Wisdom

Last Friday we joined a couple of friends and went to a lecture entitled, "Untimely Meditations on the Need for Sacred Architecture." The lecturer was the picture of an eminent scholar...he has a "real" Ph.D...that is, he is an actual Doctor of Philosophy. When I learned that he was a 70-something-year-old white guy who had spent his entire adult life reading and writing philosophy at Yale, I unconsciously made a bunch of assumptions, many of which weren't kind: yes, he would be brilliant, but also probably boring, arrogant, and stodgy.

In some ways he did not disappoint. He was brilliant. Though I was lost a lot as my brain struggled to parse and sort out his long sentences, I kept up enough to see that he was really insightful about a whole range of real-life topics like religious practice in the United States. And yes, he was a little boring from time to time (but that probably reflects more my inability to take in everything he was saying.)

In other ways he did 'disappoint.' That is, he wasn't arrogant or stodgy at all. He made a bunch of self-deprecating remarks in the question and answer period and seemed to be genuinely humble, not even taking into consideration that he'd written 180 articles and 5 books. And his mental flexibility was amazing! Quite the opposite of stodgy, he seemed more alive than most folks I've heard in any similar context.

Two of his ideas stick out in my mind. First, he argued that everything about the evolution of western civilization has pointed toward freedom. We are increasingly able to control and reproduce everything and that allows us to do almost anything we want. As a result, we are increasingly 'unbound.' That is, there is little that holds us together. To the extent, then, that architecture simply reflects people's desire to control and reproduce spaces, architecture is merely functional...it does nothing to bind us together and only reinforces our current trajectory. As he would say many times, nice-looking functional buildings are merely "decorated sheds."

He holds out hope though. The sacred, he argues, is one force that can bind us together. He was not speaking as a believer, so he was quite vague about what the sacred is. But he referred a lot to an 'aura' or a sense that there is something greater than ourselves and greater than our control-obsessed civilization. Architecture can and should help create that aura or sense of the sacred he argues. When it does this, it is a force that slows our dis-integration and helps bind us together.

OK, so that description stretches the notion of "an idea." My takeaway: we need spaces that inspire awe and remind us that we are not as big a deal as we think we are.

The other idea was much simpler. After the lecture, a person asked him if he was optimistic about the future of architecture. His answer was something like, "Am I hopeful? Of course I am. Pessimism is self-indulgent."