An Otherworld

This morning, when I left the house to get my coffee, I stepped on a leaflet, called The Patriot, which had been left on our doormat. The material that I saw on the cover of it, before I put it into the recycling bin, indicated that it was promoting the values of the Tea Party People. That would probably have been the end of it, and I would have gone on with my day, but, on that cover, there was an article that put very clearly the position of the Tea Party, which embodies their basic ignorance of what being free and being American is.

The article in question proposed that the last election was similar to a firing of employees, and that it was crazy to allow fired employees to have any contact with the business (government) for fear of vandalism from those disgruntled employees. This represents the danger of making false analogies. Our government is not like a private business, and no election is a firing of any employees. Our government derives its stability from changing periodically to reflect the will of the voting public. It changes without resorting to violence, because its method of change is governed by law. The "lame duck" period of the legislative or the executive branches of our government is the completion of a legitimate governing period governed by specific rules. The actions taken during that time are taken with the knowledge that the balance of power is about to change.

In the article, the pronoun "we" represented the views of the writers, but presumed to include all Americans. This is wrong, since their view does not represent us all, and is a wrong use of "we" in democratic politics. "We", in a democratic sense, should be reserved for those parts of the political structure that governs our behavior towards each other to protect all our freedoms (from the tyranny of each other's opinion). Particular views need to be qualified, even when they are the prevailing ones, in order to hold open a place for those who do not agree. Prevailing in democratic government does not mean eliminating opposition.

If we all are to be included in our society, we do not need to prevail in public decisions, but we do need to be heard, and our votes be used to determine (by majority decision) what kind of government we are going to have during any particular period of time; and what ever government is chosen, that it will abide by the basic rules that "we" (all of us) have accepted as the structure of our peaceful political system.

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The generational change from nuclear to extended family may be the manifestation that gives families their surly reputation. What was once a household fractures into pieces which are separated by great distances, and whose parts develop independently, losing a conscious understanding of the whole. When those family pieces become entirely independent and cease to associate with the others, a new family is formed. When they try to reconnect, there is inevitably going to be a collision of the past with the future, which is often not uplifting. I think this happens because of the lack of interest and faith we place in continuity. There is an important link between what was and what is coming to be.

Seeing in our extended family, parts of ourselves which have, in our view, gone awry is the beginning of the tension that accompanies family visitations. Seeing other successful solutions to some underlying subconscious motivation  is often another source of tension, especially since one is given the impression in our culture that one is unique, and that there is always a hierarchy to choices. It doesn't feel good to think that one is not the best, whatever that means. Since we are not an intellectual culture, the urge to leave the occult hidden drives us to leave the uncomfortability of meetings with other parts of ourselves uncomfortable and not understood; in short, nasty.

Part of the solution to the stress of these meetings is curiosity. "How am I the way I am", is actually more understandable as one's family pool of investigation grows. Part of the answer is genetic, part opportunity, and part internal constitution. Part of the answer will remain a mystery. The uniqueness of each individual is highlighted during family gatherings, and would be celebrated, if hierarchy and competition were understood not to be appropriate within families.

Understanding and accepting differentiation as a positive force, or acknowledging it as a force at all would help us appreciate the gift we have in our extended family. Respecting that differentiation during holiday meetings, rather than only at funeral gatherings would serve us all, both during the holidays and during the rest of the year we spend by ourselves.

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This isn't what you think.

Whereas I am the last person to be a booster of this time of the year, I think I might have a little bit of sunshine to cause to fall on this dark time.

Since I work for myself, I see this time of the year as something to be maneuvered through. If one has not set up enough to do during the time before Thanksgiving, it is likely that there will be nothing to do until after New Years. No one wants to think about starting a big new undertaking during the holidays. This is a problem if one does not have a buffer large enough to skate through that time. I don't have such a buffer, so this time is full of anxiety every year. The anxiety often eclipses the joy.

Life proceeds and no matter what the anxiety, one seems to always appear on the other side to continue onward. The challenge of the holidays is partly about seeing the joy in life, even in its uncertainty. Working with both thoughts simultaneously (this is a dark time / this is a time of light, recognizing the hard things while celebrating the wonderful ones), is the lesson of the season, which once internalized, makes one a richer person, fuller of humanity.

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I was walking past a house in town which is strewn with architectural objects, not attached to the house, but peppering the land around it. Today I focused on a machine made corinthian capital which was embedded in the lawn. Each of the acanthus leaves was depicted individually up the shaft in full relief.

I thought about how the intention turned into a drawing, and how the drawing was translated into that particular form, simply repetative on the one hand, and complex on the other. The person who would carry out that sort of work has been expelled from our community, and the remaining object has taken on an air of mystery in his absence.

When one thinks about the kinds of work we produce now, and the way we carry them out, it is evident that we don't have a very diverse interest in the world, but an interest in defining the world in a relatively narrow and controllable, safe way. Even as we can appreciate the wonder and strangeness of some things, we have chosen to leave them outside our cultural boundary, we don't carry with us an internal understanding of their defining features; particularly how they are made.

Our culture is in a state of transition, away from the physical form of things, toward a point where function and aesthetic lies in the realm of information, shown graphically, disengaged from the hand. The corinthian capital sticking out of the lawn is seen as a set of overlapping patterns. The forms creating the patterns carry with them a mystery as to how they are there at all; attached, embedded, co-formed, and to what balance do they represent the hand of the designer, independent from the hand of the maker (carver, mold-maker, assembler).

The thing we are told is that since the jobs that used to employ the skills of our hands are being put in cheaper hands, our citizens are required to leave those skills of the hand behind, and they need to become educated in some occupation that someone will pay them to do. It seems to me that, personally, and as a culture, learning new skills to add to the old ones that we have, rather than trading skills is a way to maintain a cultural continuity, and to enrich both the past and future skills through a richness of understanding and dexterity - a merger of mind and hand. As a culture, we would be healthiest if we made the conditions for all these skills to be valued here; not simply for us to value the benefit that the skill might bestow in its finished form.

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I read a profound article in the Huffington Post, called "Careless Words and Callous Deeds", by David Bromwich  which described the way we degrade the quality of our civic life by speaking incendiary words that are said to get attention, which then take on a life of their own, eventually becoming acts our better selves wouldn't condone, and then moving along in our thoughts to another subject by desensitizing ourselves to that reality by moving that shame into the realm of humor. That is an fascinating description of the dark side of "growing up"; particularly the last phase of joking.

In a sense, all growing up that we do in all parts of our life is like that. In this case, the growing up is dark because it moves us in a direction that our hearts would not choose for us to go.

The ability to joke, to take the power out of things that we would otherwise revere, is one of the forms of magick that most people know how to use at least on a subconscious basis; and it is the way that most people develop. Forcing all our thought through our heart on its way to our mouth might help us to develop in more positive ways.

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I was sitting having my coffee this morning thinking about public health as I watched somebody blur their personal interior with the exterior world of the cafe.

I grew up at a time when it was still the fashion to solve all public health issues through a conceptual quarantine, all people, individuals, separated by space and behavior. We were all taught to be very conscious of that separation. That model still holds, but the consciousness and responsibility has been swapped for hand sanitizer.

This made me think of the public health criticism that has been and will be leveled against architectural types like the cubicle hotel, and other social constructions which bring people closer together. I think it is time to develop another model of public health which will better protect us than the subconscious quarantine model we are using now.

Appropriate behavior will always be a primary component of any system to maintain health, and awareness of what is appropriate (and when) is the easiest way to bring about appropriate behavior. The quarantine philosophy is basically anti-social, and since human beings are social animals, one of the ways that consciousness of appropriate behavior has been reduced to a rule of thumb is: "you know how you'd like to behave; well don't". Separating us into units has brought about a great deal of unhappiness and fear.

Understanding what is individual, and what is common might be the start to understanding how to live in close proximity to other people without an extraordinary risk of becoming sick. This is manifested by seeing and maintaining one's own form in one's own mind.

Understanding the limits of one's physical body, and actively maintaining the integrity of the state on either side of the divide would be the next step. Acting on one's exterior side in a careful way to temper the forces found there would soften the environment we, as creatures on the Earth, would need to negotiate.

Hygiene would take on a different look in that the goal would not be a world without germs, but a world which was gentle enough that our bodies could negotiate it, and a world where we could maintain our form without a constant extraordinary assault to it.

The physical space we create to occupy would be judged at a different level, as the built divisions between people became simpler. Instead of demanding fully separate units of dwelling, the arrangements within larger units would be understood and controlled, and the performance of materials and forms which would compose such units would be required to be demonstrated and maintained.

At the moment, there are almost no requirements for functional arrangements within a basic dwelling unit, there is only required to be a set of features. As the number and diversity of people in a given unit increases, the functionality of the components of health within the space becomes more important, and would need to be designed and regulated with their impact on health and cleanliness foremost in mind. Living with one's one filth has less impact on one's health than living in the filth of others (preferably the accumulation of filth itself is controlled).

Designing and regulating the durability and cleanability of the materials and the their constructed arrangement in occupied spaces is another component of breaking down the physical divisions between people.

Education and image building is the final, and most important component of maintaining the public health. Altering the cultural perspective about personal responsibility to others' safety, teaching the understanding of one's own personal power to maintain one's own form in life, and establishing the expectation for the arrangement and maintenance of one's exterior environment would be the components for a successful switch to a more humane aggregation of us together.

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One of the most disturbing parts of the irrational extension of the Depleting Bush Tax Rates as our country needs more funding to be able to function to protect us is that the debt liability which was incurred by those tax rates and is growing as they are maintained is not going to go away, even after the government is so crippled by lack of funding that it will serve us no purpose. Those who hold that debt will pursue us to pay it into eternity with no protections of fairness which a functioning government could force. Those who will be forced to pay this debt will be the ones who cannot afford to protect themselves from it.

At a certain point, if the management of government is not carried out with the understanding of its only purpose, to protect all of us from the antisocial forces among us, it will be necessary to withdraw from the overt social contract that we have with each other, and allow that public debt we have to fail. Instead, we will have to rely on smaller, hidden arrangements with each other, in order not to be consumed by the bigger and more powerful among us. When this happens, I wonder how long it will take to be able to set up an overt replacement arrangement between us all which recognizes and supports our individual hopes and works.

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Over the past ten years, I have been a little nervous about my lack of ability to leave this country and still support myself as the professional I have developed myself to be. My credentials would not be recognized or useful outside of this country. Recently, I discovered a distinction which should be made which might help free me from the place in which I am licensed, and might be a way toward a self-sustaining and better regulated local community.

In terms of the practice of architecture, all of the acts of planning, design and specification are considered to be within the realm of the regulated profession. It is technically illegal to conduct those activities on a project which requires the seal of an architect or engineer, if one is not licensed in either of those professions. Designers get around that by having an architect of record seal the documents, however, unless the project was produced under that professional's control, the designer is still practicing architecture without a license.

I have developed myself as an architect in the full sense. I see every part of planning, design and construction as an integral act, and therefore I see my license to practice architecture as integral to the design and consultation that I do. Perhaps there is an important distinction to be made which would help the practice of architecture as an art and as a profession and its impact on the public.

The profession of architecture comes into play in the integration of the prevailing laws with a built feature. Good planning and design need to respond to the prevailing laws, but, they are independent of them until the feature is actually built. Tension between design and the law is sometimes offers a great benefit to our culture.

If the professional architect were to collaborate with the designer as a matter of course on all built projects, our built environment would be regulated as our society demands while the true pursuit of thought and design would be integrated into the mundane world. The key to this is the coequal quality and mutual respect of this relationship that true collaboration would give.

I have always seen those two sides of architecture as residing in the same person, and dividing those roles as being degrading to one side or the other. In the State of New York I can be an architect who designs and applies the prevailing laws to the benefit of the public and the design goals. Although I could become licensed in another state in this country, how effective would I be applying that state's laws in a project there? Shouldn't the application of laws be a purely local function? There, I may plan and design, but shouldn't I make a local professional a coequal part of the process in non-local projects? Likewise, anyone who is competent to design should have the ability to do so, as long as the respect for the (letter of and spirit of) the prevailing laws is shown by involving a local professional to ground the project to the place. This is not a new idea, but it is different enough from the methods followed here now, that it seems new (and important).

Obviously, this solves my identity problem with regard to leaving this country behind. My ability to think, plan, design can be disengaged from the permission to cause buildings to be built. At this stage of life, the thought of architecture could be independent from building, but when building is needed, developing the ability to collaborate with others on the possible is the new skill to develop.

That is a comforting thought.

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I participated in an architectural competition in New York City in 1987. The competition was called Vacant Lots and its purpose was to address the problem of urban deterioration in the outer boroughs of the city through the participant's intervention on one of several designated vacant lots.

My response to this problem was to establish an underground support system depicted through a board game played on several levels. The place I created was a bathroom, laundry, and dormitory accessible to the public as well as a soup kitchen. The idea was that this was a protected place where one could get away from the unwelcoming surface level of the city, when one was not meeting one's challenges, to rest a bit in preparation to take another try at succeeding there.

In the search for a sustainable cultural form, incorporating such an idea of shelter into general use for the whole public might solve a number of problems. Cubicle hotels, which were a residential form used in the late 1800s and early 1900s might be the basis of such a form.

A cubicle hotel is a multiple occupancy sleeping space with individual defensible bed spaces; a large room which sleeps many people, where each bed is a lockable cubicle, open on its top to the environment of the room. The defensible individual space would be small; the size of whole room would determine the sleeping capacity. The sprinkler system and the heating and cooling systems, as well as the supervision of the space, would be made to serve the one large room, and the cubicles would be "furniture" within it. The benefit would be that a minimum of resources would be devoted to providing a safe resting place to the maximum number of people. Even unsubsidized, such a place would be much more affordable than any current form of temporary residence, and could economically occupy places in the center of the city.

This would be a shelter for people who had lost their place to be, and as a subsidized feature of the city could take the place of homeless shelters, however, adding this type of housing to the ordinary housing options would solve several other problems as well. This could be a launching ground for people starting out, whose wages are not yet enough to allow them to buy independence in any other way. A cubicle hotel would be a step cheaper than a boarding house. This could be an inexpensive emergency travelling solution.

If what we see as  failed existence were merged with emerging independence, or exploration, and each of those conditions were cradled in health and safety, then, as a culture we would not be so divided or so cruel. All the services which one needs when failing, starting out, or exploring could become visible at the cubicle hotel. The true worth of such services would be visible too, since the usefulness of those services across the lines of human condition would be finally understood.

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I just heard something on the radio about the House of Representatives refusing to take up the tax cut for the rich "compromise that the President negotiated without the Democrats. Hooray for them, and I genuinely hope that the House of Representatives forces a legitimate compromise which will be sound policy for the conduct of our nation.

Thinking about the concept of compromise which has been exposed during the last two years of our government, it is clear that one needs to begin any negotiation from a position of ideals, and not from a calculation of realism. If one negotiates using the position one might have to accept, one of two things can happen; one has to give up even more of ones principles without ever having had the chance to get what one would like to have, or one is accused of intransigence, since there is nowhere to move in one's position, having given it all in one's own internal dialogue before one starts to negotiate.

In the case of this government, starting from a practical view of what should be ideological issues, the results which have been achieved may be important, but they are seriously flawed. Having to give tax breaks to the wealthy, who are doing very well in this recession in order to provide some defective social safety net to some of those who are doing poorly is the latest example An earlier example was getting everyone covered by health insurance that they will have to fend for themselves to obtain, rather than tackling the problem of how all Americans will have access to necessary health care no matter what their economic circumstance. Each of the moves to move our society forward in the current government has been marred by narrowing the discussion to something that is calculated to appeal to the other side.

The tax issue should have been linked to the recession/depression, and the goal should have been to reestablish a safety net for all citizens who have been hurt by the economy. This would be reinstituting "Welfare" for all Americans who are out of work, at least temporarily, as opposed to extending "Unemployment" to those who meet the criteria of having had a job at a particular time (remember that nothing is being considered to help those whose "Unemployment" has expired). It should have been identified that tax breaks for the wealthy will not lead to any more employment as long as demand is low and while there are cheaper ways of obtaining labor outside of the country. Link the actions of the rich to the economic problem at hand, In such a case, it would be part of the discussion that the well-being of all citizens must be included in our national compromise in addressing our economy and that is the ideological position that the cause will have to feed the effect. Stimulus in the form of discounted taxes (remember that the Bush Tax Rates were understood to be designed to divest our country of a surplus it had accumulated; it was never thought to be a sustainable system for funding the government) needs to be balanced by its effect of social welfare of the whole country as well as its effect on public debt.

Starting seriously from that harder position, one can easily see how those who represent the rich would be able to negotiate away their position on the extension of the lower tax rates for the uppermost tax bracket, and it could easily be that the extension of the lower tax rates on the lower tax brackets should be negotiated to be temporary. One could also see how it would be possible to extend "Unemployment" for the current recipients, and those who are not addressed in the current system would become visible in the debate (and would move closer to help).

Compromise is not about the position one will accept, nearly as much as it is about the trades one can make to approach one's ideological position. The reason the other side has not been willing to make concessions from their position is that our side has not been willing to force the give and take to be meaningful to them. We lose if we cannot govern effectively. They needed to lose if they stood in the way of effective government. Effective government should be understandable to both sides.

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