Structures and Things

Building Meaning

All of us are in a time of change. We are either building up our assets, paying off our debts or stripping away our lives to pay for the future one day at a time. Why is our situation the same as it has always been, shouldn’t things be getting better?

During times of drastic change, where most people don’t understand what is happening to them, decisions are often left to other people that we trust. We trust our family, we trust our boss, we trust our religious leaders, we trust our government, and we trust our friends. We don’t usually trust strangers, though when one thinks about it, all of the people listed are strangers. They rarely know who we really are. That person is reserved for ourself. So then, who do you trust?

Before a long list of family, friends and other people show up on your list, YOU should at the top listed as ‘me’ ‘myself’ ‘your name here’. So let’s start with the person at the head of the list. Trusting is part of believing. In order to trust ‘me’, you need to believe in ‘me’. Do you? Take your time and feel it out. This is not a mental exercise, it is an exercise in being. You need to trust your feelings about you. We hope that most of our feelings about ourselves are positive and nurturing. There will be negative feelings, no doubt, as we are privileged to know every little thing we have done in our lives and we judge those actions and thoughts more harshly than anyone else. So in spite of all the things you know about you, do you still believe in yourself? The answer should always be ‘yes, I believe in myself’. If you answered ‘no’ because you judge your past decisions too harshly and feel that you must rely on others to account for your actions, then you are not aware of who you are or your feelings. Take the time to know you, and when you reflect on your actions, you create the opportunity to amend, repair and act anew to create a future greater than you can presently imagine. If you can begin to trust and believe, then you can act freely and responsively to your desires and needs.

So the questions that follow are many. Who am I? What do I want? I am happy, why not? Am I in control of my life and future? Can people rely upon me? Do I want wealth, happiness, love, joy, excitement, health, vitality, peace, and abundance in my life? What is really going on in the world? Do the people I trust lie to me to protect me? Do the institutions I trust tell me the truth? How can I know truth? Do I fool myself in to believing things that I know aren’t true? Why is it that my friends know the same things I do, shouldn’t we have different experiences and thoughts about life? Why is entertainment such a big part of everyone’s lives? Why do most people learn nothing from and despise their public education? Why has language and dialog degraded to a 5th grade level in the last 50 years? and so on…

No one can tell you who you are, only how they perceive you to be based upon your actions and the beliefs that you try to convey to them. I’m not going to tell you. I can only say that you are exactly who you believe yourself to be. Belief is not some fading dream or wish. It is what stays with you in your ‘soul’ ‘heart’ ‘spirit’ ‘mind’ all of the time. You act on it everyday and are that belief, you feel it to be true. You are joyous, happy and contented to be who you are. If you believe yourself to be less than you are capable of, then everyday you are that person. Clear you mind and choose to be who you are.

So now on to the subject at hand, ‘Building Meaning’. Belief and trust are the foundations for building anything in our lives. If you want to build a family, career, a home, an empire, a successful business, a relationship and a legacy for generations to come, then you need a strong base from which to reach the heights of personal meaning. All determination of success and meaning are only in your head. You are the only judge, just like it is for the whole of your personal belief structure. If you’re determination of meaning and success is to have other people agree with you that you have achieved meaning and success, then that is exactly what the criteria will be. Nothing more, nothing less.

The accumulation of abundance, including materials, valuable items, leveraged power, and physical assets, brings with it a measure of freedom and more responsibility than if you did not temporarily possess them. With all of it, you do what you will. Providing for yourself, providing for family, friends, and employees. You may accumulate it all and then sell it for paper, your place in the sun, or your retreat from the world. In the end and along the way at your various stages, you are providing meaning to your life. Your goals, dreams and wants are all fulfilled. This live offers many joys and if these are yours, then embrace them and do not apologize for having had them.

If your journey is to discover peace and to quell the imbalance in your desires for this life, then achieve that and meaning for yourself. Use stillness, motions, breath, actions, and thoughts to live each day.

We need to choose how our world is changing. We have to act in our own best interests. We have to chase our own dreams and wants. We have to provide our own means when necessary. We need to care for our health and vitality. The world does not span the dimensions of your home, or even your country. The world was not created in the last 50-100 years by our institutions and corporations. The world is created every day by you, each and every one of you. Each of you building meaning for your life and those you influence, care for and believe in. You do not have to give away your belief in you because of doubt. It is your doubt that makes you question and seek out the answer, your personal truth and meaning. If you have no doubt in yourself, there are plenty of other people out there who will try to plant doubt in your mind, so that you will trust and believe in them rather than yourself.

Building takes time, each day another piece, and more leaps of faith (personal belief) that whatever you are doing will work out, that you will be lucky, and success is coming to you ‘head-on’. You need to believe, by having a vision, and more important a burning desire to achieve your desires. You need to be ready to act and trust yourself that you will be ready for whatever comes.

So the question of “Who do you believe in?” still stands. So who is it?

The Structure of Structures

Structures are behavior deployed utilizing a strategy to optimize for interaction in a particular environment. In short, structures are made to survive. We often think of structures in terms of the physical objects in the world. These are buildings, organisms, vehicles, and the matter that make up the many wonderful elements that we are blessed with. It is truly a wonder to have so many differing structures that can be manipulated, combined, and placed together with such beneficial results to our own survival. We have other structures, discovered and re-discovered by humanity, that develop from our minds and varied experience. We have languages and the construct semantics that embody ideas, strategies and methods for expressing a behavior or desired response.

Language is perhaps our greatest structure. This single structure provides the means for knowledge to be leveraged among large groups and resources. We define a structure whose common understanding and expression provides us the foundation to our highest arts and methods. We develop codified actions, beliefs, and strategy for achieving reproducible results. This is our science. Science is an expression of a belief structure and is no more real than any other belief structure. Perception is a part of the belief structure, and with some structures we have developed a sense, sometimes a feeling, for what structures are correct and will be capable of enduring. Structures that ‘ring true’ will endure and survive change through their robust nature and adaptive qualities that encompass a vast range of demands.

Our structures must endure the environment, our use of them, and the challenges from competing structures that vie for position in our consciousness and social structures. They must contain principles that are functional, reproducible, and robust to perform in their particular environment or realm of action. We use language, symbols, and defined constructs to define what we feel to be truths of our experience. A ‘column’ behaves as such and exhibits the response mechanisms to the loading under which a column is defined and expressed. If it were to be and do otherwise, it would be expressed and defined differently than it presently is.

One of the weaknesses of language is the ease with which its meanings can be manipulated by cultural mandates that redefine fundamental elements that have the test of survival emboddied. We make way for these new expressions of our structure, our very foundation, by making commentary regarding the ‘antiquated’ state of a particular meaning. We often detract from the semantic strength of a structure by belittling it relevance. We ‘know better’ in the present. Most people lack the understanding of principles and forego any past knowledge for their present perceptions. They have not come to leverage the history of meaning. We build structures to endure. To do otherwise is a waste of our energy and resources.

The present adaptation and application of language looks not to the past, and only to the immediate future. Our goal seems to make meaning that is ephemeral and relevant to only a few individuals for the sole benefit of personal recognition. Our vast archive of structures need to be considered and incorporated into the future. We cannot be lazy or indifferent in our understanding of the many structures that have been utilized by humanity. Unique structures that embody fundamental principles have the potential to survive the many demands of the present social and environmental expressions.

Structures are our records and the embodiment of our many cultures. We cannot fail to understand what structure is and how to make a proper structure to define our human experience.

Architecture and building space

It would seem like a contradiction to be building space. In fact, what’s done is the confinement of space, harnessing of space, defining of space and assigning function to space. Space in its self has no definition. Unless you’re a phycisist and would argue that space is defined by mass-energy-quantum-particles and influenced as a medium by gravity, dark matter and unseen forces, then we can state that space is undefined until people step into the equation. We define spaces for living, working, sleeping, eating, bathing, and so many other activities.

The defining process is architecture. So in order to satisfy architecture, we ask many questions regarding those elements that will help form and develop the undefined space in to occupieable space. Will it be for groups of people? Will it be for private occupancy? Will the outside world impinge on the interior space? How will the space be lit, sound controlled, access given, and what geometric configuration will the space occupy? How does the space interact with other space?

It might be argued that each space is a dynamic environment that must see, listen, breath, process, recover and endure. It is not living, though it may be alive when used. It’s artificial heating/cooling mechanisms, its apperatures to control daylight, its electroluminecent contol mechanisms (lighting), its sound control mechanisms, warning messages for danger, its interior linings and entry/exit passage ways. It has similar characteristics to living organisms. It has some self awareness through sensors, controls, and corrective algorithms. However, it lacks the ability to achieve self-preservation through fight/flight mechanisms. We as architects and designers provide all of these mechanisms to defined space so that it can care for our needs without our active efforts. It protects, entertains, feeds, joins us together, and seperates us from one another.

Should space be so defined that it can only perform one function for us? Is space a specialized feature of our lives? We don’t live that way, changing our minds, habits and activity every day. Do rooms provide us a place to act or do we act according to the room? From experience, we have seen people live their whole lives in a single room that serves all their daily functions. It does not necessarily serve their needs. It is limited to be only what it was designed to do. We sometimes need confined comforting spaces and sometimes vast unending spaces. We sometimes need to sit and concentrate, while other times we need to run free from a single place.

When we design, build and engineer architecture it is up to us to remember that flexibility and the use of a particular space will not always be what we think it should be. To provide longevity to a particular space, we must be willing to provide the space with the needed mechanisms, controls and features that allow it to adapt over the years to serve many differing people. Open floor plans, so popular in high-rise complexes, office building and convention centers, provide unique conditions in the built world. This practice is so different from our residential design practices where each room and space is assigned a specific function. It is becoming more rare that an individual or family will live a single generation in a home, much less mutliple generations. The needs of one family will often differ considerably from the next and as different cultures begin to occupy foreign architecture, the challenge is to provide space and platforms for people to live their lives.

When was the last time you learned of a major city coming into existence? I’m not talking about sub-urban city centers or expansion of an existing metropolis. I mean a city, founded near a natural resource, grown and planned to meet a growing population and commercial interest. The closest thing is perhaps a college campus or new corporate campus. This is not the same. I don’t think we’ll see too many fresh opportunities to define communities or large city centers (except perhaps in countries outside of America). I think we’ll define and redefine existing spaces to serve the current population and technological method.

So, with this in mind, seek to provide flexible space both inside and out when defining new architecture.