easter poster

Below is a poster I made for the HopeArts Easter exhibit, which was 'garden' themed.

storytelling part 2: good friday

I went AWOL from blogging for a few weeks because I was caught up in preparing for the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services at my church and working on the Easter exhibit and installation.  I think I'm mostly recovered from Holy Week and I've started writing again.  You may have noticed that I didn't quite get to the 40 entries that my 'writing for Lent' post suggested.  Oops.

Anyway, I'll include some of the introductory and concluding remarks that I made for the Good Friday service here to bookend my previous introduction to Lent.  You can hear the whole service online here.  It's rather long but it's worth a listen, and you can tell a bit about what the service entails from my intro:

Welcome:

Welcome Hope Chapel, welcome Christ Church, welcome guests, welcome brothers and sisters in Christ.

Let’s pray.

Father, we acknowledge and welcome your presence here among this, your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon a cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. 

Bless our speakers this evening with courage and comfort as they generously share their stories with us.  Grant us open hearts to receive your word and your work in our lives.  Give us eyes to see and ears to hear.  In Jesus name we pray.  Amen.

Our story and God’s story

Each year as we walk through the seasons of the church, from Advent to Christmas, through Lent to Easter and on to Pentecost, we re-tell the story of God’s work for us. 

Moses told the Israelites to ‘remember this day on which you came out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery . . .’ (Exodus 13:3)

Jesus told his disciples at the Last supper ‘. . . do this in remembrance of me’ (Luke 22:19).

We need to hear the story of God’s grace in our lives over and over and over again.  I need to hear the story of God’s grace in my life over and over again.

But God’s story is new to us each time we hear it because we’ve lived through another year, found new trials and new joys, and because the story is so rich we can hear it many times over a lifetime while always discovering new and beautiful things in it.

On Good Friday, we come to the second-to-last chapter of the story, the execution of our Lord, Jesus Christ, on the cross.  It’s not the last chapter where we find out if everything turns out ok (or not), it’s the second-to-last chapter:

- It’s like the moment when Odysseus finally arrives home after 20 years but he’s lost his ship and all his men and his home has been taken over by suitors who, believing him dead, want to marry his wife. 

- It’s like the moment when Frodo finally makes it to the side of Mount Doom, but he can’t muster the energy to go on, the battle outside the gates of Mordor is going badly, and Gollum is lurking behind a rock waiting to attack.

- Or it’s like the moment when it looks like Wile E. Coyote’s Acme Catapult will finally help him catch his prey and he can have the roasted Roadrunner dinner he’s always dreamed of.

It’s the darkest moment, right before the end of the story.

As we’ve done for the past eight years for our Good Friday service here at Hope, we gather together to hear seven of our friends use the ‘Seven Last Words of Jesus from the Cross’ as a starting point to share their own struggles with us.  We hear these very personal and often difficult stories and connect them with our own lives and with God’s story.  And just like the struggles of Jesus on the cross, we know that our struggles are not the end of the story.

This year we are honored to have two members of Christ Church participating in this service with us and look forward to what God has in store for these two communities together. 

Our Good Friday service has a very simple structure.  It follows a pattern of a song, then a personal reflection, then a moment of silence.  This pattern happens seven times, once for each of the sayings of Jesus from the cross.  We’ll go straight through the service from song to reflection to silence without comment or introduction. 

As many of you know, David Taylor initiated this service and has managed and introduced it for the past eight years.  I’ve always been amazed at the depth of this service and am truly grateful for all the vision and work he’s put into this service over the years.

And because I’m taking over for David here, I feel compelled to end with a list.  So here’s my list:

Why is it important for us to tell these stories of our struggles to one another?  I’ll give you three reasons:

1. The first reason it’s important to tell these stories is so that we all know that we are not alone.

We all struggle.  I’m sure most of you will find that one or more of our speakers stories echoes your own story.

2.  The second reason it’s important to tell these stories is so that, again, we all know that we are not alone.

We can comfort one another because we understand each other’s struggles – we’ve been there too.

3. The third reason it’s important to tell these stories is so that, yet again, we all know that we are not alone.

Our God suffered tremendously for us, He understands our struggles from personal experience, and is there with us in them.

Let’s begin.

(seven verses, seven speakers, seven songs)

Conclusion:

To be vulnerable is to risk being hurt.  It’s to offer more of ourselves to others than we normally would, and it can be answered with judgment or rejection, but not here, not with us.  We share in each other’ struggles, mourning with those who mourn, rejoicing with those who rejoice. 

Each speaker is in a different place in his or her struggle.  Some have already found healing, for some their struggles are lifelong, and others remain in the wilderness, feeling forsaken.  And Jesus felt all those things as he walked through his struggle. 

Comfort

One of tonight’s speakers directed me to 2 Corinthians 1:3-7:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God.

You can hear in Paul’s words how tangled up in our lives are affliction and consolation, suffering and comfort.  Each of our struggles puts us in a place to comfort others who suffer.

We are not promised a life without suffering, but we do have others to join us in our struggles and a God that is by our side in them.  We also know that it’s not the end of the story.

We’ll conclude the service in silence.  The speakers will remove the veils from the panels on the wall and lay them at the foot of the cross.  We’ll end in darkness.  When the lights are off, you may remain to pray and meditate or you may leave quietly.  We do ask that you refrain from talking until you are completely out of the building. 

Could the speakers come forward to remove the veils?

 

 

critical theory part 2: utopia, an island and a city

The dreaded ‘u’ word: Utopia

It is a naïve, hopelessly idealistic vision of a seemingly achievable perfect world.  To come up with a utopian plan for something, be it a small community, a large society, or a physical city, is to be a fool at the very least.  But to attempt to create a utopia is well beyond simple folly, it is to be an oppressor seeking to impose one’s own vision of the common good on all others.

Or maybe utopianism is the only way to look forward in a constructive way.

I am interested in the question of utopian thought and action from both an architectural perspective and from a philosophical perspective.  I understand and agree with many of the critiques of utopianism in architecture and urban design but I also see some real potential in a highly modified form of it.  I also think that those who make buildings and cities have an important challenge to offer to thinkers for whom critique is their final goal.  To explain this I’ll start with a discussion of utopia and design to be followed later by utopia and critical theory. 

I’m less interested in the way utopia was used originally than in it’s current usage, but I should mention its origins.  The word was coined by Thomas More in his 1516 book entitled Utopia: On the best state of a republic and on the new island of Utopia.  The name for the fictional island in the book comes from Greek words that combine to mean ‘no place’, and is likely to have been intended to suggest its homophone, eutopia, which would mean ‘good place’.  The book describes the seemingly ideal social and political order of an island in the Atlantic where everything is done differently than in sixteenth century England.  The only other thing I would like to mention about More’s work here is that I believe this book is a satire.  I know this is not the only interpretation of the book but I fail to see why.  First, More had already been immersed in satire along with his friend Erasmus.  They had translated ancient works of satire and More had participated in the conversations that led to Erasmus’ classic satire In Praise of Folly.  Second, the only reason I can see for determining that More’s work was at all propositional is that it was written a long time ago and therefore is much less enlightened than we are now – an idea I see little evidence to support.

Let’s jump from the sixteenth century to the twentieth.

In architecture and urban design, utopian visions for a ‘new city’ or a ‘new architecture’ were part of the grand visions of modernism.  Many designers came up with alternate ways of making buildings and the ways they relate to one another that were faster, or more open, or freer, or simply newer.  Broad, sweeping manifestos often accompanied drawings of new cities that required a broad sweeping away of existing cities.

Sadly, many of these ideas began to be implemented.  This sweeping away of cities involved the sweeping away of people.  And, as it turned out, much was lost that was of value in existing communities and their buildings. 

The results of these experiments were so clearly disastrous that many challenges arose to the implementation of modern urban projects.  One could argue that the reexamining of architecture and urbanism that began in the 1960s is still going on today.  Design writers such as Robert Venturi (Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture) and Colin Rowe (Collage City, written with Fred Koetter) began proposing heterotopias as an alternate model, valuing multiplicity without unity for buildings and cities.  It took someone outside the echo chamber of design schools, though, to really get to the heart of the problem.  Jane Jacobs’ sprawling The Death and Life of Great American Cities takes a detailed street-eye view of existing urban spaces and details how communities use these spaces to provide safety and maintain social connectedness.  She uses this to point out why high-modernist urban projects are a huge mistake.  Venturi and Rowe attack the surface of the problem, Jacobs gets to the core.

Part of what makes Jacobs’ work compelling is design related.  She demonstrates all that is lost when a designer ignores the collected wisdom of existing urban communities to create entirely new kinds of cities. This is not a challenge to those that propose new ideas, only to those who do this with hubris.  But I would argue that the more important lesson from Jacobs is how much the process of change matters.  It doesn’t matter how wonderful the physical spaces of a city are if they are created in ways that ignore or are forced on actual human communities.  Because of this she proposes a model of incremental growth that is slow, messy, and complicated, kind of like communities.  (The planning strategies of the New Urbanists seem to take into account the design-related aspects of Jacobs’ work while completely ignoring the process-related aspects of it, continuing many of the problems of their modernist forbears.)

So what do these challenges to utopian architecture and urban planning mean for us today?  Stay tuned to find out what I think – and to tell me why I’m wrong.

critical theory part 1: ideology and sin

Architecture school can be a strange place.  One minute you might be cutting cardboard and sticking it to other pieces of cardboard with Elmer’s glue, then the next minute you could be arguing about how false ideologies maintain relationships of power and oppression and if resistance is possible.  The cutting and pasting of kindergarten exist alongside the esoteric idealism of a graduate school philosophy seminar.  This combination can go badly sometimes - fingers and beliefs can get cut and bleed in the process - but I appreciated this part of architecture school.  I also avoided schools and professors that lost sight of either part of the equation, the making of things or the thinking about things.

The field of philosophy has many different branches, each with its own methodology and its own priorities.  One particular philosophical discourse seems to have taken hold of art and architecture theory and hasn’t let go, even as other fads and fashions have come and gone.  Critical Theory, though it sounds fairly general, is actually a specific set of ideas birthed in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1930s.  It has its roots in Marxism and was developed as a challenge to early twentieth century capitalism, the failings of communist governments (seen as distorting Marx for their own ends), and to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.  They had a lot to be upset about.

The name for this school of thought came from Max Horkeimer’s 1937 essay, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’.  The basic idea is that traditional theories seek only to describe the current state of affairs (in politics, in culture, in social relationships) whereas critical theory challenges the current state of affairs with the express intent of effecting change.  Traditional theories were not considered wrong only because they didn’t seek change, they were also accused of being part of the system that maintains and enhances existing injustices.

From within this framework, critical theorists developed an idiosyncratic vocabulary, often using words quite differently from their normal usage.  ‘Positive’ became a pejorative description of an idea or practice that maintains the status quo.  One of the most important concepts in Critical Theory, ‘ideology’ is not simply a generic description of a set of ideas, it denotes a broad, powerful system of ideas that is innately false and exists to maintain the current state of dominance and oppression.  Though the word is sometimes grouped with ‘false’ as in ‘false ideology’, this is rare because it is considered redundant.  Critical Theory has deep (and somewhat anachronistic) roots in the Enlightenment version of rationality so ‘ideology’ is often contrasted to true ‘science’ or ‘reason’. 

A lot of the things I have discussed above I will try to expand on later.  I disagree with significant portions of Critical Theory, but I often feel that finding problems with a thought system is the easiest, cheapest way to analyze it.  Even the most false and corrosive set of ideas has some important kernel of truth that makes it appealing to its adherents.  I believe that there is a very large kernel of truth in the basic premise of Critical Theory: it comes very close to accurately describing many of the broad ramifications of structural sin in the world.  The voices of Critical Theory may be at times bitter, simplistic, condescending, or nihilistic, and they almost always think at such a broad scale that they miss the effects of sin and the moments of resistance to it in individual lives, but they are on to something by starting from the belief that things are not the way the are supposed to be or could be.  They may not be seeking God’s kingdom but they can offer some useful ways of challenging its opposite.

writing about writing part 3: a note on method

One of the joys or burdens of being an architect is that you know a little bit about a lot of things but not a lot about anything.  I can, for instance, explain how a structural moment connection works in a steel frame building but I can’t tell you how thick the steel plate needs to be or how many bolts are required.  I need the specialized training of a Structural Engineer for that.  I enjoy laying out places for plantings and trees but I need the detailed knowledge of a Landscape Architect to select the best plant materials for a specific location.  Other generalists, like composers, film directors, pastors, and presidents, are similarly ‘dependent on the kindness of strangers’.

For better or worse, I deal with philosophy and theology in the same way.  I know just enough about a lot of things to get me into water that’s too deep for me and am dependent on specialists beyond that.  This ‘shallowness’ of my knowledge has kept me from writing down my thoughts for a long time but I’m just now learning to live with it as an occupational hazard.

I am currently working on a post about Critical Theory for which this note is highly relevant.

thinking about building part 4: everyone's spatial

If you want to understand a person, you could put him in a small room by himself and observe him through a video camera.  Or you could take tissue samples and analyze those samples in a laboratory.  Alternately, you could do a statistical evaluation his society to determine the broad demographical characteristics of his milieu.  In other words, you could look at a person under a microscope or through a telescope, as an isolated individual or as a subset of a large group.

But both of these perspectives would miss important aspects of the person.  People are intrinsically relational.  Yes, they exist as separate selves from others and yes, they are affected a great deal by the societal setting in which they exist.  But these two perspectives certainly do not explain the whole person and I would argue they do not get at the core of the person.  The realm in which we exist most fully as humans is in our daily interaction with others.

As much as the Christian faith has often been reduced to either a mass phenomenon (like joining the church) or an individual pursuit (like overcoming sin or getting to heaven) the core of the faith exists at this relational level.  The great commandments to love God and love our neighbor are about interpersonal relationships.  Forgiveness is entirely about fixing a relationship that is broken.  And as complex as Trinitarian theology can be, the basic concept that God exists eternally, creatively, and lovingly in relationship is a simple one.

This ‘relational anthropology’ that is central to the Christian faith has, to me, often been one of the most convincing arguments that the Christian faith is true.  This fits well with the world as I’ve experienced it.  (An even more convincing argument for me is that the world is very fallen – but that’s for another time.)  My point here is not so much about apologetics.  My point is that we do not have to choose between a Christian understanding of the person and a secular phenomenology of the person.  They are one and the same. 

A conception of the human person as intrinsically relational has huge implications across a broad range of disciplines, including architecture.  Architectural thought has gotten stuck in a false choice between the microscope and the telescope.  Some want to focus on the broad social and political effects of architecture, but others insist that the individual experience of a building matters most.  Those that prefer to address the broad social and political aspects of architecture consider individual experience alone to be too, well, individualistic.  And those that highlight the personal experience of built space are troubled by the way the first group misses the basic value of real, tactile, visible things.  Robin Evans summed this dilemma up nicely when he referred to his task as an architectural theorist as a way to ‘. . . treat the formal, spatial and visible on the one hand, and the social on the other, as involved in exchanges that do not entail the destruction or domination of the one by the other’ (from ‘The Developed Surface’, italics in the original).

This dilemma does not exist, however, if we accept that the basic element of life is not ‘life alone’ or ‘life in society’ but is ‘life together’.  We all exist physically and spatially, not as isolated minds or instances of universal ideals.  And this is a good thing.  Our social and political contexts are made up of a vast array of communications and interactions.  These contexts may be radically messed up, but because they are made up of the actual ways we enact them we are not determined by them.  We can even change them.  The everyday ways we act with and toward one another, even while working toward large-scale changes, can be the building blocks of an alternate and better way of life together or they can be more of the same.  These daily interactions matter a great deal.  And though the spaces we enact them are of secondary importance, they matter too.

thinking about building part 3: a mad world

The world.  It’s a big place and it’s a big word.  As a word, it can be used many different ways.  It is well beyond my competence to outline all the meanings of the word ‘world’ or even to offer a very precise definition of the way I have been using it here.  So I will try to offer a constellation of concepts that may start to get close to what I am talking about when I use the word.

First, I am not talking about the planet.  The physical sphere we inhabit is radically important and worthy of consideration, but it’s not what I’m talking about.

What I am talking is close to the idea of ‘the human community’ but this phrase may be way too broad, and in some ways too narrow.  It’s too broad because it squeezes everyone into one big box, the way ‘society’ and ‘the culture’ often do.  It’s too narrow because in keeping people in the abstract it can reduce out their actual physicality and connections to things.  No, the world is made up of actual people, connected to each other through a complex web of relationships, and enacting their lives in actual bodies in and through actual physical things.

The way I am using the term ‘the world’ is heavily indebted to the way Hannah Arendt uses it in The Human Condition.  The language I have used of a ‘web of relationships’ is, in fact, straight from this source.  This is way out of my league, but my sense is that Arendt’s concept is more communally based than either Heidegger’s ‘world’ or Husserl’s ‘life world’ and that Habermas’ ‘life world’ is heavily indebted to Arendt.

But Arendt’s use of the term is not original to her.  She began her career studying St. Augustine’s concept of love and his ambivalent perspective on ‘love’ and ‘the world’.  And of course Augustine’s perspective is even more heavily indebted to the apostle Paul and to Jesus.

The biblical language that says both that ‘God loved the world’ and that we are to ‘hate the world’ has often been seen as a contradiction.  Arendt seemed to envision her role as a philosopher as overturning the biblical hatred of the world and replacing it with a love of the world (amor mundi).  But in order to turn the idea on its head she had to begin with a very similar conception of ‘the world’ as Augustine.  And I believe that in doing so she managed to get very close to the philosophical implications of ‘loving our neighbor’.