We have problems. We
over think.
We
take ourselves and what we do too seriously.
And we
surrender creative collaboration to our egos and the ideas of individual greatness.
But all is not lost!
First, stop taking yourselves so seriously and thinking you are so important. We are not. We are a fraction inside a fraction of only what we know. We have one life to be the best we can, why waste it conforming?
Let the dense wooded divergence of what we want to do and what we should do fuel the fire of our creativity! Down with the concepts of the world that have become clouded and gummed up with the soot of the modern world we've built and down with the rubbish of importance and respectability. And let yourself have fun, damn it!
We must steer ourselves out of this sparkling, flashing path towards perfection, and we must remember the ever-eloquent words of Nate-Dogg, "...look real close, cuz strobe lights lie."
Instead, embrace Wabi-sabi: The Japanese notion of finding beauty, perfectness and wholeness in imperfection.
I've tried to discipline myself for years only to realize that I'm a lost case. I admit that I have no self-discipline. I have no self-control. And as much schizophrenic agony it causes my cognitive reasoning, I do what I want, when I want. But by applying this Wabi-Sabi paradigm, I start to understand that it is in this blind following of the heart that one can really learn about himself. His core values, his likes and lusts, his personal religion, his truths, his loves and fears. I feel closer to myself the further I separate my head and my heart.
So in the words of Bruno Taut: "Death to everything stuffy! Death to everything called title, dignity, authority! Down with everything serious!" and down with trying to control everything around you.
This seriousness is what makes us often forget to love each other and embrace the differences in other people, places, cultures, and ourselves. Let the pedestal of the individual crumble! because we. need. each other.
And while we're at it, why don't we apply this thinking to architecture?
Tar and feathering to the serious architects that think they're all-knowing. Design must be about collaboration. The architecture of tomorrow will never be without a cooperation for true solutions to today's problems, and a knowledge that the rigid and "respected" concepts of our world need to be broken to move ahead.
We should want to be taboo.
It is only when we listen to others around us - their opinions, no matter how crazy they may be - that we can listen to ourselves and create this new school for thought. This alliance lets us make new ideas, associations and reasoning within our own minds that we may otherwise have never imagined.
And while it is important to embrace your own opinion and execute it through with conviction, we must never get too serious and must never forget the perfection in imperfection.
1 comment:
down with seriousism!
so, what do we do?
do we create environments that nurture that? do we develop new unimagined design methods/processes? do we try to teach people through architecture the notion of wabi-sabi? or?
in other words, what is the core direction that your manifesto proposes? and how, at the needed moment, do we realize it through architecture?
can we make an architecture where, like you, becomes more "truthful" or "understood" when it separates the "head" from the "heart"? the rational from the irrational?
and, if so... what would that be?
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