Standing Still

Of course our mobility, physically and intellectually, has gleaned immeasurable wealth and benefits for us. We are a world wise, multi-cultural, fully mapped society. But we are bored [even though we can’t admit it]; nothing is hidden, it’s all so easy. We can be anywhere anytime [worthy of its own blog entry]. So I have to wonder about standing still.

“My grandfather, on the contrary, and despite his life’s persistent theme of hardship, took a great and present delight in the modest good that was at hand: in his place and his affection for it, in its pastures, animals, and crops, in favorable weather.

He did not participate in the least in what we call “mobility.” He died, after eighty-two years, in the same spot he was born in. He was probably in his sixties when he made the one longish trip of his life. He went with my father southward across Kentucky and into Tennessee. On their return, my father asked him what he thought of their journey. He replied: “Well, sir, I’ve looked with all the eyes I’ve got, and I wouldn’t trade the field behind my barn for every inch I’ve seen.”

 In such modest joy in a modest holding is the promise of a stable, democratic society, a promise not to be found in “mobility”: our forlorn modern progress toward something indefinitely, and often unrealizably, better. A principled dissatisfaction with whatever one has promises nothing or worse.”  Wendell E. Berry

Part of me envies this connection and believes the loss of this intimacy with the land, and loss of value seen in localness has ruined us – but wasn’t it inevitable that we explored, then wandered until it became common to never dwell anywhere fully?    So now we question; in the midst of unhappiness, war, and climate change we wonder about the price of mobility, and accessibility.

Simply put, if we don’t stop moving we can’t see the immensities involved in locality.  If we can not make this connection how can we connect to each other?

I was born in Pennsylvania.  My parents took me to Wisconsin as a baby, then Kentucky as a young child.  In the aftermath of divorce a smaller ‘we’ moved to Michigan, then Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia. I continued the trend, and moved on my own back to Georgia and Florida,  then left the country for 18 months in Italy, Germany, and even Israel.  When I returned it was  New York, Rhode Island, and finally west to Colorado and Utah, then Arizona.  By the time I had reached my twenties I had easily shifted landscapes as many times as the candles on the chocolate cake.  My example may be extreme but not unusual.

My history includes me with the group of wanderers trying to place themselves.   Now I am in New Zealand, the last land to be settled by man, wanting to stand still.  So appropriately I ask, can a built work facilitate the reciprocity necessary for a life long dialogue with a single place?  Can architecture beget belonging?

Architecture for the Lost: Provocation for Master of Architecture Thesis

We all have a homeland, a place bred into our bones; some know they stand on that ground, some leave it but tell the stories, others wander, forget, and grow empty. Then wanderers beget wanderers who are truly the lost.

The lost have no connection to the land, and seek to fill an emptiness with everything and everything and more…

This PROJECT investigates man’s relationship with and response to the land. My project considers historic precedents [to be determined as a combination of architecture, art, and/or writing], and a literature review as examples of man’s expression of a fluctuating relationship with his environment influenced by an a priori knowledge of beauty, driven by an evolutionary history of familiarity with the land [nature], and broken down by globalization.

My investigation contrasts and compares the precedent study, and the literature review with current examples of a globalized world: we have adapted behaviorally at the cost of our social and physical wellbeing; we have lost touch with what it means to be part of the land, and part of a whole. These issues are far beyond our attempts at sustainability. We must look to anthropology, sociology, evolutionary biology and psychology, and perhaps to the arts to reconstruct our connection to the land, and to repair our ability to connect with one another.

A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in its beauty.
~Albert Einstein, 1950


This project, in essence, seeks physical design solutions by interpreting ‘answers’ established through current scientific and academic theory, and to express these thoughts poetically as a symbiotic relationship between our built environment and our place in the world.

I intend my research to influence the design of two Department of Conservation Huts [or two groups of huts] constructed as a response to two very different environs found in New Zealand [to be determined]. I assume at this point [dependant on literature review], these designs should demonstrate a deep response to the land as architecture, and begin to investigate the properties of such a response as one ingredient of many necessary in reconnecting humanity physically and socially through the land.