Filed under: architecture
if, as architect mies van der rohe, famously said, “less is more” then elegance is a quintessential element of beauty. this series has been exploring the question: what is architectural beauty? as defined in alain de boton’s book, the architecture of happiness. to boton, like van der rohe, elegance is:
“…present whenever a work of architecture succeeds in carrying out an act of resistance – holding spanning, sheltering – with grace and economy as well as strength; when it has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted.” -boton. the architecture of happiness
here are two bridges in the u. k. on the left is the fourth bridge, located in edinburgh. on the right is the gateshead millennium bridge in newcastle upon tyne. both bridges span rivers, but only the millennium bridge fits boton’s notion of elegance. to the fourth bridge we would probably fit adjectives like heavy, clunky, sturdy. we do not get the sense of boton’s “economy.” watching it we get the idea that bridge building is strenuous work. its squat, stone pillars and busy latticework of iron and rivets speak loudly of its strength. it looks like the armature of dinosaurs being led snout to tail across the river. the millennium bridge, however, seems neatly balanced, as if a gust of wind could knock it flat, though we know it couldn’t. it seems to be accomplishing something more grand – in its simplicity we get a sense of poise. all its engineering is hidden away. this is elegance.
“for us to deem a work of architecture elegant it is not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of a demanding technical or natural predicament.” -boton. the architecture of happiness
something is not elegant if it is simple only, but its simplicity has to have complexity buried inside it. a graceful curve alone is not impressive, but we must feel that curve is the exact shape even an omniscient designer would have chosen had she a million years and endless tries. elegant architecture belies an economy of effort and materials. for instance, take the design challenge presented by a staircase. as with the fire escape on every high-rise apartment you’ve ever seen, it is easy to solve the problem of moving people vertically by building an iron-railinged box as tall as you want it. but fire escapes are an eyesore exactly because they are inelegant. rather than a dense simplicity they carry all their complexity on the outside in a jumble of rails attached to the sides of buildings like barnacles. spiral staircases, on the other hand, strike us as efficient and we can hardly keep our eyes from tracing out their double-helix shape. rather than railings, stairs, girders and beams they simply are built of a spiraling structural support around a central column.
“we admire starkly simple work, that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated.” -boton. the architecture of happiness
Filed under: Uncategorized
i was at a wedding this weekend and a friend asked me if there was any way that she could do some research or help out with the blog. i thought it was a great idea and i took her up on her generous enthusiasm.
it got me thinking about inviting more interested people to play a role in the blog. the inspiration is this: 1. the world is bigger and more wonderful than any one person can learn and think about alone 2. collaboration creates synergy and 3. keeping hold of a vision can be exhausting and more and more it is something i think happens best in community.
this post is an invitation. if anyone wants to help, shoot me an email (patton.andy@gmail.com) or leave a comment.
Filed under: architecture
part of what constitutes architectural beauty, according to alain de boton in his book the architecture of happiness, is simply a feeling of home in a place. boton does not define home narrowly as only the place a person grew up, but expands the idea of home to refer to any place where we feel enabled, connected, and empowered to be our true selves. he writes:
“we look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mold, to a helpful vision of ourselves… we turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings, and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves… to speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognize its harmony with our own prized internal song.”
sometimes, paradoxically, we need help being ourselves. home is where we find that help. anyone who has experienced depression, self-consciousness, or just a black mood understands that our identities can be vulnerable, malleable things. we tend to think of our true selves as fixed, and perhaps they are, but they are fixed as a tree is fixed to the ground; its roots grasp the ground, but the branches sway and move in the storm. home are the places that calm the storm and still the mad sway of our inner selves. in short, home is where we find stillness, and we call that stillness beauty.
“we value buildings for their ability to rebalance our misshapen natures and encourage emotions which our predominant commitments force us to sacrifice. feelings of competitiveness, envy, and aggression hardly need elaboration, but feelings of humility amid an immense and sublime universe, of a desire for calm at the onset of evening, or of an aspiration for gravity and kindness – these form no correspondingly reliable part of our inner landscape, a rueful absence of which may explain our wish to bind such emotions to the fabric of our homes…what we call home is merely a place which succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding on to.”
not only do we need help being ourselves, more specifically, we need help being the best version of ourselves. the darker sides of ourselves proliferate freely. they need little encouragement. however, it is not so with our virtues, our nobility, the quiet within ourselves. for this we need every aid available to foster “the better angels of our nature.” beautiful architecture is a place where we encounter that help.
consider the following examples:
worship vs. distraction
in today’s modular, noisy world the poised stillness of an attitude of worship is next-to impossible to maintain. that is why we build places of worship and why we build them grandly. architecture can either foster or hamper this endeavor. is it any wonder that we might find it difficult to feel small before the majesty of the divine in a building that speaks more of efficiency and cost-effectiveness than about eternity and expansiveness? here are two church interiors. which better fosters an attitude of worship?
peace vs. anxiety
anxiety can creep into our minds like a fog that does not announce itself and won’t burn away. peace can be much more elusive. the architecture of work places often does not cultivate peace but instead values productivity, and a byproduct is the creation of a space that does not guard against anxiety, worry, and haste. the idea of the office has become synonymous in our culture with urgency, haste, dislocation from the self. its drop ceilings and modular, impersonal spaces speak more of what a human person can be made to do rather than what a person can be enabled to be. the longing for a vacation can be spoken of simply as the longing for the escape from an architecture of dislocation to an architecture of home, where we feel we can be who we have been hoping to be. which of these two views is bent more toward peace rather than anxiety?
community vs. isolation
here are two dinner scenes in the midst of architecture that speaks of vastly different themes. the family dining at mcdonalds, though they are eating together, is separated. they eat individual dishes out of disposable containers. they face each other but their attention is on their food, which is built for eating quickly. the way they eat rises out of the place where they are eating. the sense that they are eating at someone else’s table in someone else’s house is impossible to forget. in the other picture the men eat from common a meal with their own dishes. one of them is wearing an apron and there is a sense that the meal is a gift to the people eating it. the proliferation of dishes shows that this was a long meal with many courses. they pass the food to one another and their hands touch as they receive it from one another. they are seated at a common table side by side just as with the family in mcdonalds, but their attention seems fixed on the community rather than the act of eating. the meal, on the contrary, seems merely to the occasion of their community, not the focus of it and is subordinate to it. it may seem strange to cite the implements and style of dining as architecture, but it isn’t. architecture is not limited to walls and rooves, but includes tables, chairs, plateware, and every item inside a house. we live the full spectrum of our lives inside buildings and those buildings effect the full spectrum, including meals. which of these two scenes seem to foster community and which a rushed sense of haste and isolation? which scene evokes a sense of home?
humility vs. self-exaltation
what is true of an individuals experience of beauty as it relates to home is also true of a whole country. here is a picture of hitler and looking at the model for the german pavilion for the 1937 world expo. on it, an eagle of the third reich sits atop several towering columns as exalted and proud as the any statue of a god in a temple. it is a microcosm of hitler’s mind and motivations in the years before the ww2. the architecture both fostered and reflected a twisted notion of the dominance of one nation over all others. it speaks of strength and superiority, but most of all, it speaks of pride. the picture on the left, on the other hand is the german pavilion in at the 1958 world’s fair, the first one after the war. it is two stories and made almost entirely of glass. it speaks of democracy and transparency. it would not tower above the other country’s pavilions, but humbly inhabit its space as one among many. in stark contrast to the pre-war pavilion’s pride and self-exaltation, the post-war pavilion speaks of humility. no doubt hitler, looking out on the german tower, found it beautiful because it evoked what he felt was the best about his home and his self. german after him experienced a cultural shift in consciousness away toward a much more humble vision of their place in the world. those changing ideas of what home is were written into the architecture germany produced.
as boton writes, home is a magnet that “pulls to the surface the submerged filaments of our souls.” that magnet can be a quiet library. it can be a noisy subway train and the smell of recycled, air-conditioned air. it can be the cool, whitewashed stones of a low farm wall. it can be a hard chair with no back. a windy balcony at dawn. a cedar gazebo on the lake shore. we leave pieces of ourselves in all the places we pass through. we invest our buildings with our own image. the surprising thing is those places and objects can return that image back to us when we need it, pressed down, shaken, and running over. the pieces of ourselves ingrained in our surroundings fly back to us like iron filings to a lodestone and we call the experience beauty.
Filed under: technology
predicting the future is anything but a science. history is full of gaffs in predicting the future. as neil postman explains, one of the reasons for this is that each change we introduce into the world is not simply additive, but ecological. it is more like introducing a new animal or plant into an ecosystem. we cannot predict the consequences of something like that. europe after gutenberg was not just the old europe plus the printing press. it was a totally new europe, one that you could not have predicted before the gutenberg’s invention. the same could be said for television, phones, the internet, or any number of other advances we’ve seen. we don’t know what will come and we don’t know what consequences those things will have. in addition, the world is changing faster than it used to. technological change is happening on an exponential curve. the more it changes the faster it changes. yet another challenge is that we cannot say how different changes we see will impact one another. for example, two factors that will undoubtedly influence the future are genetic engineering and climate change. but who can say what will happen if scientists change the human dna structure to include chloroform so our cells begin to do photosynthesis like a plant, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and throwing off all the predictive models for climate change. despite all these challenges, however, we can say something about what the world to come may look like. after all, it grows out of the world that is and is a result of it. the thinkers shown here are trying to do exactly that.
panel discussion from the 21st century school: the world in 2050. the debate forum, intelligence squared, hosted a discussion about what the world may look like in 40 years. experts from the james beard 21st century school offer a sample of some of their work in a variety fields including, ageing, genomics, climate, and others. this talk is a great overview of what the future may look like from people who, even if their speculations are incorrect, at least are presenting a lot of interesting possibilities. click on the image to go to the video.
ray kurzweil: the evolution of technology. kurzweil shows how technology evolves on an exponential curve. the implication of this is that the world is changing faster than it was before. the first half of this talk he proves the point with graphs and statistics then in the second half of the talk he makes some predictions about what life might look like in the future. he talks about nanotechnology, the future of medicine, human enhancement, among others. here is another talk in which kurzweil talks about the coming technological singularity he predicts. here is his book about the same.
alex steffan: a sustainable future. the founder of worldchanging.com talks about the challenges facing the future. he locates hope for the future in an open-source, wiki world where children in developing nations are the future leaders of the world and the very ones who will solve the problems of the developing world. check out worldchanging.com.
martin lord rees: the world in 2050. astronomer and renowned scientist, martin lord rees, lectures on the foremost challenges humanity will be facing in the coming decades. he is the author of “our final hour: a scientist’s warning” in which he looks at global trends and forecasts how they will develop in the future, as well as makes some guesses about what we might do to head off impending disasters and dangers.
kevin kelly: the next 5,000 days of the internet. kevin kelly predicts an increasingly connected world facilitated by the internet. kelly says that the internet will move farther off of the screen and into our real lives. he describes a change in paradigm from seeing the internet as being a connection of many machines to simply that of one machine with each computer being the windows of that machine onto our world. kelly predicts that machine will reach out of those windows and pull the real world into them.
kevin kelly: the evolution of technology. kelly asks the question: what does technology want? he puts forth a few principles for the evolution of technology by drawing conclusions from the evolution of organisms. he points out, among others, a drift toward specialization and divsersification, socialization, and even biology. according to kelly, technology should be thought of as the 7th kingdom of life.
bill joy: what i’m excited about, what i’m worried about. futurist, bill joy, speaks about his worries for the future and what he sees as the hope of the future. throughout the talk he references a much talked about article in wired magazine in which he first put forth his views entitled, “why the future doesn’t need us.“
ian goldin: what the future holds. goldin speaks, in this excellent lecture, about what the future may hold in broad brush strokes. he touches on several factors of todays world that will have a large effects on tomorrow’s world including: ageing, migration, longevity, the effect of the growth of china, technology, globalization, genetic manipulation, and a number of others. he is the director of the james martin 21st century school, which is dedicated to studying the future in all the areas he discusses in this lecture.
Filed under: Uncategorized
i’ve always got 10 more ideas for posts than i have time to write them, so this is a teaser and a way to hold myself accountable to actually do the research and writing and set some of these down in print. here they are, in no particular order:
1. the world in 2050: by all accounts the future will be a funny place. for evidence, just look at how strange the present is. this post is a gathering of videos of various futurist’s predictions about what the future could possible look like. it will cover the spectrum of everything from the future of human enhancement and genetic engineering to the possibility of a global catastrophe.
2. 10 pieces of art that can change your life: art is a powerful thing, of that no one can argue, but often a prerequisite for that power to have an effect on us is knowledge. this post is dedicated to an in-depth reading of 10 pieces of great art, trying to place them in some historical and artistic context and hopefully remove some of the barriers lack of knowledge casts up which prevent us from truly appreciating great art for what it is.
3. does foreign aid work?: at some point aid became sexy. bono, oprah, brad and angelina, and countless others of high and low profile have thrown themselves into the work of starting ventures designed to make the world a better place through the influx of capital. bill gates and warren buffett started a campaign to get 400 of the worlds richest people to pledge to give away half their money. however, amidst all this generosity there are countless examples of aid gone wrong. empty hospitals, aid stations, initiatives, and dead ngo’s dot the landscape of the world’s impoverished places like wrecks lost at sea absent of captain and crew. as many voices as there are clamoring for immediate relief one can also hear voices asking for aid to stop, crying that it is contributing to the brokenness of the world, rather than relieving it. aid can help. aid can hurt. in light of this reality this post will explore what might be some possible guidelines for effective and as well as highlight some examples of foreign aid done right.
4. the story of an aluminum can: there is a village in jamaica where bauxite is mined. bauxite is a key ingredient in the making of aluminum. spending several weeks there i was struck by two things: 1. the mining is destroying the community and worsening people’s lives in the valley and 2. i am complicit in it, as a user of the aluminum which is extracted from this valley. it was a profound sense of connectedness and it made me want to explore the connectedness of our world through the lens of the story of one aluminum can from the extraction of the minerals from the ground to the eventual disposal of the can of soda where it floats into the pacific gyre, a floating continent of trash in the currents of the ocean.
5. the ipad is the message: i saw a video of steve job’s presentation of the release of the ipad in which someone had edited out everything but the adjectives. what follows is a slew of “fantastic!…amazing!… incredible technology!” and i was left with wondering what i am being sold and what consequences it is having on me. this would be a jumping off point for larger reflections about the place of technology has in our modern lives and exploring the maxim that we first make our technology, then it makes us.
6. postmodernism and advertising: advertising both shapes and reflects culture. in a world where every american sees 7,000 ads a day it seems pointless to argue that we are not shaped by the messages we are inundated with. this post would look at our postmodern culture and also at individual ads that echo and reinforce a postmodern understanding of ourselves and the world.
7. an annotated tour through history’s greatest speeches: history is full of great rhetoric and this post would be dedicated to the 15 greatest ones. everything from the gettysburg address to the ‘i have a dream’ speech, from lou gehrig’s farewell to baseball, to macarthur’s farewell to congress. it would be interesting to see what unexpected contrast and resonances they take on by being placed side by side in one reading and what unexpected things are provoked by putting them together in one post.
8. can organic food feed the world?: i recently got into a debate with a farmer about organic food. his point was that there was nothing wrong with organic food, but if we switched to it en masse there would be massive amounts of starvation, so we are stuck with the industrial food process for now. i think there is good reason to disagree. this post would explore who is right and what might be the future of food.
9. transhumanism: our technology is allowing us to push the borders of what it means to be human. we’ve expanded our brain capacity with computers, the strength of our muscles with machines, our lifespan with medicine. transhumanism is taking these alterations to the next level and drastically altering foundational things we’ve always used to define what is human through genetic engineering, cybernetics, etc. this trend to improve ourselves touches on one of the great questions: what does it mean to be human, and is the answer to that question infinitely flexible? this post will explore some of the ethical questions regarding the definition of humanity.
10. beauty and scars: this post would be more of a meditation on the beauty of the world and how it has become scarred in the time that humanity has had dominion over it. i’ve been collecting photos that will contrast the wonder of the natural world with tragedies resulting from man’s errant rule of it and will place them next to each other and see what thoughts/feelings/ideas they evoke together.
Filed under: architecture
what is architectural beauty? for most of the history of the west that was not a difficult question to answer. it basically looked like one of these :
“the greeks gave birth to the classical style, the romans copied it and developed it, and, after a gap of 1,000 years, renaissance italy rediscovered it.” -alain de boton, the architecture of happiness.
however, recently the questions has become much more difficult to answer. for 30-50 years western culture has worked hard to strip down rigid, narrow, traditionalistic definitions of beauty embodied in the classical standard. across the broad sweep of culture postmodernism has succeeded in breaking the canon of what constitutes beautiful architecture, thereby making room for the admission of new definitions of beauty. it has also done what deconstruction always does, namely, remove any organizing principle. this lets us answer the question “what is beauty” in new ways, but it also makes the question more confusing. when the answer was more rigid it was more narrow and excluded huge swaths of what might be considered beautiful, but the upside was that it was clear. the purpose of culture is to provide us with clarity, to give us a sensible way to move through the world. in the absence of a strong answer provided by culture to any given question there is greater diversity, but there is also greater confusion. that is the modern context in which the discussion of architectural standards of beauty must be held. there is confusion, but still, something can be said by way of answer.
alain de boton, in his book, the architecture of happiness, has attempted to do just that. he offers the novice a new vocabulary, a lens through which to view architecture. it is a way to enter in sensibly to the discussion of what is beauty in architecture. his criteria span everything from functionality to elegance. for boton, the question takes in considerations of everything from what a building seems to say to what feelings it evokes in those who pass through it. he offers other ways to understand a building in terms of balance, coherence, order vs. choas, and self-knowledge. but he begins with the criteria of personification.
personification
boton writes, “the objects we describe as beautiful are versions of the people we love.” at first the idea seems like a stretch. boton is saying the reason we love certain buildings and spaces is that we read into them more than is there. we take from their curving shapes, the intersections of their planes, their angular lines and shadows certain character qualities. we personify spaces. if that seems unlikely consider this simple exercise: 
if you had to associate a different character with each line, could you? of course. even something so simple as basic lines can have personality associations. that is not because of anything in themselves, but because of our habit of personifying objects, a habit which, boton says, can influence our experience of beauty in them. or consider a further point: what is the difference in the expressions of concentration and wonder? try it. isn’t it only a slight contracting of the eyebrows and contracting of the eyelids. yet our brain is capable of reading completely different emotional states from such subtle differences. we take mere lines and shadows and curves on the face and intuit meaning into them. it is a survival technique, in fact, it is so useful to us that we dedicate a rather large part of hte visual cortex to it. our brains read and read into spaces the same way they do with faces.
boton tries further to prove his point by seeing parallels in language:
“the ease with which we can connect the psychological world with the outer, visual and sensory one seeds our language with metaphors. we can speak of someone being twisted or dark, smooth or hard. we can develop a steely heart or fall into a blue mood. we can compare a person to a material like concrete or a color like burgundy and be sure thereby to convey something about their personality.”
consider the work of mies van der rohe, who famously said, “less is more.”
or take the architecture of frank gehry
or le corbusier
can you fit any personality adjectives to their work? is van der rohe’s work austere or simple? clean or unfeeling? are gehry’s buildings wild and confusing, or whimsical and playful? does le corbusier embody modernity and reason or coldness inhumanity.
the associations we have with simple shapes and lines affect oru experience of beauty. we may instinctively find ourselves drawn to a building that personifies those we love or our own ideal selves, or conversely find ourselves repulsed from architecture that embodies the values we don’t fancy.
a few years ago i went on a retreat to a remote farm in the missouri woods with a few other people for a week of rest and study. the farm was set back on 500 acres of forest and pasture. we stayed in an old french hunting lodge; luxuriously appointed, but not in a way that felt lavish, rather in a way that felt rustic, homely, and lived-in. on one wall of the great room was a large stone fireplace surrounded by bookshelves. stuffed chairs and couches were scattered throughout, along with lamps that suffused a yellow light through the room. the place we were in exactly fit the things we were attempting to do in it; study and rest and have conversations. the space itself seemed bent toward those activities, as if someone who entered the room with no purpose would eventually find themselves reading, thinking, and conversing despite themselves. it was my first experience of being conscious of architecture having such a strong influence on me.
not everyone there that week shared my feelings about the place, as was evidenced by a conversation we got into around the lunch table toward the end of the week. there were two architects in attendance that week so off and on the conversation had strayed to the idea of aesthetics. during one lunch one man, perhaps being put off by the general consensus in the group that aesthetics was something that mattered, exclaimed somewhat angrily, “all of this doesn’t really mean anything anyway, does it?” by “all of this” 
he meant beauty as embodied in a place. he was asking if architecture and the way a place looks has any significance. it is a question that was asked not by a person who is impervious to the true significance of architecture, but simply one who is oblivious to the effect it already has on him. the one comment that has stayed with me from all the responses to his question was what one woman said, “imagine if we had been meeting this week in a room with white, fluorescent lights and a drop ceiling.” the image she conjured was in such contrast to the soft, inviting surroundings we’d been in that week was so incongruous that i couldn’t imagine having anything near the same experience in the one as in the other.
it raises the question: can we be who we want to be, who we were meant to be in a dentists office, in a cubicle, in buildings designed for their cost efficiency? alain de boton, author of the architecture of happiness, would answer no. his book is a wonderful introduction to architectural aesthetics and the central concern of the book is the question “what is architectural beauty?” boton traces the history of the debate over that question in simple, concise terms. after closing the last page the reader is left with a new language with which to analyze the spaces he or she enters, and a strengthened conviction that not only does architecture matter, it matters a great deal.
boton comes to his thesis early on, that architecture has the power, and therefore the responsibility, to help make us the people we want to be. it can raise us up. it can push us down. it can shape our experience of life for the better or worse.
“belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or worse, different people in different places – and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be”
he opens his book by fencing in the significance of architecture, which he says is truly something, but not everything. it can put us at ease. it can move us to tears. it can raise our inclination toward the noble. but you can still be an evil person in a beautiful building. it cannot efface pain and grief. it is not the secret talisman against the slow anxiety which can gnaw at us. there is a power to architecture, but it is not a comprehensive power, and it is a power that some people can be more susceptible to than others.
“of almost any building, we can ask not only that it do a certain thing, but also that it look a certain way, that it contribute to given moods of religiosity or scholarship, , rusticity or modernity, commerce or domesticity. we may require it to generate a feeling of reassurance or excitement, of harmony or containment. we may hope that it will connect us to the past or stand as a symbol of the future, and we would complain, no less than we would about a malfunctioning bathroom, if this second aesthetic, expressive level of function were left unattended… we want our buildings to shelter us and also to speak to us – to speak to us of whatever we find important and need to be reminded of.”
a building which speaks of national greatness. german pavillion. world's fair 1937.
if there is a hermeneutic to architecture recommended in the book it is this last bit about what a building says. boton believes that every building is capable of saying something to us. buildings can speak of national greatness. they can speak of god. they can speak of war and peace. of scholarship and contemplation. of industry and business. it is through these things that buildings say that a critique can be made of them. and it is through what a building says that it has its impact on us.
a building can delineate the horizon of possibilities of things that can happen within it. consider these examples:
this cathedral carries its own explanation within its walls. entering the nave of this or any other great old cathedral has a certain kind of effect upon us. we speak in hushed tones. we instinctively look up with wide eyes. we find it a place where it is perhaps more easy to imagine that there is a god, that there is such as goodness and mystery. just by the arrangement of bricks and mortar and sculpture the architects of these old places have made building that speak of the vastness of the divine. and yet also, speak of its connectivity to earth. they are places where god comes down and mankind rises up.
or take for example the work of the french architect, le corbusier. he believed that architecture should be austere, functional, and bare of ornamentation. the places he designed
were crisp rather than warm. clean rather than cluttered. they were white and almost antiseptic. one might even think to call this home unlivable and cold. the building speaks of a belief that humankind is reduceable to fundamentals and that human life operates best alone clean, ordered lines, and thus the places that we need to live in are places which foster that kind of order. this is a home more suited for silent reflection or a refined dinner party than a christmas morning.
i
t is hard to imagine the play of children happening in such a place. we can imagine people coming to see it, which is exactly what the architect told family who lived there by way of assurance when she complained that the flat roof let rain leak in incessantly, le corbusier explained that because of the greatness of his design, “people will come from far off just to see your home and sign your guestbook.” he built them a museum rather than a home.
what does the architecture of a mcdonalds speak about? efficiency, profitability, and repeatability. it is a place where it is nearly impossible to dine slowly. people enter and stand in one of many lines divided by a counter at which the whole process of ordering and payment takes less than a minute. behind the counter sauce is served from a gun to give the exact amount of ketchup to every hamburger. pre-made fries wait impersonally in their own grease to be scooped up, salted, and served. hamburgers slide down a chute to be kept warm beneath a heat lamp until they are purchased. nearly everything is disposable. the experience of dining is about the exchange of cash for calories.
there are values implicit even in fast-food architecture. those values seep into us as we move through those spaces. just as in a cathedral things become more difficult and more easy to believe. as boton says, “mcdonalds is a place where it is almost impossible to believe there is a god.” along with the divine things that might be eclipsed are things in the family of slowness, conversation, reflection, substantive friendship and community. rather, the architecture fosters and environment where things like worry and hustle can wax in our minds. the florescent and paper wrapped around our food makes us feel that if we stay overlong we are somehow become late for something or over worn our welcome.
at the end of boton’s book i felt like there were two groups of people in the world: those who are cognizant of the significance of architecture and the effect it can have on human life for good or ill, or those who are ignorant of it, but simply find themselves feeling and peace or anxious as they pass through certain places but are ignorant of the result. there is no third group of people who are immune to the effects of the spaces they pass through.
Filed under: travel
two friends living in africa told a story recently of a conversation in which someone offered to them his perspective of americans, saying, “you americans are always trying to expand yourselves by experience.” the comment has stuck with me because it seems like an accurate summary part of the myth of travel. travel promises change, that somehow in the course of a journey we can become new people. that is what so many who travel are seeking – to be enlarged somehow. we call it “broadening our horizons” because that is what it feels like. new ideas. new people. new places. they rub up against us and we pass through them. somewhere in transit we incorporate new ideas, modes of dress, dishes, stories from faraway places. we imagine we are becoming a newly made bit by bit in the process.
travel and change seem to go together. the occasion of travel is an occasion to mark a separation between what came before and what came after. its easy to underestimate how much who we are is influenced by where we are. the horizon of possibilities in terms of what we can become can be delineated by things like place. in that sense any place is a stream that carries us onward to its own culmination. each place has its own family of experience which sinks into us and saturates us and works to make us who we are. in travel we enter a new environment with new people new ideas, new experiences which have the potential to carry the traveler onward to a destination we never would have otherwise come to.
travel has the power to change a person because everyone is a product of the convergence of several factors. friends, culture, geography, language, past-times, etc. all of them are the building blocks of our identity. we are products of our places in ways that we cannot even always control, but the culmination of all those factors in a given place seemingly inevitably forces us into a certain shape. in travel, nearly all of those factors are shuffled around like the set on a stage when the lights go out.
imagine a jello mold in which the jello has solidified into a certain shape. then the mold is removed and the formerly rigid walls of the jello inevitably start to ooze into the new shape they find themselves in. the process of change fostered by travel is even easier to see when there was something in the original environment that didn’t sit well with our identity all along. areas of conflict with the old identity will be the first to change. we all have things that we would change, either about our environment or about ourselves. almost no one is completely at home in their home. in travel we are offered a chance to do exactly that. the things we like about ourselves are more stable, but the things we do not like about our identity as it was derived from our original place will be unstable and changeable.
the intrinsic connection between travel and change begs the question: can we go home again? answering yes reflects the belief that we are basically the same people no matter where we go, only we can pick up a suntan, bits of other languages, and stories. the answer no reflects the potential for a deeper change to happen during traveling, one which doesn’t end when the travel ends. more and more i’m leaning toward no.
change during travel is part an inevitable process that has a lot to do with our very humanity; we can’t help making a home for ourselves wherever we are. that home-making tendency means partly that we bring our culture with us and impose it on the new place. perhaps an indian immigrant’s house will always smell like curry, or a korean traveler will remove their shoes the moment they enter someone’s home. but part of that home-making means that the new place imposes itself on us as well. humans adjust themselves to their environments and that involves an internal change as well. so a curious thing happens: the traveler herself becomes a hybrid of her experiences as her external and internal makeup is put together from a composite of places.
t. s. eliot articulates the common myth of travel when he says, “we shall never cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.” in that sentence is the idea that travel is essentially bent toward the homecoming; here travel is an arc in which a traveler starts at home and then ranges abroad and in the process gains knowledge but that knowledge is not the kind which draws her away from who she used to be, but rather draws her further into it in ways that she could not have accessed otherwise. it tells the story of travel ending with greater congruence to home rather than less. i think that is partly true to reality and partly false. travel can enlarge our longing for home through the experience of foreignness, certainly. we all have a deep-seated need to be known and a discomfort with being an alien. but the part that is false to reality is the propensity for foreignness to be a state that it is difficult to come back from.
this is the paradox of travel. when one goes to a new place they become a foreigner and their only hope of breaking through that boundary is through becoming intimately known – to go beneath the surface. when we are away our superficial differences are a screen between us an being truly known. but when we return home the similarities are a screen. if we find we have become new people in subtle ways during travel, that change is at first invisible to the people we left behind and for a moment we reenter the lives of the people we used to be, which exist frozen in amber in the minds of others and in the places of the past. the changes, if they are there, become visible when old friends in old places go beneath the surface.
herein lies the risk of being a traveler. sometimes it is as if it is foreignness itself that the traveler is traveling into, rather than any place that she encounters it. in long-term travel the place she finds herself in can sink into her to the point that, though she is a foreigner abroad, she is also a foreigner at home. the further she goes anywhere the more she becomes completely changed. the traveler can come to live between two worlds, completely at home neither in the original world nor the new one.
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a few years ago the washington post asked renowned virtuoso, joshua bell, if he would be interested in “a stunt.” the stunt involved bell standing in a subway station in D. C. and panhandling for change by playing on his (+200 year old, 3.5 million dollar) violin some of the greatest classical pieces ever written. it was a concatenation of greatness strewn before morning commuters like the change they dropped into his violin case as they hurried past.
what happened? to quote gene weingarten in his pulitzer prize winning article on the events, “in the three-quarters of an hour that joshua bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. that leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.”
they installed a hidden camera and the video is on youtube. watch for the one person who does recognize him at the very end.
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as long as there are humans on the earth the law of entropy will not be the only law at work. a part of being human is being tasked with the solemn work of pushing back the chaos and carving out spaces of order, of beauty, of flourishing. we make straight lines of natural curves – we make the rumpled surface of the earth to fall in orderly rectangles we can live in. at its most fundamental level that is what work is. this is more readily visible in some kinds of work as opposed to others but it applies to the man taking calls in an information center just as aptly as the farmer tilling her fields and sowing her seeds.
work is a place where so many threads of our humanness converge, making it impossible to move the one without vibrating the others. work so often incorporates our bodies. loggers, miners, and farmers sweat and their muscles turn to ropy straps beneath their skin as they carry their loads. work taxes and calls our rationality into use. it is always a question of bringing the resources of our minds to bear on a given problem to some fruitful end. work is so often a social activity, drawing communities together. it is a creative endeavor as we bring things into the world that were not in it formerly. it teaches us our own limitations and finitude as what we make requires constant upkeep and often calls out of us more than we have to give. in this work itself becomes a means of humanization. the more threads of our humanity that are drawn together in our work the more human we become.
it is impossible to not come into contact with the world when we do almost any sort of work. here a farmer bends his back in the sun. his hands are soiled in a way that he doesn’t think of as dirty, though they are covered in dirt. the sun is hot but it makes him happy because though it makes him sweat it is how his plants, and thereby how the man himself, lives. he is tied into the rhythms of the earth as only farmers are. the wind and the rain. the clouds. the rhythms of the season and the range of work that it calls forth from him. his life is tuned into to the cycles of the earth.
the contact with the natural world is easy to see in the case of the farmer but is no less present in the case of the factory worker. these women stand side by side and under their eyes pass by reorganizations of the matter of the world in the form of shoes. they stand under an aluminum roof and under the light of fluorescent gases becoming excited in vacuum-sealed glass tubes. they breath air. even in a factory, which has become the archetype for work disconnected from the earth, we find the earth in abundance. there is a dignity in that. it is as true of a farmer with his hands in the dirt as it is with women standing on an assembly line passing their hands over shoes and breathing the chemical fragrances of patented leather.
i do not mean to paint the picture that all work is equal. it is not. just because work is the work of restoration, of pushing back chaos, doesn’t mean that it itself is not subject to that chaos. our work is subject to all the brokenness that everything on earth is subject to. the work of restoring the world must itself be restored. for every form that brokenness takes there is a form of that injustice incarnated in some kind of work. in that, even work, a piece of what it means to be human, can become dehumanizing.
miners in africa search in the mud for diamonds. the presence of diamonds within the borders of their country has drawn people who would exploit that wealth. and it is not only the mineral wealth of african countries that have been exploited, but the human wealth as well. injustice has become systematized as wealth is taken out of a country and exported elsewhere. poverty forces people to take jobs on the lowest chain of development, for instance, that of miners for the very mineral wealth that is a part of their own oppression. his work takes place in a system that has worked to erode his dignity, and thereby his humanity.
a worker crouches huddled in a dirty blanket in the space between two streets. on either side cars pass by in a blur. he is waiting for one of them to stop and pick him up for work. sometimes work comes and some days he goes home to his family having only sat all day with his shovel next to him. those who see him know who he is and what he is waiting for but do not pay him mind except to notice perhaps that he was there on their drive to work and he was still there on their drive home. he waits surrounded by the crush of traffic and bodies but he is isolated. his work makes him into an anonymous set of hands. when he does get work no one knows his name. his work has taken it from him.
machines, though they can vastly increase what we can produce, often require of humans an opportunity cost in their humanness. work fosters humanity most when the worker and the object of their work have a connection. machines can sever that connected. a farmer whose hands put seeds into the soil he has maintained and kept for a generation and then looks after those seeds through their transformation into the crops. when he pulls the fruit from the plants he has invested a part of himself in those plants – and gets part of himself restored to him in return. machines, in contrast, have the effect of incorporating humans into themselves in a way that reduces them instead of raising them up. the boot maker laboring at a machine huffing noisily beside him also puts a part of himself into his work – we cannot help but invest ourselves – but he in turn becomes only a part of the machine and it does not give his humanity back to him pressed together and strengthened because in the process he has alienated himself. though his hands made those boots they do not bear his mark. though he is an individual, they are not products of an individual. though he has a name, no one will find it out. he has skills, but they are machine skills, the kind of skills that he could pass onto the next generation in a weeks apprenticeship, not a decade. simply in doing his work he has replaced himself. this is dehumanization.
at the center of human work lies a question: will it increase order or create chaos? will it promote human flourishing or dehumanization. though work can be a curse on this cursed world, it is also its best hope. hopkins expresses it so eloquently:
generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
all is seared with trade: bleared, smeared with toil;
and bears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell; the soil
is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
and for all this, nature is never spent;
there lives the dearest freshness deep down things…”
