The Golden Ass

I'm part of an "Architecture Shaming" group on Facebook. Often, it's hilarious. But, it has also spurred some rather interesting - or even intense - discussions, posts, and thoughts. I realized they might often be helpful in ways that speak to worlds outside that of Architecture. So, I decided to start writing some of the lessons down. It makes sense, then, that I swiped a couple of the above screenshots from THIS FACEBOOK POST in that group.

A false comparison of similarity between Architect Louis I. Kahn's Salk Institute and Expo '67 is helpful for instruction in a lot of ways. I think the massive differences between them are easy for us to miss, but hugely important, in many ways.

Here is that false comparison typed out as a description of the Salk Institute, in case you can't read it in the collage here:

"[W]ell, the part shown here is dreadfully drab and must cook in the scorching sun. It’s a horrible, endless mass of concrete, with no plants or shade anywhere. I hate it for the glare of all the damn concrete and tile (besides which it’s just a bunch of boxes, like back at Expo ‘67). Nay, verily."

This can help teach us about our everyday perception and interpretation of our built environment, as well as about how said everyday lived environment is shaped by and reflects influence from larger socio-political concerns and discourse. What does something so simple that we take take it for granted, such as our perception of a building, tell us about ourselves? How does it tell us this?

Let's take this person's response to Louis I. Kahn's Salk Institute as a kind of microcosm where these questions play themselves out:

1. On the topic of "lack of shade," the entire central Plaza at Salk was originally a garden. An Institute of human learning was to point indicatively back to the Garden where the relationship between an intimate knowing of God, "nature," and one another was distorted and disordered by a vain search for a different kind of knowing. Kahn changed his design, however, after touring the site with another famous architect named Louis Barragan, who said, "That's not a garden. It's a façade to the sky."

This change was made for completely different reasons from why the Brutalism of Expo '67 presents as "just a horrible, endless mass of concrete." (See #4 and #5, below)

And, this decision to change from garden to "façade to the sky" speaks to our relationship with simplicity and complexity. Humans, like Architects, can have a complex and competing set of concerns that are ordered towards a common end or aim. Decisions are often made with those competing concerns in mind within a larger desire for one aim or end. This can be very complex. We tend to imagine that our decisions are and must be more simple or simplistic, and made towards competing ends.

Our bodies and our perceptions inhabit and are interwoven with this complexity of our mental, written, historical, and built environment. Growth into our humanity, discipleship, is, just as in Architecture, a matter of giving order to this complexity towards the good and beautiful. This complexity of concerns and decisions with either varying or similar aims has parallels for how we make decisions of how to relate communally, politically, on social media. If we imagine all decisions simplistically towards competing ends or desires, we are more likely to relate antagonistically. Just as the person above likely imagines that Lou Kahn is unconcerned with providing shade, or that Kahn's only desire is for an aesthetic artifact, actual humanity be damned (which is actually completely untrue about Kahn), progressives and conservatives often imagine that the other doesn't care at all about what they care about or has completely antagonistic desires rather than varying means to desired common goods (which is often, though not always quite untrue about "the other", in either case).

And, speaking of the relationship between knowledge and intimacy: just as the above person who hates the Salk Institute would have a more "correct" understanding of Lou Kahn's work if he took the time, effort, and care - in other words, the love - to relate to it more intimately, so Progressives and Conservatives may be able to work together (at least a little) more harmoniously if they were to function with an imagination for a different and better relationship between knowledge and intimacy formed by and in love.

With a fuller imagination for the relationship between complexity and simplicity, intimacy and knowledge, we can better work towards the good and the beautiful - like Lou Kahn here at Salk.

2. Said plaza in question has a small artificial stream running through it, down to a pool at the end closest to the ocean. The entire building site is a microcosm for how the elements of nature relate to one another. A bit like how science is meant to function.

In everything we do, humans always tell stories that interpret the world.

I grew up in a fundamentalism that believed it was not interpreting the world or the scriptures but, instead, only gleaning "the facts" and then teaching them. I've seen this in our political discourse, as well.

The Brutalism of Expo '67 also doesn't believe it tells organizing and interpretive stories. Expo '67 is a Fundamentalist. It believes it is presenting to you the "bare facts" of human experience. It's not; that's a lie. The abstract form and volume of its supposed visual appeal IS ITSELF the telling of a particular human story. So Architecture is what first began to teach me about my own Fundamentalism. This was, for me, a humbling.

The reason this is important, besides my humbling, is because the question of what story we are inhabiting is a question of whether our path is aimed towards life or death. And, once our humanity is abstracted, we are already dead.

3. The wood that you can see but is downplayed in the photos here of Salk is vitally important in person. The wood brings the image of human nobility in the concrete - that appears at once as having both glorious weight and wings of light - down to the scale of human touch. So, when you are there "in person," it's not alienating.

Brutalist buildings, on the other hand, do not tend to these questions of touch. And, they only tend to the questions of human scale in order for the abstraction of their form to meet their function.

When we presume to "just give the facts," we rely on abstracted information in a mediumless vacuum for our alienated knowing inside a loss of intimacy. At this point, we have lost the importance of human touch. When we do this as Christians, we have lost the humanity of Jesus. This means we've lost our own, as well. The story Lou Kahn tells us as a Jewish Architect about our relationship to our body and to the elements of creation can teach us not only about the Incarnation of Jesus but its importance to our humanity in our everyday experience, perception, and interpretation of the world.

4. Salk is not "a horrible, endless mass of concrete" ALSO because it invites us to listen while a material and it's weight, the elements of creation, powerfully and movingly speak for themselves - specifically rather than needing to be plastered, painted, or otherwise "covered" in order to put on a dead display of visual appeal. Paul talks about this in his letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 1 & 2).

Brutalist buildings tend to revel in the visual delight of changes and movement of abstract form and volume. They do not "speak" to us of the inextricably interwoven relationship between the mass of earth and light of heaven, body and mind. Expo '67 told no story about and had no purposeful relationship with the weight of the body and the earth in figurative relationship with what's "above" and lighter, gravity in relationship with levity, heaven in relationship with earth. It purposefully defied that story, actually.

In comparison, that's one of the primary things Louis I. Kahn is doing at Salk, and in the rest of his work - is telling the story of the relationship between "heaven and earth." He's Jewish, with a history of relating to the Temple as the place where the Spirit of God comes to rest here. And, the difference between the second photo here (more open, more air, more light, more "seen," rising like fire towards the fire of the sun) and below photo (more closed, more heavy, more shadow, more mystery, standing firmly upon the authoritative glory of the earth) speaks to this (discussed in #4 here and in #5, below), particularly about the inextricably interwoven relationship between gravity and levity, earth and sky, body and mind. But, again, this is more easily "heared" and "seen" "in person" as compared to in photos.

Our secularism isn't merely ideological. The story it tells is woven through the senses and perceptions of our everyday experience of the world. As Christians, our ideological culture wars thus miss the boat when they respond to what happens in the everyday of our materiality and our body with abstracted ideological pursuits. Our ideologies cover over our unrecognized shame and visceral disgust with disembodied information about the world in the same way that we think we need to cover over concrete with white paint rather than allowing ourselves to submit and receive it into our senses.

5. Salk Institute is not "a horrible, endless mass of concrete" ALSO because it faces and reflects, submits and bows to the elements of nature which make it what it is in the first place. Concrete imitates stone, from mother earth. The entire appearance and edification, or presentation and construction of the building is a microcosm for relationships between the ground of existence and what appears, and between "nature" and humanity - as Kahn discusses in his piece of writing called Silence and Light (which can be read HERE, if interested).

Even the way he organizes and plants the trees in the middle of miniature rock-gardens that appear between the parking lot and the building, which do provide shade, participates in this dynamic of allowing a thing to "speak" for itself in an ordered fashion, rather than getting lost in our usual cacophony of chaotic sound.

Indeed, the light and shadow that plays upon the building and ground itself is key to this dynamic, as well - in relation to the sun. And, it's stunningly powerful.

Expo 67 has no interest in re-organizing the economy of our sense and perception. Expo 67 is content to be shaped by our default drive to raise our investment through higher "interest." This is accomplished with a multiplicity of purely visual changes (without concern for the weight of the body or the earth, which is not seen in photos). Expo '67 "steals the show" from the elements of nature and carries an abstract message of "form" and "volume" rather than allowing what stands before us to BOTH ACTUALLY speak for itself AND step back in submission to earth and sky. Lou Kahn was a prophet who "saw the world differently" and taught me to do the same. He died $5000,000 in debt. Expo '67 is a member of the King's court using the default tools of the world's powers for its own (visual) "interests." Whether architects or not, we all have such choices to make. And, we are presented with them in our everyday sensory and perceptual experience of the world.

6. Brutalist buildings like at Expo '67 are not figurative. No figures appear. Again, they are all abstract form and volume.

In Kahn's work in general, and at Salk Institute in particular, subtle human figures appear as mirrors before us, mirrors of and to the humanity who makes it appear. This is difficult to see in photos, because what is meant to appear is an embodied figure who carries weight upon the glory of the earth, in relation to the levity of air and fire.

Kahn's buildings, in the same way as his Jewish Torah, thus point us to he who is the fulfillment of his scripture, the figure who is the fulfillment of all con-figurings. We actually and actively sense this in our very bodies as we stand before and behold the figures themselves. Vacuumed abstractions, whether presented to us in the form of buildings, sermons, or political speeches do no such figurative pointing.

Salk Institute is to Expo 67 as Theological readings of scriptures such as Typological or Allegorical interpretation is to the Historical-Critical method of exegesis.

7. In our Romanticism and in our capitalism that concentrates all intimacy upon the nuclear family, we associate love with "coziness" or comfort. This is one of the primary things we are often reacting against with our repulsion from Expo '67.

Lou Kahn's purposeful and explicit "Monumentality" apparent in, by, and through his buildings teaches or reminds us that love is (at least also) about edification and dignity. Love "builds up," like an "elevation."

The "elevation" of Expo '67 is a drawing on a piece of paper. The "elevation" of Kahn's Salk Institute is an invitation to you and me to be lifted up, to be edified, to be loved. Where is the "elevation" of our sermons and political speech embodied, and how do we discern this?

8. The person whose response I am highlighting here had not been to the Salk Institute. Kahn's works in general are not made for photographs but for embodied relationship (i.e. to be "experienced in person").

Humans and disciples are also not made to learn and be instructed by images or words on screens or on paper but through, in, and by embodied relationship. Architecture was what first taught me about Incarnation.