Do I miss Mallarmé? Sure. Does that mean I need to bring him into everything I design? No. Do I see the value (and joy) in beginning the design of a garden, and then an urban park, with a reinterpretation of Finnegan’s Wake (and did I pour over it when I first encountered it)? Sure. Would I reveal that source after the initial design had been tested and adjusted for very specific and real inhabitation? Probably not. Does this mean that I have gained a stronger understanding of realistic spatial implications or just become more jaded? Are we ever doing more than reinterpreting our points of inspiration, tainting them with architecture and mixing them with our knowledge of precedence? Does this mean that we should avoid inspiration that comes from sources outside of the discipline? Why am I getting depressed?
Hey Guys,
This is my first draft for my application essay. Thanks casey for posting that little quote of mine. I read it over and copied it to word and wrote the rest of this. Its a little long for our ADD culture but bear with me, I could really use some feedback. here goes...
What myriad forms and beauties, what precious creations our Sisyphean battle against loneliness has birthed. That mercurial enemy that we find in that same room we lock ourselves into seeking refuge. We find the reality of a life led alone nauseating, vapid: the unwitnessed is no better than the untrue. What good is my triumph without the accolades of those who care? And so we, one, run to be two and begin fighting loneliness now with justification because the other has not met, not seen, not appreciated, not heard, not cared, not freed us from what we are and what we will always be, alone.
I did not come to enjoy academics until I began to find it afforded a way to articulate these inexorable struggles from which I could find no escape. Somehow these pithy unflinching accounts of our condition did not seem dreary or bleak. As I read of Sisyphus, “cheek tight against the stone, shoulder bracing the clay covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands” (camus) I felt profoundly met. I could as well have been standing with him as he finally heaved the rock onto the pinnacle and shared a deep breath as he and I watched the boulder careen down to the valley below.
Even the companionship I enjoyed in the myth of Sisyphus and the rest of the existentialists timed out. As Sisyphus run’s down the hill to restart his own futile quest I was left on the mountain side, yet again alone, to contemplate my own. Aware that I shared Sisyphus’ fate, aware of the indubitable truth of ephemeral, keenly of my limited time, the question began at a whisper but soon began its crescendo. “So what? now what? What now? NOW WHAT? NOW WHAT?”
What could I do? There was a fork. Two answers. Yes or no: to celebrate the swings and fallows of this outrageous pendulum or, like Hamlet, be paralyzed by them. My truth was already evident in tremendous excitement I felt with Sisyphus sharing his moment where his work became clear; fully activated for his task at hand. The pursuit of the heights is not only enough to fill a man’s heart but articulates the undulating life force itself.
Sisyphus was not done instructing. His ups and downs gave voice to the fecund trembling tension of opposites, the ups and downs, the inhales and exhales, the electrified nodes, the explosive chemistry of opposites. So the question became, how do I lay out my life as a stage to welcome the fusion of opposites. How do I activate myself fully and let every facet of my composition be activated in this celebration. How do I let my artistic inclinations war with my need for mathematical precision? How do I let my delight in organization be enriched with observation? How do honor my needs for physical interaction with introspection. How do I unite philosophy and action?
The answer began to coalesce as I began to realize that the most satisfying articulation of these interweaving forces was formal. What better way to celebrate the this trembling life force of the dynamic union of opposites than to create the space for them to occur? I found my thoughts leading to a wealth of spaces, where tension is given permission to activate expansion, for the outside to liberate the in and in to define the out, where old meet young. I drifted to the creation of spaces that find their definition in the in between, between exposure and security, between compressive and tensile members, between heaven and earth.
What a profound privilege it seemed to engage in the celebration of the struggles that make life rich from a vocation that has bears the potential to consume every last inch of the myriad me_s. Architecture: a profession that promised liberty from the myopia of specialization. A last remaining choice for the contemporary renaissance man.
And as I reflect, the trajectory that led me to architecture could not be more timely for architecture will soon be asked to seriously grapple with its own sobering set of limitations. Just as philosophers, a century ago, grappled with the possibility that this life is it, so to will architecture soon be asked to consider the possibility that the resources we have left are it. Liberating as I found the pithy unflattering synapses of life and toil, so to do I see a great possibility of liberation in the realization that efficiency has become necessity. As the appreciation of our own ticking clock infuses every action with an added weight so too do limited resources exponentially multiply the responsibility of every material application.
The principles, the needs, the questions, and the means are all asked to be distilled to their essence. Again, I find the the process of distillation comforting. The elements I can understand, what do we have? We have the sun’s rays, we have earth, we have the chill of the depthless sky, we have the need to be protected and the need for companionship, to witness others grapple with their rocks, search for their heights, watch their rocks plunge. Additionally, we have our labor, our resources, and a limited amount of both. So we are demanded to act with a judicious application of both. These are should not be a source of dismay. The acknowledgement of these limitations are what will give life to the next epoch of architecture. They hold the promise of liberating us from the feckless digital baroque.
Not realizing in fact that the writing was to a question, that the words were out of order and confused that in fact the secret was not something I held but something unknown. That not telling anyone was beyond privilege; a state of lack, a state of indulgence in not knowing. A state in the process of the realization that creativity, originality, or not seeing, blindness on as many levels of grayness, of black and white, of light and dark in the formation of understanding that defies, dismisses, persuades, patronizes, absorption and consumption.
I did not realize that you might describe someone as sick. That I heard those words and heard someone else saying them. I heard those words in a voice all too familiar, in a face I knew too well. In a voice that I could feel lying recently, where lying is not natural and that the prospect of ignorance in the sense of dismissal is much easier than addressing the envelope and sending it, that time exhibits pressures on the moments when it, the crisis, could turn the air a different color, make it weigh more, make the burden less, make it evaporate, make it mute, make it sing. The patience of a notion to keep things indisputably even, that things boil over eventually.
I watched, eked, through the motions and concluded similar conclusions.
In hearing an account, an anecdote, a story, a fable, a dream, a sketch, a moment, of another, I pressed words and asked to ache less. Everything hidden seemed useless as if exposure, revelation, implies empathy, as if clarity, description, understanding, provides these things in themselves. In propaganda, in proposals, in an eternal conversation, dialogue, monologue, some truths and some lies pervade the lines and all of the space, too.
A valise carried unremembered words, unforgettable tone, unspoken, written, etched, scarred. It was the single mention that recalled all of it, opened it, found it and impressed with associations, yearned for more of a lapse, ached for its destruction, that I remembered the pressure and soreness between fingers and in the palm, in its discomfort, in its translation from the letter into a world, a universe.
A stretched hand watches the color fade from areas of the surface, watches the lines of the palm grow darker not in shadow. In tension. The response of the body, of the heart, of the capacity for patience, ill-served, has not revealed itself.
