BUILDING WITH THE
BREATH OF LIFE - Tom Bender - revised
draft text 8 Jan.1999
<<<>>>
A building with a soul has a number of characteristics:
FIT: A building with a soul fits its site and makes best use of it,
making almost magic connections between location, relationships, and views.
The arrangement and organization within it, outside it, and in connection
with the life around it are apt. It fits its climate, its use and users,
and the dreams that drive their society.
COMMUNITY: A
building with a soul fits and belongs to the natural community of the local
area. It uses local materials, local ways of building, local traditions
of design, and supports local patterns of living. It chooses local wisdom
for dealing with the similarly local climatic conditions and ways of heating,
cooling, ventilating and sheltering. It nestles into and celebrates, rather
than standing apart from, its unique ecological community which has evolved
through the on-going testing of centuries. It touches the spirit of where
it is. [wildflower lawn] [wilson ice garden] [jack frost window]
SIMPLICITY: A building with a soul takes a simple and modest route
rather than a complicated one to fulfilling our needs. It lets nature do
the work rather than machines. It finds simple answers to needs (with complex
reasons why they work so well) rather than complicated high-tech ones. It
knows that excess is as harmful as meagerness, and discriminates between
things that harm and those that enhance our abilities, our relationships,
and our lives. [Hasht Behesht]
INVISIBILITY: Like a good servant, a building with a soul is invisible
- a presence known only through the smooth and faultless orchestration of
energy, communication, and flow of experience. When our places act as good
servants, they draw back into shadow, revealing themselves only slowly,
revealing quiet surprises to us from time to time. They let the light and
attention rest on their inhabitants and their partners in Creation. They
place but small demands on us for attention, operation and maintenance.
They evoke deep and moving experiences. Their making and use pay attention
to important inner qualities rather than superficial outer ones. They surround
us only with meaningful things, and convey love and clarity of intention.
They make us subtly aware of important things in life, so we can come to
feel at home everywhere.
They are filled with the emptiness of Lao Tsu's teacup, and reverberates
with the peace of silence. They are free of unnecessary possessions
and mechanical noises, and open to the joyful sounds of birdsong, laughter,
and the sound of the wind. They have learned restraint and simplicity, and
the ability to say, "No." [Bender house]
CONNECTION: A building with a soul is enriched and given meaning
through its connection with other things. It brings us into closer touch
with each other, the rest of the world and the rhythms of nature. It connects
us to the daily and seasonal cycles of the sun, the moon, and the stars,
and to the visible and invisible universe. It adapts readily to changes
in use and additions to its structure. [Loft skylight]
GENEROSITY: The relationships of a building with a soul are based
on "giving" rather than "paying". Its retaining walls
give more than needed - a place to sit as well as holding back the earth.
Its roofs shelter birds and other creatures, as well as passers-by on the
street. It may well accomplish that generosity in surprising ways - like
a Japanese room, which is generous in space because of its emptiness, not
because of its size. Its generosity is created out of the love and energy
put into its making. It gives the unexpected. [Japanese room] [MacNaughton
terrace]
RESPECT: A building with a soul honors its surroundings, and the
lives of materials which were given up to make its existence possible. It
honors the skill and competence, and the sacredness of the work gone into
its making. It honors its users, like the Japanese placing a guest before
a tokonoma, giving them a sense that they and their activities are of value.
In respecting its building tradition it honors the insights and wisdom gained
by the past. By planting trees, or other means, it honors a hope for a future.
It celebrates age, and newness, creativity, death, and its neighbors. It
honors all life, and the power that begets it. [Bender door] [Brygman chapel]
[ Nurselog]
COHERENCE: A building with a soul is consistent and arises out of
a single, whole, and clear vision of the needs it can fill and the possibilities
it can unfold. It reflects a lucid and unencumbered intention of
its owner, designer, and builder. It has sought and found the heart of the
institution it is sheltering, and found ways to honor and unfold that heart
in its making. The issues it has addressed are fundamental and not frivolous,
and the solutions it has created are sound.
ENDURANCE: A building with a soul is built to endure beyond the needs
of its makers - to become a gift to future generations. It acknowledges
that a building that lasts 200 years costs 1/10 as much as one that lasts
only 20 years. It would be as comfortable a thousand years in the past or
future as it is today. It is comfortable with the changes of time, neglect,
and love - mellowing and becoming enriched rather than tarnished and tattered.
There is a hoary strength and a nourishing peacefulness in the timeless
qualities of a building that truly fits our hearts and spirits. [S. Chapelle]
NOURISHMENT: A building with a soul enfolds, shelters, gives peace
and rest to all who enter it. It uplifts our spirits, nourishes our souls
and brings us into harmony with its own. It gives refuge and sanctuary.
It welcomes us with water in the desert, fire in the cold, shelter in the
rain; food and friendship everywhere. [MacNaughton porch]
It fills primal psychic needs - for protection, for warmth, for companionship,
for meaning. It moves our hearts, and enhances our chi. It helps
us marshal our inner resources and stimulates us to use those resources
for growth. It affirms sacredness and meaning in our lives and surroundings,
and creates places for our hearts and minds as well as our bodies. A building
with a soul draws on and connects its users to power extending beyond just
the material world. [Kiyomizu] [4 elements]
Together, these qualities combine to create a place that gives us deep welcome
and refuge - a place which connects us with the beauty of a unique locale,
and draws us more closely together with the rest of Creation.1 Entering it, we are drawn into
an inner calmness, peacefulness, and joyfulness.
<<<>>>
The energy basis of Creation is reflected
in the altered roles that buildings are designed to fulfill, in the kinds
of activities that we undertake and need to house in buildings, and in the
image of our society and our universe which is reflected in those buildings.
It influences the kinds of institutions we develop which need buildings.
We might have restorative justice centers rather than prisons, healing centers
rather than hospitals, learning centers rather than schools. It influences
the honesty of our building. No fake-brick, no pseudo-Georgian manors, no
hyped-up shopping malls.
Energy fields in the earth are acknowledged in choosing locations for buildings
that support sensitive uses. They are used to avoid places with bad natural
energy for all buildings and in the location and design of buildings to
balance and augment the chi of the landscape. They are important
in the preservation without buildings of landscapes which have powerful
energy.
The Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, Japan, is an outstanding example of this kind
of design. The favorable spot was so near the edge of a hillside that the
temple builders went to the great effort of a "scaffolding" support
structure to permit exact location of the temple. That temple has a very
powerful effect on visitors, leaving them with an exhilarating sense of
well-being. The temple itself, interestingly, has managed to escape the
vicissitudes of popularity and neglect that are inherent in the lifecycles
of almost any institution, and certainly of most other temples in the city.
[plan and photo]
The interaction of chi in people and place makes it important that the emotional
and spiritual well-being of building's users are considered in its design,
so that our user energy imparted to the building is good. Fulfilled users
leave positive feelings behind, just as pilgrims leave good energy in temples,
churches, and shrines they visit. It leads to increased consideration of
others in the use of our buildings. It increases the care we take with electromagnetic
fields in our buildings, the materials and design, the connection with the
outside. It ensures that we design to shield from bad chi and to connect
with good energy.
Consideration of chi affects the use of gardens in conjunction with buildings.
It leads us to have skylights to connect with the night as well as
the daytime sky - connecting to the northern lights or the stars. We may
reduce exterior night lighting so we can experience the night, the darkness,
and the stars. It brings our buildings to reflect clarity of intention,
and at times to focus energy in yantric fashion, where specific geometry
of design of space or sculpture affects the chi of building users.
Consideration of the health of all Creation asks us to reduce our numbers
and our consumption of material things (such as large or second homes) which
take space and resources from other life. It calls for the use of solar
heating and natural cooling rather than using fossil fuels. It is acknowledged
in the use of renewable resources in construction, the consideration of
durability, and the sharing of "our" places with other life. It
becomes reflected in smaller scale of communities and their interweaving
with more natural areas. It rejects the use of toxics in building construction
and maintenance, and encourages our buildings to nestle in with the rest
of life in its place. It may affect the exterior impacts and connections
required by our building patterns....transportation, land use, food and
energy cycles, community, or health.
The role of our minds, hearts, and beliefs in the energy flows between us
and our buildings brings about design that deals with the psychological
needs of its users. It teaches us to trust our tummies and to design for
what feels right. It brings us to seek patterns, such as those developed
by Christopher Alexander,2
which fulfill emotional and community needs.
Both the real and the psychological concerns of a vehicle going out of control
and crashing into your space led long ago to an aversion to building at
the head of a "T" intersection of roads. Concern with lack of
privacy, bad energy, or views of our activities by people on the street
leads to avoiding doors opening directly from the street into interior use
spaces.
Our relation with the past led the Chinese and many other cultures
to emphasize the importance of tombs and their locations, to having ancestral
shrines in houses, and to respect for traditional design concepts. It leads
us to honoring good tradition and existing surroundings, and to creating
places to honor and connect with our ancestors. Consideration of our relationship
with the future leads to durability, planting trees, and to sustainable
use of resources. It brings us to supporting values and practices which
teach future generations enduring patterns, and which bring our intentions
in line with that of Creation.
Consider how differently we would feel as a community making decisions,
if the actual ashes of a hundred generations of our ancestors were kept
in urns under the benches we sit upon as we ponder our actions. We would
have a sense of continuity, of durability, of responsibility into the future
far different from acting alone just in the here and now.
The greatest achievements and most shameful failures of the past would unavoidably
be present in our minds as guidance, support, and measure of our own actions.
Aware of how our lives are impacted by past actions, we would realize how
greatly the future is impacted by our present behavior. We would instinctively
draw upon the wisdom of the past as well as our own, and at times perhaps
even feel unequal to the standards they have set. We would think to call
on the aid of our ancestors themselves to resolve our problems.
Harmony with our cosmology leads to building design incorporating creation
and cultural myths, and making connections between our lives and aspects
of the cosmos important in our beliefs. It brings an awareness of cyclic
change, and of balancing the qualities of energy in a place.
<<<>>>
ENTRIES
Entries to buildings, particularly homes,
hold an importance in this process far beyond their actual size. Getting
a sense of the multiple and important roles they play is vital to successful
placement, design, remodeling, or accommodating their function even in an
apartment.
[suburban house]
A typical North American residential patterns shows us almost everything
not to do with entrance to a home. A large living room window open
to the street across an open front yard ensures lack of privacy for the
occupants, exposing them constantly to the view of passers by. Anyone approaching
the front door has to walk directly in front of that window, waking up in
an embarrassing fashion the owner sleeping there in his underwear amidst
the ruins of last night's party. Once at the front door, the visitor stands
there in the rain getting soaked, with no place to put down their packages
or sit and rest while the owner runs around inside trying to get presentable.
When the owner answers the door, the visitor comes directly into the living
room, interrupting whatever is going on there, and becoming the immediate
focus of attention of everyone in the room.
How would your tummy feel as either visitor or resident in this pattern?
Chinese feng shui pays a lot of attention to which room an entry door should
open into. The real answer, perhaps, is that entry requires a separate
place inside the house, apart from all interior activities. Entry
deals with strangers as well as family, and needs to accommodate their business
without impinging on the occupants of a house. This doesn't need a lot of
space. It does require separation. At minimum, it needs a bookcase,
or portable screen, or even a curtain, that can visually close off the entry
door area from the rest of the interior.
An entry has to address many needs: weather protection, being a thermal
"airlock", putting on and taking off outdoor gear. It has to deal
with privacy, safety, protection; places to sit, to put bags and gear, and
to discuss business or life. In snow country, roofs need to be designed
not to dump snow or icicles on visitor's heads when the door is slammed.
Other climates have different needs.
Entries are also the settings for important rituals in our lives. Passionate
goodnights after a date, farewells, waiting for family or friends to return,
setting off to school or work, return to comfort and rest at the end of
a day. They are places of celebration, grief, joy, reticent departures and
emotional returns. They are entwined with love, beautiful mornings, sadness,
loneliness, excitement. They sometimes denote entry into and departure from
sacred space. They become containers for ritual energy, adding to the power
of those rituals. They can show connection and how our lives are nestled
into the native community of life of the place. Most of these events require
at least an eddy out of the way of traffic in and out of an entry
door. Some require much more.
Entries can also be a place of giving - offering shade, coolness
and water in the desert; warmth and shelter in the cold. They can be a place
of giving to the street....of beauty, of caring, of connection and conversation,
of guardians and a watchful eye, of mingling the emotions and energies of
family and community. They can be places of honoring - honoring visitors
and guests, honoring the neighborhood, nature, the materials whose lives
were given up in the making of the place. They can be a place for expression
of caring.
All this takes more than just the 1-3/4" thick door we usually give
to entry! Designing, modifying, and adding elements to an entry area to
accomplish these things creates the conditions of harmony between us and
others and between us and our surroundings.
The ambiguity of the suburban living room with picture window facing the
street is an important one. It speaks of absence of even the most minimal
awareness, skills, or traditions to provide privacy to the occupants of
the home. But it also speaks of the need for connection, of loneliness,
of wanting to know what's going on out on the street and desire to connect
with it. While the suburban "front lawn" is a particularly odd
and wasteful pattern, connection with the human world outside is an important
need.
If designing from scratch, placing the house closer to the street or building
a front porch can create a useful in-between space. Even with a row house
in the city, placing a couple of pots of plants beside the front door can
create a "front stoop" area which can make it comfortable for
us to "hang out", talk, or just enjoy the street scene.
[Fire Mt. School or Head Start]
Using topology, or "rubber geometry", we can often accomplish
more than one thing at a time, and more than one thing can occupy the same
space. By stretching an entry walk over towards one of the sides of a front
yard, the rest can be fenced or walled in for private outdoor space for
the residents, while still giving access to the entry. In a small elementary
school, rubber geometry can stretch the inside "entry" space so
it is large enough for a "Commons" - a non-classroom place for
parents to wait for kids or to meet with each other, a place for kids to
have lunch, do individual work out of class, or hold small group meetings.
[saihoji]
At the Saihoji Zen garden in Kyoto, the entry walk is rubber-stretched to
extend around two whole sides of the garden, to give the city world
time to drain out of visitors' heads, and to bring them to where the garden
could be viewed with full attention and with the vegetation backlit by the
sun. A front entry can be stretched around to the side of a building if
needed for better weather, surroundings, or to link better with the interior
arrangement of activities.
[Bender house approach]
One of the first of our needs that entry responds to is our anticipation
and need for comfort. Approach to this house gives a glimpse of warm light
pouring out of a kitchen, with reserves of food visibly at hand on the shelves.
Smoke from the chimney, a sheltered porch, and a full woodpile easily at
hand give immediate assurance of warmth, shelter, food, and companionship
regardless of power interruptions, road closures, or the worst of weather.
The wood is dry, the larder full, a haven in any storm. We start to relax
already!
[Bender entry and plan]
Inside, a soil cement floor keeps the entry as part of the ground; steps
up to the house floor provide a seat for removing or putting on shoes; a
shoji screen provides visual and thermal separation from the living space
while bringing light into the entry; a stairs provides access to upstairs
offices; and a pantry provides storage for bulk food purchases.
[MacN entry]
Where site conditions dictate living space on the upper level, rubber geometry
can stretch the connections entry needs to make. With having entry on the
downwind side of the house, and by extending the roof overhang to give rain
shelter to the entry stairs, approach to the entry door can occur outside,
opening into a lovely wooded area. At the front porch, a bench and shelf
gives place to set packages, rest, or take off muddy boots, then a right-angled
turn brings visitors to the entry door.
Interestingly, that right angle turn works differently leaving the house.
Opening the entry door, the porch gives direct connection out into the wooded
part of the lot, then you remember the stairs going down on the left!
This pattern makes it possible also, by opening both entry doors, for the
house to connect out directly to the woods on nice days. All this from a
kink in the entry path!
[MacN patio]
Design of the garden side of the same house used careful organization of
levels of outdoor terraces and walls to provide seating without view obstruction.
At the same time, it created a rubber geometry stretching the ground level
up to the upper floor, although the house floor is almost a full story above
grade. By locating circulation paths so people are drawn to a corner of
the site, a distinctive view of the ocean and the end of the mountain gives
a special sense of connection with the forces of nature.
[beach]
The wonderful Dutch architect Aldo Van Eyck used to talk about doors and
windows as a special category of "in-between spaces". He talked
about the specialness of walking along the edge of the last landward movement
of water on a beach....that in-between realm between water, earth and sky...and
how such places have characteristics of their neighboring realms and additional
unique ones themselves.
[Nepalese grandma]
Doors and windows do lie on that kind of edge - between the inside and out.
Enlarging that edge into a realm of its own containing porches, verandahs,
and entries, can recognize its specialness and capture its special potentials
for making us comfortable in our complex world. Steps between inside and
out can give us a place to sit when we are unsure whether we want to be
out or in. It lets us be part of what is going on both outside and inside.
A window seat can allow us to linger in that in-between world, able to be
securely inside our home, yet able to call out to a neighbor or friend,
start a conversation, or just enjoy the passing world outside.
[Queensland porch] [Alquezar]
Houses in the Queensland area of Australia developed a unique pattern of
front porches enclosed with a wood lattice - allowing breezes to pass through,
giving visual privacy, yet allowing view out to the street. "French
windows" in European villages give connection between upper story rooms
and friends in the street below. "Spirit walls" outside entries
in Japan and China allow entry without losing visual privacy.
<<<>>>
[The Arbors]
One common entry problem is "Where is the doorbell?" Its underlying
issues are confusion between intended and perceptible boundaries
between public and private areas, and how visitors can make their presence
known. Consider a site enclosed by a wall, with a closed gate. Do we knock
on the gate until the owner hears us, or is it okay to open the gate and
go up to the house? Will the owner be upset...after all the gate was
closed?
Or as here, when we approach the house, what if there are several possible
"front" doors? Or we get to the outside porch door, there is no
doorbell, we hear the owner inside but they can't hear us knocking. The
glassed-in porch is obviously furnished and used as part of the house. Do
we go on in and ring the doorbell at the original front door? Or will the
owner open the door and say, "What are you doing in my house?"
Again, how does your tummy feel as you try to sort all that out? And why
should you have to sort it out?
If we consider everything inside our walled front yard to be private, we
should locate a doorbell at the gate. If we expect people to enter and go
up to the house, we should keep the gate open, or otherwise indicate welcome.
If we close in our entry porch to use as a sunroom, we should move the doorbell
to the outer door. Of course, we rarely think of doing those things, but
when we don't, there are psychological consequences for others and ourselves.
[Rombalski entry and plan]
Some geomantic traditions such as feng shui emphasize a compact house design,
ideally one that will fit easily onto the square geomantic chart diagram.
These same guides, however, go on to show how to stretch those diagrams
to fit differently onto a house through addition of a sunspace, outdoor
room, garage, etc. This suggests the greater importance of our comfort with
how things fit together than an exact theoretical fit of a diagrammatic
overlay. A good design usually has indoor, outdoor, and in-between places.
Fitting a chart onto such subtlety becomes more and more problematic.
Strict geomantic analysis would not result in an "L"shaped house.
But this one fits beautifully. In this case, numerous factors resulted in
a strongly "L" shaped house design - even more, an "arrow"
shaped design. Orientation was with the diagonal of the house facing south
rather than a side elevation. The owner did not want the garage dominant
to approaching guests, and the Oregon rain indicated the value of covered
entry approach. The owners also wanted view out of the house to the north
to an entry garden and the rest of their property.
The design of a garden as part of the entry accomplished several things.
Interestingly, this brought entry into the center space of the overall
house, not one of the perimeter spaces. It gave "protection" from
the north, while enhancing the view. And by carefully locating the entry
walk, visitors are brought to the front door along the edge of the
garden under a wide roof overhang, while the pond keeps them outside
the sight lines from the entry windows. This simultaneously maintained view
out to the garden, visual privacy of the interior from approaching guests,
and rain shelter for the approaching visitor. With rubber geometry,
things can be molded and stretched to accomplish what would initially appear
impossible from a rigid geometric thinking.
Work out what feels right, then tweak it or stretch the diagram to fit!
<<<>>>
[Inland Sea]
Then, of course, there is the story of the Japanese Zen master. As the story
goes, a famous Japanese tea master was given a piece of land with an outstanding
view of the Inland Sea. When his teahouse was finished, his first guests
arrived, curious to see how he had sited it to take best advantage of the
magnificent site. They were shocked to find that he had planted a hedge
that totally blocked out the dramatic view of the sea.
Then, as they bent to drink the traditional dipperful of water before entering
the tea house, a hidden opening in the hedge exposed a view of the waves
breaking on the rocks below, just as the water in the dipper touched their
lips.
Later, when the master had finished the tea ceremony inside, he quietly
slid aside the shoji screens and brought the sense of water that lingered
still on their lips and in their hearts together with the powerful vista
of the sea below.
The design of entry can do many things!
<<<>>>
INSIDE HOMES
Homes are personal places. Our living patterns,
cultural traditions, and individual comfort levels are very different. The
energetics of personal space are dominated by our hearts and minds. Glare,
noise, smells affect us differently. What represents comfort and security
to each of us is vastly different, and it is those personal perceptions
that need satisfaction. Listening to our tummies as to what feels good or
bad to us is vital.
Every part of the daily patterns in our homes contains opportunity for embodying
the sacred in our lives, for honoring others, finding meaning in our lives,
and for deepening our rootedness with the rest of our cosmos:
* A good kitchen does not need fancy appliances, or cabinets filled with equipment and packaged foods. It needs to be a place capable of honoring and enabling those who feed and care for others. It needs to cradle the social rituals of making meals. It needs to honor the foods, allow them to embody the energy given through them by the cook, and enhance their ability to nurture our energy as well as our bodies.
* A bath can be the heart of a home - a place to honor and restore our bodies and our spirits, to wash off the fatigue and tensions of the day, and find wholeness out of its experiences. Our bodies, too, are sacred and wonderful. Even our wastes are food for other life, and nutrients that need to return to the fields.
* Where and how we sleep is not important. Where and how we dream, whose hands we put ourselves into when we sleep, what we wake to and say goodnight to are important. The place between sleep and awake is a place where the veils to the spirit world are thin and where our dreams can be brought to life.
* "Living-room" is a seed of family and community. It is a place for enabling and evoking our relationships, honoring others, our relationships, and ourselves. It is a place of opportunity to care for others, to give gifts of spirit, hope, love, and support.
<<<>>>
There are many things we can do to align our lives with our surroundings and our universe. We can change our lives - our perceptions, beliefs, actions. We can make physical changes to our surroundings - choosing or not choosing a site, modifying it; determining or changing the characteristics of what is built on it. Or we can work directly on the energetic level to alter or augment the forces at play and how we relate to them. Beneath all the rules, the goal remains achieving a sense of "rightness". That rightness comes in providing the nurture and love needed for us to feel comfortable within our surroundings and part of relationships and patterns that give meaning and power to our lives.
TOM BENDER
38755 Reed Rd.
Nehalem OR 97131 USA
503-368-6294
© 8 Jan. 1999
tbender@nehalemtel.net