theory:05

"Never mind the machine, whose fuel is human souls" - R.S. Thomas

What do you hope will be true for your community (at any scale) in twenty years, and how can you use your professional life to help achieve that vision?

In twenty years I hope to gain a better understanding of the following question and be able to embrace it within a body of work that is somehow influential on future architects, artists, and designers.

How can we encourage sharing and positive dialogue about architecture and it’s ideology through architecture? What if we could create an architecture that fosters such a dialogue? What is that manifestation?

“Another Turn of the Crank” by Wendell Berry is a collection of essays regarding the degradation of farming, rural communities, and food economy, in a society which focuses on global economy and is desensitized to the local community. When reading Berry’s work I found myself substituting architects, inhabited space/built environment, architectural economy, and professional practice for farming and farmer.

“In their dealings with the countryside and its people, the promoters of the so-called global economy are following a set of principles that can be stated as follows. They believe that a farm or forest is or ought to be the same as a factory; that care is only minimally necessary at all; that for all practical purposes a machine is as good as a human; that the industrial standards of production, efficiency, and profitability are the only standards that are necessary; that the topsoil is lifeless and inert; that soil biology is safely replaceable by soil chemistry; that the nature or ecology of any given place is irrelevant to the use of it; that there is no value in human community or neighborhood; that technological innovation will produce only benign results.
These people see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world. They believe that knowledge is property and is power, and that it ought to be. They believe that education is job training. They think that the summit of human achievement is a high paying job that involves no work. Their public boast is that they are making a society in which everybody will be “winners” – but their private aim has been to reduce radically the number of people who, by the measure of our historical ideals, might be thought successful: the independent, the self employed, the owners of small business or small usable properties, those who work at home.” - W.Berry, "Another Turn of the Crank"