According to Travis Price, an award-winning architect and philosopher whose work is rooted in ecology and mythology, most architecture today is just plain soulless. "You go into malls and they float all kinds of Roman columns and fake images. It's Disney. It's superficial. It's mass produced. It's empty."
Price, a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, focuses on restoring the "spirit of place" to modern design by providing an alternative to the "sprawl, mall and tall" trend [...]
— huffingtonpost.com
36 Comments
Rather than designing shopping malls to encompass cultural myths we need to abandon consumerism as the basis of all culture.
is he saying a strip mall should be considered 'sacred' space?
if a soul exists, it can be measured. if it can't be measured, it doesn't exit. perhaps we should focus our efforts on how to measure the soul, then we can find quantitative data to support how much soul a strip mall really has, and perhaps even develop specs to make sure the contractor is meeting the architect's design intent as to how much soul should be included, and not cutting it out so they can pad their profit.
Think I had a Bit Coin moment......here today gone tomorrow.
Curt, the "soul" in a metaphorical sense exists. I'm not a religious person, but there is a clear difference between the american grocery store and the markets in some older cities. The market is rich with colors, smells, and human contact. Buying bread from tony the baker is a more soulful experience than buying bread from frys grocery store. The soulfulness is embedded in the quality of the product and the love of the artisan. It is also embodied in the human connection between the baker, the place, and the customer. The soulless nature of the strip mall is due to the disconnection it has to the place being that it is owned and operated by a corporation thousands of miles away. It has no sense of place, there are no names, just items and logos. The "soul" he is referring to is the intricacy between people and place and between product and place.
if a soul exists, it can be measured. if it can't be measured, it doesn't exit.
There are plenty of things that can't be measured but still exist.
Also, qualitative things cannot always be quantified. That's a huge misnomer. But if you must, craftsmanship, connection between place and object, function, etc May be a starting point.
It's nice to see Huff Post delve into architecture a bit deeper than just "Look at this building shaped like a piano!".
how does an architect create a 'soul?' sort of like a frankenstein thing? does the soul exhibit particle behavior, or wave behavior? both perhaps? i'm sure we can all agree that once a person becomes an architect, they literally become a god, but perhaps for simple people like me, you could explain a bit better how that works. is a building granted a soul when certain
we could use better architects, not more bullshit. talking about sprawl in units per square foot, residents per square foot, usable square foot per mile, or something like that would be more helpful.
maybe leed 4.0 can include a credit for 'soul.' if you have enough 'soul' in your building, you could even get an exemplary performance point. also, souless places, like those with grocery stores, can get a regional priority for 'soul' to help encourage 'soul' development.
Soul isn't created by the building, it's created by the use of the building. The architect can facilitate that.
Well put Miles!
Wave and particle are actually one in the same curt. Everything is a wave function until it is observed. The observer collapses the wave function creating the "particle." Without that its basic components at the sub atomic are only potential in the form of wave functions. The observer creates reality. See the double slit experiment. This goes for all matter.
I would say the soul is neither particle or wave. It is the experience of being the observer as miles said. The soul is experienced. The facilitation of such experience is what the author says lacks.
Science
Making two possibilities a reality
predicting the future of things we all know
fighting off the diseased programming
of centuries, centuries, centuries, centuries
Science fails to recognise the single most
potent element of human existence
letting the reigns go to the unfolding
is faith, faith, faith, faith
Science has failed our world
science has failed our mother earth
Spirit-moves-through-all-things
Spirit-moves-through-all-things
Spirit-moves-through-all-things
Spirit-moves-through-all-things
Spirit-moves-through-all-things
Spirit-moves-through-all-things
Science has failed our world
Science has failed our mother earth
Maybe the definition of science needs to expand. The pure faith that modernists placed on science (or at least the idea of it) was as dogmatic as religious dogmatism. Afterall, it's becasue of science that we see the limits of the prevailing scientific triumphalist paradigm. Becasue of our biological nature, we will never match up to machines, or better put, they will never synch with us. As such, there should be allowances for those elements that make us human, even if they are not quantifiable.
Science is starting to recognize that everything is connected, for example quantum entanglement. And in his last book Hawking turned to doG, presumably because of the things he could not find an explanation for.
Buddhists have know that everything is connected for 2,500 years.
The internet is entangling, fer sher.
I have a new analogy, I read this recently in regards to conscientiousness (buddha style), that consciousness is like a laser, where the energy gets more and more focused and then it becomes something else, something very powerful. I see that in architecture, where form and material and energy and human behavior become focused.
curt, according to science, life can't even exist! Scientist have lots of big holes in their game, they can't explain photosynthesis either. Look up Far from Equilibrium Thermodynamics. It is a theory that life is an energy force emergent from equilibrium and that when are you most alive you are like a charged battery or far from equilibrium (different than what people say when they say they need balance.)
modernists? really? You're going to turn this into another one of your clueless 'traditional' rantings? haven't beaten that dead horse thoroughly enough?
the idea that a building can house a soul would be referred to as animism. i don't think christians or typical buddhists would ascribe to that belief. those who believe a building has a soul would be something like a shinto, or perhaps an architect who wants to pretend they're playing god because for whatever reason they lack the humility (a virtue in both christianity and buddhism) to understand life does not revolve around them.
you can be a great designer and still hold on to a bit of humility. once you've so completely lost your mind that you think you're a god creating life, or that 'science' has something to do with the 'modernists,' you're probably not going to be a great designer.
the definition of science should absolutely not be expanded to included bullshit. do you want us to start teaching kids in school that if thayer likes a building, it must have a soul? you can still put fypon and 'classical ornamentation' on a building without redefining 'science.' it's not the threat you think it is. observe, test and verify, and leave your hokey religions and ancient weapons out of it.
"or that 'science' has something to do with the 'modernists,"
You may want to brush up on your history if you thing those two concepts are antithetical. Then again, the fear of history might have something to do with your ignorance on these matters. Kind of a self fullfilling prophecy, wouldn't you say?
" you can still put fypon and 'classical ornamentation' on a building without redefining 'science."
It's not us redefining science, it's science redefining itself.
it's goofy to say that this is a modern/non-modern argument. it's an ill-considered, careless developer-driven building economy vs architecture argument.
"You go into malls and they float all kinds of Roman columns and fake images. It's Disney. It's superficial. It's mass produced. It's empty."
modern and non-modern can be superficial, mass-produced, and empty. both can also be instilled with the more personal and rich values of those involved in their making.
it's also not a science argument, in my mind. we've all heard the adage that just because we can doesn't mean we should. gypsum technology could allow us to do a lot of things. the construction industry made choices that resulted in the drywall boxes that we typically occupy now.
price's is an argument for people to pay attention to their environment, to educate themselves about what they want, what they value, and to surround themselves with the results of better choices.
if i wanted to be provocative i'd say that people thinking they want traditional is the cause of a lot of the schlock we see developers deliver. but they certainly give us modern schlock, too.
'give the people what they want' is obviously not always the right answer.
'get people to think and learn and work toward a better, richer answer' may be.
What is the difference between real estate and architecture? Real estate is a physical body. Architecture is a physical and non-physical body.
I guess curt designs real estate?
you could say that if you want tint.
i don't always design the places people want to work. but, what i design is where they will work. there are a lot of people other than me involved in that process too, including real estate people.
having a conversation more eloquently phrased, as steven posted above, might be useful if we're going to improve on what's happening in the real world instead of just in studio. i would think you have to take the 'traditional soul' out of the environment and look at what's actually there. better stuff often costs more, which someone other than the architect is ultimately going to have to pay for. that isn't always just money either, it can be a question of life cycle cost, maintenance, time, or a bunch of other things that end up getting lost in the process.
you can't really talk about the "soul" of a building unless you can clearly define it. if i was supposed to inject more 'soul' into a design, that would likely mean something different to me than it does to you. it's like saying 'i'll know it when i see it.' that isn't useful direction. i advocate less bullshit and more clear communication.
if you were to involve the entire design team as well as the public into developing what it is they really value, you may end up with people wanting cheap disposable crap. if there wasn't any cost or priorities to set, then sure everyone would want pearly gates and golden streets and all that, but once values are defined and priorities set, things start to change. if this conversation with the public really did occur, would you be willing to accept an answer you don't like?
curt, are you saying there is no such thing as soul? Is this an matter of semantics?
i'm saying the 'soul' shouldn't be in conversations about architecture, due to the generally ambiguous and often inconsistent use of that word in trying to explain things. using terms like that tend to obfuscate the message you're trying to get across, making it difficult to understand and often making it harder for me to do my job, much like when someone says "i'll know it when i see it."
i don't really care whether or not the soul exists. as zaha says, it's "not my duty as an architect." however, i do believe if the soul exists, it can be measured, much like the higgs boson or gravitons or whatever. i would lean towards consideration of those religions that consider the soul somewhat analogous to energy. energy can be measured. i think would be great if someone at cern or wherever was able to find the soul. it would be huge jump in our understanding of life, the universe, and everything. unfortunately, as an architect, that discovery is beyond me.
@steven: price's is an argument for people to pay attention to their environment,
and this essentially translates to policies that encourage people to largely get around by walking or by bike rather than only by car. We've known for a long time that cars alter our perception of place, and I recall a recent study that showed that people who drove through a particular neighborhood had a far more negative view of the area than people who walked or biked. Price's argument is pretty much the social costs of drive-up and drive-through architecture.
I feel like I keep beating a dead horse whenever I say this stuff. The more people walk/bike places - through the same places, over and over... the more they'll pay attention to their environment. it's really that simple. It's not some nebulous idea that buildings somehow lack "soul" or about "giving people what they want." We all just need to move a little slower.
I guess the psychological costs of building our society around cars is a fairly reasonable argument for facilitating other non-car modes of transportation (and there are many many other reasons why we should be shifting to a more multi-modal view of transportation infrastructure) - but no one is going to take us seriously when we sound like we're talking about "values" or start veering off into metaphysics.
"however, i do believe if the soul exists, it can be measured, much like the higgs boson or gravitons or whatever." So if it can't be measured, it's not important? I think toasteroven makes a great point though. How do you measure the fact that driving vs. walking through an environment engenders different feelings? We don't need a neurologists brain scan to verify every feeling we have. It's simply important to create a space whereby those feelings can be given room to animate ones work, which is unfortunatley not often enough. Why censor ourselves to only that which can be measured when our work already denies many things we'd like to incorporate that woud make our spaces more pleasurable? We are not machines.
Can you define why "echos" by pink Floyd has more soul than "I want to me a billionaire" by justin bieber?
is it the intent of the music? The composition of sounds? The space between notes? My bias?
Its difficult to quantify. Too difficult for me anyway. I think the soulfulness of anything be it music, art, architecture, food, etc....is about the ability of the maker to communicate something meaningful and honest to the observer. The strip mall only communicates "buy this" and is filled with dishonesty. The illusion of a neighborhood baker, the image of a friendly neighborhood market owned by a corporation 1000 miles away. All lies.
The object is the medium that transfers the "soul" through its language. The soul is not in the object, but the object evokes the soul in the observer through a certain language. In the case of architecture that language is one of tectonics, materiality, spatial composition, intricacy, connection to place, function, history, memory, and usage. Soul does not have to be intentional. A flower is not intentionally beautiful. It's beauty and soulfulness is the bi product of a design process that only cared about function and survival. The Grand Canyon has a soulful quality as do all natural habitats. We find these places moving for all sorts of personal reasons, but the place itself acts as the catalyst to evoke such feelings
I would say that architecture can be unintentionally beautiful and soulful as a byproduct of its quest to mediate between form material, place, and function. However, the word function can be expanded beyond utility alone. Or architecture can seek beauty and work backwards reverse engineering a certain "vision" of beauty. Obviously no process is black or white, but overall the soulfulness is embedded in the careful mediation between all aspects of the project.
The only thing I know for sure is that soulfulness and honesty go hand and hand. The nature of the American consumer landscape is rooted in dishonesty making it difficult to be soulful. The only hope for any soul in the common strip mall is the creation of memory in a few observers who attach the place (as dismal as it may be) to a certain event or time of life. A group of kids that spent years skating in the parking lot for instance may find the place to evoke some soul through their personal memories associated with it. But to the average observer who lacks such an associative connection, they will likely find falling water more soulful than cvs.
So. Soul is a product of process and honesty. The more rigorous the process, the more honest the message, the more refined the object, the more soulful it feels IMO. Then we have history, tradition/ritual, and memory which also adds another layer to it. The pyramids for instance cannot be replicated. Their soul is embedded in their history and authenticity.
but then authenticity can be a slippery slope. long read here - http://places.designobserver.com/feature/hating-bourbon-street-new-orleans/38323/ - but hits some of those issues.
soul is the same thing as saying psyche (mind) or flow (life force energy) or the metaphysical (beyond physical) or incorporeal (without body). All the same thing. Not believing in souls is like saying you don't believe we are alive. So it can be observed (measurable), right? Curt you must live under a rock there in Kansas.
information is metaphysical. It is without body but it exists. I can say Miles, I adore thee! and if he reads this he might blush from over 1,000 miles away. :)
do you think that definition of soul is the same as what jla was talking about with pink floyd and honesty?
i didn't say i don't believe in souls, i said i don't care, and that it is an ambiguous term. since you gave 4 definitions in your post, which i think generally don't fit neatly into jla's music analogy, that would support my statement that it's ambiguous, wouldn't it?
as a matter of fact, lots of people talk about souls around my rock in kansas. some people are even trying to redefine what science is, so they can say 'it says so in a very important religious text' is the same thing as observing natural phenomena.
when trying to design a building, or even develop some sort of manifesto that an architect could follow, using ambiguous terms like that is not helpful. it obfuscates whatever intent they're trying to get across. that obfuscation is probably intentional, because their intent is often just bullshit anyway, and has no place in actually designing buildings. kind of like when someone says 'i'll know it when i see it,' it might be true, but it's not helpful direction to someone who actually has to do something.
I believe that there are two ways to view the universe, one is scientific and the other aesthetic. One uses our rational, scientific mind, and the other uses our capacity to apprehend beauty. They are complementary views, and each view may contradict the other in some way, but both are necessary for our understanding to approach completeness.
(BTW...I don't believe that it's a coincidence that this kind of symmetry resembles Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity from the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.)
Here's an interesting essay by Mark Anthony Signorelli which describes this dualism really nicely:
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/134740/sec_id/134740
"Suppose we were watching a tiger hunting in “the forests of the night.” Suppose we were observing – from a safe distance, of course – his deliberate course through the brush and the undergrowth as he stalked his prey. What is it that we would see? In a certain sense, there are two scenes we would be watching.
In the first scene, we would observe the animal’s slow propulsion as its elongated hind legs transferred force down through the muscles to the powerful ligaments in its feet, to the soft padding underneath, and ultimately to the floor of the forest itself. We would catch the unique glow in the beast’s eye, caused by a reflective retinal layer which allows it to see in the dark especially well. And of course, we couldn’t miss the tiger’s famous stripes, the effect of certain genetic combinations which evolved over time because they increased the animal’s camouflaging potential and therefore increased its odds for predatory success and survival.
Watching the second scene, we would marvel at the tiger’s lithe form moving through the florid vegetation with its unique combination of grace and muscularity. The balanced symmetry of his body, which makes his impressive locomotion possible, would captivate our attention. So too would the slight fragments of moonlight which made their way through the canopy, casting a unifying glimmer over the palm branches, the twisted roots of the mangrove, and of course, the banded flank of the animal in its passage. The entirety of the scene, its barely illuminated placidity mixed with an unmistakable aura of danger, would be certain to affect us in the most powerful way.
In the first scene, what we are looking at is a world of analyzed parts, indefinitely divisible, each related to the others in a purely causal fashion. The chain of these mechanical causes may extend from very small parts to very large (as in the genetic processes which cause the stripes to appear in the pelage of the tiger), and may extend very far into the past (as in the evolutionary events which have preserved and modified those processes). But all that is to be observed there in the first scene are the various parts, and the sum of their effects when they act upon one another.
The second scene reveals to us a composition, a unified picture. There the parts are not related to one another in a causal fashion, but rather according to a harmony or appositeness that we can perceive running through them all. Those parts, moreover, are not indefinitely divisible, but display an unmistakable unity in and of themselves, a delimited nature which constitutes each thing as what it is, and not some other thing. The composition before us is a composition of forms. Its appearance is an affective as well as a perceptive experience, most palpably manifesting in a desire to remain in the presence of the appearance. It is a vision of beauty that we see here."
Science is often incomplete, inaccurate or both. Aesthetics are subjective. The serch for a grand unified theory is essentially an exercise in ego. Hawking, in his last book, cited doG for the inexplicabe.
That's really nice EKE. I think it captures the main difference between how many architects view the built environment and how the user tends to view it. Why a lot of overly intellectuallized work tends to leave many people flat. This in no way disvalidates the more analytical aspects of work, like one's attraction to a possible mate is made deeper with familiarity after the surface beauty has worked it's charms, but it clearly states that the former can't be discounted and ideally, should work in concert with the latter. This intuitive aspect has been alternatley described as animalistic, base, or primitive and all the associations that carried with it.
Ironically, it's the rational mind through the latest breakthroughs in biology and neuroscience that's shown a clearer picture of the emotive substructure underlying our more "rational" brain. Afterall, who hasn't had a fight with someone where both sides are claiming the "facts" when there was some hidden emotion underlying the armies of logic. All that being said, Curt, your point about Kansas is well taken. Trying to supplant a scientific understanding of evolution with a religious one is no joke, but it's not what's being talked about here. The fear on both sides of this debate is that someone will establish a dogma (and has) that will nulify or at least diminish ones personal perspective or balance between these two aspects of our mind.
To quote Roger Scrutom in The Aesthetics of Architecture..."But the criterion of success lies not in any 'optimal solution', scientifically derived, but in the ability of rational beings to understand the solution that is proposed. A 'solution' to a design problem will be satisfactory only if it presents, to those who live and work with the product, a suitable basis for their own practical understanding. Therefore, the search for some ideal solution, which satisfies some given set of functions ( or theoretical precepts) as well as circumstances permit, must take account of an intuitive understanding, not only of the 'problem', but of the 'solution' itself. Being constrained at both ends, as it were, by the limits of human intuition, it is hard to see that the proces of design can hope to free itself from intuition, or that it ought seriously to try to do so."
Curt, the music analogy...let me explain...
just my opinion of course, but this is how i see the relation between architecture, art, music, etc,and soul...its basically about communication. The message being communicated will appear to contain "soul" or evoke soul if the message is meaningful in some way to the observer. Simple. Emotional, poetic, nostalgic. it must have meaningful content. The second part is that the message must be transferred clearly through whatever medium one uses be it music, architecture, painting, etc. For that message to transfer smoothly it must be well designed. It must have some clarity. It cannot be convoluted. the "strip mall" condition is not meaningful in content nor does it contain clarity. Doesn't necessarily Mean that shitty design is souless, people may apply their own meaning (the skater kids for example) but the place itself does not come with any infused content or Clarity. It's content must be created by the observer, by tradition, ritual, history... Also, content does not need to be intentional. As I said, the flower is soulful without intent, but that is because of its extreme clarity. It's message or content is "nature" its message is its rigorous process and its clarity. It's message is its refinement and its overall existence. It's ability to achieve its fine tuned form through a rigorous design process of natural selection. Architecture can do this too IMO. It does not require an intentional poetic message, but it must be refined to the point of perfection to be unintentionally soulful. So yes the engineer can create soul as can the artist. Both approaches work IMO.
This relates to the tiger analogy. One could say that the artists approach is to envision the message and imagine the way in which it will evoke emotion in the observer. To imagine the second tiger scenario and work down to the details so that it functions. The engineer approach would be to start with the details and work up to create a series ofrelated parts working in harmony. Either way, both approachs will create both realities if done correctly.
The problem with the strip mall is not its typology necessarily but rather that the economic condition of development does not support either approach. There is no room for excellence. It's very intent/purpose is soulless-because it is guided not by humans but by the cold lifeless force of corporate greed. This force has a stranglehold on architecture. If we ever want to create a more soulful world we need to break its grip. How??? I dunno...but so long as we work within its grip, the relevance/potential of architecture will be limited to its thirst.
To comment on curt's concern that talking about soul or spirit in architecture and how he feels that doesn't belong in the profession, I disagree, I do think people are receptive to it and I have done and do it all the time, it is how an architect differs from an engineer and a real estate agent. People that know what architects do know that they can get someone who is more concerned with the immaterial patterns of life vs a real estate agent or engineer. If you go to the bookstore, you can see it is now pop culture to engage in the non-material or spiritual and soulful aspects of our lives. Materially driven crap is on it's way out. Since I don't think architecture drives culture as much as culture drives architecture, I think this is a good thing. The culture is changing, people ARE interested in how we are all connected and leading more spiritually meaning lives. Better architecture will follow.
As for the Kansas education controversy, I propose they forget both intelligent design and evolution and teach sexual selection instead. :)
i was just at the mall. the mall is full of texting teenagers in uggs buying hello kitty phone covers and duck dynasty fear the beard t shirts. these children wouldn't recognize or respond to architecture if it bit them in the ass. the children may take a selfie in front of a realistic bronze statue. a this mall, however, there is only a stuffed bear (as in taxidermy) roaring on its hind legs. it is just inside the camouflage shop. get a pretzel or a giant cookie while you're there. enjoy the spirit of place.
Places do indeed have spirit, they are embued with the activities that have taken place there.
Shopping malls, Dachau, a coffee shop, Ground Zero, a cathedral, Hiroshima, a park, etc.
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