A Conversation With Gillies

Gillies Macbain is a contemporary philisopher and critic of the absurd. He contributed this piece in response to the Autumn Equinox Sheltermaker. Replies in red.

 

Your mailings from Sheltermaker suggest that you are always at risk of a tipping point – from architectural research with a spiritual content – to spiritual research with an architectural content . . .

Perceptive as usual Gillies. The tipping may well be permanent, stranding me in the latter mode. I seem to have paid off some karmic debt which is freeing me up. Loosed of these shackles I am scrambling to package my ‘architectural research with a spiritual content’ to provide some form of revenue stream so that I might concentrate on ’spiritual research with an architectural content’. Presently this latter fascination is focussed on the balance achieved between gravity and levity. All of this is aided by a love relationship with an Australian geomancer ….

Going in to Thurles I now pass ten new houses – each one of which would have done duty as ‘the big house’ in the pre-motorised, pre-European Union, pre-financial services Ireland. I literally do not know how these houses are built, or paid for, except that they all express – by their orientation to the road – their dependence upon the road, not dependence upon the land. Thurles is 12 kms from here.

You are looking at the Irish Unconscious in all its (concrete) glory. It looks like the Irish are destined to live out their Anglo-inspired coldness rather than cluster around the hearth radiating their natural warmth. It is likely too that famine of some sort will be required to unravel this picture.

Some are quite good, in that they begin to have what I call ‘cultural content’ even though they are all constructed of stuff that came on the back of lorries from the builders’ suppliers in town. All of them are late twentieth century houses. No need to insulate them – if they anticipated any difficulty in obtaining heating oil, they would not be
built here in any case, because they are commute-dependent. They are not really ‘here’ at all but an attenuated suburbia that covers almost the entire country. Some of them are built because parts of Tipperary will soon be connected to Dublin, Cork, and Limerick by motorways. This same motorised society finds Leitrim ‘accessible.’ (current ad.)

If people spent any more time than they do in these piles we will have to build at least 10 more psychiatric hospitals!

You are exploring a direction of architecture that is ‘right hemisphere.’

Is that something to do with my brain?

At the extreme of this spectrum lies the hippies’ camp. It is convivial, playful, ramshackle, home made, idiosyncratic, personal, radical, communal, theoretically responsible to the earth, while risking being escapist and a holiday-from-reality culture.

Ahhh, that old chestnut! But, as usual, you are right to the point. The balance needs to shift from reaction to action. The hippy lore is too much about reaction leaving too many places for people to cry off that agenda while they cling to (or even defend) their lifestyles. This is where the psychology of change needs to be given space. There is too much emphasis on doing and not enough on being. We have to enter the inner dimension into all equations rather than leaving it out as is currently the case. This leaves the scientific heads scrambling for purchase while they programme their WMD’s just in case. This is where my Sheltermaking Theatre enters the picture. I am tired of the endless questions and of having to lug proof around in a briefcase. I want to crack things open, parade fear onstage, rattle the bones of complacency and disappear into the Green Room while the audience lick their wounds.

At the opposite extreme lies a culture where the commuters complain about the traffic – unaware that they are the traffic, and complain about having to have two jobs and childcare just to pay the high price of housing – unaware that their strategies are the causes of the high price of housing. I would not live happily in one of these houses, but it would be churlish to deny that they give great satisfaction to the people who build them, and express their status and aspirations as they are at the present, not as they should be in some imagined future.

Back to the psychology! But how pitiful a picture it is! This is why caution is required as the demolition crews move in. Deflationary action is going to leave a lot of people reflecting on the emptiness they have bought and nurtured. Better to stand back as the edifice of illusion comes tumbling down. These houses might well be the original dominoes of the theorists. ‘Sub-prime’ may well enter the lexicon of history as the fabled location of Archimede’s fulcrum.

It is not much help to society as a whole if certain elements opt to retire to a retreat that suits their (possibly untypical) temperament, and complain that everyone else should now join them there. The aspirations of the mainstream and those who live in the present culture of mortgaging the future have to be acknowledged.

Who says that is not productive or limits one’s right to complain? Such complaint will certainly not be inviting to the huddled masses! If ‘the aspirations of those who live in the present culture of mortgaging the future have to be acknowledged’ then one simply is freed of an enormous workload. Acknowledging their rootedness in illusion leaves the weight squarely on their shoulders. It has ever been thus. We make our own pain – technology has simply improved our success rate.

Nevertheless, when society as a whole makes a change of direction – there will inevitably be outlying members of society whom the new turn of direction puts ‘out front’ and no longer ‘off centre.’

When the sheepdogs of sustainability manage to turn the herd we may well find ourselves at the forefront of the stampede. Thank you for the warning! I will exercise caution as I proceed!

In the 1990s I helped to stage an annual rare breeds and home produce show – ‘the rats’ harvest festival.’ I learned from this that the things that appeal to me appeal to a segment of society that includes a proportion of ‘hippies’, drop
outs, foreigners, migrants from the city, idealists, and people that I would call ‘out on a limb’ or ‘without parameters.’

To a guy in a suit, these few characters would be noticeable. Just as people say that ‘the Irish have red hair’ – meaning that the Irish, who are overwhelmingly brown and dark brown, have a small but noticeable proportion of redheads.

I began to dislike being identified with this segment, not because I tired of my own friends – but because it erected an artificial barrier between the ideas which interested me, and the people – the neighbours – whom I lived among day to day.

Some time ago I saw that to retreat from society as a whole could after all be a valid tactic, but a temporary one. I saw it by analogy with polytunnel seedlings. the separate and benign environment was good for raising seedlings – but sooner or later the new plants – however exotic – would need to be hardened off and planted out.

This goes to the heart of what I might call the Inside Out Syndrome. We are all striving for belonging – this clogs the M50 every day! When you become totally Your Self belonging takes on a different face. This is the paradigm shift, the shaking loose, the pit of fear. We are all alone! There is no uniform, group, coven, herd or football team that can dispel this truth. Outsiders we are all. Denial of this secretes a natural adhesive that bonds tighter than steel.

So, back to the spiritual content of architecture. People are often baffled and defeated by the sheer variety of personal
spiritual mindset, and its formal and communal religious expression. A glance at a 400 page book – ‘the encyclopedia of new religions’ – will show that there are more philosophies out there than most of us have so far taken into account.

It would be an unrealisable project to blend all of these sects into a single spiritual community, or a single political structure. Somehow they have to be left to follow the paths of evolution and shoot the rapids of natural selection on their own . . .

And that perhaps is the concept that will come to be incorporated into all of our mindsets. Historical circumstances will oblige us to divest ourselves of the illusion of control. Even the ‘greens’ are part of this self delusion – though they express this control as ’stewardship.’

The essential principle of any spiritual mindset will be the surrender of control to ‘nature.’ Nature is always in balance. Any idea that the balance of nature is in danger of being upset, is part of that same illusion of control. Each religion or philosophy needs to make humble recognition of the subordination of the rational control-orientated mind within nature.

Individual upbringing and personal preference leads us to depict nature as ‘god’, ‘gods and spirits’, ‘creation’, the cosmos, providence, or whatever. If there is any unity to be found, it has to be at a slightly deeper level from which religious and philosophical ideas emerge.

In seeking for a more harmonious and spiritual architecture, we must resist the retrograde approach of trying to buy the spiritual content as an added on extra – something that we select out of a catalogue. Everything made expresses, usually unconsciously, the spiritual mindset of the maker. So you do not buy spiritually expressive architecture or technology, so much as ‘be’ spiritually expressive, upon which all else follows.

Yes, ou literally have to ‘live your architecture’ allowing it to emerge from inside you.

My great fear of current ‘ecovillage’ architecture (theoretical because I have not personally visited any, except Coolbawn Quay holiday village), is that it has even now not discarded -

* the paradigm of mortgaging the future.

* the ‘growth’ paradigm that everything will increase in value over time.

* the idea that essential change can be concentrated in a favoured locality. (Remember Ennis – the winning entry for ‘Ireland’s information town ?’)

* the idea that you can propose a coming breakdown of industrial society – but do not need to specify security fencing for priveledged enclaves.

The great difficulty in formulating an architecture that responds to post-industrial practical and spiritual needs, is this: that we are so thoroughly embedded in the ‘growthist’ paradigm. We start to build cycle lanes and we meanwhile add fifty per cent more to the total number of cars and volume of traffic. We are not who we pretend
we are.

The idea that we might seek to know who we are is an extremely radical idea!

The coming architectural revolution may, at one level, be this simple – two families living in one house. That reduces mortgage bills and heating bills by half, likewise carbon emissions. No investment is required. And in hard times people share old cars before they invest in a new Toyota Prius.

Unemployment solves childcare and commuting bottlenecks. Tesco in town survives and lLidl on the by-pass fades away, because people are not buying the wife a shopping car. Borrowers are squeezed, savers are the winners but hold on to their savings even more tightly.

So the spiritual qualities admired, become – resilience, self reliance, resourcefulness, humility, stability (in the old monastic sense of staying put) and the values of family, community, and give-and-take.

I would see the next building boom as possibly being in inner city and town centre conversion. Modification to small economical units, terraced, close, rented dwellings in pedestrianised zones with retail units interspersed. More Italian mediaeval hill town than American commuter suburb. Likewise conversion of rural one-off housing to 2/3 units served by communal transport. the school bus network idea expanded to cater for commuting. working hours staggered, but also synchronised for people from a particular geographical location.

The perfect autonomous and earth friendly house will exist, on its sheltered and wooded site, but it will remain an ideal – not the typical dwelling of the early twenty first century.

Ideals will be the first victims of the catalcysm!

We have begun to reach the extreme of the ‘growthist’ industrial boom society, where the pursuit of individual satisfaction is about to compromise its own context, the current configuration of the natural world. Nature will still be in balance if we persist – but she will begin to narrow the niche in which we do what we do.

A little known example of great relevance to us is the early history of Iceland, in the 800s, where Scandinavian emigrants and pioneers moved into an intact but fragile ecosystem, and utilised its few woodlands to destruction and near extinction.

It was an accelerated version of a process that occurred in Ireland from 7000 BC to 1600 AD.

The Icelanders henceforth had to import large timbers from Norway and ceased to be the builders of their own ships. Likewise a recent excavated viking ship in Denmark proved to have been built of Irish timber.

No spiritual change came over the Icelanders. they put pressure on their ecosystem, and nature pushed back. When you have exhausted your resources you become beholden to those who have not. If any change came on the Icelandic mindset – it could have been a trend to greater humility in the face of natural balance.

A spiritual approach to life, to philosophy, to religion, – and thus to architecture – may be as simple as this: the concept of balance has to pervade all levels of thinking and understanding. Balance of what is under our control, and even the wider context that is not under our control, also to be seen in terms of balance.

That is the great virtue. The great fault is that of ‘moral partition.’ People struggle to achieve balance and earth friendliness in an area which is like a mental ‘gated community.’ Al Gore flies to meet the next storm of applause at the next global conference, but the plane that he flies in is granted a priveledged exclusion from the concepts that he is retailing. he has indulged in a moral partition. He is no better than George Bush patting his dog while children
die in far off Iraq.

So there are two rules for architecture with spiritual content -

1. A spiritual life cannot help but build a spiritual architecture – so first cultivate a spiritual life.

2. To pervade all that you do your spiritual life must recognise no limits, but must accept the the earth is one, and see that everything that is within it affects and is affected by everything else. There is no partition.

3. Nature and her ecosystems are always in balance. A humble acceptance and respect for her power allows us to build an architecture that tries not to perpetrate more mindless destruction of the kind which can only work to our own detriment.

Gillies

Gillies Macbain
also readable at :
http://darkbrownriver.blogspot.com/