variety of configurations in the Tate, bed’s could be unmade and paper screwed up to make art.  In theory everything could be art and everybody an artist, just as any builder could pile up some bricks and call it architecture, could this post-modern direction really be sustainable?  By what means could one piece be distinguished from another?  In this situation the high priests of the art world assumed positions of extreme importance, as they became the final arbiters, just as the tailors and courtiers within the Emperor’s Court judged his invisible suit to be the most beautiful in the land.  Fortunately the child inside me, like the child at the Emperor’s parade saw that the post modern package did not offer an answer to my question, certain buildings done in the post modern language were successful but too few to validate the movement, for the answers to my question I would have to look deeper. 

My hunger reluctantly drove me back into the universities and to my first great teacher.  I was introduced to Geoffrey Baker and for four or five years we were to work together in a perfect creative relationship.  We shared a passion for design.  Geoffrey had developed a way of examining buildings that opened up the complexities of a contemporary building without destroying its integrity or layering it with superfluous historical interpretations.  The building was allowed to stand alone within its own context and the analyses explored it within the building’s own terms.  In this sense the methodology accommodated a post-modern posture at a much deeper level than that described above.  Within this methodology the building could be examined against its own criteria and if necessary against those of the building’s context.  For me this became the perfect tool, I felt like one of Galileo assistant’s must have felt when he invented the telescope, suddenly I was able to open up the delights of a building, exploring how one set of ideas could be reinforced in innumerable ways within a design, finding layers of consistencies supportive of the whole.  This way of working led beyond the superficial ‘image’ of glossy magazines and into the integrated reality of the building.  The methodology became the tool that took me back to my primary quest; my desire to understand the basis of good design.

  Cream Squirls in Barszcz: Tasty and Visually Delicious

After I had been on this task for some months and after I given up the day job for a 50% cut in salary, it dawned on me that my question … “What is Good Design?” was not dissimilar to the perennial question that had preoccupied philosophers for millennia  “What is Beauty?”  Feeling very foolish, I was immediately tempted to give up, if philosophers could devote years to this question, why should I be spending my time stumbling around in this area.  Was this not one of the great mysteries of life?  Had I not burnt my bridges, I would have run back onto firmer ground but then some days later a simple observation struck me?  A good building and a bad building could stand in front of me with equal reality; I could bang my head on a beautiful building just as easily as I could bang my head on a bad one.  They were both very real yet one could leave me cold and the other move me to tears.  This thought kept me going, how could you bump your head against a mystery.  If the building in front of me is beautiful, then beauty cannot be magic or mystery, it must be present in the very fabric of the building.  ………”

Silent Lion

“………………….In the programme I defined ‘Humane Architecture’ as …. “architecture that displays a reverence for life and the environment.”  Those of you familiar with Henryk Skolimowski’s work will recognise immediately that I had borrowed the word ‘reverence’ from his writing.  I loved the way that he had made this transfer of language across disciplines thereby bringing spiritual values into the secular world without talking about spiritual issues per se.  Henryk’s way of describing the world as a ‘sanctuary’, similarly flavours the discussion; moving it out of a purely scientific ecology into a more spiritually responsible position.  In structuring the new programme Henryk’s work was to feature highly.  Somehow I had managed to incorporate a module entitled ‘Architecture and Self-Awareness’, into the programme and yet another called ‘Eco-philosophy,’ the latter directly designed to address Henryk’s philosophical works.  It proved a popular module and underpinned the work in other parts of the course, the ideas about ‘eco-philosophy’ and ‘participatory mind’ were challenging yet accessible to the students.  We read his books together, ran seminars and wrote lengthy essays about them.  The students were quick to appreciate the ideas and started to learn how to make connections between the philosophical ideas and architecture.  His words gave us a way of making distinctions between humane and inhumane buildings.  The manner by which Henryk had expressed his thoughts presented us with a way to articulate our views about architecture.  Many seeds were planted at this time and many students took an extended responsibility back into the world with them when they left the school.

 

The design studio that ran in parallel with the theoretical modules encouraged the students to apply the humane principles to their own design work; we called it the ‘Zen Studio’.  The ‘Humane Architecture’ programme placed strong emphasis on the tactile and experiential dimensions of architecture which contrasted with the conceptual approach that the old architecture maintained.  Henryk’s philosophy was making the same distinction, condemning the objective and detached view of the world in favour of a committed engagement with it.  Strange as it may seem, the old architecture that to a large extent is still the dominant architecture of today, is more concerned with the idea of the building than with the experience of the building.  For these architects, buildings are seen as pure form uncompromised by the context or even the environment.  The drawings used to represent this sort of architecture will generally speak of those values.  For example they will often be drawn from above in a bird’s eye perspective.  Such drawings detach the building from its experienced context as seen from street level and they will usually be rendered with ethereal finishes that do not define the materials.  People will not normally be displayed on the drawings and few furnishings that indicate use will be shown.  Within this old architecture the face of a building will be seen as a conceptual surface, as such it is its qualities as a concept that are important rather than the materials from which it is made.  As a concept, a surface is there to make a division in absolute space, in its most pure form it extends to infinity and has no need of depth or texture.  For these reasons glass, the immaterial material is often the chosen material for a surface or if it must be opaque, it will be detailed without reveals, overhangs, drips or junctions so that its conceptual reality is not disturbed.  Of course the omission of these construction details leads to the failure of the surface.  There is no such thing as a pure surface, no material can deliver it, all materials must show their age which is why so much of the old architecture ages so badly and after a few years looks like the aged Hollywood star a few months after plastic surgery. 

In contrast with the conceptual approach of the old architecture the application of ‘Humane Architecture’ principles generated projects that celebrated both the formal and conceptual clarity of a design and the building’s materiality.  We encouraged students to make parts of their buildings in the workshop; we even ran projects in which the students made pieces of furniture; very small architecture.   Such projects were purposely chosen to put attention onto the materials and the making of the artefact.  In these projects the students were quick to pick up on Henryk’s concept of frugality to save money within their meagre budgets and would build their tables out of drift wood or recycled found materials.  The projects were so experiential and tactile that by the end of a day in the workshops the students would be physically tired.  I quietly used to take delight in their exhaustion because it pointed so clearly to the fact that they were using their bodies as well as their minds to create their architecture; a feature so different to the one-sided conceptual approach adopted in many schools of architecture.  Such small scale architecture became a characteristic of our work.  The smallness presented an opportunity for the highest attention to be applied to the work.  ‘Care’, became one of the watch words of the ‘Zen Studio’.  By applying care to every act, raised our level of awareness of the work we were doing and such a raising of awareness lifted our own levels of consciousness and seemed to be a way of introducing the spiritual back into architecture. 

 

The students thrived in this environment when they were given the opportunity in Henryk’s words to engage in a ‘Quest for Quality’.  They loved the opportunity to get close to their task and in the process made some really beautiful pieces of work.  Other projects were run with similar intentions, we had the students make measured drawings of some of the best Arts and Crafts buildings that we have in Britain.  These drawings had to be drawn with the utmost care, each student taking just one part of the building.  The drawings were then rendered in watercolour.  We introduced this request because it slowed down the drawing process and contrasted greatly with the instant drawings that at other times they were making on computers.  The students were shown how to stretch watercolour paper on a board and then over a number of days or weeks shown how to build up layers of colour in the painting.  The process again had the effect of introducing care and physicality into the work but also allowed time to be folded into the painting.  This was such an effective technique that it generated some very beautiful pieces of work. 

The shorthand distinctions that I have been making here between the conceptual and the experiential which loosely paralleled Henryk’s contrast between objective detachment and a committed engagement with life can be taken much deeper.  ……………..”

 

Part of the student group on Bodmin Moor: Marcus Toop, John Pace, with Henryk and Juanita Skolimowski, Flora Samuel, Mike Westley and Frank Lyons

 Silent Lion

The distinction that I make in this paper between the masculine and feminine world views is of course metaphorical and although men and women will perhaps find it easiest to relate respectively to the masculine and feminine world views, the paradigms are not gender specific.  Within Jungian psychology a man is said to have a feminine soul and a woman a masculine soul.  He suggested that it was each person’s role to work respectively towards a reconciliation with their male or female psyche and to live out such realisations in their lives.  So here at a cultural level the responsibility is similar.  I am also enclosing this piece because it may answer some of the questions raised by an earlier piece on this blog.  I hope that you enjoy it.

“……….During the creation and development of the ‘Humane Architecture’ programme it was possible to add more detail to these observations.  It became clear that the masculine approach was only giving the student a partial engagement with architecture.  Working conceptually was depriving the student of an immediate engagement with the experiential reality of the building.  Buildings were therefore becoming objects to be viewed in abstraction, in idealised space, or as the idealised Platonic form, remote from the reality and untidiness of use.  It was sobering to realise that these very same words could be used to describe the work of the early modern movement that saw architecture as pure form seen in light and which as Henryk will tell us had its roots in the Renaissance.  The more I thought about it, the more it became clear that the modern world of architecture was literally a masculine worldview.  Suddenly it was clear why our cities looked the way they did.  The towers of glass and steel were creations built by a society that was largely wearing male glasses; we were building through the eyes of men.

In contrast whereas the masculine agenda starts by seeking the ultimately unrealisable perfection of the pure abstract Platonic form, the feminine principle starts by accepting life as it is.  The feminine principle does not seek to impose from the outside but rather works from within what already exists.  The feminine side of creativity therefore seeks to open up and transform rather than replace or dictate.  Such an approach calls for the ability to listen and observe; to identify the potential growth points within existing conditions and to allow those conditions to grow into something new.  Within the world of architecture the needs of the client, the landscape, the history and culture, the context more generally within and around the site and the environmental conditions relating to the building are all important sources of potential growth and transformation.  These are the existing conditions and I have described them elsewhere as comprising the ordinary.  Looked at from the perspective of the feminine principle it is the ordinary that is waiting to be transformed, extended, re-created, re-made.  The feminine principle is essentially organic in character and therefore close to Nature in both identity and in the willingness to engage with Nature’s reality.  Ordinariness therefore represents the ground conditions of the feminine approach to architecture but out of that ground of ordinariness, feminine creativity offers the potential of extension and growth into the extraordinary.

Within what we are calling the feminine view of architecture the qualities of materials do not need to be subjugated to fulfil a higher conceptual purpose within the masculine world view, but can be accepted as what they are for themselves.  The qualities of a material can be enjoyed and used to create a particular character or mood.  The clinical neutrality that emerged within the masculine view almost as a by-product of the need to create the perfect cerebral form, captured most closely in the ethereal glass box, can now be replaced by the sheer joy and sensuality of materials.  When buildings loose the need to be neutral the way is opened up for an architecture that displays the variety and passion of life.  Architecture is therefore freed to address the particulars of life; to capture the particular mood of a specific project, a nursery school, crematorium, night club or maternity clinic.  From the feminine perspective the masculine world that was dominated by thinking and cerebral explorations is replaced by a world of feeling and emotion.  A world of feeling and emotion is a threatening world for those who seek security through control; however feelings and emotions also bring us closer to our deeper selves and open us to a perhaps risky but potentially more vital reality.

If the symbols that have dominated our cities have been the neutral masculine forms that were almost stripped of feeling, the symbols that are needed now to redress the masculinisation of architecture are the potent symbols of femininity.  Instead of the glass boxes and gridded towers the feminine principle would rather emphasise courtyard, cave or womb-like structures that symbolise our relationship with the earth and with each other.  Such structures would be more sensual and free than the grid-controlled plan.  Earth bound structures that engage wholesomely with nature and set up positive relationships between the landscape, the elements and humanity are the types of symbolic forms that the feminine principle would promote.  Contemporary examples of such buildings do exist but remain a minority within our unbalanced culture.

The dominance of the masculine principle, if that’s what we can call it, has been so complete that the feminine is barely able to surface.  A few years ago I gave a lecture in Mumbai (ICHH International Conference on Humane Habitat at Rizvi University, School of Architecture) about ‘humane architecture’ and this metaphorical male-female division of the architectural world.  After the lecture I was taken on a tour of the city.  Glossy glass and steel towers were springing up everywhere, marking the city’s status as India’s leading financial centre.  Between the towers people slept rough on the streets but then we came to Dharvai the slum capital of the city.  The power of this area seemed immense, a whole community, vital, lively, trading and accommodating millions of formerly homeless people had grown up on the western edge of the city over a period of some twenty years.  It was as if it had risen through the cracks in the pavement; a colossal illegal symbol of femininity.  It was breathtaking, within a generation a city had literally grown out of the earth and displayed all of the qualities of the feminine architecture principles I had earlier described in my lecture, though I was not able to make that connection with my colleagues.   The city had grown out of need, out of ordinariness, it was messy but related to the earth, indeed it could be said to be built of the earth, it gave shelter, accommodated industry and commerce, and encouraged trade.  Within a few metres of this community the soullessness of the commercial towers glistened.  The futility of this juxtaposition screamed loudly, the opportunity for reconciliation between these masculine and feminine principles was there to be taken but instead, like a bad divorce they were seen to be in conflict.  The result was that the city authorities were slowly clearing away the slums and replacing them with the most appalling stacked minimal shelters, racked in ranks of four and five storey sterile blocks.  Like a concrete machine the masculine principle was marching across the city.

The experience in Mumbai was revealing because the masculine and feminine principles were still vying with each other and clearly displayed the dichotomy.  It was clear that neither the masculine nor the feminine principles alone were the solution.  The need was to redress the imbalance.  It is not enough to swing from a male dominant paradigm to a female alternative.  The need is to create a Natural Order, a genuine balance between these two polarities.  The healing that our culture needs will take place when the masculine and feminine agendas discussed above are brought into a genuine symbiotic relationship with each other such that each side is enlivened and enhanced by the other.  The healing balm is to be found in the gap between these two great metaphorical opposites, just as transcendent peace is to be found in the loving conjunction of man and woman.  The silent therapeutic middle ground that is between all opposites can be opened and held by great art and architecture.  Great art has always performed this function.  When the symbolic forms are found that are able to hold the opposites in perfect equipoise, the architecture will hold open a therapeutic gap for all and for all time.  Once opened the gap cannot be closed and thus remains permanently accessible, offering therapy like a spa pool to all those able to enter.”

Silent Lion

We are told that these artists are understood by a select audience but I wonder how true that is. Does that select audience really understand or genuinely share some truth that the rest of us are missing? Is this select audience being regularly transformed by these works as earlier generations have been transformed by the masters of the past? Of course new work often has a period of ‘challenge’ but Carl Andre’s bricks have been sitting in the Tate now for over 40 years and the screwed up pieces of A4 paper were mailed to members of the art world over 15 years ago. For me it is time to take stock, if such conceptual work is to be considered art, at best it is partial and at worst too thin to be seen at a cultural level. Partial because it is generated largely by the mind and therefore remains a commodity only for the mind; which is of course a partial reading of humanity and too thin, because a work cannot be seen if it remains essentially private and unable to communicate with a wider audience.

Culture is by definition a collective phenomenon, so a central quality of any art work has got to be its ability to communicate. We have got to ask the question therefore, if these Turner shortlisted schemes are put forward as art, by what means are they expecting to communicate? Is it enough to assume that if a form means something to an artist, that it will mean the same to everyone else? Clearly that cannot be the case. We each have a unique view on the world which our postmodern culture validates. So by what means are these pieces meant to communicate? If the post modern edict that ‘anything goes’ has run its course, by what criteria are we to judge the works of the new culture? Well those criteria have surely got to be some form of clear communication that sets up a positive connection with and within culture, in my view this has three separate but sometimes related qualities which if justified will not only explain the grounds of communication but will also suggest a way of reintroducing beauty into art. Indeed beauty may once again become a criterion in the judgement of art. These three qualities are:

1. Ordinariness: generating links to the exiting culture
2. Good form
3. Reconciliation of dissimilars

Each of these three criteria can arguably stand alone and can be sufficient in themselves but they will often be interrelated. Let’s examine them briefly in turn. Firstly what do I mean by ordinariness? The ordinary is the ground state of culture, which is of course constantly being extended. A table for example is part of this ground state, in the distant past we would have eaten off the earth or perhaps a flat stone, at some point someone created a table. Its usefulness communicated and established its continued use in culture. Other artefacts similarly established themselves, bowls, jugs, wheels, and eventually more subtle pieces that spoke beyond the utilitarian, about the sensual and emotional world of humanity, in painted and sculpted artifice that remained connected to the ground state of culture through the figurative. Within this first mode of communication the artist is simply working within the established boundaries of culture, a well crafted artefact can reinforce, extend or refresh ideas already in circulation.

The second of these qualities; ‘good form’, remains central to culture, despite the fads and fashions of recent times because it is essentially derived from the ground state of our perceptual systems. The nervous system sees, feels and hears the world in coherent form. It is our nervous systems that find the order we experience in the natural world but also in the human extension of that world in what we call our culture. We cannot separate ourselves from this perceptual reality; it is part of what we are which is why it promises to be a return to beauty. In this mode of communication the artist is using her form making skills to create an artefact that is so well composed that it resonates profoundly and speaks directly with our nervous systems.

The third way that communication takes place is through the reconciliation of dissimilars. If an artist has adopted this method of communication it is because she has experienced something which she cannot communicate within the ‘ordinary’ established aspect of culture and needs to speak beyond the edge of the ordinary. To do this she must find the similarities within dissimilars. She must find a way to show us how previously contradictory phenomena are able to be reconciled, how an aspect of the world beyond the edge of the ordinary can be related back to the ordinary. This aspect of culture may initially need a period of time to be assimilated by the culture, not because the work is seeking difference for differences sake but because of a compelling need on the part of the artist to share her experience of the world. This is a relatively rare aspect of culture; it is the most vital aspect of culture, a relentless process of unification, a process that reveals what we might call beauty in its pulling together of our post modern worlds.

Well this piece clearly needs filling out but it is an offering. It may raise some question about how the Turner Prize nominees seek to communicate with their public or whether they have no such ambition and seek rather to remain in their private worlds.

Silent Lion

This has been an interesting week, in quite separate ways the power of architecture to affect lives was raised as an issue by two people but from very differing perspectives.

A few days ago I had a discussion with a politician who talked about being shown around the Houses of Parliament by a lady who outlined the way the building influenced the behaviour of the users. The building was presented as having a very authoritarian, masculine form. Most people would not have been aware of this but with just a moment’s reflection; it is easy to see how the form of the debating chamber for example sets in stone the politics of conflict, or should I say opposition. I quoted Winston Churchill’s lines to her, “First we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” but added that she was lucky to have had such a tour with someone perceptive enough to make such observations. The conversation then moved to the buildings of Plymouth and our shared confusion that a building as modest as the Plymouth Civic Centre could merit being listed by English Heritage.

To me this clearly seems to be a decision made by visitors to the city rather than those of us living here. From an experiential perspective the building has offered little to the inhabitants of the city. It is a prima facia community building but does nothing to speak about community. Rather its form is strident in the urban landscape standing as a dominant masculine form more suggestive of civic control than civic community. One can only imagine that its English Heritage champions were more concerned with its modest pedigree, seen from an academic historicist perspective rather than from the experiential perspective of the Plymothians who use it. It is interesting however, though perhaps not surprising, that both these political buildings have such controlling forms.

The second time that this issue was raised this week was at a lecture delivered by Professor Woudhuysen. He was talking about future trends in architecture and the construction industries. His presentation was filled with critical figures and statistics including the £4,000.00 price tag he normally charged for is lectures. His position was largely an overview, often remaining at a national or even global level in its breadth and perspective. His offerings to the future of architecture derived from this global perspective, his criticism of other architectural gurus, such as Lord Richard Rogers and Prince Charles were scathing, and any models that he hinted at for his audience were distant and lacking context. At one point the brutal high-rise dwellings of Hong Kong were offered as a model for the housing shortages in the UK. Even if the 1947 planning acts were repealed as he suggested, a position with which I have a certain sympathy, his proposals remained almost totally without a qualitative dimension. This lack of an experiential take on architecture was typified by his derision of Winston Churchill’s remark that by coincidence I quoted earlier …. “First we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” His futuristic posture seemed to release him of the need to engage with the real time experience of the ‘now’ rendering him unable to read the qualitative affects of architecture. Although his macho lecturing style won him some raucous laughs from his largely male student audience, I suspect that the future lies closer to the female readers of the political architecture mentioned earlier rather than with a Futures Guru that lives more in his head than his body. Fortunately and somewhat ironically I believe that his kind of take on the future belongs to the past.