Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
March 4, 2007
Obedience to Reality
Once upon a time, in the days of humanity’s intellectual youth and superstition, it was a common belief that trees had resident spirits. These beings, the theory ran, found it inconvenient and annoying to have their abodes summarily chopped down, and were likely to behave in spiteful fashion if not appropriately propitiated for the loss of their homes in the service of human necessities. Given sufficient notice, however, they could be induced to relocate, and this is the anthropological origin of the practice which persists to our own day, of knocking on wood for good luck – to evoke the favor of the tree spirits. Our own spiritual ancestors, the Transcendentalists, -- of whom Thoreau was one -- had a more sophisticated view of the world that carried something of the same quality; they saw all objects, human, animate, and inanimate, as endowed with power and a kind of moral integrity; soil and stone, timber and water, could be debased from their intended dignity, as well as men and women.
The concept of a secret handshake goes back to the era of medieval stone masons, whose guild carried extraordinary status and freedom in that highly regimented society. Because the work of building the great cathedrals and fortresses was specific to particular places at the time of construction, stone masons could move around throughout their working lives, traversing even national boundaries, in a way that almost no one else, whatever their rank, was allowed to do. And because many lives depended upon their mastery of the skills of their trade, it was imperative that there be a system by which they could recognize one another’s competence. Thus, one master mason, when he was satisfied with a potential colleague’s level of experience and demonstrated understanding of the traditional techniques, would show him the handshake by which he could certify his training at another job site. Knowing that they would be at the mercy of others so certified in their own future work made them quite cautious about communicating these signals to any but the truly proficient and trust worthy. There are dozens or hundreds of accounts of great building projects founded upon rituals of sacrifice to ensure their success, and about the rigorous disciplines of preparation undergone by those who plan, execute, and oversee such projects. This is what the ancients knew; that building is a spiritual as well as a material enterprise; that when we construct humanly composed space upon the earth, we perform an act of creativity that has something of divine power about it.
Architecture in the industrial era of western civilization, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries primarily, often seems like a collective effort to dispense with that awareness. It has tended to see the technological aspects of building as a series of challenges to be overcome with advanced materials and innovative methods; to regard natural limitations as hurdles to be surmounted in the service of what was imagined to be efficiency, order, and cost effectiveness. Now, I am myself sufficiently a child of the enlightenment and a creature of comfort that I rejoice in many of these accomplishments. The elevator is a boon to the disabled, the elderly, parents juggling small children, and enables greater density on a smaller footprint than is otherwise possible. Air conditioning, while it can be overused, can also be literally a life-saving technology. Nothing that we have discovered in the past two centuries about how to construct the built environment is intrinsically bad knowledge. The problem is, as Amory Lovins identifies, that we have become mired in an architectural aesthetic that no longer respects the organic needs of human beings as having a spiritual basis, or component. Instead, what has come to dominate is an aesthetic of achievement; of largeness and improbability that makes the viewer exclaim, "How in the world did they do THAT?" Of course, grandeur has always been one of the goals of architecture; the pyramids and the cathedrals were also designed to be overwhelming, and elicit amazement. Yet they also had the overt purpose of expressing and connecting to the spiritual realities of the cultures that built them; of saying something about the meaning, purpose, and dignity of human existence. Modern industrial architecture, whether in its sprawling cinderblock commercial aspect, its glass tower corporate aspect, or its endlessly reiterated identical housing development aspect, often ignores the natural cravings of people’s experience on a human scale. It assumes that space, materials, and energy are all inert things, to be arranged at the builder’s will, rather than living components of an environmental system that will have an eco-logic unique to itself, and that will feed in to the life quality of everyone affected by it.
This dilemma is of particular concern to us as Enlightenment humanists, because we have long been advocates of the movement away from what we might call the organic superstitions that attributed self-consciousness to spirits abiding in trees and rocks and rivers, toward a more materialistic perspective, based upon science, logic, and the human agenda of comfort and convenience. We would maintain, I think, that this perspective has served its purpose well; in fact, it has generated unprecedented levels of individual well-being, freedom of choice, and certain kinds of increasingly global interconnections. At the same time, this perspective has also given permission to discount the legitimate needs of the human spirit, that once expressed themselves in the premise of organic consciousness. The concept of Green Architecture is exciting to me as a humanist theologian, precisely because it lifts up the tangible, human context within which the aesthetic of the spiritual matters most. The spaces in which we live and move and have our being shape us; they determine, often invisibly, what our world is like, and what is possible for us. They do this, of course, in very direct ways, through what is destroyed in order to build and maintain them, through how they protect or expose us, through what they enable us to or prevent us from consuming; through what they offer us to see, hear, touch, and smell as the hours and days pass. Yet I have learned enough about the dynamics of our relationships with one another to know that how people feel and function is affected by many factors that we are not necessarily able to put a finger on. Our built environment can have aesthetic or moral integrity, or not; it will express the intent of the builders in a thousand subtle, unintentional ways that all add up to its impact on us for good or ill.
The poet Robert Frost articulate this sense of unconscious impact is his poem about a remembered creek:
The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square
With the new city street it has to wear
A number in. But what about the brook,
That held the farm as in an elbow crook?
I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength
And impulse, having dipped a finger length
And made it leap my knuckle; having tossed
A flower to try its currents where they crossed.
The meadow grass could be cemented down
From growing under pavements of a town;
The apples trees be sent to hearth stone flame;
Is water wood, to serve a brook the same?
How else dispose of an immortal force
No longer needed? Staunch it at its source
With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown
Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone
In fetid darkness still to live and run,
And all for nothing it had ever done,
Except forget to go in fear perhaps.
No one would know, except for ancient maps,
That such a brook ran water, but I wonder
If from its being kept forever under
The thoughts may not have risen that so keep
This new-built city from both work and sleep.
This is the voice of the modern consciousness, that has moved beyond the dryads and water sprites that once haunted our imaginations, and yet is restless with the awareness that we cannot quite so lightly dispose of immortal forces no longer needed for our own rational purposes. To be completely cut off from the elemental energies and identity of the place, is to live in an unsustainable artificiality, that in the end will keep our new built cities from both work and sleep. It is not a return to superstition to know this; it is rather, as Amory Lovins describes, a design philosophy that both embraces the technical challenges of conserving resources, and seeks to apply technology wisely, in a mature relationship with our needs and capacities. In its largest aspect, he names this "applied love." It seems to me that nothing could be more congruent with what a truly humanist outlook would wish to adhere to.
Lovins gives several examples of the philosophical contrast between what he calls the "elegant frugality" of traditional Japanese sensibility, and the "crude and ugly wastefulness" of twentieth century commercial design, arguing for "the simple but profound idea that technology is foremost an art form, to be judged first on aesthetic criteria." Green architecture, he suggests, means "creating serene and beautiful structures that grow organically in and from their place, structures that do not exploit or pollute, but rather increase harmony with the whole world around them."
"The typical Western mechanical engineer would strive to eliminate every pesky trace of variability with thermostats and humidistats and photosensors, to render the human experience uniform and constant down to the last lux of light and molecule of air – as if people were dead machines, not dynamic organisms. All too often, the architect, who seems to have forgotten where the sun is, designs a box that is randomly oriented, "all glass and no windows," shuttered with blinds and curtains to block any natural light that might somehow overcome the radiant and airborne chill or heat of the poorly conceived building envelope. Controlled ventilation replaces operable windows. Glaring downlights replace the luminous sky under which people first evolved. In every case, the artificial substitutes for natural conditions are less and worse: they do not let people do or be or feel their best.
However skilful the designers, such buildings cannot provide the conditions in which people evolved, in which the body is healthy and alert and the spirit tranquil and nourished. Yet so pervasive has this travesty of architecture become that few people today have ever experienced real comfort – thermal, visual, or acoustic – and so they don’t know what they’re missing. When finally people do experience a space in which they can feel comfortable, see what they’re doing, and hear themselves think, they do far more and better work (in eight recent case studies from Rocky Mountain Institute, about 6 – 16% better); they remain healthier and more alert, friendlier and happier. Businesses (at least in America) typically pay a hundred times as much for people as for energy; so such an improvement in labor productivity is an order of magnitude more valuable than eliminating the entire energy bill. Yet it remains extremely rare.
From the east, especially from Japan, comes the idea – utterly contrary to the comfort theory used by Western mechanical engineers, yet utterly obvious to any evolutionary biologist – that people will prefer and will thrive in a subtly dynamic environment rather than a static one. So it is that modern Japanese room air conditioners slightly vary the temperature using a pseudo random number generator, and deliver air not in a steady flow but in a series of pseudo random gusts – sometimes even in a pattern typical of a certain famous resort near Tokyo..
Green design can work its wonders on any scale from a cottage to a city. In South Amsterdam, it created the headquarters of the major bank NMB – a 50,000 square meter complex where changing sun angles reflect off colored metal (part of the highly integrated art work) to bathe the lower stories in ever changing colors. (In an newer building, these might even match the body’s daily cycle of ‘appetite’ for light that’s now cooler, now warmer.) Every office in NMB building has natural air and natural light. Water gurgles and splashes down flow-form sculptures in the bronze handrails along the soaring stairs. Absenteeism is down 15%, and working hours far exceed design expectations, because the workers can’t bear to go home, and hold all sorts of evening events at their workplace. The bank’s board of directors ordered "an organic building that would integrate art, natural materials, sunlight, green plants, energy conservation, quiet, and water" – and that would not cost one guilder more per square meter [than standard construction]. They insisted on a highly integrated and transdisciplinary design process, led by an architect, Ton Alberts, who had never before designed a commercial building. And when it was done, the building became the most readily recognized in all Holland, and the bank, with its newly progressive and creative image, soared from fourth to second biggest in the country.
Other such buildings (though not enough yet) already exist. They combine superior human and financial performance. They create delight when entered, harmony when occupied, regret when departed. They can be built in practically any desired style or size, program or climate. They simply (at least it seems simple when it’s all done) combine a biologically and spiritually informed appreciation of what people are and want, a completely integrated design process, and a toolkit of advanced technologies. They require the art and science of design to yield a result that is simple, not complex; passive, not active; gracefully responsive rather than stubbornly resistant to climate and sunlight and weather; uniquely optimized, not formulaic. And when you are in such a building, you know in your bones, as instinctively as if you were still on the savannah where humankind was born, the time of day and the time of year. You know which way is south. You know if it’s snowing, if it’s cloudy, whether there’s a rainbow, whether the stars are out. You know you are a child of the natural world – not a refugee from nature, not a prisoner walled in a drab cell, cut off from our planet’s constant change."
The point of green architecture is most certainly not an ecological Puritanism that seeks to minimize energy or resource consumption at the expense of either comfort or beauty; indeed, it seeks rather to restore both the comfort and the beauty that have been stripped from our lives by the sterile technicality of industrial age building. Green architecture has, when it is successful, the effect of making people more productive in their work, but this is not its primary purpose either. People who are genuinely comfortable, relaxed, and happy do in fact tend to be more energetic and efficient, but it is the comfort and peace, the nourishment of the human spirit, that is the underlying purpose of this approach. Such a philosophy is religious in the most original sense of the world; it is about re-connection, about the ways in which buildings connect to their natural environments, and the ways in which people connect to the earth, the universe, and one another. We have been designed by millions of years of evolutionary pressure to live in a dynamic relationship of mutuality with the natural world; that relationship is flexible, but it is not optional. When we allow ourselves to be cut off from nurturing connection to the organic source, our humanity shrivels, and we become alienated, and troubled in spirit. To create the homes and stores, the factories and offices and schools that do not do that to us, but that support and celebrate our infinite implicit connections to the world around us, is a high art; it requires the best of technical skill, in the service of both exquisite sensibility and profound integrity. It requires, I would argue, a spiritual sensitivity to the essential questions of human existence: What is it that truly heals us, restores us, creates the sense of abundance, and a peaceful heart? To be sure, these are not questions of architecture alone, and it is not for architecture alone to answer them. They are rather the questions of all forms of "applied love," and the answers will always bring us back to Alexander Pope’s observation, in the opening moment of the Enlightenment era, that nature, if it is to be controlled, must be obeyed.
That obedience, in the form of architecture or any other art or science, is finally a spiritual discipline, a commitment to wholeness -- for ourselves, and in the context of an entire planet. We cannot, I think, return to the enchanted universe of organic consciousness, nor would we wish to, for it had its own alienations of the human spirit. But I believe that we can recognize the ultimate insufficiency of mere technology to create the quality of the world we seek. For if we would be fully human, we must live in a way that is grounded, not arbitrary; dynamic, not sterile; and responsive to the needs of body and spirit, not just logic and utility. We must envision ourselves as co-creators and co-laborers with the energies of nature, whose children we are, however accidental. The old myths have clues; the modern technologies have skills. It is our good fortune, and our challenge, to live in the era when humanity must learn to bring the two together in a new fusion that honors the whole truth of our natures. If we are to be at home, here in the wonder of this life and this world, we shall have to build our homes in harmony with the rhythms of all creation, not against them; we shall have to be the architects of applied love, whose reverence for truth at last embraces not only calculation, but inner wisdom; not only all that we know, but everything we are.