The projects worked on in 2021 by Duo Dickinson, architect. Photos Duo Dickinson

It is fully lame to say that “times have changed.” Because time is change.

I have made things for 45 years. In some places the work has been lauded, but others have decried what I do as traditionally lame or insensitively modern.

This mutually exclusive disdain makes sense to me. These varied results are due to the reality that beauty is both universally felt and individually perceived, and it has nothing to do with “style.”

The 1,000 things that I have helped build use the polymath way of making, where a site, the users and the designer channel the beauty that is already there, what is already there ready to be revealed – as Michelangelo said, "I saw the angel in marble and carved until I set him free."

I am what I do, but I do what is not a conspiracy of outcomes, but a manifestation of motivations. I think this way of working is why my office has always had work, and just enough money. I end up working with those who value what we do – and that means that I have never laid an employee off or missed a payroll in over forty years.

I end up working with those who value what we do – and that means that I have never laid an employee off or missed a payroll in over forty years

The consequences of having no Canon, no “Style” is a double-edged sword in architecture. There is no intellectual baggage, or orthodoxy to heal to. It would be easier to imitate myself, or others. Each project has people wanting to make things and a moment that is exquisitely unique.

The work all architects do creates outcomes we all can see. These results are often as shallow as the screens that let us see them. Either self-referencing easy answers or mimicking the moment’s distractions insure vapid and pandering imitation. Finding creation listening to all the competing realities found in any context becomes complicated when our culture explodes into uncertainty, as it has in the last two years. 

The internet has taken the human desire to judge and control and given it both steroids and  meth to create hideous caricatures of reactions to the most human acts. It is painfully obvious to declare that the culture of everything is in full flux. No thing, no person has consensus. Everyone is sick of coping: and responding is not leading, let alone hopeful, so coping is but surviving.

Thirty years ago, the world was just a little different. No internet, no computers (well, in most offices), and the Fax was high tech. Three architecture magazines. Professional photographers. Sweets Catalogues filling bookshelves. Making the 5pm US Mail drop off, waiting for paper everything, receiving scores of phone calls a day. A reality that is so long gone, who really knows what that existence was like?

But this time of technologically based, socially realized, politically enflamed, biomedically desperate living takes the word “change” and renders it constant. Like most everything else, we have no resting heartbeat in architecture.

I have Followers now:  2,600 Twitter, 1,800 Instagram, 3,300 Facebook, 200 WordPress: Completely Lame. But they know everything I do because I share. Those “Followers” honestly do not care about what architects cared about even a decade ago. No editors. No Keynote Speakers. No “Important” Papers. There are so many awards, publications, podcasts, videos that everything might as well be on Facebook. Wait, it is. The Pandemic Plague may have changed everything beyond the technology of this century.

So, what does all this mean?

The world may be tilting to a new angle. The last tilt was at the advent of the “Industrial Revolution”. The world before that tilt, only 200 years ago, was fully incomprehensible: Food was what was grown around you, often by you. Things you bought were rarer than things you made. You lived to have children then most often died in the generation after their birth. God granted life to the deserving and Hell to the Bad. Months between communications with anyone outside where you were was normal. We bathed once a week or so, pooped into a pot or hole, ate no fresh food for eight months a year.

Just as we are experiencing now, that era’s first 30 years of tumult happened. In that tilt of time Engines. Factories, Trains. Cities. Universities. Books. And Architecture all happened. Every aspect of how everyone viewed everything shifted, because, like today, the basis of our lives shifted. That industrial world of analogue living then saw world wars, skyscrapers, electricity, trains, automobiles, planes and medicine - but our lives were improved in outcome, not changed in motivation.

In these two hundred years “Architecture” became a distinct fine arts profession, fully changed from living on a site and building things. In this new world, architects now describe what is to be built away from us, by others. We became detached and needed rationales to support our distant directives.

The result is that in the last two centuries,  "Architecture" has become an assortment of religions of "Style" each with their own Koran or Bible, while the rest of our culture is now fully questioning faith. Many architects and those who care about design have carefully crafted Canons. That faith-based pseudo-science, made by those who use it to judge their own work, is simply inverted. If God did not write the Koran, or the Bible, then those using them are humans judging humans.

But humans did not make beauty. We find it in the places, circumstances and people that coincide to experience it.

We, the ones who want to define things in architecture used a theology of aesthetics that overrules what we knew in favor of what we hope is “Right”, and therefore valid. But in the time of the end of editors, the unlimited gusher of exposure to everything, immediately and for free may simply render architectural theology as suspect as the theology of any religion.

In this moment, today, theologies of all sorts are as existentially threatened as the U.S. Mail. Theology and Architecture share a fundamental origin: They are human fabrications created to control and define what may not be ours to define. 

Beyond shelter, architecture serves our delight in beauty and culture, in that way it is taught and often practiced like theology.  Beyond eating and sleeping, humans want to define who they are to the point that they want to know what they are.  Architecture and Religion attempt that control. Religion is to Faith as Architecture is to Beauty. All are real, but Religion and Architecture are human, and Faith and Beauty are simply there, unmade by humans, but uniquely perceived by us.

In this century anybody declaring that God explains anything is judged to be intellectually invalid to more and more people, in fact almost all of academia. Religion as a human creation may be as fully flawed as are the “Style” applications of any Canon.

Humanity desperately tries to define itself in what it does. Whether religion, architecture, or physics, humans define realities that, in truth, they often cannot understand. Faith-based perceptions are not limited to religion, and faith is present in every construct we apply to every aspect of our lives. We have faith that our bodies will heal after we execute enormously complex medical interventions. We have faith in the physics we apply, that the plane will fly, the car will stop, not understanding their creation.

Ironically, if the human fabrications of Canon are applied to things that we actually do not make – like faith and beauty – we may begin to understand them. But that understanding needs to give up any sense of universal truth or objective certainty that is central to any Canon because we try to rationalize what we cannot understand. We did not make ourselves, either, so when we try, endlessly to define, direct and prove ourselves, the effort is fully flawed. Trying to empirically define anything without control or understanding is folly. Humans respond to what we experience, and then try to calculate the responses we value, rather than simply listening to our irrational reactions.  

Architecture only exists in humanity. Burrows, hives, nests and anthills are products of instinct, not design, despite their exquisite beauty. Our buildings have the most elemental of reasons to exist. Like the burrow, buildings protect. Like the hive, buildings allow for use beyond protection. Like the beaver’s dam, our buildings intentionally impact the environment. But like almost every human act, the value of architecture goes beyond those outcomes.

Humans who make anything perceive the art that it embodies. The reality of our perception is as undeniable as gravity. We can live without music and dance or any other unnecessary aspect of living. But the thrill of living in beauty is the reason we want to live. The power of that motivation to experience the joys of being alive allows humans to have faith in beauty, in God.  

Why do we care about the motivations of our aesthetics? I think it is because we are scared of being “wrong” in an internet era that fuels any differences into divides. If "Style" is human, and "Beauty" is revealed and not made, where does that leave architects?

 Almost 150 years ago, Emily Dickinson wrote:

“The Definition of Beauty is

That Definition is none —

Of Heaven, easing Analysis,

Since Heaven and He are one.”

Some of us are afflicted with beauty, particularly architects. Not being in possession of beauty to replicate it, we are searching for it. In that effort, the desire is largely unrewarded. I have that disease. If the effort of architecture tries to simulate an outcome, hope unravels into disappointment. Whether words, pictures, dinner, a song, or even, (forgive me) buildings, when we try to find the spark of joy that has no recipe, the effort can end in a self-fulfilling depression. Unless we have perspective.

Humanity is based on purpose and meaning: our motivations and outcomes. Consequently, we can be depressed over the unanswerable need to know what beauty is because we have been exultant in its perception. To think that the joy of beauty is limited to art, or music or architecture is sophistry. Beauty is in the warp and woof of the human condition; in everything we do. As anyone who has children knows, motivations do not guarantee outcomes, or ensure the joy we live for.

Understanding that we should first listen to the miracles that we did not earn, let alone create, may be the only Canon architects need. If humans created the world, our fabrication would have a rationale, a Canon, a purpose, expressing our values. But we did not make this world.  Beauty, as we feel it's joy, is as essential and absolute as the air we breathe. If we could, we would create the beauties that we ignorantly bump into, versus being in their good graces. But after 45 years I know I do not make beauty, it is revealed to me.