“… a certain ghostly place where there
were two openings in the earth side by
side, and opposite them and above two
openings in the heaven…”
Plato, The Republic, Book X1

For days, weeks, and years, the issue of permanence has been persistant in my mind. On a daily basis the meaning of architecture challenges itself through the events taking place around the world. Over the course of history, wars and battles leave their mark through human casualties, but also the casualty of mass, the destruction of place, the ruin of a building. Months, years and decades collaps in a momentary lapse with the destruction of a made artifact.

Recent occurrences in Iraq and the Middle East continuously play like a broken record over the elusive waves and frequencies of radio and TV. Images, sounds and words run through the infinite length of communication lines that run below our feet and above our heads. Specifically, acts of destruction, like that of the Shiite Shrine on February 2, 2006, set off a wave of reactionary episodes of further uprising and destruction. What inherent substance is embedded in the things we create that hold so much energy, so much emotion? The link between the tangible and the intangible gives me sleepless nights. But, within this link we begin to stumble upon the heart of the organism, the central processor of this embodied energy.

As I come to the end of my formal architectural education, dreaming future, imagining the projects to come, one particle of information feels the particle of permanence, the weight of what we create. It is not just and masonry, the cloth and glass; it is the significance that people project we produce as architects and landscape architects; a house, an office, a walkway; places to inhabit, places to lunch. As designers, we are given tremendous responsibility of understanding our surroundings, of understanding physical manifestation of our intangible ideas, of our imaginations.

“In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow
on the earth, and in this pale light of the shadow we put together a house.”
Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

Is it more powerful for a place to be marked by a shadow than defined by a wall? Is a carpet more defining than the ground beneath? As I see our creations in the horizon I start to mediate the real from the imagined. Just as the shadow grows stronger through the implied object outside of view and the carpet heightens the mystery beneath, Luis Althusser’s decades old ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ describes our gift in education as designers. It is a gift of submitting to rules and established order, only to become operative on the ruling ideology in order to create change. This connection to Althusser relates specifically to the notion of ‘thinking outside the box’, to use creativity to understand our surroundings and our past and to create for the future.

To what extent is thinking ‘outside the box’ beneficial, when does it harm? ‘Outside the box’ does not signify losing the box entirely. The box is a borderless place marked by boundaries; a self-marking organism ordered to facilitate the new. In recent history, computers have changed the profession, changed our education. Is the ability to produce an endless amount of flashy images inhibiting our ability to imagine tangible space with intangible qualities instead of tangible qualities with intangible space? Will the significance of place embody as much energy in the future as in the past; as the present still does only in some places?

The manifestation of permanence is conceived within our universities. It starts with our pencils to paper and our hands connected to our minds. I pose no answers for permanence in architecture, only my thoughts, some worries and some hope. For me this first edition of lunch reinstates a specific kind of permanence within our education, the journal: an idea forgotten by the School of Architecture for some time. Inside its pages are stories of walls and carpets; imagination, food and a fall from grace; open discussions and final competitions. It is personal to some and universal to others. Establishing itself somewhere between tangible and intangible, choosing to be printed and held, it’s a place where imaginations turn real, held within our fingers, worn with time and possibly soon to be forgotten only to be found again in a serendipitous act, in another place, another time.

April 23, 2006, 1:18 PM

“For if any man always steadfastly
pursues philosophy whenever he comes
to life in this world, and if the lot of
choice falls to him not among the least,
it appears, from what we are told from
yonder, not only that he will be happy
in this life, but that his journey from
here to the world beyond and back
again to this world will not be along the
rough and underground track, but along
the smooth and heavenly way.”
Plato, The Republic, Book X