I.
Aristotle tells us in Book II of Physics that when we use our building skills to bring something new into the world we are completing what nature on its own was unable to do. This is of course an anthropomorphic viewpoint and by today's ecological consciousness it seems perhaps a bit out of touch, yet if we think about its deeper implications a new sense of what it means to build emerges. As biological beings, we are indeed sprung from nature, or more appropriately we should say sprung from "earth" (earth as Husserl used it). As its progeny, we are that part of earth that has recently evolved into consciousness. Accordingly, we are the part of "earth" that thinks. We are also that part of "earth" that reshapes itself into things recognized as built works. In this sense then there is no anthropomorphic bias. We humans -- we earthlings -- are intricately part of "earth" acting interconnectedly when we build.

Carrying this to its deepest level, we begin to see that when we act thoughtfully as that part of "earth" that thinks, we totally reshape our self-perspective. That is, there is a shift from perceiving all that is from "out there" as separate, to one where "earth" and us are intrinsically connected. With this outlook we are able to set aside our collective ego, to act in accord with all that is -- to be that part of "earth" which perpetually rebuilds itself. In that sense there is no separation, but rather the deepest interconnection between our species and all that is around us.

Once this confluence of identification is recognized the conventional barriers between subject-object are broken down. There is no longer the "I" that builds. It is now more a selflessness as part of the whole, the wholeness of place where building occurs. This identity with the phenomena of building, whether local or global, engenders unmediated identification, one that provides a profound interconnectedness with all that is around. All the earth is the human body and, in turn, the human body becomes "earth".

Step outside the building you're in right now and likely you'll find a brick wall nearby. Consider a single brick in the facade. Look at it, and by looking, we mean take in what is seen directly at face value, without assumption or preconception. There you see the brick in the wall in its immanent form, a physical thing about the length of your outstretched hand and in height about as tall as your four fingers held tightly together. You notice it has some depth since the mortar that surrounds it reveals the brick's edge, even though you can't tell precisely how deep it is since it's mostly embedded in the wall. You also note that the brick must have solidity since there are many other bricks weighing down upon the one you've been concentrating on; all those bricks would crush each other if they weren't solid and strong to some degree. As you run your hand along the surface of the wall you feel its rough texture. You see the deep bluish-gray color of the brick and notice shiny specks in its surface that have a metallic sheen. Judging from the shadow cast onto the brick wall from the building across the street you realize it's in the afternoon, about five o'clock. (You can tell that because of your prior encounters with shadows of similar angles at that time of year, giving you the ability to compare the visual quality of the shadow now before you with clock time.)

These are some of your initial impressions as you stop to consider the brick in the wall. But we likely only noticed this brick because we have chosen to use it as an example. Otherwise, it's one of those innumerable things that make up the background of our lives. We tacitly accept things like this wall without much consideration. We don't take them in as a part of our living world. Yet, to look deeper into the fabric we're but one tiny part of, we might give this brick wall more thought. To do that, we should begin with its fundamental condition.

In our early perception, we assumed without question that the wall was a thing. But, for the moment, we want to be even more basic, just to see where it leads. We can begin by asking why do we see what is before us as a wall? In our recognition of it as a wall-thing what is its ground? To ask this way we're more likely to experience the wall for what it is, on the basis of what is actually before us rather than casual conceptualization. We've already said that the bricks in the wall have a definite weight and shape. Each has sharp crisp edges and a rectangular quality; they're dense and solid. Yet in questioning it in the broader sense, we can first say more simply that there is a thing there before us, a fixed real object in the world. It is an existent form with extension.

But just as well, we should remind ourselves that this wall has the potential of not being there either. And likewise, it can be close to us as it is now, or it can be very far away. We can consider the single object of the brick, and simultaneously we can regard the brick as a component working in unison with many other ones. While we conceptualize "brick" that condition is actually not present in the thing itself. That is merely our understanding of its brick-ness. While brick is, "brick" also it is not. What we call brick glides easily back and forth between being and non-being, simultaneously both phenomenon and idea. Yet we see that the brick is. Because of its qualities the wall is of necessity a stable and lasting thing, otherwise it would not serve itself in its brickness. In its stability the brick wall is limited; it has limitation. This limitation is what allows us to recognize it in the first place. We readily see that it cannot be anything other than what it is. This limit, because we see it as a brick, is certainly not a limitation in the sense of it being less. This restriction of brickness gives it its being. In fact, the characteristic of the wall's being lies in its "limitation." It preserves itself in the light of its own showing, its quality that it is a wall. That is its revealed presence.

Of what we directly see however, we perceive that the brick is one of many. Its potential is revealed in it being part of the wall. Thinking larger, we realize all things are like this, each having its own potentiality through that which it is part of; the potentiality of the brick lies primarily in what it is as part of the wall. The brick needs the wall. The wall needs the ground beneath it for support. The wall needed the mason to construct it and the factory to make the brick. The factory needed the unformed shale and the energy needed to run its equipment. And all that needed us to observe the wall and bring it forward into thought. In its unfolding before us as it has we regard the wall as interdependent.

That which stands through its own presence reveals itself in its own light. We have indeed seen the wall as a thing before us, resisting its own non-being, revealing itself as a thing in the world. In this way the brick is active, not a mere inert physical condition. It has active interconnected being, self-arising, self-emerging, that which is is seen in its own light. We recognize that the wall's being is in its coming to stand in its own light and its ability to endure in that revealing.

Before the brick was set in the wall it was unshaped clay dug from the ground. Reminding ourselves of this we find connection with the earth from which it was taken. Standing before the wall we feel its weight. Its heaviness reminds us of the earth's pull -- its gravity. We discern the crisp linear pattern of the mortar joint in the wall, straight and long. We're reminded of the horizon where the ocean meets the sky, and where at the end of each day, the blazing sun is extinguished by the watery expanse. The ebb and flow of the ocean in turn recalls the stability of the earth, from where the brick was born. In all this we understand that the brick is intricately connected to "earth," and we likewise through our consideration have discovered a similar relationship regarding our own being.

The brick wall made itself present through what was already there in its brick-being, it was that which permitted a visibility to what was before us. In this greater sense, its condition encompasses all things that are. Our brick wall has shown itself as a thing standing in its own light, encompassing all that is -- "earth". We've come to understand what this means when we look at a thing in its totality. In discovering our brick through this lens, we see that it potentially reveals all that is. In just this way all things that are emerge in their own light, their being capable of encompassing all that we conceive, even what we cannot conceive. Once we begin to see this way we realize it's a revelation unfolding before our eyes. Something has been revealed that changes the way we approach our work, the way that we live. Living through this interconnectedness becomes a way of life. We can never be the same.


II.
Why do we say "parts seen within the background of the whole" rather than "parts seen within the whole?" Why do we include "background?" By nature we're discriminating creatures. We seem from birth to be hardwired to pick objects out of a field and concentrate on them to the exclusion of everything else. We seem particularly adept in doing this with objects that move. Likewise, we've been formally educated to do the same, to discern facts by concentrating on single components of a larger whole. We learn to differentiate one thing from another and treat things as inherently dividable. In order to understand this way, we're taught from the very beginning to break things down into their constituent parts, self-existent and independent, so each can be more easily conceived. We do the same with ourselves; we differentiate our needs over those of others, the needs of our community over another. Likewise, we separate ourselves as distinct from other animals and consider ourselves as outside of nature. We consider the totality of everything that is and see it all made of individual elements, each a separate and distinct thing, seen this way at the expense of the whole.

As in the example of the brick wall, there is another way to see our world and our relationship in it. It is the background that enormous hereness that is everything. The background is the field that contains each object, those objects in turn combining to make the field. Each -- object and background -- are dependent on one another.  Without this background there is nothing. The background is the world as a totality, everything in it thoroughly and immeasurably interconnected, unbroken, undivided and without division, in the flow of movement, uninterrupted and whole. This is a non-objective condition where the figure merges seamlessly into its ground, no form no content outside of mutual co-arising.

If we think of what we do as makers of buildings this way, then we begin to see that what we're doing is always in a state of flux, in a flow of movement. When we step back to see the greater whole we begin to realize that our buildings, like everything else, are in movement. But what does a building in movement mean? We typically think of a building as a static object sitting indefinitely in a particular location. And it is all that. However, at the same time, we can just as well consider that same building as in a state of becoming. That is, movement from the largest -- the universal -- to something considerably smaller and concentrated -- a concentrated point of amassed energy -- being for a while this built thing in its particular location. Then after a time it returns to the larger realm, back to the earth again, the universal; only to be repeated again by some other generation, constantly in a state of movement, for a time collected, arranged and ordered as "building".

In understanding through this lens of becoming we see how the work evolves from multiple origins, not one particular truth such as beauty or permanence. Seeing this opens us up to a deeper understanding of the work and, in fact impacts its very making. Such a dynamic, experiential, flowing reality permits us to consider each work as part of the greater whole, in mutual dependence where all that is comes together in one accord. A building sets up a world and that world sets up each building, forever becoming.

No thing is an independent thing standing on its own. It needs innumerable other things in order to be. This is not a metaphorical comment. It is literally true. To understand this through example, let's once more consider the brick that goes to make up our wall. You know that the brick was laid into the wall by a well-trained bricklayer, it was held in his hand and carefully set in place; we know the wall is a human construct, mortared and plumbed by the toil of another human being.

Let's consider that individual who last held our brick. The mason, early in the morning, came to the job site of the new construction ready to lay up the brick and make it the wall. Before he arrived at the site, our bricklayer had his breakfast, necessary to give him the energy to do his job that day. Oats grown in Kansas' rich soil by the farmers there went into the packaged cereal eaten that morning. All those farmers likewise needed their breakfasts too, and the work of countless others to get their grains in from the field for the mason's cereal. And let's not forget the trees used to make the cardboard cereal box sitting on the bricklayer's breakfast table. Pulpwood farmers from Alabama cut those trees for the packaging, which were shipped by barge to a paper mill on the Tennessee River and made into the material for the cereal containers. Dozens of people worked hard in that mill to make certain the products they made were the very best.

Nor should we overlook the mason's morning coffee brewed from beans cultivated and handpicked from humid groves in Brazil. These beans had to be handled by many people before they were properly roasted and ready for the coffee brewer. And then there's the orange juice from fruit grown in the warm wet costal plains of Mexico. And what about the needs and equipment for those Mexican fruit pickers who were up early in the morning working in the groves to pick the fruit for our mason's breakfast?

And what about the brick itself? Before it was set in place it had to be made with shale dug from the earth, molded into a specific shape and exposed to a very high temperature in a kiln making it durable, able to shed water and provide comfort for those inside. That clay was dug up many miles away in South Carolina, then shipped as raw material, to Virginia where it was made into brick. The plant that manufactured the brick was powered by coal. That black energy, like the brick's clay, scooped out of the ground had been lying there for countless eons, in an immense carbon sink slowly made by the sun's energy as it interacted with the growing forests of ancient earth, rising again after millennia to participate in the wall's construction. There are also the truckers and their equipment that brought the pallets of finished brick from the plant to the local distributor and then the site. These trucks, made in Japan, are partly stamped metal from ore mined in China. There is also the glass, the plastics and synthetic fabrics that make up the vehicles that are needed to help build the wall. These come from all parts of the earth, each with its own far-reaching lineage, too extensive to trace. All the materials and energy used to make a single brick is immense if you stop to consider all that goes into getting it from the earth to wall itself.

This whole other immensely connecting network leads us on untold paths, those paths in turn leading to others, so that in the end what it takes to construct something as simple as a brick wall becomes an endless web of connection, unimaginable in size and breadth. What it takes to get the brick laid into a wall is gotten from all corners of the earth, each part inextricably connected.

While providing for our mason each person involved in their own endeavor reaches out to provide for incalculable others as well, people whom the mason will never know. This can be said of everything our bricklayer uses in his preparation of building the wall. This thread of connection goes on and on, reaching out in uncountable ways reaching untold individuals, all unknowingly working as one in helping build the brick wall. When considered in this light, it's not unreasonable to say that everyone in their daily working and all the things of the earth are somehow connected to the efforts of our mason in getting his wall erected. The seemingly singular work of our mason connects him to everyone else who likewise find their strength from the earth. This is the intricate wholeness of "earth" as it goes toward making the brick wall.

In the wall you see the orange groves in Mexico, the revitalizing rain and fertile soil that go to make those orange trees produce their fruit for the mason's breakfast. As well, you witness the oil fields of the Middle East, the dry hot sand and the imposing refinery that transforms the crude to become energy, powering the equipment and transporting the brick to its location. And in the brick you see the mountains of China, the rich emerald slopes and the cerulean sky laid in the wall. You can also see the yellow hills of the Carolinas, the pine belt of Alabama and the ancient Cretaceous forests. 

The brick is because it is the earth. The earth's ocean is the cloud that falls back to the soil as water; the earth's clay is the mountain and ages-old glaciation that ground the rock into the brick's material. And likewise, all the laborers who go into building the wall are the earth as well; their bodies' nourished and constantly remade from what the earth gives. When you shift your viewpoint, you begin to recognize that each part of a building is more richly connected than we can possibly imagine. Because we have altered our perspective to see everything as part of the whole, we're offered a deep connection to the earth and the joy of making. The brick in making the wall makes a world, it reaches out to offer connection as well as protection. That protecting reaches out to reveal in itself the wholeness of "earth". All that it is, and all that it gives shows its earthly character, how it is authentically. When we see the parts within the background this way we see the parts within the whole.

As has been pointed out in the example of the brick, everything depends on everything else. As we've been saying everything is everything else. This is not meant to be metaphorical, it is absolute. It is what Buddhists call pratitya samutpada -- literally "in dependence things rise up," interdependent co-arising, or dependent coming forth. Things like trees, rivers, bricks, space shuttles, and sunlight all share beingness with one another, which of course implies a deep connection with all that is around us. In fact, it is even improper to say "around us" since that infers separation from our surroundings. Instead of things "around us," we are the rocks, trees and sunlight; we are the things that we make. A seemingly separate thing cannot be. Each being is part of the greater whole. Everything is, connected in one inconceivable ever-flowing movement; all things unseparated energy, part of an over-arching enormous field.

A built work cannot be without the earth; it, like us, arises from the greater whole that is the earth. Deep familiarity with one's location acknowledges this deep interconnection with all that is, from the most profound to the common experience of the everyday. Finding connection can mean something as mundane as being aware of where the sun comes up on your eastern horizon and how it changes its location just a bit each morning. It can mean knowing where your weekly trash goes after it leaves your apartment, knowing where the energy that you use to power your home comes from; is it produced by coal or hydropower? It can also mean watching the shadows move across a brick wall outside your office window and being able to tell the time of day from it.

Like a river full of whirlpools and ripples, those eddies temporarily brought out of the background have their own specific activity, movement and momentary form. For a while they are a concentrated location of liquid energy. Yet they still are part of the river, each a reflection of the greater whole. They are water just as the river is water, all acting in a distinct flowing pattern.  Everything we experience as reality is part of the same interactive field, a connected domain containing everything that is -- the whole.


III.
In the early days of quantum theory it was determined that subatomic particles had the peculiar -- and disturbing -- quality of coming into existence only when an observer was present. Only when there was consciousness present to observe an event would a wave function collapse and that quantum event make itself known. In other words, one could not speak of a quantum particle's property as independent, one could not observe any particular aspect of the particle in question without affecting it and, at best, what would be observed would be only probabilities. This rocked the very foundation of what science was supposed to do -- accurately measure and predict our condition of reality. Quantum theory, after all, was founded on unpredictability. The word "quantum" itself represents the condition of a wave-particle as a discreet measurement, an event jumping from one state to another as a discontinuous packet of energy -- a quantum leap -- that can only be considered in probabilities.

Quantum theory, also about this time, told us that in order to understand the conditions of an electron, both its attributes of wave and particle must be taken into consideration. This duality of the wave and particle, both necessary to understand the conditions of any quantum entity as its basic state, was called the Principle of Complementarity. However when attempting to measure one these aspects, either a particle's wave or particle characteristics, the other was affected so that accurate simultaneous measurement of both was impossible. And, even to top that slippery either/or-ness, the electron's condition was acutely affected by the observer and the manner used in measuring the conditions at hand. Consequently, unaffected accurate measurement was impossible. The fundamental question arising from these newfound conditions was: could there be a correlation between scientific predictability and physical reality?

These basic unpredictable either/ors -- both/ands were shaped into a dictum, the Copenhagen Interpretation. It generally described that indeterminacy is a fundamental part of nature while making credible the fact that an observer who measures a particular event necessarily affects the results of the event, through the very act of measuring. The Copenhagen Interpretation goes on to imply that there is no deep reality. While our physical sensate world is apparent and real enough it is founded on events that are not quite real. At the quantum level, there is simply no deep reality. Things just don't exist in a way that we commonly think about in our everyday world. Quantum "things" are more degrees of possibility waiting for the action of an observer before they become what we regard as measurable. The second part of the Copenhagen Interpretation then involves the fact that at some real degree the phenomena that we observe are not quite real until measured. Accordingly, quantum entities don't possess any dynamics of their own. What we regard as "measurement" is, in fact, the result of the quantum condition, the measuring device, and the observer. (A measuring device can simply be the human eye or any other sense organ.) Each of the three components needed to make the quantum world "real" depends on the other, thus there is complementarity.

As if that wasn't enough to call into question the deep levels of reality, it wasn't long after the Copenhagen Interpretation that quantum theory predicted that one particle could effect the action of another particle, even though they were in no way connected over great spans of distance. This aspect of quantum theory known as non-locality only added to the breakdown of common sense rules that had begun with complementarity. 

Non-locality was especially an affront to the theory of relativity because according to it, two things simultaneously interacting across great distances were theoretically breaking its basic law, which stated that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. Reasonable definitions of classical reality did not allow such conditions that were being put forth by quantum theory. The only conclusion was that in a physical universe shaped by the theory of relativity, there was no room for interconnected phenomena such as particles simultaneously interacting across vast distances. This would make for a wholly unfamiliar and utterly strange universe, what Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance".

Einstein, who helped give birth to the initial thinking of quantum theory, was particularly puzzled by these assertions of indeterminacy and disconnected simultaneous interaction. Einstein and Niels Bohr, through a series of thought experiments over the years had had an ongoing debate regarding these slippery attributes of quantum theory. On opposite sides of the argument they were attempting to get at the very nature of reality. Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics and the first to propose that a particle's properties only appeared when being observed, believed quantum theory to be complete and testable, where Einstein felt that every condition in any physical theory must have its counterpart in physical reality, and quantum theory didn't always provide this. In fact, as already pointed out, quantum theory clearly stated that reality, at least at the quantum level, is uncertain and not wholly predictable, therefore an exact correlation cannot be made between prediction and reality. For Einstein there could be no uncertainty in science, it must exactly predict the physical world if it's going to be valid. Classical physics was founded on exact predictability, and if quantum theory proved to be correct, then science failed as a precise mirror which reflected physical reality.

While at Princeton in 1935, Einstein sought the help of two of his colleagues, Poldosky and Rosen, to develop a thought experiment, which would challenge the very foundation of quantum theory and once and for all prove that it was incomplete. What they came up with we now call the EPR experiment (Einstein-Poldosky-Rosen). In their imaginary test they began with two identical photons that originate from one common point. These two photons then move apart in opposite directions until there is some measurable distance between them. As they separate there is no interaction with anything else at all, no influence from the outside until they are measured (observed). Since these two photons are identical, they have complementary properties. And since we can precisely measure the momentum of the two particles when they are still together, the test assumes that this momentum will remain the same for both photons when they are separated and have moved far apart. Once they've separated a sufficient distance, one photon's momentum is measured and, based on their correlation, we automatically know the momentum of the other particle, even though we didn't measure it. (The original EPR experiment dealt with momentum. This was updated later to consider a photon's rotation [polarized spin] instead.)

Quantum theory tells us we may know the momentum of one (or both) of these particles but we can't predict its exact location (based on the uncertainty principle that says, because our measuring disturbs the thing being measured we can determine one or the other [position or momentum] accurately but not both simultaneously.) However, as the EPR experiment points out, even though we necessarily disturb the position of the first photon, because of our measuring to determine its momentum, we won't disturb the position of the second photon because we didn't measure it. And, since we know the exact position of the second photon from our initial measuring, and because we know the exact momentum of the first photon because it was directly measured (because they're identical and haven't been disturbed in any way, we safely assume the momentum of the first and second photon are alike), we can indeed determine both the exact momentum and position of the second photon.

Being able to accurately calculate both the position and momentum of any particle would undermine the basic tenant of quantum theory -- unpredictability of both aspects of the photon. Overcoming quantum theory's uncertainty principle would permit a one-to-one correlation between predictability and physical reality, precisely what Einstein needed to keep the foundation of classical science intact. It's important to point out that the EPR experiment implicitly depends on the fact that the measurement carried out on the first photon could not in any way effect the conditions of the second photon. Nothing known about physical reality would have allowed such indirect and disconnected disturbance to occur. This is what is known as the Principle of local causes which simply means that one physical occurrence cannot effect another physical occurrence unless there is some direct connection, even as simple as a signal of some sort.

Yet quantum theory predicted just such a correlation, two photons separated by distance would affect each other if acted upon by measurement, regardless of the amount of separation. And, this is the case, as quantum theory predicts, even if the distance of separation required faster than light speed for the particles to simultaneously interact. Taken to its logical conclusion, in theory photons potentially galaxies apart had the capacity to immediately interact and shatter all conditions of time and space. How associated photons "know," beyond established laws of light-speed, seemed irresolvable, a fluke in quantum theory's capacity to understand and predict the world.

Since the theory of relativity proved that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light and since the EPR thought experiment predicted both aspects of a particle could be determined, Einstein felt confident that quantum theory was incomplete. It could not predict physical reality and classical physics, which relied on a one-to-one correspondence between reality and theory, was safe. This left cutting edge physics a paradox. On the one hand a well-intended group of eminent physicists claimed there is no possibility of non-local occurrences. On the other hand, an equally well-intended group of eminent quantum theorists claimed they'd proved its possibility through calculation. It seemed an irresolvable riddle and came to be known as the EPR paradox.

Bohr adamantly disagreed with these doubts that Einstein had regarding non-locality. In fact, Bohr didn't see the simultaneous interaction of the two photons as inconsistent at all. That's because Einstein's refusal to accept the photons simultaneity overlooked the basic indivisibility of quanta. And what's important to realize is that Einstein still thought as a classicist who considered particles and events as separated occurrences. Einstein's inability to recognize quantum theory's findings lay solely in his assumption that the universe was made of an infinite number of separate entities, each acting independent, where space and time (space-time) separate all things.

Where the EPR experiment took for granted that two photons were separate and divisible, according to Bohr, the two identically acting photons were rather indivisible, interdependently acting together. There was some, as yet, unidentified, underlying connection. In our Newtonian world of cause and effect, it appears on the surface that things operate as separate systems. Yet, at the quantum level when two or more entities interact they seem to respond more as a single system with indivisible characteristics.

The very fact that the two interacting photons were predicted not to follow classical rules, pointed to the possibility that Bohr hit upon open. That being, the two photons in question, and everything else for that matter, were minute parts of an extraordinary indivisible and interdependent universe where wholeness was the primary reality. Instead of separate entities somehow mysteriously defying the speed of light, they were instead wholly connected and able to respond instantaneously. Quantum mechanics claim that there is no space between objects seemed more and more credible, when things were considered as interdependent. In fact, aspects of quantum theory like phase entanglement say that there are no distinct objects at all as we normally conceive them, the notion of separate things have no basis.  Without distance and time separation, measuring separate things and conditions in the classical sense, are meaningless at the quantum level. So for Bohr, and other quantum theorists after him, it is pointless to make specific determinations based on things like speed and position, because that is thinking of the universe comprised of measurable separate and distinct parts.

Because of the shift in thinking that quantum theory permitted, everything in the universe could now be seen as a continuum, all things acting together as one. How else could the two photons defy sensible calculation and act in accord unless they were interdependent over time and space?

Yet as pointed out, these were only thought experiments, highly speculative and theoretical; they likely would not hold up to the scrutiny of real testing. Few believed that non-locality could ever be proved. For thirty years the two opposing camps of locality and non-locality knocked about with no definitive results. Then in 1964, while on sabbatical, John Bell of CERN in Geneva decided to investigate these paradoxical aspects of quantum theory that Einstein had brought to light. Bell, like Einstein, was particularly puzzled by the instability quantum theory had posed regarding any correspondence between non-locality and our everyday physical world. Particularly, he wanted to resolve quantum theory's propositions that called into question our ability to test hypotheses about reality and predict their results with certainty and precision. As we've already said, questions surrounding the EPR experiment left doubt about a local universe. With time to himself Bell believed he might find a way to dismiss these anomalies of non-locality once and for all.

To describe "local" in more detail, a local condition is one that is measured (observed) at a particular point in space that cannot influence what happens at another point in space, when their respective positions are far enough apart so that there's no way for any signal to travel between them at light speed, during the time it takes to measure the condition in question. That seems straightforward enough. All of us of course believe in and depend on a local universe, what can be called a "local reality." Unless we practice voodoo or mental telepathy we don't spend much time worrying about what happens at one spot and whether or not it might affect something in another corner of the universe.

A non-local event, on the other hand, is where the conditions at one point in space instantly effect another point in space, regardless how far apart they are, defying the limitations of the speed of light. Non-locality allows for an instantaneous jump from one location to another as if space and time did not exist. A non-local universe is one that is immediate and unmediated; everything everywhere is instantaneously interacting, which undoubtedly defies all common sense.

Quantum theory predicted this non-local possibility before the EPR experiment, though as we said it was only theoretical at the time. Bell's assumption, as he set out to conduct his own experiments, was that the universe is local and he believed he could prove it by using quantum physics. Through unraveling a series of time-tested proofs Bell set out to develop his own model.  Without the need to describe it in detail, using what he'd learned as a physicist and relatively straightforward mathematics, he developed results, which were very much to his surprise the precise opposite of what he hoped for. Setting out to disprove non-locality, he had instead actually proved that it was the fundamental order of the universe. His theorem clearly described the probability of action-at-a-distance where a non-local interaction occurs between two or more conditions simultaneously.

Bell's theorem, like the EPR experiment, initially revolved around the interaction of two photons. And it's somewhat comforting to think that these issues surrounding the two isolated photons are only valid at the atomic level don't have much relationship with our everyday reality. Yet Bell's theorem encompasses more than just the quantum world. It describes events that occur at the macroscopic level as well; Bell's theorem does address our physical world, the very one we live in. It distinctly describes non-local phenomena at the level of everyday physical reality. (It's not hard to understand that if a system in its smallest part responds to conditions in a particular way, then those reactions potentially effect the larger aspects of the system. Even in classical systems, parts go to make the whole and affect that whole accordingly.) In fact, Bell's theorem states that a local universe is impossible, it simply doesn't fit the description of a proven reality where local phenomena arise out of non-local events. And although we don't commonly feel that we experience non-locality in our everyday lives, Bell, beyond any doubt, has proven that our world, behind its everyday events must be based on non-locality.

Still, we don't think we experience our lives the way Bell's theorem describes, our lives simply don't respond to obscure quantum theory. Yet, that may only be tentative; just because we're conditioned to experience our world in a particular way doesn't mean that things may not be different, we simply may not recognize them that way. Now as you've been reading this and realizing how unsettling it could be regarding everyday reality you've probably said to yourself, even if this has been proven mathematically its still just a theory, only a set of thought experiments using highly specialized arithmetic. And that's the way the EPR experiment was dismissed by many for over thirty years, neither it nor Bell's prediction would ever hold up to the reality of a physical condition.

However, not long after Bell's theorem went public an experiment at the University of Paris by a physicist named Aspect who, with his colleagues, provided unequivocal proof that non-locality is real. They clearly demonstrated that two photons while in flight thirteen meters apart, did indeed respond to each other at a faster-than-light correlation. In fact the response was instantaneous. And again in 1997 at the University of Geneva, Nicolus Gisin and his team conducted a similar experiment to see if these instantaneous correlations would weaken over significantly larger distances. This time the two photons were separated by eleven kilometers (about seven miles). At the quantum level this distance is so great that the results whatever they might be would hold in any condition, even if it were across the span of the universe. Amazingly, distance did not seem to matter. Correlations between interacting photons did not in any way weaken as the distance expanded to the eleven kilometers. The interaction between the two photons still happened instantly. It was as if time didn't matter, there was no lapse between the simultaneous interactions. The results of the Geneva test left little doubt with the physicists conducting the experiment that non-locality (non-separateness) is the order of the universe, whether seven miles apart or millions of light years. Bells Theorem and its resultant physical experiments once and for all proved Einstein and the EPR experiment wrong. Quantum events do indeed interact over great distances and defy what was most sacred to Einstein -- nothing can travel faster than light speed.

These findings are incontrovertible and incredible at the same time, in that they rock the very foundation of ordinary reality. They seem an affront to commonsense everyday experience, yet they are proven and do show us a universe quite different that what we're accustomed to. With these physical proofs to substantiate non-locality, Bell's theorem tells us that: 1) an object cannot stand alone with its own distinct attributes. Every thing potentially affects everything else. In experimental conditions, the entire observation situation (the experience of the thing) must be included to describe the attributes of the object in question. 2) This condition of interconnection even extends to the observer (the one who experiences the condition at hand) who depends on attributes outside his/her immediate situation as well. This dependence extends to include everything. In other words, the actions of the observer must include conditions at other distant locations. 3) Quantum entanglement is reinforced. (Quantum entanglement is when two quanta that have interacted because each has left a part of itself in the other do not separate into distinct waveforms once they move apart. Rather, they are ever after linked into a single wave permitting instant access over space and time.) All "things' that are in the universe today were once together in an unimaginably condensed condition -- the singularity immediately before the big-bang. Because of that everything has interacted and is now connected through quantum entanglement.

At least, these are some plausible explanations a few physicists attempt to give for the how and why of non-locality. Either non-locality is achieved through an interconnected field, which permits instantaneous messaging across great distances at faster-than-light speed or there is some condition that allows for instantaneous jumps directly from one situation to another that somehow disregards space and time, regardless how far apart -- even across the universe.

Bell's theorem has been described by more than one physicist as the most important discovery in the history of science. It offers us mathematical proof that our basic assumptions about the world are blatantly mistaken. The theorem is based on quantum mechanics, which has never failed in accurately predicting not only subatomic conditions but those of our physical reality as well. It's the most successful means of predicting physical events that we've ever had. Complementarity seventy-five years ago described how our commonsense approach regarding the subatomic world was false. More recently, Bell's theorem and its associated experiments have shown us how our everyday assumptions about the macroscopic world are wrongheaded as well.

It is profound and challenging all at the same time. And it's happening in our lifetime. We have before us an extraordinary possibility for discovery. The questions that Bell's theorem has raised leave us in a reality crisis -- as long as we attempt to hold on to a classical model of a non-contextual reality. Physics proves that non-locality is a fundamental aspect of nature. By opening to the possibility and accepting that since everything is made of quanta and that these quanta have been inseparably interacting since the big-bang through quantum entanglement, we begin to see that there is indeed the possibility for non-local conditions at a physical level of reality. We might even begin to regard non-locality as the foundational condition that connects everything to everything else in the universe. It's not as difficult then to regard our world as wholly interconnected, as an unimaginably large web of interaction simultaneously in contact with every aspect of what is. If we open ourselves to this way of seeing the world and our relationship in it, then we would change our thinking at its most fundamental and begin to respond to a reality that manifests itself as an indivisible whole.


IV.
We can consider this wholeness as a kind of structure where everything that is responds in kind to make up what we know as our world. David Bohm, the forward-thinking physicist theorist, tells us that the essential meaning of structure comes from the Latin struere, meaning to build, to grow, to evolve. It's suffix ura is a verb meaning the action of doing something, rather than the way we typically think of the word structure as a noun, a static built finished product, the result of some action. Bohm, as a beginning point, uses structure but then goes on to add a new more active meaning to it. He coins the verb "to structate", meaning "to create and dissolve what are now called structures". Structation is understood through order and measure. We're given an example of a house where its parts are arranged in a particular order and measure to make walls. Those walls are arranged to make rooms, those rooms similarly ordered to make the house, the house to make neighborhoods and streetscapes, the streets and neighborhoods to make cites and so forth. These are orderly "harmoniously organized" totalities.

To further understand this, we can continue by looking at the original deeper meaning of words. The word organize, as Bohm tells us, comes from the Greek "ergon" meaning, "to work". So when we say that a structure is organized in a particular way we are saying that each aspect of the structure works together harmoniously. Now this is not only true of houses, it's evident in everything, even on a universal level. All organisms that are in movement and in growth are evolving in highly organized patterns just this way, each of its constituent parts working together to form a whole, this whole including the tiniest imaginable condition at the quantum level and continues onto galaxies and the universe. In this active way all things are organized into the fundamental dynamic, all things arranged in a "totality of ever-flowing movement.

Bohm describes this interconnectivity of the universe by what he calls the superimplicate order, which expresses the interdependence of everything.  As a scientist working in quantum field theory, he describes the perceived universe as an enormous interconnected field. Field, as he refers to it, is the fundamental beginning point, rather than what we typically think of as the particle. (Conventionally dividable things like particles are typically described as being comprised of other divisible things, and on and on, so that everything is divided endlessly. As already pointed out, this is how we are accustomed to seeing the world, where each thing relies on its individual parts, each working together like a gigantic mechanical device, orderly and operating in a cause-and-effect relationship.) Bohm's superimplicate order (super quantum potential) instead begins with the whole field, just the opposite of focusing on individual parts. The parts arise out of the whole, in seamless connectivity, interacting as one. And no matter how much the whole is broken down into constituent parts, the whole is still seen within each of those individualized conditions.

The primary thing that we're trying to get at here is that it is not the inert parts that form structures but rather it's the active whole, the organized dynamic, what Bohm calls structuation, where essential growth and evolution spring forth from the totality of the active moving whole. In the implicate order, this is the foundation of all things, active flowing movement in recognizable patterns. With this we are given an entirely new definition of structure where everything is wholly dependent; everything is connected, where things rise up into specific patterns for a time, only to eventually shape-shift into something else later on through its own duration. This inclusive pattern of connectivity of course infers that we live in a closed finite system, which we do, where everything that has been and everything that will be is already here.

Imagine a rock cast into a quiet pond and the set of concentric circles it makes on the water's surface. Now imagine two rocks cast into the same pond falling closely together. These two rocks produce two sets of concentric wave patterns that expand in ever-increasing outward circles until they pass through each other. As a result, these two interacting patterns make for a complex set of troughs and crests. These are known as interference patterns, complex structures temporarily manifested out of the background of the pond's surface. This is a metaphorical description of ever-flowing movement. What we build in the physical world can be regarded similarly to the waves and crests of energy, as kinds of interference patterns. The energy events crisscross to make their own momentary organized dynamic. They arise from the background of the whole just as the water's ripples arise as concentrated energy out of the background of the water.

Just like the concentrated energy of the water, we do the same thing when we build. We have taken embodied energy from various locations and concentrate it for a time in a kind of interference pattern. Just like the crests and troughs in the pond, the embodied energy of building arises out of the background, manifesting itself for a time as a distinct complex pattern where the wholeness of the background is momentarily interrupted and new patterns emerge. The part that we call building is an interruption, that is, it's structuated from the whole. 

We can use another example of something tangible to help us further relate to how the whole is structured into each part. Imagine a leaf on a tree. We consider it a single thin green thing. We know we can hold it in our hand, isolate it from things around it. We can discuss the leaf as an individual object; we can take it apart to discover how it operates as a photosynthetic energy collector and the like. In seeing it a part of the tree, we separate it from its background and regard it as an individual thing. Yet that is our conventional conditioned thinking. And that is what Bohm calls explicate thinking. Explicate thinking sees the world as made up of parts comprised to form the whole. In the explicate world things are endlessly reduced into individual constituent parts.

However, that leaf is not a singular thing at all. Rather, it is the totality of all that is, an ensemble that has the potential to manifest itself as the whole world. At the quantum level this is seen when energy is gathered from the entire field into a condensed region of space. This gathering of energy into a particular location is what we'd ordinarily call a particle, or a quantum jump in the particle's energy state. Yet, this particle, this "individual" object is nothing more than the overall field's energy momentarily concentrated. It's just like the river's eddy, for a while showing us a distinct pattern, moving about in what we typically call its own distinct vortex. Yet it is just water revolving in its own pattern of concentrated energy. After a while it returns to be part of the river, always having been water, a manifestation of the river itself. The whole is at work to make up each part, instead of the continuous field appearing to be made up of elementary disconnected particles. The particles are just one tiny momentary part of the whole infinite field temporarily condensed into concentrated locations for a time. In that light individualized things are not one thing at all, rather they form a totality enfolded within the whole of space.

When we describe something in terms of its being a single object that's because a particular aspect of the whole order has unfolded to reveal itself. That is its implicate quality. The whole is manifested in every single object we experience. We only need shift our perspective to experience that way. Bohm tells us that implicate order is from the word "implicit", which is derived from "to implicate". Which means "to fold inward", or enfolded within. Which, in the way it's used here, means, "in some sense each region contains the total structure 'enfolded' within it. In other words, all order, all structure is contained in some implicit sense in each region of space and time".

The tree's leaf that pops out of the background to be seen momentarily is the result of something much grander, an immense sea of energy that has partly manifested itself as this green supple object. This implicate quality begins with the whole; there are no individualized independent parts. Things that we see as parts are really just folds in the seamless fabric of the whole. In the implicate order the totality of existence is enfolded within every region of space.

The leaf is the tree, the tree is the biological manifestation of the forest's biomass. The forest enfolds into the soil, sun, sky and water. The leaf is "earth". Rather than a single thing, it is one manifestation -- one aspect -- of the earth's ensemble that has unfolded from the background to reveal itself. When the leaf appears in its unfolding, it is revealed as the larger whole. In that sense the leaf is just like the eddy in the river and our built work, nothing singular or permanent, instead a temporary manifestation of the greater whole, sustained by a constant influx. For when the leaf finally falls to the forest floor and deteriorates back to the soil, it is not destroyed, as we'd typically say. The leaf is in fact never destroyed in the way we think. Instead, since it was only a temporary manifestation of the whole it merely changes, reconstituting into something else, another form of energy. In this way, we can think of a physical object -- every physical thing -- in terms of duration rather than a specific point event in time. All things enfold back into the greater whole, changing into another form and guided by the manifest order out of which it originally sprang as part of the totality.

In this way then, each and every thing that makes up our world can be seen as a momentary gathering point of energy within the larger whole. Every thing that is, in the largest conceivable condition, is also discoverable in the smallest imaginable thing; the whole is discernable in every part. As in the example of the brick and the leaf we only need to refocus and look. Every thing in our reality is experienced within the broader background that we're calling the whole. And just as true, each of these things in our reality eventually dissolves back into the background, only to be reshaped into something else anew. In that sense then everything that we call real is the permutation of an ever-changing condition, the whole a connected pattern of movement in its continual flow.


V.
Building is not so neutral. In fact, as it's been described here, it has far-reaching impact beyond what we typically recognize. It ripples through the world in untold ways that have unimaginable implication. Building requires utmost thoughtfulness; it demands responsibility. When viewed this way, issues of appearance and representation weigh very little as contemporary concern. Far more important are the ontological conditions deeply imbedded in each built thing. With the blinders of appearance and representing cast aside we expand our horizons to witness what ontology allows. When we expand our viewpoint this way we are free to ask, what are the grander consequences of our decisions? We can begin to understand what is revealed in the built work and how it informs us about our relationship to being in the world. We can begin to inquire about our technological condition, and ask how can we use the materiality of the world responsibly, in ways that keep the unintended consequences of dislocation and degradation intact. We can begin to ask, are the decisions we make through building sound as regards the long-term maintenance, not only of ourselves, but also of all living things surrounding us? Including wholeness and connectedness into the equation of building makes these questions imperative. This vantage point causes us to fundamentally inquire about the components that go to make the work. What are their origins? What was their world? How have they impacted other conditions on the long road to becoming "building"?

Questioning in this way awakens us to the world and makes us more responsive to the responsibility we have. Seeing association like this brings forth what is. It reminds us, as makers of buildings, that we are not autonomous agents acting independently, but rather, we are the part of "earth" that has evolved into consciousness. We begin to realize the actions we take encompass the whole of the real and not the isolated cause-and-effect situation of the individual work. This viewpoint opens us to the larger web of connection implicit in every thing; where each thing is given meaning through its being part of the whole, where every action and all things touch each other at every conceivable level.

Questioning and remembering this way leads to a condition of caring. Care clarifies the intent of thoughtful building. Caring makes tangible our interconnectedness with all that is. Caring breaks down the walls of independence and degrades the "I" who builds. Caring brings about selflessness that opens to the whole, making us realize we are part of "earth." Care illuminates the preserving, the enhancing and the binding to "earth." 

To preserve means to endorse that which is; it is keeping close to that which is preserved. Preserving keeps things from harm; it upholds and sustains them so that which is continues, not for personal gain but for the sake of that which already is before us, guarded over and made lasting. Preserving gives space to living. Preserving opens on to that which lies just beyond the horizon, expanding the field of possibility into unpredictable dimensions. Preserving keeps close to the richly textured open field of presence. Through thoughtful building we maintain and protect.

To enhance means to bring forth that which is; it is revealing that which is all around so that it is more readily recognized. Enhancing permits us to see that what is already before us in ways we never have before. Enhancement allows us to recognize that what we experience is ever changing and momentary, an acknowledgment that lets us receive and hold high our responsibility as builders in the world. To enhance means not to impose on the conditions at hand but rather to expose the open spaciousness of "earth." In this way the expanded field of "earth" is apparent through the work where something beyond is revealed. Through thoughtful building we intensify and raise up.

To bind means to embrace the immense hereness of "earth;" it is the unfolding of that which holds us all together into one community. Binding commits us to obligation; it secures and unites us through our very acts of building. Binding compels us to discover the connection to "earth" inherent in our very being; it allows us to never forget the foundation that we are part of, where we all find sustenance. To bind brings humanity and "earth" closer and overturns our anthropomorphism. Binding brings together the subjects and objects of the world. To bind to "earth" through caring seamlessly interlaces us inside the whole. Through thoughtful building we make attachment.

Building becomes earth and earth becomes building, ever changing and interconnected. Through building we belong to "earth." This is the deepest sense that one can regard building, the fundamental reality of belonging.

I.
In steady strophe and antistrophe the work is described this way
1. Work is work of the individual -- not the one but the many -- it is work of the hand, many hands. As well, it's the work of thinking. Moving back and forth these become the work of thinking through the hands. Hand-thinking. Considering how one builds wraps itself around a concern for thoughtfulness. That is, the sort of thought-filled building that yields a critical approach to what is at hand. Building, as it's presented here is an affirmative act, and it's the only way we'll be thinking about it. (Yet we certainly know that all building is not this way. To not be a thoughtful builder of course implies thoughtlessness. Thoughtless building demands only will.) Thoughtful building asks; it makes its own space through questioning -- as an inquiry about the world. Thoughtful building, in its capacity to explore and experience untraveled paths, doesn't shy away from the strangeness of what is before us, that which is the world. Thoughtful building sustains the mystery of the world as mystery. In this way, it envelops the wonder of the world, providing us with an opening where we aren't always sure about our direction. In this way, building attentively takes on risk; it prospects what one doesn't know. Because of this, building can't be authenticated by already in-hand information. Rather the reverse is true, for thoughtful building leads to a line of exploration, setting us on new paths where discovery is made.

Built-ness grows from multiple-points of origin, places that form their own self-sustaining. All this is to say that building affirmatively is a response. That is, it opens onto reflection. It reflects the presence of the world. When we reflect on affirmative building, we get a deeper sense of how the word reflection, from "flectere" meaning to bend, turns back to those things that we reflect upon. Reflecting on things that are ascribes the achievement of building where something is given back. That is to say, thinking building casts back toward a source, the fountain from which the work flows. We inevitably respond to that which is reflected, just as a light source that bends back to reveal the thing that was otherwise unrecognized. Affirmative building, which wraps itself around reflection, leads to a line of questioning. That is the heart of the act; those questions having as their source how it is that we get along in the world. Reflecting, through working with the hands, thinking through the body, provides us a sure and legitimate way of questioning. We are given a reasonable way to ask about our fundamental concern -- how we are in the world. In the end, this allows the builder to avoid indifference, which is crucially important. For, standing against not feeling welcomes the impact that the world makes upon the heart. Whether meaning to or not, all of us who build do so in large part so that we may come closer to the sharp intensity of that which surrounds us -- that being the realness of the world. We build to find our place, and pursue the discovery of being connected to the full physicality of all that encircles our lives. These experiences weave themselves into what is constructed here, in a way that extends itself to bring about a new line of questioning. Often times, this is the most crucial aspect within the process of constructing-thinking, for it opens up a space for beginning. 

Once built, a constructed thing comes into the world in a way that calls forth its own existence. The built work re-presented here is first of all a thing.  

2. It resonates in its tangible presence. It stands as a perceptible document of the reality of human constructing, that which was its original palpable making. Let's establish this right here in the beginning. Once given over by the builder, a built thing stands on its own, illuminated in its own light. As a result, the builder inevitably steps aside, sensing the wholeness of the constructed thing. In this moving back, in order to gain perspective, the builder necessarily becomes disconnected from the thing that has just been built; the binding tie that building makes in the beginning, ultimately brings about its own severance. What we gain for a time, we inevitably lose. Yet, this is positive loss. For once the builder molds the thing into its particular shape, into its constancy, something is gained that was not here before. If the builder has done the work well, then what's been built has its own foundation on which to stand. This own self-sustaining stance obscures its origin and relies on its own stability. As the built work stands it makes a world. It grows beyond our own capacity as first maker, offering itself to the world through its own presence. This is the affirmation that the builder seeks when making a work, the made thing's newly acquired clarion autonomy, agreeable yet resistant.

Yet as we have been speaking of things as things themselves, in the possibility of standing alone -- seemingly nearby, yet encircled in their own dimensionality, what gives these things their constancy and concreteness is that which holds our own field of experience together. This interconnected "attracting" field unifies all the things that we encounter to make a world. It is a constancy that is not a structure; it is nonstructural, rather aspatial. It is not even what is realized as real. It makes a region, which encompasses subject and object; it forms a province in which we experience foreground and background as unified. It is that which permits us to recognize that which has been built and it permits us to build. Yet while we are permitted this, this constancy that is in things overreaches our intent and surpasses understanding. For to say with firmness that one knows what has been made is a slippery and misleading footing indeed.

This inability to explain with authority what has grown beyond is exemplified here. This is because the way these two-dimensional images and written ideas present themselves now to act merely as a sort of replacement. At best, they're a distanced re-presentation, incapable of fully expressing that which has already been made. One can't pretend to provide an equivalent substitute for the already built work that stands on its own, in its full sensibility. To attempt to do so immediately puts at the risk of stumbling -- of tripping over the made thing. With that in mind, what's presented here -- after the realization of building -- is not an equivalent, nor is it something to stand in for the already built. Without the thing here first hand, without being able to feel its presence with our bodies, we run the risk of re-presenting appearance. And we don't want to make more appearance. Though we think of appearance as that which we see before us, we need to be mindful that appearances are frequently misleading. That is because appearance overlays that which lies hidden beneath the surface. When we rest upon the appearance of a thing, we confront what we're seeking only in an indirect way. We see only the thing's consequence, and not the thing itself.

The way one experiences the full scope of any built work is to be there directly in its presence. One has to move around and through that built thing, to feel its length and breadth, to pass in and through its space. One needs to touch the smooth texture of the unfinished wood, to smell the dust motes heating up in the sunlight as they revolve in patterns around the work. It's necessary to hear your footfall, your breathing, and the crumpling of your clothing as you spend time in going about the thing. Fully experienced, built things require just this type of bodily encounter. There is no substitute, either in the thing's making or in the experience of it; we must be fully in a thing's presence to become part of it. In its presence in the real world -- our built things become an extension of our lived experience this way. Built things -- specifically the one's that we're describing here -- are full of their own form, texture, aroma, and structure. In their wholeness they have the capacity of giving which opens us to the world. Building is about this type of connection.

And so acknowledging that this directness can't be achieved here, what we should consider is expanding this enclosing frame of ours a bit. In doing so, we attend to built-ness by standing back and thinking not about the work itself but more about where a thinking-work such as this might lead. And to do so, we might consider where the work of building has come from. It's a direction that allows us to move toward something through considering the way we establish a response to built things everywhere, In taking this path we're better equipped in attending to the non-present built work here.


II.
As corporeal things, we shape other existing things in ways that are constant with our being. This is the basis of building. In this enterprise, nature presents us with its own order. Sometimes we recognize that order for what it is, yet many times we don't. What we may perceive as a shortcoming, in not recognizing order, doesn't mean there is no order in nature. It simply means we're not able to catalogue, categorize and refer to it in a manner accessible to us. And in many cases we won't be able to. These unnamed conditions of nature are what we might call mysterious, some things in nature forever remaining a mystery. Yet, even with that as a given there is still ample room for reorganizing within the frame that we do know. This limitation is how we build -- within a framework of knowing -- while, at the same time, acknowledging that there remains the vast unknowable. 

In that condition of knowing and the unknown, we can think of building as rearranging (reordering) rather than creating. We do not create what with we build with -- it is pregiven. For example, we clean the bark off of trees and cut them into convenient shapes so we can frame a house; we straighten out the edges of stone from the quarry for comfortable stacking; likewise, we crush and cook other stones so we can mix them with sand and water to make concrete.

Since all that we make is pregiven in its own way, it's valid to say that when we build we aren't creating; instead we are re-making something already present into something different to suit a specific need. In a closed system such as our planet, all that is is already fully here before us. Building adds nothing to this already here. Instead, building re-arranges what was already here before. Building translates the "already-presence" of nature into something more familiar to us humans. And though we don't always recognize it, we are comfortable with the rearrangement of nature, not only because we humans have re-made it, but because it is still integral and connected to the natural.

To carry this even further we can also say that nature being abundant in energy is itself embodied energy; nature, in its physical presence described as dynamic, forceful physical energy. Consequently, if we take those things of nature -- which are on their own embodied energy -- then it must stand to reason that building is reordered nature in the form of embodied energy. In this sense then, what we as builders do is take embodied energy from one place to another, rearranging it for a while for our own habitation, until it eventually changes into something else again, another form of embodied energy. This viewpoint inevitably leads to work that is "contingent," ever changing and temporal.  The only stability at all is the constancy of what has been derived from nature, which will one day change its form again. A work then is in a perpetual state of change has that condition of constancy about it; it in a state of being rather than becoming. This condition of constancy coupled with ever-present change, without doubt, puts an emphasis on process rather than product, and opens onto the kind of built work that's discovered rather than imposed as a preconceived idea. This discovery is gained through exploration, through the conditions of the building and its temporal location.

As we've said, in order to think about the constancy of building we must first consider things. In their embodied energy, things are physical and in the world. In taking into account something that has been constructed by human hands, we first make this straightforward observation: Whether it is an enormous suspension bridge held in place by miles of powerful steel cable, a finely crafted poem, or an incomparable painting by Chuck Close, any built work, and all, exist in the world as a thing. To make something means to bring it into the world. A work, at its most basic, is a thing because it's made of granite, oak, plastic, stainless steel and the like. It is this thingness that makes a thing, its durability and materiality is what makes it a work in the first place. Beneath the surface of cognitive recognition, things like buildings always have this thingly character. Whether realizing it or not, when we experience a built work, at some level we tacitly acknowledge that it has this distinct physical quality. With this then as a place to begin we're able to attend to this quality of thingness, and think about how we encounter what is in the world.

To consider what shapes our recognition of thingness, we'll use an ordinary table as example. When we first encounter the built work of a table, whether we think about it or not, we are apprehending its thingness as a specifically shaped substance, what we're more likely to call material. Here we are standing in front of this thing of substance, this material object, which is known to everyone as "table." As we encounter it, we relate to this table-thing as a mass of material. It is experienced, with weight, quantity, and expanse. Because of its rectangular form and four solid legs resting on the floor, we readily assume the table supports its own weight, that it's rigid and capable of doing a good job as a table. As well, its scale and height gives us a relationship with our own bodily shape, we recognize it as having connection to us physical beings. As we begin to open ourselves to the table this way, we become aware of the table's various attributes. We call these conditions the table's characteristics, the table's properties. Commonly, we experience things in our world this way, by what our thinking tells us about a thing's properties.

But it's not only our thinking it into being -- naming it "table" -- that makes it a thing. Far from it, for we respond to this table first through our physical senses. There we are in the room with the table. We move around it with our bodies, our footsteps guide us as we sense its overall length and breadth firsthand. With our eyes we see the table is made of rich red cherry, the warm finish is comfortably worn through age and care. As we sit down in front of the table we find that its shape is comfortable. It fits like a glove and feels like a cozy place to sit, think and write. Reaching out with the full length of our arms to gauge the size of the top, we realize that the table easily holds the things we need for our work ahead. Firmly tapping our knuckles on the tabletop we tell that it's made of heavy solid wood. As a bright beam of sunlight pours through the window next to our table the top is warmed a bit, allowing us to catch some small residual smell of fine furniture polish, giving us another discriminating way to gauge the attention that has been taken with the table. All these characteristics are perceptible to our senses. We've used them to ascertain the table's color, its shape, its hardness, its resiliency, comfort, practicality, and so forth. Even though we wouldn't list these things to ourselves openly as we go about using the table, our intuition nonetheless tells us these things about the table. Our immediate bodily contact with the thing gives us a certain kind of unique understanding about the table, which is beyond our thinking of the table's properties.

Considering these complementary ways of apprehending the table, through our thinking and our senses, we understand that both have clearly told us that this table exists in a particular form, that it has constancy and presence in the real world. This, constancy when spoken of in its materiality alone, is what we describe as having substance; it is comprised of matter (hyle). Yet we know too that matter alone is unshaped, that which is without form. This table before us, made of a particular kind of matter -- wood -- has its own specific hardness, elasticity, strength and shape. On thinking about the table for a moment as a thing of form, we understand that work and skill were applied to the wood-matter we see in the table. Before the table was made there were other forms (morph), which preceded it. The table's predecessor, we call "tree." And once human hands have reshaped the tree-matter we call that reshaped form "boards". Those boards, cut to specific sizes and shaped for a particular need, were then skillfully fabricated into this specific shape before us now, the table. This worktable -- this table-thing -- is there because we experience it as matter that's been shaped in this particular way. And so, matter alone is not what the table is. It needs the accompaniment of shape; what makes matter into a thing recognizable is its form. (Actually, there is no material without form; it's simply impossible to consider matter without some attached form.) Then, in a foundational way, we can say that the prerequisite constant in making a thing is that matter stands together with form, what is called hylemorphism. The thing as a work -- as a table -- is present in its formed-matter. This is what we commonly refer to when we speak of something in general terms. And so, a thing is what its form and matter tells us it is. We think and sense things as substance invested with form.

Formed-matter, which makes up our physical world, is what we typically attach our ideas to. Aristotle, wondering about some of the same concerns that we are here, began at this same fundamental starting point.

3. In looking around at the physical world he observed, just as we did a moment ago, that things, whether they be natural or human-made -- that is, any real, physical thing -- are composed of substance. Concrete things exist because of their substantiality and substance exists without a doubt in particular ways. At its most basic Aristotle told us that substance was made up of earth, air, water, and fire. Every thing that could be experienced as real, regardless of what it appeared to be made of, sprang from and eventually reverted back to one of these original components. In looking around at the richness of the material world, it was easy to see that this matter combined in many, many different ways.

And though we know more about our physical world now, we still acknowledge that all things are characterized by their physical make-up of form and matter just this way. Yet when we think about it a bit, things in the world are not just formed-matter alone. Shaped substance, which makes everything as it is, cannot just lie around inert and inactive. It wasn't always what it is now. Any hylemorphic thing, in order to be real, requires activity. Matter and form need to be acted upon, in order to change. Matter and form require movement. And we all know that these kinds of movement were the four causes, where Aristotle described the potential for change inherent in all natural things. Things change naturally without our intervention and things change because of our action. Soil, sunlight, moisture, minerals and a single seed change to become a tree. Things like trees, we change into fine tables of solid warm cherry. To build a comfortable table like the one we just described, we first must find and cut down a mature healthy tree. In doing so we have begun the process where we change the form of the tree to fit our need. That change is furthered by the way we alter the shape of the wood, once a substantial part of the tree. That's the way some small part of the world has been changed, through our capacity as builders of things, in this case a table. We still experience the tree in the table, all we have done is change a part of tree's shape and made it more readily fit our specific requirement. Because of our need for things like tables, we are led to build (tektein), to make material things full of their own form, texture, smell, and structure, each standing on their own, as things in the world.

Building this way encompasses care. Acting upon nature is a specific kind of caring; one that is formed in our own image as reshapers of nature. Inevitably, it is in no way neutral. "Careful," from the Latin colere, means to cultivate, to care for the earth in a particular kind of way -- a way that enfolds a rising up, growing out of the earth -- as necessity and our dependence on it. Conventionally, the kinds of building that we are describing have as their goal production. We can call this "objective" building where we subjects make objects, which separate us from the background of the earth. When we think of objective building like this, the manner in which we go about "doing," we are brought back to a self-referencing position, the focus on us human beings as doers, as purposeful activity makers. With this viewpoint we adhere to this narrowest category of the real, that which relies upon an action and its complementary result, as explaining every situation in our world. And this has consequences that bring about the separation of humanity and nature that doesn't account for our full being in the world.


III.
With this concern for building as we have here, we should think more about these conditions of building by considering origins. To say origins infers beginning. Yet this is in no way meant in an historical sense. In each undertaking a thing's origin is ever present; it always lies in what is at hand. To think about beginnings, we necessarily consider what is now before us. We have used the words "world," "earth," and "nature" almost interchangeably, without proper consideration. To get closer to the origin of things, we should give these three words more thought, in order to better grasp building's tri-foundation.

All our shaped things arise from the location we draw sustenance from -- what we conventionally call the world. We place built things like tables in the world. We live in this world that we make surrounded by those things. We find ourselves immersed in the world of business, the world of art, the world of building buildings, and the like. World is a human construct, and while it may be to some great extent an abstraction, it is not absent of physicality. To make a world means to make depth. Without depth there would be nothing physical, nothing that has the physicality of shape. All hylemorphic things require depth in order for them to be. Depth makes shape a reality; depth makes the world real. In the world we speak of length and width alone as though they were actual conditions, yet without depth in the world as such, length and width would be nothing more than abstractions -- similar to the abstraction of four connected lines on a sheet of paper that we call a square. Experiencing world in all its physicality requires depth; it gives form, weight, texture, and shape to all its conditions. World depth enables us to build things in the world and give them their constancy. This is the world that we are part of and what we make; we plumb the depths of world and find it in accord with our being.

Yet world is different from earth. Where the world has measurable depth, the earth is indefinably deep. In earth, we abide in its spherical embrace, our being ringed by its roundness. "Earth" -- our original foundation -- is that immense fecundity from which all life springs. (We set "earth" off in parentheses to distinguish it from our typical usage). Everything we build originates from the richness of "earth" -- nowhere else. It is unmovable and absolute, unlimited and without shape. "Earth" is that from which all constancy springs. It is the unbounded ground, not a mere thing of measurable physical properties, as we are accustomed to thinking. That is to say, earth can't be categorized, measured, and quantified. "Earth" is more than the mere biological whole that we stand ready to classify through the natural sciences. "Earth" gives us a staying with the thing; it is what fills the void between beginning and end; moreover it is our beginning and our end. "Earth" is ungraspable and unfathomable. Here we find ourselves of the "earth", in a circle, an undeterminable arc whose passing remains displaced and incomplete. In building of the "earth", we work our way from what was not there to what is now here, bringing together the parts into a whole. We work around things that are of "earth," in order to stay in touch with them; encircling them breeds familiarity. We take this familiarity with us wherever we go; it touches the depth of our being.

Indeed nature is of the earth, but they are not the same. Nature moves and is forever changing, whereas "earth" is foundational and non-spatial.  And for nature to be real, to be tangible, whole, and vigorous, it necessarily must originate from "earth", in its concreteness of presence, in its totality. Nature is earth's activity. Nature was what the Greeks called physis, (where we get our word physics) -- as growth, with an emphasis on development, potential, and process. Nature was that which arose. Nature experienced this way, certainly wasn't formed substance that moved around in an aimless pattern. And it was not something that pushed and pulled itself in a materialistic way, without cause or purpose. Instead, nature was stable order, yet forever changing, in movement toward something; nature moved towards that which produced an end. It sprang forth for purpose; that which was its natural consequence. Movement was the essence (ti en einai, "what it was to be") of all things. Because of this -- what it was to be -- nature was always active, having a kind of life of its own, in continual movement toward something. This living nature -- this physis -- had potential for change. Consequently, what was regarded in nature as organized and active could be described as change. Change toward something was the primary cause for all occurrences in nature -- animals, plants and humans, the activity that goes to make them what they were, all sprang from change. And even now when the reductionism of science is set aside, we still see nature similarly. In the aliveness that is nature, all things spring from change. Change is constant. It is inherent in, and a significant characteristic of our world. All things change -- some sooner, some later. Change is what defines things as things.

Take the cherry tree in the forest that was the origin of the table. We can say that through its own internal and essential dynamic for change its goal is to produce other cherry trees. Those newly generated trees, through giving seeds and dying, in turn make more trees, and so forth, on and on, until the forest is eventually filled with cherry trees. From the time it begins to grow and reach maturity our one particular cherry tree is generating seeds for other trees. Those seeds find their own homes to grow and reach maturity. (And we're not even mentioning the many other things that this tree offers: it's wide spreading canopy a shelter for the forest animals, a fork in the branch for the jay's nest, abundant food and safe hiding places for innumerable insects and grubs. There's also the tree's capacity to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen that's returned to the atmosphere where it bonds with hydrogen to make rain, nourishing the many other things including itself and all the other trees it's generated. Our cherry tree provides incalculable nutrients for the soil while its root system holds the soil in place making the forest a richer biotic community.) After it's completed its life the tree falls to the forest floor where it decomposes. The dead tree provides footholds for seedlings in the crevices of its decaying trunks and branches. As its body breaks down and returns to the soil it continues to help make other trees by providing nutrients so they will find sustenance. We could go on and on.

To someone like Aristotle, this responds favorably to the tree's natural purpose, its completed end. Where situations are just right -- the suitable amount of warmth, moisture, and sunlight -- a seed will naturally develop, through its own internally generated process of change, what we just described as the seed growing into a mature tree -- changing into its own natural end.

This is what occurs without our intervention. Yet we do intervene, changing nature's action thorough technology. We are even told that, through our technological capability, we complete what nature on its own couldn't do. In the example of the tree, its capacity of change was to produce other trees. But as humans who sometimes use trees to make things like tables -- another aspect of the tree's purpose is to provide wood -- so that we might make tables. As beings who build -- we cultivate many things of the earth through technology. Building brings together natural things in such an organized way to make our constructed world. Now, one way to view this is to see us as creatures capable of making change for a higher end. From that perspective we would say that we complete nature's natural ends, re-making the world to bring nature to her highest completion. This, indeed, is a teleological view where we as builders -- as the "highest" end of nature -- are added to the equation and bring about nature's highest goal. It is of course dangerous and outmoded to think teleologically. It sets us apart and creates the separation of anthropomorphism. Yet this outlook to some great extent still reigns over our view of the world where we re-make it to fit our needs; it's the way that we cultivate the earth as separateness.

To form a non-anthrocentric, non-teleogical response to our not so neutral technological capability, we recognize that as human beings, we are natural creatures -- we've arisen within the boundary of nature? As physical beings we are assured of this. So, if nature operates through change, and we are a part of nature then, by the same token, we do indeed have the capacity to bring about change. Many things exist in the world without our intervention. And certain things exist because we did intervene to change them. This is what we conventionally call the natural and the humanmade. But upon thinking about this for just a moment, this seems too simplistic. It infers a false degree of separation. For, if we are indeed the result of nature -- and we most assuredly are -- then must we not be acting naturally when we build? We overlay human activity of building onto those things that previously existed in another form. And in doing so, we have changed nature, but we haven't stepped beyond it. We have merely acted within nature's realm, as natural beings who are part of the whole. Changing things that are given to us -- making order of them -- in the world is our nature. When we build something, our action towards order making is what makes us a part of, and extension of nature. We, in our own kind of action, show the order and operation of nature -- naturally.

Nonetheless, where environmental issues come into play in contemporary discussions, conventional approaches further lead to a separation between humanity and nature: nature is wilderness -- wildness -- and humans are culture; nature is good and humans are trespassers of that goodness. In the end, little ground is gained for this further establishes a dualistic ontology of separation. (The very term "environment" means that which we are surrounded by. This approach sets us at the center where we are encircled something outside. As innocent as it first sounds, "environment" furthers an anthrocentric position for it tacitly provides us with a view of the world outside of us.) Conceptualizing nature makes it ambiguous; it is so broad that it can be used to justify a variety of disparate positions. Analytical thinking that attempts to unravel nature remakes it into the objective, a thing of commerce, which is consumable. While we should indeed acknowledge and embrace the unspeakable mystery that wildness is -- wildness that resists description and rationality -- we nonetheless should not see us as apart and separated from nature. (Only by being of it can we repair the damage that has been done.) If we call nature wild, if we name it anything other than that which includes ourselves then we've separated us from it and set out on a path of devastating dualism. Nature is irreducible.

As humans, who are part of nature, we are indeed capable of making things that do good. We also are able to make things that do harm -- dams, bulldozers, pesticides, nuclear bombs, deadly viruses and all sorts of other destructive things -- not only ourselves but also all life on the planet. To consider that these made things are unnatural is a misleading value judgment, because it regards nature as idealized, which further alienates us from it. It is even a value judgment to call these "destructive" things part of humanity's dark side for they are nature's dark side too. These things that we make, whether we name them good or bad are of our technological capability and a reflection of us as natural beings. For, since we are from nature, these things we make are from nature as well. While we have the capacity (and empathy) to embrace the beauty of a pristine alpine forest or a clear-flowing stream of spawning salmon, we, of necessity, must also embrace our cities, expressways and waste sites -- if we are to acknowledge nature's full capability. It is only through thoughtfulness as technological beings that we recognize all of nature and hold close our being part of it. Then, and only then, will we act in accord with the wholeness that is nature. Once we recognize this interconnection and make it part of our fundamental approach to being in the world then we will be able to redefine technology, not just for our immediate needs for the need of the world as a whole.

To consider these two ways of viewing how we are in the world we can for a moment pursue one line of thought -- the one that dominates our techno-scientific view of the world, what we've called objective building. And then we'll consider another way that is more inclusive -- embracing "earth" and how we are part of it, what we've referred to as reflective building. First, as we've already described, it's common to think that our orderly action toward things potentially completes what already exists in a first-nature world (physei onta). That is, nature's natural ability to move toward some end. Our own human action extends nature's ability. In this way as builders, as makers of things, we're able to complete nature by bringing about what nature, on its own, can't accomplish. First-nature alone couldn't make a cherry table. Even though first-nature brought the tree forth, the highest purpose inherent in the tree was the cherry table. That's because we -- who have needs of things like tables, buildings, and so forth -- are nature's highest achievement. Without our action, first-nature can't complete its fullest and highest production. As said, this is one view, the one that overshadows the way we produce in our technological world.

We've asked about the table in a way that's shown it as a thing to fit our need. We know about the material of the table itself, the time it takes to cure the wood in the kiln, the amount of heat necessary to get the moisture content to an acceptable level where the wood is milled. We know what's required to make the table a certain strength; how to use the proper glues and fasteners to make it strong. We can ascertain how many coats of finish are necessary to make the table last longer. And we can accurately estimate how many man-hours it takes to produce so many tables in a workday and how much each table would cost if marketed and sold through a furniture showroom. And if the table were designed by some eminent figure -- say Donald Judd -- then we could inquire from an historical viewpoint the role of that maker, obtaining all sorts of solid reliable information.

In this approach we're not earnestly questioning our role as building human beings, we don't give proper thought to how we see first-nature directed towards its "proper" place? When we think of the world this way we're typically thinking of it in a way that regards us. We regard the world as equipment, awaiting our use. The characteristics of a thing comes to be what it does for us, how it fits our use and need; what is its purpose. Equipmental being refers to the way we use the world, as exemplified in how we regard things like trees as the means to provide us with something. The tree gives us the material for the table; it provides us with firewood to keep us warm and cool shade on a hot afternoon. We experience the world as how it fits our need -- all things as instruments fitting our purpose. We utilize first-nature's bounty in this self-referential manner and consequently use it up.

Yet, however exhaustive our findings might be in all of these areas, we'd never get any closer to the deeper regard for the work of the table; we'd never get close to its essence. We'd only have a lot of minutia collected, which in the end, amounts to a lifeless analysis of the work and its context. Completing nature through technological means is more complex and far richer than the resulting thing's equipmental use. Completion as we've been using it here -- as completing nature -- is better understood if we think of completion not as finality, as the end of some process, but rather as a beginning. Nature is completed in the way the word "complete" comes to us from its Latin origins, meaning to fill up. Completion complements. It fills, it fills the place (the topos); ever flowing with fullness, admitting into the unnamed void some thing -- some new built thing. So completion rather than meaning the end of a process instead permits a filling up. This filling up, this involvement, this action -- through our technological capability -- is our capacity as makers to shape certain natural things in our world in ways that unfold the fundamental condition of being, both for us and the world.

In this light, humankind's role as maker (thoughtful and aware maker) completes nature only to the extent that we are natural creatures, acting naturally. Completion, through our technological capability, complements that which already is. In this mode of complementarity, we understand ourselves integral with the world. Our making overlays the making of first-nature, complementing it and letting us, in turn, know intimately the things of the world. Reflective building acknowledges this interconnectedness and extends first-nature's action through techne as letting appear, through building (tektein) as bringing forth. Techne permits us to re-make our world, not to create but to re-build. It is what puts us in the world as builders. At the core, we are beings who build. Building technologically -- techne-logically -- is the way we arrange those things -- the prime way we re-make the unhandled presence of nature. To be technological means to be something far more than a toolmaker. We -- in our technological world -- are thoroughly immersed in the technological. We're technological beings through and through; we perceive the world through the lens of the technological. This is the enormous potential -- and danger -- we have. Yet, we have the capacity as beings on "earth," to wonder at things of first-nature (physei onta), allowing them to show forth in their own light, and we have the capability of remaking parts of first-nature into second-nature (techne onta), also showing forth, both giving an opening for that which is.

To see how second-nature remaking brings forth, we can think once more about the table. If we stop and let the table rest in its own light we begin to see possibilities other than its equipmental use opening up. We begin to sense the constancy of the work in the table that is a thing unto itself. 

We see that the table is, in its own form -- the flat horizontality of its smooth level top, the crisp defined verticality of each one of its four square legs, its depth of weight -- in its full-lived dimensionality. This fullness holds sway over and opens onto something beyond mere usefulness. As the table sits on the floor firm and steady, we're made aware of its struggling against gravity; pushing up into the world to make its own location. And yet it's this gravity that sets each of these -- the vertical and the horizontal that go to make the table what it is -- into one unity. All of our made things, our tools, equipment, buildings, and even our bodies -- are likewise unified and made constant by gravity. Without gravity's force there would be no sensation of upwards, downwards, vertical, or horizontal. There would be no weight, no need for structure. All things would be regarded differently; all things would be different. Things would never be brought together as one, as being of "earth."

Inherent in this quality of the horizontal that we experience here in the table, we're also reminded of limitation. To stay within the horizon is to remain limited. We already know this sense of limitation when someone observes that the unknown is just over the horizon. The horizon is the dividing that stitches the limitation of the earth and the infinity of the heavens together. In that gathering together of the horizontal and the vertical -- of freedom and restriction -- we sense the connection that takes place between horizon and the earth. We do this particularly when we open it up -- when we dig down into it, into the horizontal. When we die the ground is opened up so that we're placed in its care, horizontal with the horizon. As beings of the earth we recognize that we're limited through our mortality. In our recognition of the table's qualities we associate the horizontal with death; mortality makes its own horizon for all living things. When we consider the limitations of the horizon, we sense darkness, temporality, and constraint. We come in touch with being mortal.

Through this same way of approaching the work the table, we infer through its presence that verticality stands opposed to the boundary of limitation. In opposing the horizontal like this, the vertical breaks away from the confines of gravity that attaches us to the earth. The vertical finds association with light and freedom as it reaches toward the heavens. On earth, as mortals we stand erect. An early defining characteristic about our own structure is that we stand erect upon the earth. The first child's drawing invariably depicts us just this way. We see the organization of our body at right angles to the ground. Verticality is that which rises up to break away from the earth. And likewise the things that we make the tools, the equipment, the built works of construction; all these stand vertical; they've broken away from the constraints of the earth, even though for only a time.

Making is seen in this work of the table as a raising up, a work that strives to break away from the earth. Yet in this attempt to break free, it nonetheless remains dependent upon the earth. The shaped material of the wood that's needed here to make this work of the table is from the soil of the earth, its raw natural materials having been reshaped and reconstituted by us. In that act we are reminded that we too are also from the earth. And in so doing, are made mindful of the craftsman who made our table. Likewise, he needed his parents who brought him into the world, in order for our table to be made. Our table-maker also needed his noontime meal to give him the strength required to continue his work. He also, like our tree, needed fresh air and clean water. And, he needed a comfortable shop full of bright afternoon sunlight to better do his task. Each of these things, in turn, was brought about by a multitude of other conditions and, if we continued to trace them this way, we'd eventually find that they encompass the whole world and include all that is. Each condition unfolded, being dependent on one another, every thing comes together and is present in the made thing of the table.

"Earth" is the foundation on which lies the firm footing for all the things made. This table has shown itself as a thing. In its self-standing, the table has revealed to us something new, something not seen before. Looking at things this way, conversely we begin to see the table in the tree, the forest and the rain clouds overhead, all rising from the earth and finding their presence in the realness of the table. In everything we encounter, if we are mindful, we can see the same interconnection and experience, first-hand, all things that are, in our table and the table seen in all things. It is the constancy of building that has given us these qualities. This work -- the cherry table -- has made for us a world, and there are innumerable others within the work, waiting for each of us to find.
Yet, how does a simple table convey this? After all, it's just another thing in a world full of things already. The table stands, as something that serves need, as a piece of equipment that's depended on. We typically don't notice it as something beyond that, with its own presence. Until then, it's there only by what it does, instead of what it is. But regarded as a thing in itself, as just done in the description, something new has occurred. When we step back from our pre-conceived way of looking at things, we begin to open onto new worlds, worlds that are made apparent through the work itself. The table left to itself was regarded as something other than a thing of use; as equipment for purpose. In letting the table show in its own light, something came forward, the work of the table made a place for us. It opened possibility and made this opening as a space for other things, a place for our own presence in the world. The work of the table, in its revealing, has told us what the material and shape of the object that we call table is -- in itself, as authenticity. The authenticity that this table has made gathers around it the things of the earth -- the vertical, the horizontal, depth, weight, warmth, durability, and the like, to make for itself an opening, offering the opportunity for familiarity and for questioning.  

When we first described the table, when we looked at it in descriptive and objective terms, its being in the world had been forgotten. We didn't recognize that it contained within itself the protection of "earth." We didn't see it as a thing shining forth in its own light -- brought out into the open, into a place that it made for itself -- so that its presence was revealed. We began to discover the table's being in the world when we looked beyond its equipmental use and considered its association with the vertical, the horizontal, its attended binding to "earth," and its freedom of rising up from it. In that movement its own authenticity was revealed. By standing back and letting the work of the table be, we have discovered more than the thing's use, we've found that the thing's being has been made present.


IV.
In considering the constancy that is inherent in building, we've attempted to characterize a few concerns surrounding the structure of thoughtful building. We have attempted to weaken the accustomed bearing that we so often find ourselves standing upon, in hopes of revealing in its place a small plot of stable ground, which gives us a location to stand against the taking-for-granted production of first-nature. This footing on which the builder stands encompasses the world as full. This footing on which the builder stands embraces "earth" as whole. This footing on which the builder stands -- building -- is not of his making, rather the built thing is the foundation of building.

In moving around building this way, we have begun to pull together that which lies between second-nature and first-nature. Our concern for building has provided us with the link between thinking and the real of the world. In that, we find the kind of closeness to things that destabilizes the foundation of the conceptual, that which tries to grasp at and make objectification of those very conditions that keep us in the world. In our willingness to step away, and turn toward the unstable and shaky, we unsteady the foundations of the familiar. Stepping back toward our unreliable footing makes a move toward the incomplete; responding this way, we let go of that which binds us to the objectness of the world. In earnestly reflecting on the world at hand we slow down, we discover and find an accord with what is before us, right here and right now, without the need to go flying off beyond the solidity of "earth" itself. Reflecting on our relationship to the world expands boundaries; we begin to experience the real as never before. Standing back and letting things shine through in their own presence, we begin to let go of our expectations -- our preconceptions.

Thinking reflectively, as we've said, does not accommodate logos exclusively; in fact for the most part, logistic thinking clouds reflective thinking. What we are speaking of here, as we keep thinking-building in the forefront is a kind of taking to heart. Taking, in this sense, is not grasping after something. Rather it's letting happen -- an unfolding that reveals what is taken in and safeguarded, instead of being used up and consumed. Taking to heart is a summons where we are called upon to think reflectively about building, and in doing so, to be responsive to the embrace of "earth."

That which is before us in the world we take to heart when we reflect upon it. Taking something to heart means overcoming indifference. To be immersed in thinking-building means we are not indifferent to the world. Taking building to heart through reflective thinking makes manifest the very accomplishment of building, building as it discloses the world, brought to us in its full presence, the openness of our own activity as thoughtful builders.

As has been stated throughout, we are, each one of us, natives of "earth." As human beings, we arise out of "earth," standing erect for a time, and then just as quickly returning. Like every other thing we perceive as sensible, we know realness because of our own physicality, as springing from "earth." Our tangible bodies sense things -- we see them, touch them, walk through them, live in them, move about them. This corporeal entity -- this thinking, feeling human form -- is what we use to perceive everything around us. Because of our fleshly physicality, we are inextricably a part of, and dependent on "earth," we are forever wedded to it. Our activities as corporeal presences receive what this gift of "earth" offers and accepts it in a way constant to our being. That offering is embraced through reflective building and reflective thinking. Reflective building makes our earth-ground visible. Reflective building shows this foundation as a foundation, as autochthonous. In the end, this is the gift that makes building show itself for what it is.

The constancy of built things brings together world, "earth," and nature. Within their concentration, they offer us that which binds the earth and sky, while tying together our senses and knowledge of the world. This kind of knowledge that we gain -- what we've more accurately called reflection -- brings those things together renewed, reciprocally circling back around to form ever-new connection. This way of experiencing the world grants us a position -- a space that makes allowance for moving through and rising up -- one that gathers together a place for things in their own light in the world.

Building encircles, joining us to the world. It surrounds the boundless distance between the mind and the hand; it is what fits within the finite space between the nail and the wood; and it is what we pull from the vast chasm resting between second-nature and first-nature. Building this way makes balance. It compensates, both complementing and reinforcing that which otherwise opposes one another: the real and our thinking of it. Balance lies within the movement from side to side, from work to thinking, from thoughtfulness to building.

Form and substance shaped into things, things making space, space describing location where things come to light which, in turn, makes things what they are, this is what lies at the heart of building. Things, location, space and openness are brought about through human activity. Humanity is the site of this passage; it is the only site in which building may be carried on in the first place, building that holds fast to the world, building that finds its holding within the embrace of "earth."

The constancy of building is the constancy of questioning; questioning that is an inquiry about ourselves, which is at the same time a questioning of the world. Building leads us to ask what it is to be in that world. Building bestows a place to gather the world together. In gathering things together through building, we inevitably are unburdened from the weight of what has come together, what is stored-up and put-away as temporal and saved. Gathering through a built work is the release of this storing up. And as well, it is simultaneously the attachment to the temporal, which is our mortality. It is that which constructs awareness of our finite existence, in steady strophe and antistrophe.

1 Stro'?fe: [Greek strophe, a twist, a turning about, akin to strephein-to turn; from strephein, with the prefix strepto>a learned borrowing from the Greek meaning twined, formed by streptos meaning pliant, twisted, twined, twist.] The part of ancient Greek choral ode sung by the chorus when moving from right to left, the movement performed by the chorus while singing this part.
The phrases that open and close this work are excerpted from two separate writings by Faulkner. "In monotonous strope and antistrophe" first appeared in The Sound and the Fury. Later on, in Absalom, Absalom! it showed up again: "in steady strophe and antistrophe." We can't pretend to understand why our writer found them so important as to risk repetition. Nonetheless, it might help us in our concern for building to investigate these words a bit further. The hope is to find some significance within the two variations that occur in the phrases, particularly, the difference afforded between "monotonous" and "steady". When we look at the meaning of monotonous we find that it reflects a thing lacking in variety, tiresomely uniform and unvarying, rooted in sound, just as the sound that a voice or chorus would make. The word's prefix, "mono," means to alone or single, as in monotone. Steady means, a thing firmly placed or fixed, and also connotes an even or regular movement; that is constancy. Steady's beginnings are found in "stead": the place of a person or thing as a substitute. Alternately, we too have an older, more buried meaning: "a place or locality", that which traces its beginning to the Gothic words "staths": station or "stasis". And stasis, from the Greek, means a state of standing, to stand, to be firm. So what have we found to be in common with monotonous and steady? We see that monotonous modifies; in that through its position of being between, it makes a thing that stands unto itself, and alone. In its uniformity, we have stability and being-in-place, to stand still, and to make stable, to "stabilize".
So too, steady infers motionless.  It regards a place where one stands; as on a steady foundation; a constant footing. The commonality between the two words then offers us a kind of stability -- that which provides a steady foundation and brings about motionlessness. From this we might begin to see the significance of the ancient choral constantly in a state of movement from one position to the other; bringing about the unfolding of the events of the performance. This was achieved in designated lateral moves, as the events of the play unfolded. Here in this work, our sidestepping constantly amends itself by its own lateral and steady movement. As when we return to our earlier place, we stand in a location that offers us a kind of stasis; yet, at the same time, a kind of motion. We move but yet we don't. We step to the right and then back again to the left where we began, only to repeat it over and over in our own careful constancy. In Faulkner's two phrases then, there is inherent constancy; the sort of constancy we're already familiar with, even intimate with. It is what assures us in our own daily dance. In our own pliancy, we traverse this mortality, that which we call being, within our constant boundary. We are wholly encircled by these very definitions that create our view of the world. And as we have done here, we never quite leave the focal point at the center of the performance. We find ourselves simultaneously in a state of movement and non-movement: the Dance of Building.
An tis' tro phe: [anti; meaning against, opposite + strophe, a twist, a turning about, akin to strephein-to turn; from strephein, with the prefix strepto>a learned borrowing from the Gk. meaning twined, formed by streptos meaning pliant, twisted, twined, twist.] The part of an ancient Greek choral answering to a previous strophe, sung by the chorus when returning from left to right, the movement performed by the chorus while singing this part.

2 The work referred to is from Fabrications, an exhibition organized and presented simultaneously by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It ran from the end of January to the end of April, 1998. At each site four architects were invited to construct an actual work, rather than show models and drawings of things that they'd already built. By doing this the museums wanted to provide something to its viewers that they'd never seen before, a work that spoke specifically to the construction and assembling of materials for a full-scale built form, meant just for that exhibition.
The actual process of developing the work (long before any actual construction) began in a temporary exhibition setting that involved the participation of other architects. Wexner Center's curator, Mark Robbins, summed up this process: "The participants in the Wexner Center reveal a spectrum of modern approaches to architectural production... (and) stress the particularities of program and site (taken in the broadest sense to include materials, climate, economics, topography) as generators for their work. They draw from varied sources what is necessary to make their work serve beyond pragmatic utility.
A specific framework for Fabrications did not exist in advance, although the selection of the architects, all noted for their built work, had already delimited some common ground. Over the eighteen-month planning period, several meetings and conversations took place with the architects, both as a group and individually. The early discussions centered on the curatorial charge of working within a gallery space and making an architecture about itself. The architects expressed a general reluctance to work on projects without function and a desire to use some elements of their projects after the exhibition, not wanting to waste materials and effort.
For these architects the program ordinarily provides the impetus for design: ideas come from the immediate need of the program, which also brings with it material concerns. The exhibition context gave them a chance to produce work from an overall idea, rather than to have it theorized after the fact. As the title suggests Fabrications is about the process of building, but is also about the way people experience architecture, about relation to the body, and the physical and sensual experience of architecture."
Materiality and labor informed the work (its form and size) instead of vice versa. This way of working permitted the thingness of the project and the actuality of building to stand on its own, not to be preceded by ideas that once laid out might have been difficult to modify or jettison. This free-flow between materiality, work, and design gave the project its energy, direction and form as was exhibited at the Wexner Center.

3 For a thorough explanation, see Aristotle's Physics, Book III, "The Study of Nature". 

I.
We want to think here about measuring, and to do that we begin with these words by Heidegger: "Because man is, in his enduring the dimension, his being must now and again be measured out." And with that, we should also consider "Man is the measure of all things," from Protagoras the Sophist over two millennia ago. In reflecting on both for a moment we begin to see that there are two varying positions taken here. In the first we have our presence of being in the world, "Because man is," tells us that we are, in that we endure the dimension, our lived condition of being in the world for a time. It is our being that way that from time to time needs pondering and response. Or said, another way, how we are in the world needs to be given the attention of thoughtfulness and reflection. And from the ancient viewpoint we see that man metes (mete, metron, measures) out the world; where we are the measuring rod by which all else is regarded. This is of course decidedly Cartesian, for we are regarded as standing outside the accordance of being in the world, since it is we are who measure and are measured.

These two considerations might be said to determine the very condition of what it means to build in the world, if we think of building as its own sort of measuring in itself. In a concern for how we are in the world we begin thinking-building at the very core of what it means to live in and experience the world. We think being ontologically. Whereas, and this is how we typically measure, we regard ourselves outside the world regarding it as how it fits our need and how we might reshape it for our purpose. This is for sure an adequate and proven way of building in the world, yet it excludes the very reflection of our own presence in that world, and how it is that we experience that condition. And so we should begin with a concern for measuring.

We pursue this way of gauging things by asking ourselves what is the ground of measuring? What is at the foundation in our measurement of the world?  When we reflect on the very ground of something we have to begin with its fundamental condition, in our case here, we ask what is it to measure a thing's presence? Consequently, we are asking about measuring in ontological terms. And we should go further and say that the built thing being measured is in itself a measuring.

To think about the different ways a thing can be measured, we might look comparatively at how we typically set about measuring something. Consider the tape measure we all commonly use as example. It measures something from the top down in that it begins with an abstraction, something that is not present at all. In other words, when we employ our tape measurer we begin with the ideal of measuring-in ways that are removed from what is actually at hand. A prescribed measuring device uses mathematical measurement and applies a kind of not-here perfection that doesn't really exist to the thing being measured. After all, those whole numbers and factional parts that we use on our measuring device are atemporal; they last only as long as humankind and our concern for measurement do. In mathematical/geometric measuring we are cataloguing a thing's aspects in ideal terms that stand outside or above the thing itself. Additionally, this mathematical measurement hasn't clarified what the thing in question is nor its ground; the thing present before us. Instead, through mathematical determination it's only been re-presented as something other than what it is ideally, and not a "thing" in the world.

Instead of immediately determining a thing's dimensions or cataloging its material composition, we might instead begin by thinking about its original installment and the ones who laid it in its place as they went about their work; what were their aspirations and expectations? Could their imagination have transported them to where we are now looking at their involved effort of window building? Let's think about a window, as example, and imagine that we have need of measuring it. As we stand before the window, we might also notice the reflections in the glass and what they tell us about the window, its surroundings, its placement in the world and how it fits in that greater built fabric. Perhaps we even see ourselves as part of the window, our profile mirrored in its surface. In the window's reflection we see the blueness of the sky overhead, the ethereal vapor trails from speeding jets embroidered in the clouds. We see the faint outlines of other buildings beyond-all the other windows in those building too-and how those built works profile against the wide vault of the heavens. At the same time we feel these building's weightiness as they are enfolded into the earth's support, knowing too that they are grounded in the hard work of the many who built them and those who are within, everyday using them for their own varied endeavors. Beginning to ask about the window's presence this way is to begin from the bottom up. We are questioning the window's grounding as a built thing in the world.

In experiencing the window first-hand this way, we are looking beyond superficial measurement and deeper into the window's ontology. We are considering it phenomenologically-as it is in itself. Heidegger tells us "ontology is possible only as phenomenology." (BT 7,C) In other words, when a thing shows itself, when we experience it for what it is, we necessarily are considering its foundation of being; we are necessarily reflecting on its presence in then world. And then, and only then does it show itself for what it is. We find this truth in the very word "phenomenon" when we discover that it is derived from phainesthati," meaning to show itself, or said another way, we experience what is manifest in the thing itself through its own self showing. The window is in its own presence in the world as self-showing. Through its own light-phaino = pha = phos-meaning light or brightness, the window has shown forth in its totality. This sets up a distinctive way for something to be encountered. Now this, so that it is clearly understood, does not constitute some new concept of things. Phenomenology is not inherent in the window itself. Rather, as we become aware, as we learn to question the possibilities of things and consequently to experience the thing's windowness first-hand, we human beings measure ourselves in terms of "world," that being the world comprised of what it is, in its thingness. In this then, we are the watch-keepers of the world's presence; it becomes a way for us to be; to experience meaning and the ground of what is, to come close to the possibility of the world. This inevitably opens onto the gradual unfolding of signification where asking one question inevitably leads to another, and so on, where the process of questioning overrides the goal-oriented approach for a singular response. Here the journey is in the questioning and in hearing those questions.


II.
"Because man is, in his enduring the dimension, his being must now and again be measured out. That requires a measure which involves the whole dimension in one." (pmd 223-4) These words require continued reflection. Particularly so, when we as builders who do our own kind of measuring consider how we do it as the only correct way of conducting that sort of business. Yet, if we begin to take these opening words to heart we start to hear that building human habitation takes in its own measurement and offers itself, as well, as a kind of measuring rod by which we measure ourselves. Which leads us to ask how is one's being measured out through building? How does the "whole dimension" lead to better building? While these concerns set us on the difficult road of inquiry they, at the same time, offer the rich reward of considering how we go about experiencing the world.

To continue on this path, our living in the world involves all kinds of measuring (size, weight, transparency, distance, duration, etc.), and building is just one of those ways that we measure, all built things having this aspect attached to them. Building-measuring of this kind is exemplified for instance in the way we take the order of things from nature and reorder them into habitable spaces; a well-worn relationship where we measure our needs against those of nature. Yet we as well, we should consider how what has been built measures us, how we find ourselves gauged in the constructed fabric we are all immersed in, a relationship that is reciprocal and involves our active participation.

And so, we're going to begin by thinking about how it is that we measure our world that, in turn, will lead to a response of how we might differently regard that relationship of how we are; this should offer fertile ground for thinking about how we build and, in turn, how that significant act shapes us. When we consider just what measuring is most of us probably think about some instrument that we read, a yardstick, ruler, thermometer, a tire gauge, and our bathroom scales. In each of these we're gauging some physical condition by intellectually apprehending the instrument's findings. In other words we're reading what is before us in an abstracted way that relies solely on the thinking mind.

We might also consider this predominance and how it relates to measuring out our enduring dimension. To do this we can think a moment about Galileo. It's been said that he put two lenses into the ends of a tube, not so much to discover the heavens as to entertain the Medici family, and in the process pick up some spare cash. (It's been well documented that Flemish opticians, having developed ground lenses for distant viewing some time before, had tried to sell similar ocular devices to the military. But unfortunately, the resultant effect of these new technological innovations was more like looking through a peephole rather than surveying a wide frame of view necessary to spy an enemy in the field.) Galileo's telescope, like his predecessors, didn't work too well either on the terrestrial plane, so he turned it skyward to have a look at the moon. And there to his amusement he saw bumpy features that resembled mountains.

At first, he didn't think too much of this. But after several days he looked again and saw that these same irregular areas had changed somewhat. Because what had happened was the mountains, which caught his attention, had cast their shadows differently, since the moon was in a different position as it related to the sun. Galileo, being the clever observer that he was, realized indeed these must be mountains, and considering the fact that no one before him had seriously entertained the notion that the moon might have characteristics similar to earth, he knew he was on to something. If these were mountains, as he believed they were, he could then measure the difference in length of their cast shadows from the different times he observed them, and through simple geometry make a determination of their height. And this is what he did, deducing that the mountains he saw were about the same height as those which he was familiar with on earth. And with that the opening of the heavens for scientific scrutiny came about.

But from another perspective, and what's more pertinent for our purposes here, is the deeper significance of how that way of seeing the world shapes our views today. It isn't so much that we learned that the moon had mountains in 1610, but rather the nature of that experience and the scientific methodology that followed. For Galileo was the lone scientist to make an indirect observation of some physical condition-the moon's mountains-and in making his finding, was completely removed from any direct common experience with what he was observing. He couldn't feel the mountain's size or texture with his hands or body, he couldn't directly measure their height by walking them, he wasn't able to smell or taste the experience he was having of this removed physical phenomenon. It was the singular sense of vision that observed these shapes, thus allowing him to make calculations based on dimensions and angles from simple geometry, all in all permitting him to correctly analyze what he saw. Through the abstraction of mathematics and the sense of vision alone, Galileo's detached observation offered accurate conclusions about the world in which we lived. And he was the first to make determinations this way. In this Galileo set us on a new perceptual path as to how we experience the world, one that's based on geometrical thinking via visual perception.

We do this ourselves so frequently and without thinking about it that it seems almost to absurd to even bring this up; there is hardly any other way to conduct our business of being in the world. But what is not considered in this is how its led to our indirect experience of the world, or said another way the mathematization of nature. This mathematical view, the way we're thinking about it here means more than just what pertains to numbers. It's involved with how we gain knowledge of the world and how, when seeking understanding, we approach new experience with already-loaded presupposition and expectation. Which simply means, we're asking about the way our experience of the world is received and translated, that is modern perception, This, of course, has enormous implication for us, who want to transform some part of that world through what we build. To do that we ought to consider ourselves keen observers of that world, ever-before we take it upon ourselves to somehow change it.

To think further about experiential relationships and what this word mathematization means we can look to Heidegger. He tells us that mathematization from mathesis, is more than counting and finds its roots in the Greek, ta mathemata, meaning that which can be taught, and at the same time it means to learn.

"Mathesis means learning; mathemata, what is learnable... Learning is a kind of grasping and appropriating. But not every taking is a learning. We can take a thing, for instance, a rock, take it with us and put it in a rock collection. We can do the same with plants. It says in our cookbooks that one "takes," i.e., uses. To take means in some way to take possession of a thing and have disposal over it." (mmm251)

Seen this way then mathematization exceeds any consideration of numbers and mathematics the way we typically think of it. This taking, grasping, and using is the way we objectify things. That is, how we stand outside the things we are considering, and how we overlay those things with our own thinking. Measuring is just one way that we do that, how arriving at their condition of a thing, we determine and measure its attributes with what is other than the thing in itself. As example, when we want to know something about the attributes of a thing, let's say a table at which we are about to sit down and begin work, we'd probably begin with an initial inspection. We might start by using a simple linear device that organizes the shape of the table into an understandable construct. In measuring this table this way, we're comparing it with a device that displays a string of continuous sizes. All measuring tapes-at least the ones we use here-are alike in that they use feet and inches in a series of continuous relationships. Using these agreed upon measurements is how we reach accord when we say that the table is three-feet nine-inches in length. Measuring the table this way requires that we proceed from a whole to a division of parts in some agreed-upon unit, in our case feet and inches. But, this could be anything, (a stick of chewing gum or cubits) as long as we all agree upon it and have some record of that length of measurement, in our case the measuring tape of the fixed increments inches, feet, and so forth. Whenever we do this we are setting up a relationship between the world and us, and the way that we measure it-the tools that we use-mediate that experience.

Now what we typically don't think about when we use our measuring systems is that these common units of comparison come from outside the thing being measured. There is nothing about the three feet nine inches that is inherently part of the table; or in the many, many things that you, in your life will measure. Although there is nothing intrinsic about the measurement we have made and the table itself, the fact that we think about things this way does indeed set up a kind of relationship between us and other physical objects in the world. We use measuring so much to size things up that it seems that the fundamental nature of the thing measured is discoverable this way. We tend to think the world in units of measurement. And measuring as I'm using it here is not only dimensional length, width, depth, and so forth. It is just as easily the way one thing is measured against another-as regards, weight, color, taste, temperature, duration, and so forth. Through the many and continuous ways that we measure things we're able to make differentiation, and in doing so reduce that thing to rudimentary description. The table is three feet nine inches long by two feet wide, its top sits on four legs about thirty inches high, about two inches square, each. The wood is of the species cherry and it appears to have been finished with a number of coats of fine polish. In describing the table this way we have learned something about it, but our description relies chiefly on quantification and mathematization, conditions that are outside the table itself.

Contemporary apprehension of our world, just like Galileo's, is wrapped up in the immediately graspable and through that how our perception of something is typically reduced to mere representational description.

The question inevitably comes forward here as to why regard things this way, as primarily measured visually and mathematically? There is a three-fold response to this. As we've just been touching on with Galileo, the primary reliance on the eye as its come to weigh in over the other senses. The eye of course allows us to experience things from a distance, sometimes great distances as was just described. But using it as our primary tool of experience we become disembodied from our experience of the world. By bodiless, we mean the dominance of the eye that has replaced all other senses, rendering them much less important. And second our consideration that is wrapped up in that is the way that nature gets reduced to representational description where abstract explanation stands in for first-hand experience. This is what we just called mathematization where things are regarded primarily in superficial terms that miss much of what the thing is in itself. And third, is the way we've learned to see the world as picture, as being framed within a defined boundary of two-dimensional representation which to us and looks for all the world to be real.

Just as Galileo was removed from what he was observing, we likewise gain most of our knowledge of the world through these three conditions. For what is taken in as experience today is received predominately by the eye, information perceived in a continually temporal state, there for the immediate moment, then, just as quickly set aside for some new image standing ready to replace it. It's the way that we've come to measure our world; by evaluating in the larger sense in a kind of enclosed self-referencing that appraises and calculates. Through planning, problem solving, estimating, gauging, computing and the like, we in our scientifically oriented way of grasping the world, typically use abstraction to solve things. That is, without giving much thought to it, we employ mathematics, geometry, calculus, and so forth, determining things by their size, volume, weight, temperature and the like; using a multitude of technological devices ready for that use as they attend to our every measuring need. And much of this is now only experienced indirectly, brought before us in a disconnected, and distanced way.

The reason it's vital to think about these concerns is that we, as potential builders, tend to reduce what it is we are making in just the same way. To understand what I mean here, think about how we design and make a building. We typically begin with a two-dimensional format: a sheet of paper, or a computer screen. From there we use the abstraction of line, language, and mathematical notation to get our ideas out into the world. The length, depth, and height, of our work is called out in scaled dimension or else, noted on the page in text description. At some point we may even make models, but we're nonetheless reducing our perception of the potential in things, regarding them in abstracted terms of dimension, measuring, ordering, and so forth. When we approach making this way we have necessarily put ourselves at a distance from what it is that we are hoping to get closest to-the things that we make. And, not just as it applies to architectural making, but in how we perceive the world. As we regard the world this way we nurture an axiomatic worldview where our dominant method of apprehension seems patently self-evident and indisputable, to the degree that we could hardly imagine world perception in any other way. Apprehending the world like this we more than ever call upon the disembodied eye, as the focus of experience. As our primary yardstick for accepting the world around us, what is received visually shapes our ever-changing, mutable form of memorization and measuring.


III.
Where culture once relied upon the spoken word, and then later the written word, to transfer memory from one generation to the next, it's now the kinetic visual image, particularly the photographic (and more recently digital) image, which includes film, video, computers, and so forth. Media, whether it's the hard copy of the printed image, or the photograph, TV or computer, each fulfill the role of providing memory-as our chief referent of reality, forming our own identity, and history-what we take in exclusively through the eye. But this is not new, having been developed since the early Renaissance and only reaching its culmination more recently. In our western tradition, the eye has been thought of as the primary, as the most important of the senses. As we've already seen in Galileo and even the ancients, Aristotle for instance, considered sight to be the chief receptor of our bodies: "because it approximates the intellect most closely by virtue of the relative immateriality of its knowing". Without considering, we often we speak of that mind-to-eye connection, referring to "the minds eye" or "seeing an idea clearly," using the eye as a way to describe sound thinking. The eye and rational thinking have a long interdependent relationship just this way. The predominance of a visually oriented way of apprehending the world was furthered buttressed during the Renaissance when the five senses were ordered according to the conditions of nature. These were arranged in a hierarchical way with vision being the highest. Vision was equated to fire and light, hearing to the air, smell to the vapors, taste to water, and touch to the earth. Light of course has connection to the "light of reason" and is metaphorically connected to grasping the world rationally, and obviously as seen with sight. The gradually increasing dominance of vision over the other senses parallels the development of the ego-oriented human consciousness, where the thinking self is apart and separate from the world. It was not long before this that perspectival representation of the world became possible, through the application of geometry and science to aesthetics.

The Florentine architect Fillipo Brunelleschi developed an elaborate and thorough system of perspective that seemingly could be applied to all conditions of nature, making for us, what appeared to be, an accurate representation of the real world. By using mathematics, the straight line, and rudimentary geometry Brunelleschi was able to stand in the doorway of the Duomo and faithfully represent the Baptistery as it set in its surrounding piazza. Here for the first time was a systematic method which employed the vanishing point and its corresponding station point, framing the field of objects that lay before it making a picture of the world that could accurately be rendered within a border with the illusion of depth. Yet for all its appearance of being a truthful representation of nature, his development of linear perspective arranged the visual field into a self-reflective construction. That's because it's only the eye that's needed for perspectival apprehension, making linear perspective as Brunelleschi developed it an affirmation of the disembodied individual. Which has of course led to linear perspective's corroborating geometric principal, laid out in a pictorial fashion-a new kind of rationalized naturalism. Brunelleschi's perspectival system offered us a more precise measurability than had ever been available before, a new visual system of describing the world. In just this way the abstraction of geometry as given through point, line and their corresponding mathematical properties has dominated the worldview of western thinking since its early Renaissance development. Mathematical correspondence to the physical world this way renders individual experience through the lens of abstraction. For Renaissance vision, linear perspective permitted a new kind of spatiality. Nature could now systematically-and with scientific authority-be depicted, as it seemed to appear. With systems of perspective at the Renaissance painter's disposal, symbolic medieval painting easily gave way to a this new visual explanation of the world, that for all accounts, looked very much like the world. This acceptance had a great deal to do with the fact that it was founded on mathematical principal that consequently deemed it accurate. To the degree that it appeared like the real world, believable representation was at first shocking. It is said that at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, where the first mathematically based perspective fresco was made by Masaccio, that people entering the church believed that a new opening had been created in the wall and that an addition had been made. They simply couldn't believe their eyes, when told that it was not real. Perspective based on geometric principal established the "operation" of vision into a rationalized, measurable construction. When we stand in front of it today we have no such reaction. In fact it almost seems crude when we have the later Piero's and Vermeer's to compare this work to, not to mention photography, film, video, and now computer.

This way of experiencing the world-as it could be geometrically confirmed, and reproduced on a two-dimensional surface-lent credence to, and vastly increased the importance of the sense of sight as the primary way in which to apprehend the world. For the first time, each human artifact, which was deemed artful, was judged solely by visual perception-proportion, harmony, symmetry, and so forth. And, today this predominance of vision is all the more true. In our technologically oriented world, vision ever more dominates our apprehension of things around us. This dominance of the eye tends to cause a distance between us, as physical, feeling bodies, and the things that we grasp solely with our vision. And through the production of representational images, we see a picture of the thing without being in any actual proximity of the thing at all. Heidegger, in his essay 'The Age of the World Picture' speaks of "the fundamental event of the modern age as the conquest of the world as picture." What he's speaking of here is how vision has replaced direct physical experience. And how this is buttressed by the vast multitude of technological inventions that allow an endless amount of the production of images. We're visually bombarded at every turn-the print media from magazines, newspapers, massive billboards, and the like. Then there is television and more recently the computer that is more and more relying on the visual. We see things never before imagined, simultaneously watching events on the other side of the world, even sunrise on the planets far away. Visual images have become commodities unto themselves. Concerns for the other sensory stimuli that could potentially augment the overwhelming visual experience before us at every turn is hardly given consideration at all. Things in our contemporary world, mostly in the form of the visual, move faster so even the human eye can barely begin to take it all in, where visual apprehension is removed from the thing itself and perception depends primarily on the detached eye.

In order to keep questioning this we should pick up our description of Galileo once again. As was said earlier there had been an ongoing attitude of mistrust of the senses yet the eye was still highly regarded over all the other physical senses because as Aristotle said, it acted most closely like the intellect. This way of weighing one sense over the others was developed further by Galileo about two thousand years later. And it's no surprise that Galileo did this entrusting of the eye as the primary sense preceptor for, as we described earlier, he had utilized a visual amplifier-the telescope-to gaze into the night sky. So it's not hard to imagine that Galileo favored a rational mind and clear eye to apprehend the world. And if this were all we might not be considering Galileo right now. But what is of interest is that he went on to write a treatise about sensory perception and how we might regard the senses. Albeit this was developed from ancient doctrines, but Galileo at an important turning point in scientific methodology distinguished between primary and secondary qualities of a thing. In his writing he considered the eye as the most important sensory receptor that made observation and mathematization possible. For Galileo every physical thing had certain qualities, but certain ones were part of the thing itself while others were mere apprehension of the senses of the human participant who interacted with those things. Listen to how he describes this in "The Assayer."

"Now, whenever I conceive of any material or corporeal substance, I am necessarily constrained to conceive of that substance as bounded and as possessing this or that shape, as large or small in relationship to some other body, as being one, many, or few-and by no stretch of imagination can I conceive of any corporeal body apart from these conditions. But I do not at all feel myself compelled to conceive of bodies as necessarily conjoined with such further conditions as being red or white, bitter or sweet, having sound or being mute or possessing a pleasant or unpleasant fragrance. On the contrary, were they not escorted by our physical senses, perhaps neither reason nor understanding would ever, by themselves, arrive at such notions. I think, therefore, that these tastes, odors, colors, etc., so far as their objective existence is concerned, are nothing but mere names of something which resides exclusively in our sensitive body (corpo sensitivo), so that if the perceiving creatures were remove, all the qualities would be annihilated and abolished from existence."

Now in stopping to consider what this has given us, we indeed agree it's permitted unimagined exactness, particularly when we realize that every imaginable real thing can be reduced to its most basic visual attributes and rendered geometrically, permitting a closed system where everything is rendered within the language of science. We go without questioning this. Yet, "by the use of something known-measuring rods and their number-something unknown is stepped off and thus made known, and so is confined within a quantity and order which is determinable at a glance... But who will guarantee that this customary kind of measuring, merely because it is common, touches the nature of measuring?" (pmd224) And if we listen carefully to Heidegger's words here and begin to understand Galileo as well, and how his thoughts might relate to our own direct experience of the world, then we begin to understand that the perceived qualities we experience through things are merely brushed aside as subjective illusion. Consequently, it's easy to imagine how attributes like size, shape, quantity, and motion-all which are apprehended visually and recorded mathematically-are what matters. This ultimately leads to a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where what we experience of the world seems to fit only that pattern of measure and calculation. Yet, what the mind takes in through the eye this way is reduction, or abstraction if you will, for we can't simply eliminate taste smell, sound, and all tactile qualities from a thing and say that we have experienced its presence. And that's the point here, in our consideration of visual dominance. Regarding the world this way are left to experience a limited it as resembling Euclidean geometry, seeing it as a formalized condition which is the mathematization of nature-nature translated as a mathematical construct-dominated by the disembodied observer.

The second inquisitive mind that shaped this axiomatic worldview was Rene Descartes. In an early writing Regula -his Rules for the Direction of Understanding-he tells us that rational intellect is derived from one common root, which is comparison. How we compare the world is gained through measuring and ordering. Descartes tells us that unlike measurement, order requires no outside unit from which to establish comparison. Through order we ascertain what is the simplest of things, then which is the next simplest, and so forth progressing until you arrive at the most complex things possible. Through ordering we're able to gain knowledge through establishing things in series, one may easily pass from one component of a system to another, uninterrupted, making comparison through similarity and difference. Through this two-pronged approach, Descartes understood how we rationally understand the world, rendering how we perceive it in its fundamental character which permits us to gain knowledge of the world. Now this in itself does not remove us from the direct experience of the world. On the contrary, organizing the world in this way through first-hand embodied observation is the way we find our place in the world. But Descartes didn't stop here. For after Regula, in his more important work Meditations, Descartes goes even deeper in questioning things by employing a kind of universal skepticism. In order to do this he began with the most basic test imaginable, to analytically prove the existence of things. For, after all if we took the existence of things for granted we might well be missing something, and be on the wrong footing altogether. So to verify the existence of things and the fact that the world is real he questions everything that we take for granted about the world, not just things themselves and how we them, but even himself-that is, an inquiry about his own existence. For if he didn't exist, he was not getting off to a very good start concerning the reality of other things did. But how might one measure one's own existence?

It seems like an untenable task, for upon reflection, he began to see how difficult it was to know that he was; that is, to say with full assurance that he indeed existed. All his senses told him that he was here in the world; this seemed sure enough. For he felt the cold of the winter, he heard the sounds of passing conversations, and smelled the warmth of the fire. Yet these were not cognitive assurances here for sensations could be fraudulent, appearances could indeed be deceiving, in the way we all have experienced something that seemed right at the moment only to later find out that what was there before us was somehow different than our initial assumption. So he undertook to devise a rational method that could set out to prove his existence. The question before him was this, in not trusting your senses and being closed to everything else except your own consciousness, how might you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you do indeed exist? What was there to measure yourself against and how could you find a means of weighing the fact that you indeed did exist. To answer such a puzzling line of inquiry, he had to get clever. And he did so by realizing that if he could ask such a fundamental question in the first place, then there must be something tangible which had proved his own being.

For how could a question be asked if there was no entity there in the first place? Through a series of meditations in which he thought and wrote about this, he concluded: Cogito ergo sum: "I think, therefore I am." This simply means, that in order to question the possibility of his own existence in the first place, he had to think about it. And since he was obviously a thinking creature, who conceives of the possibility of his being in the world, then obviously, he must exist. Consequently, he was convinced that he indeed was a living thinking being who was rationally in the world. Descartes next undertook another series of questions that had to do with that which was around him-the living physical world. Even though he knew that he as a thinking being who did exist, how could he be sure that non-thinking beings-what we typically call objects-exist. Are things truly here before us just as our senses describe them, or could they merely be a figment of our imagination, we existing in an imagined world wrought in the framework of our minds and misled by sensation? How can we ever be sure-even though we might prove to ourselves that we are thinking creatures-how can we be certain that there are other things there as well?

After all he already knew that the senses were not a definite gauge of the world. In saying this, Descartes was willing to agree that things certainly did have tangible sensate conditions, other than what could be measure in a reduced way of dimension and as being extended in space. He recognized these circumstances of nature, color, odors, heat, coldness and so forth, but he distinguished them as mere secondary qualities; they just didn't matter as much, when we need to know about the world around us. Consequently he classified them as less-than-important interactions, these sensations that take place when we as feeling bodies experience things. Rational inquiry needn't concern itself with these, since it only needed proof of things as determined by the conditions of extended bodies in motion and as described dimensionally.

Descartes rationally assures himself that things in the world did indeed exist, and how they could be measured, quantified, and understood, just as Galileo had done with his own scientific investigations. After proving to his satisfaction that he indeed was, he began his next series of investigations again with the same skepticism that he used when he inquired about his own existence. He wondered if when he perceived things by using his physical senses whether he could be certain that those things did indeed exist outside, in the real world-in just in the same way that his sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing told him that they did. After all, only his thinking mind had been proved without the use of his senses. Because of this, he reached an impasse, since the only way he could experience things was through his bodily senses, senses that had to be interpreted by a thinking mind.

In having doubts about his senses, he was led to ask, "whether any certainty can be had concerning the material things that go to make up our world". He needed to know "which thoughts he has of them (that is the things in the world) are distinct, and which are confused." In order to find some condition that he knew was real about the world Descartes observed that he, with certainty "distinctly conceived of that quantity which is commonly called continuous, the extension in length, breadth, and depth, of that quantity-a thing which possesses that quantity." In other words, beyond any skepticism, Descartes could understand certain aspects of things pertaining to their qualities, that is, their conditions ascertained at their most basic level. As example, he realized that all physical things have dimension, weight, and appear, to one degree or another, to be solid. With this, he felt that he could at least be certain that things have dimension, that they were continuous and extended into space. Things could be measured and compared in a rational cognitive way. With his thinking mind that had been proven to exist, he was with confidence able to consider this, not needing to depend on the senses, which could easily mislead. This much was true and provable because it could be represented through analytical process.

The way that he came to this broad-based conclusion was that he could simply number things. There are five apples on the table, the table has four legs and one top, the room has two windows and out them there are seven trees, and so forth. Numbering was, after all, a mathematical construct which depended entirely on abstract rational thought, and consequently verifiable and accurate. Through numbering things, Descartes next proved that he could assign conditions to the various parts of any thing-its complexity of size, shape, position in space, and its motion. In other words, he could determine thing's dimensions, weight, density, place, and speed. He could measure things. Added to all that, he could even determine mathematically, a things degree of duration, or as we'd say lapse of time. This, as well, could be readily ascertained. Descartes as a thinking creature-a rational human being-could measure and order any of the things that were around him this way with certainty and authority. From his simplest methodology, Descartes realized that this same manner could be applied, over and over, to every physical thing in the world; a capability that would permit him to understand the largest possible conditions in the world. The physical world could be constructed based on mathematical conditions alone, things could be measured using mathematical notation without the need for any other description.

As we've been describing, this has had profound implication as to how we typically perceive our world. In order to measure everything in a rational, quantitative way, every thing that is perceived must be reduced to its most basic physical consideration. That is, it must be describable in the most fundamental and abstract way-primarily through measuring, calculating, and the like. Through framing a perception of the world this way, Descartes has seen to it the nature and essence of all physical matter is stated through the notation of mathematics, which when concerning things in the world is what we call called physics. That is, physics in the mathematical sense that we're taught in high school. Physics, as you'll remember is a mathematical construct gotten to through geometry. Descartes invented analytical geometry and proved that through geometry, we are able to represent, without failure, the shape and motion that are potential in all physical matter. After this, all of the world could then be expressed in relational mathematical coordinates, or what we now call Cartesian coordinates, that is, a thing as it's measured in its three dimensions-length, height, and depth, plotted at a particular point in abstract space. In other words, things could then be measured using markers to stand in for the attributes of what was actually being measured. The conditions that Galileo called secondary-and as Descartes had confirmed-were rendered less important and unnecessary for legitimate rational investigation; Descartes here, of course, values mind over matter in the deepest sense possible and only a rational mind conceives mathematical relationships.

How Galileo had rendered nature through mathematization and quantification, and how Descartes determined world certainty from within as a transcendent condition of being, where humanity could, with confidence, represent itself and reality, permitted a setting apart where everything in the world could be rendered as an object. In this way the modern way of seeing the world was set firmly on its feet, and it's undoubtedly the model we follow ourselves.


IV.
"nor is the dimension a stretch of space as ordinarily understood; for everything spatial, as something for which space is made, is already in need of dimension, that is, that into which it is admitted." (pmd220) 

With this before us here it is time that we come back to our original question of measuring and being. When we build as we typically do-in a measured way that permits shelter and habitation-in the familiar manner that we regularly do, we are indeed building buildings.

As we unbind the natural materials that go to make our built world, we organize them in a specific arrangement-this unbinding that is achieved through measuring-which, in turn, becomes a thing of measurement that in the end is a kind of self-measurement. Said another way, through our built things we measure the relationship between the world and ourselves. This relationship of measuring becomes what for us defines those things of the world. It is through those things and the way we perceive them, the way that we measure them that we, in turn, measure ourselves. We organize our own self-conceptualization through this kind of relationship to the world.

This method of understanding provides distinctions, what we commonly call knowledge. No one dispute this fact, for building is all around us, buildings that were built just this way. Yet what we want to inquire about here within the boundary of measuring is the deeper nature of building, what building is, beyond a mere physical condition of making habitable space. For our taken-for-granted way of building is not what is at the heart and ground of building in the way that Heidegger thinks of it. For what he's describing, while quite straightforward, is in the end surprising. Let's listen to what he says:  "man not only cultivates what produces growth out of itself; he also builds in the sense of aedificare, by erecting things that cannot come into being and subsist by growing. Things that are built in this sense include not only buildings but all the works made by man's hands and through his arrangements. Merits due to this building, however, can never fill out the nature of dwelling. On the contrary, they even deny dwelling its own nature when they are pursued and acquired purely for their own sake... Building in this sense of the farmer's cultivation of growing things, and of the erecting of edifices and works and the production of tools, is already a consequence of the nature of dwelling, but it is not its ground, let alone its grounding. This grounding must take place in a different building." (pmd217)

Grounding as it relates to authentic dwelling, "must take place in a different building." In other words, we, in order to dwell fully, must learn to build in a way that is poles apart from how we typically do. Yet what can another way mean? Don't we already know how to build efficient buildings, buildings that are durable and lasting, buildings that shelter and protect. Indeed. Besides, what could Heidegger know about a different way of building, for after all he was a thinker and teacher, not practiced in the skills of construction, architectural design, nor building technology?

Yet what he's talking about is the way we build, as a kind of measuring-the way we are in the world and how we take measure of that grounding. Ever since DaVinci, taking his cue from the Protagoras the sophist scrawled, "man is the measure of things" beneath his idealized image of man, we've seen ourselves as a kind of measuring rod against which all of nature is measured. This has been particularly true through the buildings that we make. Geometry, symmetry, proportion, and rationalized thinking have played themselves out well with nature as the backdrop. Particularly in the things that we build, we've used ourselves as a measure of accord. And it's this sort of measuring that Heidegger is bringing before us. For we measure ourselves in relationship to the world, how we are under the heavens and on the earth, seeking our place beneath the vault of the sky, grounded in the firmness of the world: "only insofar as man takes the measure of his dwelling in this way is he able to be commensurately with his nature." (pmd221) But so that we are clear in this, we are not speaking of any physical kind of measure-taking. "Measure-taking is no science. Measure-taking gauges the between, which brings the heaven and earth to one another. This measure-taking has its own metron, and this its own metric". (pmd221) Of course heaven and earth mean the physicality of nature and the earth on which we all depend, and the sky above, which we all thrive under. But it as well refers to the way that we, as earthlings, how we regard ourselves-how we measure ourselves-against the gods and nature. It is in this way that "man's taking measure in the dimension dealt out to him brings dwelling into its ground plan... The taking of measure is what is poetic in dwelling." (pmd221) In other words, what we're being told is the very fact that we ask these questions about our relationship to the world is what makes us capable of authentic dwelling. Which in turn is what dwelling is: a kind of gathering that makes a location which questions and safeguards our very being in the world. When we measure this relationship in "its own metric" we are dwelling poetically. And so here we have arrived at a connection between measuring and the poetic. Which brings us to the question of what it means to measure in a poetic way? What is poetry's own metron? Our word poetry is derived from the Greek word poiesis. And Heidegger tells us "Making is, in Greek, poiesis." (pmd214)

Yet, when we hear the word poetic we probably recoil a bit, we may shake our heads and dismiss it, seeing how the term "poetic" is so readily abused and misused; that poetry is hard to grasp or too easily consumed, set aside for softies and the sentimental. Nonetheless, the question remains before us, how as builders of buildings are we capable of measuring poetically-of building poetically? Regardless of any initial reaction that might dismiss this as being too far-flung and not to the point of architectural consideration, it's nonetheless still significant in that it gives pause for thought. For in our concern for measure-taking, we're being told that poetry is a "high and special kind of measuring" (pmd221), to build poetically is a special kind of building.

Consequently, this becomes a fundamental question and key inquiry in any consideration of what building is. For poetic building as it is being put before us here is the kind that measures the ground of its own being. In other words, we are describing a way of building that asks about the way we are in the world, how we go about building things for instance, how those things illuminate this line of inquiry. In doing that, building poetically means asking about how we as builders measure the world in which we live. And as well, building poetically is about questioning the significance of this asking in the first place. Building poetically then is about questioning, about inquiring into these things in each act of building. It is a thoughtful inquiry about how we build, not the technological aspects alone-though they are of immense importance-but moreover, the ontological concerns that are wrapped up in how we measure our place in the world.

Our being on the earth, our "dwelling rests in the poetic." (pmd222) This is what we are told. And this is what needs to be heard. For when we build we are always taking measure and measuring. But if we are building poetically then how do we measure something that is poetic? For what is poetic is subjective, and difficult to gauge. It can't be contained in a report or tally. said another way, the poetic is that which is without measure in the way we are accustomed to thinking about it. Poetic measuring is something unnamed. It is inexpressible in the way we are accustomed to talking about the world in terms of facts and quantities. And so we are told that we must "leave the nature of the dimension without a name." (pmd220) This may indeed strike us as strange and even contradictory when we consider what was just said about how poetry is a measure-taking. Because, how do we take measure of something without even knowing what to call it? And even more importantly, how does one build poetically without even knowing its name or being able to describe it? In other words, how might building this way be explained in terms that are readily grasped, and how is measuring which takes place through building conducted, where so much description is required and where so much analysis is needed? The response is found in Heidegger's own words: "(A)s long as we understand measuring only in the sense current for us. In this sense, by the use of something known-measuring rods and their number-something unknown is stepped of and thus made known, and so is confined within a quantity and order which can always be determined at a glance. Such measuring varies with the type of apparatus employed. But who will guarantee that this customary kind of measuring, merely because it is common, touches the nature of measuring? When we hear measure, we immediately think of number and imagine the two, measure and number, as quantitative. But the nature of measure in no more a quantum than is the nature of number." (pmd224)

Measuring our way in the world is more than thinking in quantitative terms that regard things reductively. In other words, in trying to reduce something to its basic condition, in ways that causes it to be easily measured and grouped, and classed. Poetic measure-building comes about when things are left to show themselves in their own light which illuminates our own place in the world. Thinking about measuring in this fashion, it has to be said that there are moments when the activity of thoughtfulness outstrips the explanation found in dimensioned measuring, mathematization and explanatory words. For poetic building to come forward-for measuring through building to happen poetically-the consideration of dwelling must be prime, that is, the type of dwelling which reflects humanity's place on earth and "lets the earth be as earth." (pmd227) "The nature of the dimension is the meting out-which is lightened and so can be spanned-of the between: the upward of the sky as well as the downward of the earth." (pmd220) This is the manner is which the gathering of dwelling happens-when dwelling is thoughtfully poetic, "as taking a measure for all measuring." (pmd227) As poetic building-measuring is described:

"This measure-taking is itself an authentic measure-taking, no mere gauging with ready-made measuring rods for the making of maps. Nor is poetry building in the sense of raising and fitting buildings. But poetry, as the authentic gauging of the dimension of dwelling, is the primal form of building. Poetry first admits man's dwelling into its very nature, its presencing being. Poetry is the original admission of dwelling." (pmd227)

What we begin to see in this is that which we call the real world, that which we take for granted, may not be so straightforward and matter-of-fact after all. Another way-though this one is decidedly non-scientific-is to see the world we encounter as more of our own reshaping, constantly being reformed through our senses-that is through our own whole perceptual experience where the embodied being-that which we all are-in turn shapes how we are in the world. In its own way then this opens us to a potential line of questioning that is the poetic. Another way of naming this is to call it a phenomenal experience of the world, where our perception is mediated by our own bodily consciousness of it where we let things show themselves in their own light. To look at the world phenomenally is to expand our relationship with the world, and to question how we perceive it the way that we do. It's about heightening that perception of the world, to be alive in it, and fully a part of it. This might be understood better if we consider what Robert Irwin has said about experiencing the world in a phenomenological manner. Doing this is simply "the gift of seeing a little more today than you did yesterday." When we thoughtfully regard the phenomena of the world openly and without preconception and presumption, we begin to think about the most basic quality of "things."

When we put these questions before us about how we are in the world we begin to see that our conventional ways of experiencing are, more than anything else, learned. This is what Irwin has realized and what we saw with Galileo, Descartes, and perspectival thinking. They've been handed down to us through history and are little more than cultural constructs that we have forgotten as being so. Moving toward a newly attuned way of looking at things he said:

"I began to see things which are in themselves contradictions to the whole logic of seeing. Since we perceive through a system of reference points that we have been conditioned to believe are real, we allow ourselves small room for expansion. Some things are meaningful and some things are meaningless to you, so actually you have a structured way of looking at the world that means certain things probably are totally invisible." (Artweek, D. Rush, 2/15/'75).

To look at the phenomenal experience means to step back from the mere material explanation of experience and, in doing so, encounter the things of the world through a deeper primal intuition. That is, a more direct experience than science alone allows and it is what Heidegger has described as poetic dwelling. A mathematized world-view is, after all, a second-hand experience of the world which works toward explaining things through concepts and ideas that are removed from the things in themselves, and overlaid by our thinking them into a certain kind of limiting perceptual experience. To open oneself to direct embodied phenomenal experience is to give room for what occurs before our rational experience kicks in. It's to open our senses to the world before we grasp them and re-make them with logical explanation. How do we set aside this way of looking at the things that comprise our world? One way is to not think them into the particular kind of being that we've been referring to as mathematization. That is, by not thinking about them in ways that re-present them into organizing concepts, ideas that make them behave and fit our category of behavior, "as long as we understand measuring only in the sense current for us." Instead let things be as themselves-don't give them conceptualized shape. Instead of re-presenting them, allow them to present themselves, in their full phenomenal possibility. Beginning to experience the world this way-as the builders you are-makes allowance, for a place of poetic work.

Which brings us back to where we were in the beginning as we asked about humanity's enduring dimension of being which now and again must be measured out. In the end we respond to this by understanding that we should be mindful-and thoughtful-about how we frame our perception of the world. In our questioning we are reminded to be ever diligent in our consideration of the nature of measuring, and how when thoughtfully regarded we are altogether involved with the full potential of the world. It's as Irwin described, a "perceptual interaction with the 'phenomena' (of the world) "that calls for us to attend to the pure potential in our (own) circumstances." For Irwin, it is through a fervent regard for the wonder of this world where experience is made the fullest.

I.
What is undeniable about the world is its physicality. More specifically we sensually apprehend the world's physicality; we're in the world because of our own physicality. We perceive its condition as thinking bodies and, as our senses seem intangible and ever changing, it's nonetheless our physicality that is in the world. And just like us who are physical beings, multi-dimensional, the very same is true for the things which we call buildings. They, like us, are real tangible physical things. To experience built works fully, it takes our own physical being which lets us belong to other physical conditions such as buildings. This immersed bodily involvement is practically unique to three-dimensional built work, where the full physical body, moves, sees, touches, hears, and so forth. The involved body is what distinguishes physical experience from other experiences also meant to transport us-reading a book, watching a film, looking at a painting, listening to music. Only dance, theater, and athletics come close to involving the full physical body the way that experiencing a built work does. And then, they are temporal and ceremonial, where involvement with a built environment is lifelong and constant.

The built fabric of the world, as we are speaking of it here, is fashioned by our technological cunning where things of the earth are brought out of it, each measured, gauged, ordered, named, and used by us. We bring things up from the earth, in order to make our place on the earth, in order to find a relationship to it. In this orderly measuring we build verticality. This is the direction in which things are brought up. To be technological means to bring things up out of the earth and build. Those things-those materials-that we gather, we arrange them to fit our needs, extending our own capability. We take minerals from the earth, copper, iron, aluminum, and refine and re-arrange them to suit our needs. We cut down trees, clean them up a bit and re-arrange them into a specific kind of frameworks to make our homes and work places. And in the end, this re-organization, this re-arrangement is accomplished in the image of us, the maker. Through our technological capacity, we re-make the world in our own likeness, yet by likeness, we don't mean that we make things that look like us, sometimes they do of course, but more specifically we make things that look like they'd be used by us-us makers who've remade these things. This is a kind of measuring in its own right.


II.
A built thing, like this building here-we sense it, that is, we see it, touch it, walk through it, live in it, move around it and experience it. As a tangible presence, a thing-like the room that you're in right now-it is more than an idea. To experience the presence of the room requires bodily participation, which is, as it relates to our fully dimensional tangible world, in a constant perceptual act of measuring. Using our senses to touch things in the space, to see them, to smell them means that we are at some level constantly apprehending that space, our animate human form giving us a lived sense of being alive, offering an experiential notion of proximity and distance.

We feel the size of the room before we know it.

This sense of space that we all have is measured out and felt by the whole tactile body and it is quite the opposite from the Cartesian coordinates found in geometry. For it takes our rational intellect to stop and put this lived experience together with the x, y, z coordinates of geometric space to form the most simple observation saying for instance, that this room is twelve feet long by sixteen feet wide and the ceiling is eleven feet above the floor. Rendering space this way is not lived experience, but instead a mathematized reduction that, after-the-fact, responds to what our bodies already know. Consider it another way, our bodies already know before we think about it, that the furniture behind us is not as close to us as to what is immediately before us. Dimensionally, that chair and table that is to our back may indeed be at the very same distance from our body as what is in front of us, but perceptually they're further away than what is at arm's reach directly in front of us. That's because the action of our body in motion as it turns and reaches out to grasp the chair takes time, which is its own kind of space, making what is behind us consequently feel further away. It's the full human body in action, moving about the world that tells us that we're standing upright or sitting down, that some things are far away while others are close at hand. As we move about we don't have to analyze and rationally grasp our surroundings, we don't even need to be conscious of their measured conditions, our bodies are constantly doing this for us, without our "thinking" about it at all. Our sensate forms, give us the direction we need for moving forward or backward, stepping to one side or the other, reaching out into enlivened perceptual experience, which is, all in all, entirely unattached to geometric space. Our feeling bodies reach out to experience the room in a way that it becomes an extension of our immediate experience. We are attached to the place of the room we're in, sensing it and responding to it, as a built room-thing. It's this way that we become part of that room, and it, in turn, becomes part of us. For each of us, the body measures itself in agreement to its world.

Using the table and chair as example again, this time suppose that we're on the other side of the room some distance from the chair we just spoke of. In wanting to sit down in it and relax, we begin moving toward it. Yet that space that we cross is not a distance in the way we think of it in geometric terms, rather it becomes a tension that occurs between the chair and us. It's our exertion and the duration that we experience in order to reach it. We gauge that distance in an embodied way that is involved with the chair. In our need for relaxation, we are not responding to it, but rather in the world with it. And, it's because of this as we move toward the chair that analytical distance and geometric measuring is not something we're involved with at all. That is, unless we stop and think it. For when we are immersed in the things of the world, just as we were in moving toward the chair, distance between that object and us disappears. It's only when we conceive of ourselves conceiving that we step back and think geometric distance. In fact, when we are involved with things this way we are not conscious of them as objects before us. In standing ready in their use, they offer themselves in as background. In sitting before the table and writing we are indeed involved with the table. We rely on it; we are resting much of our weight against it, as it holds the paper before us, making our task of writing comfortable. It is just the right height to make us at ease and relaxed, strong enough to support our needs. Yet in going about our daily lives we likely don't give much thought to the table's gift of extending our own bodily capacity. It simply slips into the background of our lives. It's only when this table fails to perform this way that we become conscious of it. We all know how it feels to sit before a table where one of the legs seems a bit shorter, making it out of balance and moving as we shift our body weight. We all run to find a piece of cardboard, to fold it just so that the table is once again balanced causing us no inconvenience and slipping back into its pre-conscious condition of attending to our needs. Our whole perceptual world is enveloped in this pre-conscious action with things. Merleau-Ponty expresses these kinds of experiences that we all have daily this way:

"What counts for the orientation of the spectacle is not my body as it is in fact is, as a thing in objective space, but as a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal 'place' defined by its task and situation. My body is wherever there is something to be done." (pop250)

This enlivened, acting body that makes its own place as well makes its own measuring. Action is measurement of it's own kind, just as duration is as well. Our physical form places us in the world among the many other physical things that are there, and as being physically attached this way, our bodies gauge and measure that experience of living. The world of the real and our presence in it this way sure enough comprises what we call reality. But our physical presence here is not all that makes us perceptive beings. For it's through our thinking and thoughtfulness that we perceive, measure and re-shape our world. Yet in calling the body we inhabit physical means much more than just another substantial thing, as the table that we're sitting before right now. For, although we're physical creatures, with weight, girth, and substance, our bodies are never wholly present and self-contained like this table here that we are before. That's because we think and that thinking transports us. While this body may sit here, as a distinct tangible presence, it may effortlessly and simultaneously be somewhere else. This body, as a reflective and imaging being, moves around in its own kind of non-spaced space.

For all our fleshiness, we are in fundamental ways non-dimensional -- or perhaps more appropriately omni-dimensional. In it's self-reflection, in attempting to grasp itself as a "thing" in this world, the body is incapable of encompassing its own complete presence. It never even fully closes in on itself. That's because this body is forever reflecting on its past or peering into its future. This perception, this awareness -- that makes this body apparent to us -- is not, in the strictest sense, there with that body. It's in a kind of non-presence outside its strict physicality. Just try to locate the source of your own perception. In this ever re-shaped domain -- with what we perceive to be the capacity to feel and experience -- the body isn't fixed in any place at a given moment. As a locale for possibility, this reflective entity -- this body -- sees itself reflected everywhere -- first in other live sensate bodies like itself, and second in the objects that these bodies, in the collective sense, have made. In its reflecting on the world, the physical human body acts as a conduit which permits what is made-up inside to be brought forth and made-real outside. What's made in the mind is remade in the world. For what we build into a real physical presence begins initially as a non-dimensional idea. In making ideas into things we've connected the physicality of the body back to our own perception, which, in turn, becomes aware of itself. The mind makes sense of the body, our self-awareness seeing itself re-presented in the very act and fabric of building. It's in this reflective way that building grants us an image of that body, through our built things we re-cognize who we are. Our senses, our eyes, ears, touch, and so forth completely shape our thinking about the conditions of the world, our experience of the world through our own perception. Our perception of this physical world is what grounds us in that world and leads to our own self-perception, about our own being in that world.

In thinking how we perceive the world this way as it relates to the human form, we might consider some specific relationships of measuring that support this. As example, when we were young we were taught the relationship of measurement and how measuring related to the human body for, as children, we compared the length of our index finger from its outermost joint to the mid-joint and found that it approximated a distance that represented an inch. We also learned the measurement for our unit of twelve of those inches originated from some medieval English king's foot length. And if we read the Hebrew Testament we discovered that God also measures according to man, in cubits: (the length of a person's forearm from the elbow to the end of his outstretched fingers). In just this way God described to Noah how the ark was to be built, in relationship to the human body: "the length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height thirty cubits." Measurement based on the human form has provided a relative sense of our being in the world, as being a part of it. And though, not very accurate, this form of comparison has nonetheless provided us with our primary basis for linear measurement in a three-dimensional world granting us things as exacting as world exploration, most of what we know as great world architecture, and space shuttles.

Learning the relationship of measurement to the human body at an early age like this, we some time later were also introduced to the metric system of weights and measurements. As we learned, this was another form of measurement planned and implemented in eighteenth century France and was based on the dimensionality of our planet. That's because the meter was originally intended to be 1/10,000,000th of the distance of the earth's surface between the equator its poles. Though still based on a physical condition -- our earth's surface -- the metric system no longer depended on human form. Likewise, the gram was based on a non-human physicality, a mass of pure water that, at maximum density, filled a small cube measuring 0.01 meters in each direction. This system of measuring metrically is indeed less arbitrary than the English system, but it's still relative to something physical in our world.

As we became familiar with the metric system, we also learned about light-years. With the marrying of space and time through relativity we needed to find a new form of measurement that calculated immense distances. Light-years allowed us this extremely large way of measuring things, which as we know is based upon the fastest thing in the universe, the speed of light at 186,000 mi./sec., and how far that beam/particle of light traveled in one year's time. Again we have a relationship of measurement to something we already know, our earth year which is 365.25 days. Each of these three systems is relative to something that we are familiar with. First the physicality of the human body which we are all intimately familiar. And then there is the earth that we're dependent on, but the distance from the equator to the pole is a bit more difficult to grasp. We know it through the time it takes to travel its distance or by looking at it abstractly on maps and space photographs. But we can't take it in as a whole in a way that directly regards our physical form, not as a immediate way of perceiving distance. The speed of light based on a year's length is something we also relate to, even though it's now almost entirely abstract to us. The enormous distance that a light-year marks out is beyond the grasp of most. We try to relate to it by relative comparisons that more fit our own physical statue, for instance a marble that represents the sun is placed twelve miles from the local mall, this distance being relative to a quarter of a light-year and so forth.

Yet even as our way of perceiving the world has become increasingly abstract, there are nonetheless all around us multitudes of conditions that still relate to and remind us of our own human form. That's because when we build things we have ourselves in mind, and whether conscious of it or not, we do it in a manner that relates to us, that is to our own physical measurement. It's in this way that we take an accounting of the world in the way it compares to us. Comparison makes sense of things for us. It organizes things into specific systems, one that permits us accessibility. This re-configuration of natural things into human-made accessibility sets up an increased level of accuracy, one that produces results, and one that permits an accountability of the world.

In looking at our capacity for making as we have been here, we've touched on four considerations, each building upon this sense of being at home in the world. 1) The physical body organizes, structures, and informs the things that we make. 2) These made things in our world extend our physical capacity, as regards our need. 3) These made things respond to this call in a kind of kinship or likeness to us, making the world a familiar place. 4) These conditions that we initially shaped have, in turn, fashioned our perception of the world, consequently us.

Now where does this all lead us? In the end it's focused on an attuned perception of our surroundings, about fully and deeply experiencing the world that we're all in and part of. For, in becoming keener observers, we begin to appreciate more the importance of making and how it offers us this placement in the world. If we're sincere in exploring this, it might even challenge some of our own preconceptions of made things. Each of us, as makers -- as makers of tangible whole physical things -- in our case buildings, as places for others to inhabit, ought to consider the larger experience of being in the world, and how we, the makers are, in turn, shaped by it. And, likewise we should be aware of the significance that this sort of reflection has as we offer our built things to others. It is these connecting aspects of reaching out through making that need to be kept at the forefront, the experiential condition of these things that others gain from our abilities and talent. And, in turn this offer us our own grounding, gather together for us a sense of our own being, each of us as temporal beings, here in the flesh, for a time. We, as human beings, as makers -- the particular things that we make here named architecture -- might consider our making as that which gives dimensionality to our experience of being in the world, as a kind of perceptive consideration of things that have the capability to get us closer to our own presence in the world. To stop and stay awhile with these concerns, nurturing a certain kind of perception that allows us to become intimate with what we make, in such a way that that sort of making gathers the things of our world to give us a sense of our own relationship to it. Through this way of looking at building, we'll begin to see that our made things are more about pondering our own being, than about what is made.


III.
Thinking back to visual dominance and a world-view that weighs everything through measurement and comparison, Merleau-Ponty considers human sight "embodied vision that is an incarnate part of the world" -- what he calls the "fleshiness of the world." He describes this as: "our body is both an object among objects and that which sees and touches them." We are in the world as full physical bodies and cannot stand outside of it as a neutral visual observer grasping things from a distance with our vision. We are a part of the world, and it is a part of us. Merleau-Ponty devoted most of his thinking human perception, focusing mostly on vision. He makes the human body the focus of the experiential world: "We choose our world through our bodies as living creatures on intentionality, and that is how the world chooses us." he passionately argues.

"Our body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system."

All experience is integrated through the physical human form. This self-realization of one's own physical being and its experience are transformed into the whole -- that which is reality. To think of the way Merleau-Ponty has described it, we say that this corporeal entity that we all possess is thinking, feeling human form and the eye is just one sense organ among the others we all have. It determines our very perception of the world and is the only vehicle available to us to experience the physical world. Its ability to move defines limits and makes its own kind of measurement. Within its limitations, such as they are, it's the perceptive human body which is the original standard by which all else is regarded. Merleau-Ponty continues this line of thought by saying that:

"my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.... (Things) are incrusted in its (the body's) flesh, they are a part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body."

The perceptive human body takes in the world through all of its senses, moving through it, forever becoming part of it, making it the beginning point by which we make all our comparison. This is a pivotal point to consider when we think about how we are in the world. For when we say that what we have knowledge of in the world is, to one degree or another, obtained through our own physical presence -- though comparison to it -- then the perceptive human body shifts focus from a relationship gathered by the thinking rational mind, to one that relies more on the physicality of the human being itself -- that is the whole physical human being and not just the rational thinking mind of us humans. Experience, as it actually occurs, can't be isolated and given separate meaning outside the context in which it's experienced. It's only afterward, that we abstract, isolate, and rationalize experience -- through thinking. This involves the whole sensate physical human body, a fully perceptive being. And this leaves someone like Descartes far behind, for he was unable to trust his own sensate perceptions, except as they could be reduced by the purity of geometry and mathematics, and abstract idea. The effect that his complete perception might have had on things was simply out of the question, for a relationship like that would not have been reducible or calculable in the terms he conceived the world. Which stands in contrast to the fact that we are made of the same stuff as the world.

Our transference of exactitude, between measuring and the thing that we measure, sets up a relationship between building and knowing. That is, between the physicality of the body in its act of building, and its inseparable companion the mind, our ingenious engine that so easily grasps what it is that its carnal body senses. Our minds and our bodies are employed to unbind the natural materials that go into making our built thing and organizing then into specific arrangements. This unbinding which is achieved through measuring -- becomes itself, in turn, a thing of measurement. That is, a thing by which we -- our seeing bodies and mind -- are measured.

As corporeal beings we shape other things in ways that are constant with our being. Our activity on the earth as builders cause us to build; we as material things making other material things full of their own form, texture, smell, and structure, each standing on their own as things in the world. In this way, our built works are first of all things, resonating in their own distinct and tangible materiality. These things in their own self-showing open up worlds, and in so doing attach us to the world. As such, these things that we make are never neutral and uninvolved with the way we are; we find our location in the world through these things that we have put in it. Because of this, these self-standing works do much more than merely serve our needs by protecting and assisting us as we daily go about our lives. More significantly, they stand ready to offer us self-reflection; their palpable quality poised in their own constancy, making for us a material document wholly wrapped up in the reality of human constructing.

To acknowledge this fundamental kinship, means to expand our potential; not only as builders but as human beings who are on the earth, and a part of it. Through building we come to understand ourselves. That's because the materiality of constructing has the potential to describe how we are; and in doing so, to open us to a deep and steady inquiry, responding to and embracing our very being. This is the most crucial condition within the activity of building-thinking, for it opens up a space for reflection. Reflectively responding to our built things lets us avoid indifference that is crucially important, for standing against not-feeling makes explicit the impact that the world has upon the heart. Whether mindful of it or not, all of us who build do so in large part so that we may come closer to the sharp intensity of that which surrounds us -- the realness of the world.

As we've already stated Merleau-Ponty describes this intertwined alliance with the world as depending, not just on these things that we make but as well, upon our own materiality but being fully caught up in the world as a thing among things. We know the materiality of things only because of our own physicality. Because of our tangible physicality, we are inextricably a part of, and dependent on this earth, forever wedded to it. Yet, while our bodies attach us to the earth, our thinking that makes its own world inevitably stands outside this pure raw physicality. So, what we conceive about things is beyond the tangible, outside the earth. In other words, what we think about things remains extra-terrestrial, and consequently distinct from the earth. Yet, it's always the physical human body that acts as the conduit to bring us back, to ground us, enabling us to transfer what was "in-there" to the "out-here." Our own corporeal materiality brings what was merely an idea into the fullness of material presence. Because of this, the living palpable human being is put into the world, not outside it as distinct, but in accord with it. Within this freedom, the perceptive human is no longer the original standard by which all else is regarded, but instead "a thing among things." As such, we don't lose significance we gain association. In other words, we have the potential to find our place in the world through reflectively responding to the built physicality of all that encircles our lives. Everywhere we turn the opportunity awaits us; us and things coequal and co-responsive. As example, think about something as unassuming as a simple screened door. This door was built to make our passage through the world as agreeable as possible. It is there to assist us in our need. This can't be disputed. Yet as a material thing it responds to more than just this functional capability. It offers us something about ourselves, the manner in which it gives of itself. The door is a gift that is in accord with our presence in the world. When standing before this screened door, we understand that we must have certain deftness, since someone like us was able to make such a thing in the first place. The door as a humanmade thing tells us that our bodies are agile enough; that our hands and muscles have the right amount of dexterity and strength to shape and form such a work. The same screened door also reveals that we must be capable of moving about; that we are mobile; our passing through the world exemplified there in the existence of the screened door. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to move through things like walls that the door is a part of. Which, in turn lets us know that we must be solid. Since in its being a door -- an opening -- it immediately discloses that we're unable to pass through other solid forms -- like walls for instance. To move through certain conditions of the world, we require the openness that a door affords. That's why we make things like doors in the first place.

The shape of the door likewise proclaims that we're connected to the world vertically; the door's shape oriented uprightly informs us that we too stand erect as we move through the world. Through the same screened door we also come to understand that our bodies need protecting; refuge and relief from the many kinds of pesky flying insects that would make a meal of us on a hot summer afternoon. Similarly, the door announces that we desire the cooling breeze that it allows into our home. As we continue to reflect on the screened door this way, we also take note of the location and shape of the simple cast-iron handle, and the fact that the door has hinges. On reaching out for the handle, we immediately understand that some part of our body grasps and makes a particular kind of movement -- a pulling or a pushing -- as is necessary to open and close this door. The handle and hinges in being capable this way offer themselves according to our desire.

These same hinges and handle also attach us to greater conditions of world, reminding us that through our own physicality we're able to draw ore from the earth; to fire it at very high temperatures and refine it; and then to forge it into a shape that suits our hand. There is also the screen-cloth that makes up most of the surface of the door. In its gentle intricateness it lets us know that we make sophisticated and complex machines, able to produce such gossamer things. As we run our hands over the pithy worn wood that is the door's stile and rail, we delight in its hue and softness of touch. And we could go on in describing the kinship that we find in the door. But with what we've already said, we see the many ways that the door offers itself to us, recounting that our bodies are solid and mobile, fragile and temporal; that we need its relaxing breezes; and that we want the protection of its guardianship.

Yet this is not all that a built thing like this screened door offers. As a material reminder of our own physical relationship to the world, the door simultaneously tells us that we are not alone, that there are others like us. Whenever we experience something like this screened door through our living, feeling, thinking bodies, we're expressing half of a reciprocal condition that involves someone else, when it was built by another's hands, muscles and mind. As such, the door stands as a material expression; the work of that predecessor who gave some part of himself for what is now before us, as door. As a material thing, the screened door is a testament of that person's presence and effort, now reaching out on our behalf today. Through making something like that door there, the body is enlivened twice. First, there was the builder's, whose own eyes saw the maker's making. His hands guided the tools, feeling the work coming together as he handled what was being fabricated; he smelled the aromatic sweetness of the pine, the acrid smell of the oak as his saw blade cut smoothly through the wood. His ears heard the solidity of the material as he carefully tapped the thin pieces of the frame together. The builder's whole body experienced the materiality of his making -- as he originally brought his handiwork together. That previous experience, in turn, now offers to us, the work standing as testimony after the builder had done his best. Our bodies -- like his was earlier -- are now inspirited, as we experience the work in our own way. Through the door, we discover not only a great deal about ourselves but, as well, something important about those who caused the work to be in the first place. This effect of the builder's work this way -- though anonymous -- has a long life, as the work of the door is given over to others. It's this double activity brought about through the materiality of building that instructs us about our own presence in the world. In their unison of purpose, each complement and propel us forward, as the door moves deeper and deeper into making for us a world.

Through something like this door, we sense ourselves embedded in what we have made. While our own capability shapes what this built thing is, its materiality likewise defines our own being. We come to know ourselves through things like screened doors. It puts us in touch with the way that we are in the world. By thoughtfully considering things like this screened door, we're reaching out into the world, to experience it in its fullest. Each time we do so, we're considering the human stamp found upon every simple made thing. Reaching outward to build simultaneously turns inward to offer something about ourselves. As sentient entities who organize, structure, and inform the things that we make, we build because of our deep-seated need to be at home in our world. In making a location for ourselves -- we measure ourselves in accord with those things, obtaining a reference of our own self-standing.

How we build materially, is how we perceive the world. Building connects the body (both the individual physical being and, as well, the collective body of humanity) to consciousness. To be immersed in a built thing means to be immersed in a reflection of our own being. Through our built things, we find not only resemblance we discover mutual standing. Through a work's self-standing, empathy is discovered. Through sensing the realness of something as mundane as our screened door, we begin to experience how it is that we re-mold the materiality of the world in our likeness, consequently re-making the world like us; not as standing apart but as standing together. Being caught up in built things means being involved in an inquiry about ourselves. Through the materiality of our built things we find a response to the way that we are in that world. This is, in the end, the significance of measuring, that which is our own self-measurement. Through the many built things that we build, we measure the relationship between the world and ourselves. This relationship of measuring becomes what, for us, defines those things of the world. We organize our self-conception through this specific relationship to the things of the world.

I.
All around us are regions. There is the region of the Middle East we now hear about daily. There is the farming region of China, the upper region of India, the desert region of Africa. In our own country there is the northwest region, the east and the region we call home -- the South. In our locale we differentiate even more distinct regions, the Cajun country of Louisiana, the Mississippi Delta, and the Pine Belt of Alabama just to name a few. We distinguish these regions for a variety of reasons, each having their own individual flavor, geographic quality, food, climate and the like. Each regionalist takes satisfaction in what makes their locale unique, as they lament the ever-increasing loss of what makes one different from another.  All around us are regions, in every direction we turn. And while we may call one particular place home, each of us simultaneously belongs to the world on a planetary scale. Through the electronic media we have instantaneous connection to events that happen all around the world. As this ever-present stream of information bombards us, we are overwhelmed by mind-numbing commodification and the mass-produced sameness of transnational corporations. Their tantalizing fragments of commerce, stripped of identity and drained of any real meaning, follow us to the corners of the earth; these disconnected parts have no background, no deep grounding. Yet, out of these we are left to construct our identities, in an attempt to find our place.

In this universal civilization we find ourselves immersed in these two simultaneous conditions: our physical locale that we inhabit at a given time -- the physical tangible presence -- and the global community that we never leave -- the non-physical and non-present -- our world of global information. It is this dual climate that we are focusing on here, through the regionalism of built works. And so, the question is asked: Is critical regionalism pertinent in an increasingly connected and global community?
In formulating a response we might begin with the critical as applied to the regional. In doing that we could conventionally look for the distinctive characteristics of the region's buildings: we would seek identifying characteristics of those built works, looking at their parts and cataloguing them, seeing how they respond to the local climatic conditions, the technological capability of the culture and the found materials of the locale. Through our analysis we'd establish that, because they are of their locale, they resist the leveling effects of globalization.

But to understand the deeper significance of regionalism in our global community we might dig further to find out just what the foundation of regionalism is. That word "regionalism," as it attaches itself to the critical and the global community, weighs heavily in architectural conversation; often we architects attach ourselves to meaning through words rather than the built work itself. So, before we jump into an undertaking to discover the ground of built works through critical regionalism, we might begin with the words we use and consider how they frame meaning for us in what is built. For when we begin with words this way, we often find that they both reveal something new to us while, at the same time, concealing something within them.

On the surface, the word "regionalism" has two parts: "regional" + "ism." That, which is "regional" we are told, infers an area of considerable extent, more than the merely local. A community is not a region, neither is a town or city; a region encompasses more, both physically and culturally. "Region" finds its birth in the Latin word "regio" -- direction, line and boundary. It is equivalent to "reg(ere)"  meaning "to rule." The prefix "reg" gives us words like regiment, an organized group for the purpose of rigid or complete control. And "ism" means a distinctive doctrine, theory, system or practice. As a suffix, it's part of many words and is used to denote, among other things, principles and doctrines.

And so, we find in "region" something that points to the distinctly physical -- a place, a particular area with somewhat defined boundaries. This is no surprise for we think of regions in terms of physical places. And in "ism" we find the theoretical, that which is idea. Ideas, of course, are not things; they're absent of physicality. In this, if we think about it, we find the absence of place, since ideas are non-present. And so within the confines of regionalism, "ism" reorients the physicality of place, transforming it to mean the "idea" of place. Now, an idea of a place is frequently quite different from the place itself; in fact an idea of something is significantly different from the thing in itself. That's because ideas layer all sorts of conditions onto places and things. Cultural ideas, political ideas, tribal ideas, there are all kinds of ideas embedded in things like regions. And, these ideas are never neutral, they're forever modifying what it is we experience, their overlay concealing the real of the world. So, in regionalism we have both presence and non-presence, each pulling at the other, looking for a sure footing, both in tension but both dependent on each other at the same time.

In this push and pull of place and idea a site emerges where building takes place. The site emerges because of a building; a region inevitably emerges through building. Instead of buildings being defined by a region, the inverse is true. Region is experienced through the built work. A building does not come to a region to be absorbed by it -- to be consumed in regionalism. Rather the reverse is more correct; building makes the region and brings to light what it is. Region becomes this place where things are revealed. Because of the thing and action of a built work the region is where all that is comes together.

This is worth carefully considering further since it inverts the typical building/regional relationship. While there are regions before the act of building, we don't simply come to a region with everything already shown to us. Instead, we discover it through what is built. This work of building causes the region to emerge, to reveal itself anew. Rather than impose on the already-there conditions of the region, a thoughtfully built work exposes them, showing them for what they are. In this way, region emerges through building and is released into its own nature. What this shows us is that a built work's foundation is building itself and not the cultural climate in which it is built. Before regionalism there is building. Building is the ground and conduit that connects us with the world.

Building sets off a power that penetrates all that is around. This strength lets what is all around be seen in its own light. In this way, site emerges through building and is released into the world. In this unfolding, the region of building becomes the place where everything comes together, the location where things are concentrated. Through building we are shown who we are, how we are in the world.


II.
Playing off the etymological tactic we took with regionalism, we can also see that building is both a noun and a verb. Building is a thing, and it is an activity. Building is that which brings about buildings in the first place -- a building always has as its source building. In this way everything built is related to building. This is the constancy of building as it shines through its own self-showing, as the built-ness of things -- in stasis, yet always moving. 

In formulating a response to the validity of critical regionalism in a global environment, we begin to see that building is the foundation on which a region is made. So, we would do well to focus on, what it means to build in the first place. In looking for meaning, we should consider the source of a built thing. For when we do, we're apt to discover a deeper foundation, the underpinning of building itself.

Conventionally, we tend to consider the activity of building as a process, as producing results for a prescribed and predictable end: shelter. We build because we are physical beings who need other physical things to protect and extend our capacity as human beings. We clearly understand that our bodies alone don't keep us from the harshness of the cold, the chill of the rain, the hot summer sun. This is so obvious it hardly need saying; we build because of need. When thought of this way, sheltering inevitably produces results that provide us with an outside and an inside. There is shelter on the inside of what we've built and there is wilderness (wildness) on the outside that we're protected from. This sort of conventional building embraces the output of shelter, enclosing space to make a haven for habitation. When we build this way we're concentrating how a built work fits its need, how efficient it is, how long it will last, how readily available or convenient it might be. We similarly measure building's beauty, popularity, and the respect it garners from our fellow builders. Each of these in themselves might be regarded as important.

And without a doubt, each go toward making habitable shelter, a sure end that produces a stable finished structure. When we build this way we're at the center of these built things. Whether they are buildings or bubble gum, we conventionally set ourselves as the focal point of all made things, to transform the world from one that is indifferent to us to one that acknowledges how we are.

And likewise, when we attend to the local culture so that it is reflected in the built work, we believe we are responding correctly so that the building resists the loss of locale. Responding under the banner of regionalism, we utilize the materials at hand and the locally available technologies so that we manifest the cultural and climatic conditions of the region. When we attend to building this way, we gain confidence we're making a new work that will be appropriate for its time. And of course, none of this can be argued. Yet if we are thoughtful and genuinely critical, we might begin to see the limiting and abstract character of a conventionally built work based on producing habitable space. For production is self-referential and closed, in that it distinguishes us humans while using up that which is the earth rather than taking it in to enhance and preserve. And likewise we might also see the inherent shortcoming when we consider regionalism as a quantitative condition when it sets boundaries between one particular place and another. To be critical of these characteristics implicitly concealed in production and regionalism is to be critical of separation brought about through reducing the world to abstraction of thought -- the "ism" of regionalism.

Finding shortcoming in thinking regionally does not in any way eschew diversity. Rather, just the opposite, for diversity can be readily maintained by means that don't require setting one condition against another. To achieve the greatest degree of diversity possible, we might begin to reflect on how we are all in the world through the constancy of our built things, how we are wholly interconnected with those things and through them how we are intertwined with everything that is. Adopting this viewpoint, we'll begin to shift our focus from thinking in parts to thinking of the whole. When we do this the world begins to expand and we experience the interconnectedness of the local with the global, the individual with the entirety. This might begin simply by thinking of ourselves as "earthlings" rather than humans consumed by humanistic concerns.

A better way perhaps to describe this is through an ancient account, Indra's Net from the Avatamsaka Sutra. Imagine Indra's Net as an infinitely large network where, at each intersection, we find a multi-faceted, light-reflecting jewel. (We can think of this jewel as our world's phenomena, each thing or entity. Or, in our case specifically, we can think of each jewel as a built work.) In each facet of each jewel we see the reflection of the other jewels in the net so that, as we look deeper at each facet, we find more reflections of more jewels, ad infinitum. We should remind ourselves however that what we see in each jewel is a reflection of the others, which consequently means that each jewel's nature is a reflection of all the others. We find no sustaining self-nature in any individual jewel, just reflections of the others. Yet, each jewel does indeed exist as a separate entity, how else could it be able to reflect the others; each as separate and all together, existing in mutual relationship. Indra's Net describes our interconnected condition of the world as we might discover in each built thing we encounter. Seeing the universe in every grain of sand or thinking locally and acting globally are other ways of saying the same thing. What's being described here is that this intertwined condition of the world can be seen in everything we experience, and that includes what we build. This is important to understand for it opens us to a broader experience of what we build and makes us better builders as an outcome.

This interdependent relationship replaces the ideological with the phenomenological. It's another way of describing how the local coexists and is dependent with the global, where both are intertwined and interconnected. In other words, there is no regional without the global and vice versa. Nothing can be thought of in isolation, but rather should be seen as interconnected. Even the most humble rain puddle in the back lawn is dependent of our planetary weather system, to one degree or another. And that rain puddle even affects the planet's weather, only if in the tiniest way imaginable.

An inclusive outlook that sees the interconnection of things links us to the characteristics of a particular place and the whole world simultaneously. Through that, we begin to see that every built condition inherently has not only the particularity of locale but the totality of everything within its province. In this light then, a place of habitation no longer is just an enclosure surrounded by space, but rather a gathering together where every individual thing is seen as part of the whole. In considering it this way, the relationships we set up when distinguishing things are irrevocably called into question; the separation of solid and void, enclosed and exposed, inside and outside, human and nature become meaningless. We find the richest diversity possible in every single thing we encounter without the need to separate the parts from the whole. The integrity and resonance of the world unfolds before us.

Through opening onto the world this way we discover this interconnecting field of constancy embedded in our built things and how it holds the world into unity, making it discernible and familiar and in precise accord with our experience of that world. This constancy of building is the heart and marrow of our world, the glue of first-hand fully-lived experience. We are not just guided by this domain of constancy; we're possessed by it. Yet, not only does this condition of constancy bind together and make visible a thing's substance and shape, texture and color, and the space that it surrounds. As importantly, it gives a thing its reflection and shadow; it gives rise to the tension and pressure it layers onto the surrounding world. This all goes toward the topography of holding-together, where our built things make their own presence and define ours. This interconnected condition is the constancy of building itself.

Building is fundamentally the way we are in the world. Through our capacity as makers, it is what we make that defines us as humans. We find our way in the world through our built things through the constancy of building as the foreground of our being. Building defines our being. The source of building then is building itself. It prefigures any concern for a place or an idea of a place.

And so, in our critical thinking about building we're beginning to see that it encompasses every dimension of our presence in the world. Building is omni-dimensional. Building makes a clearing so that our made things offer us a measure of the world, where built things generate worlds.

This then is where we are brought to in thinking about building within the framework of regionalism. From its restricting condition where we began, we've discovered that the foundation of building is the interconnected whole of the earth. As physical beings -- as earth's consciousness -- we have this capacity for reflection. And we can call this inclusive way of looking at how we build reflective building. Reflective building takes into account our place in the world, how it is that we are intertwined with the earth, and what it means to be this way. Reflective building makes room for openness, where a built work stands in its own self-showing. Reflective building holds to its own so that a degree of mystery is maintained, so that the poetry in the work can come forward. Building reflectively clears the way for a belonging to the world as it gratefully accepts the earth as its ground and lets us recognize building as interacting within the interconnected whole. 

III.
Reflective building acts in one accord, as an affirmation of our being in the world. When regarded like this reflective building represents nothing, but simply is. Building in itself then is a reflection on its own, the kind of reflection that lets something show forth. That showing forth in its own light, is not from the outside but rather that which shows from within, this inner showing is inherent in the phenomenon of a thing. Phenomenon, at its deepest level means that which shows itself. This certainly doesn't require a new concept of things, only that we become aware of our surroundings and experience them first-hand for what they are, not relying on conceptual underpinning but seeing things in themselves and their interrelatedness. A thing -- all things -- manifest themselves through our presence and experience, meaning we are the watch-keepers of the world's presence, which allows us to come close to the possibility inherent in the world. This is our deepest responsibility as thoughtful builders.

It can be said, sometimes we simply think too much. Instead of conceptualizing, rely on the at-hand conditions where the building is taking place, using our senses instead of our minds to make determinations. If we awaken to what is all around and openly see what is before us -- through firsthand thoughtful reflection -- then there is no need to concern ourselves whether we're acting regionally. Any self-conscious interest in this manner simply dries up. There is no need for even the question to arise, whether there is validity to be found in critical regionalism or not. For when we find ourselves acting in accord with our firsthand experience of what is, concerns like regionalism quickly fall away.

If we shift our perspective this way with open eyes appropriateness will inevitably occur. The important term here is inevitable. The goal is to be awake and alive to what the world offers, to witness it with open curiosity and respect. Without the necessity of being self-conscious and referential to what was thought beforehand, an appropriate work will inevitably emerge on its own accord. The work will be grounded in its own authenticity rather than any cultural or conceptual reference.

I suppose another way of saying this is, if we accept this way of seeing things then we're replacing critical regionalism with critical holism. Talk of holism of course means the whole biotic community where the focus is shifted from the humanistic -- that is, our self-consciousness as the privileged species. And talk of being critical within the framework of holism means opening our eyes to the bigger picture, formulating positions that reach beyond strictly human concerns, where seeing what we do has an effect that ripples through the world with consequences greater that what we immediately see. Yet critical holism, if we recall what was said earlier, is just another "ism," and it runs the risk of sending us into the same quagmire as any conceptual construct. The message here is simple, wake up to the world and respond to it with honesty and integrity. Reflect thoughtfully on your first-hand experience, be careful regarding the consequences of your actions and make your decisions accordingly. This is more than relying on your intersubjectivity; it is an ontological commitment, a way of being in the world that reaches beyond your immediate concerns and locale.

Reflective building easily sidesteps the defense that critical regionalism is necessary to resist the leveling effects of globalization. That's because the tension between regional and "ism" -- between place and idea of place -- alluded to in the beginning is resolved when we see the interconnected whole in every thing we encounter. That is, the "ism" -- the cultural overlay manifested through our ideas of things -- becomes secondary to our first-hand experience of things as we regard them as part of the whole. Experience based on what is at hand in things themselves of course requires a knowledgeable basis, a deep understanding of our interconnected relationship with the world, an awareness of what we're doing and how we're being responsible of our actions. Things as ordinary as knowing where our drinking water comes from and how it's treated before it ends up in our glass; asking about the materials that we choose to build with, how and where they come from; being concerned with the kinds of energy our buildings use and how they impact the environment. These become fundamentally important questions that stand side by side with other high-minded cultural considerations embedded in tectonics, context, and the like.

When we see everything in the one then we see no division but rather the diversity of the world in every single thing we experience. When the world is more fully received this way, we acknowledge the physicality of the earth as our foundation for building; we're given the full-lived experience of being in the world.  Relying on things themselves and not our ideas of things offers us a richer, deeper experience of being which, in the end goes to make us more attuned and more responsive to how it is we go about building buildings.

In 1969 Buckminister Fuller calculated that each of the then four billion humans on the planet possessed around two hundred billion tons of earth's resources, and this didn't even include the immense quantity of solar energy bombarding our earth every moment. By 2025 with a predicted world population doubling the 1969 count, each resident's sum of resources will dwindle by half. And this statistic doesn't even recognize the needs of all the other beings on earth, from the enormity of bacteria covering the planet to our closest kin, the fellow mammals. Nonetheless, one hundred billion tons of resources per human is still an unfathomable amount. In its abundance, and if we're the slightest bit clever, what we have is more than we can ever use. But only if those assets get distributed and if they're sustained; that is key to the earth's continued survival.

As a species we've spent most of our existence calculating the world's goods just this way, under pressure to endure. Our first habitat -- the wilderness -- was perilous, uncompromisingly life-threatening; it was where we struggled life-long. The very concept of topos as "idea of place" was conceived as a clearing in those hostile wilds. Eventually, if not vanquished, wilderness was at least domesticated to make our home for countless generations, clearing spaces and using earth's resources.

Our age-old thrust into the future has been, and continues to be, driven by the technological. Certainly in western culture technological progress has been the vehicle propelling us head-over-heels into the what-is-to-come. Progress founded on the techno-scientific assumes its own propriety; its capacity to better our lives is its own self-fulfilling prophecy. How would progress be otherwise?

Yet progress has challenged our time-proven way of carving out space for ourselves. The "idea" of place -- topos -- in many ways seems outmoded. Not because nature has been bested, not by any means, rather it's simply that physical location -- place -- is less essential in a technological culture. With ever-increasing ease we traverse the planet, we thrive almost anywhere we choose. Worldwide economics, increased mobility, intensified dependence on dwindling resources, and amplified demographic change have had an astounding impact on our stressed global community. Electronic media makes any place -- all places -- immediately accessible and instantly available. Place is anywhere that's reached by technology; the ancient polis replaced by electronic "no" place. Our current cultural milieu no longer requires attachment to the physicality of the world; the need to put down roots in fertile soil and call that place home seems short-circuited. Our proverbial clearing in the wilderness where our predecessors gathered to form community has been superseded.

But this will soon be outmoded too. Not long ago Marvin Minsky, one of the founding developers of AI and part of the Media lab at MIT, spoke about his work of creating virtual worlds. One of his forecasts about our future portrayed a fabricated electronic environment, a complete alter-reality all its own. As part of what he'd been developing, Minsky with great pride and optimism described a time not far off, seven generations or so according to his timetable, when we'd have the capability of transferring our consciousness' completely into that electronic virtual world. Once there, it would appear just as real as our own. Our physical world he points out is an insecure place; it's being systematically depleted, full of ever-deteriorating physical things including ourselves who are also burdened by our own temporal condition. His "new" reality, Minsky argues, will be more exciting than the dangerous, calamitous place we currently call home. Minsky would certainly want to be one of those who'd opt for a life in this brave new virtual world. With evangelistic fervor he says we'd all be fortunate for the opportunity to leave our real world behind and he's convinced we'll all want to be there, that is, almost all of us. For he does acknowledge there will still be a few unwilling stragglers, those hesitant to exchange their physical bodies for a new electronic one, these he calls primitives. While we may be incredulous about such a prediction, most would nonetheless agree that with all the remarkable technological advances we've experienced in the last fifty years this may not be science-fiction after all, but a real possibility; we ought to at least brace ourselves for this potential future.

Consequently we're suddenly confronting a future, from where we'd just begun to live within the bounds of our natural world to the possibility of leaving it all behind for good. No matter how extraordinary this possibility may seem, we are a species at the crossroads. As a community we have before us, for the first time, the distinct privilege of asking ourselves the fundamental question of how we are in the world. We have the never-before potential of reflecting on how we want to respond to our relationship as physical beings in a sensate world. We can ask where is progress grounded?  How does community anchor itself on such progress? With this choice before us, we have the possibility of learning to love the world, to embrace it for what it is, thoroughly immersing ourselves in it, reflecting on it and wondering at it. And there's no better way to do that than through an earnest consideration of building and how it connects us to the world.

Those very questions came from Husserl early last century as he sought a new way of thinking about how we are in the world. In his quest for a more original "ground" than that which our western techno-scientific thinking of reductive investigation had provided, Husserl began by laying out a description of our life-world (Lebenswelt). From there he went on to integrate "earth" into life experience. This earth was not that astronomical planet zipping around the sun, weighing so many tons, composed of so many elements, and scientifically definable. Rather earth, unlike Buckminister Fuller's description of a measurable definable object, is our stationary stable ground, that from which we derive sustenance as "fleshy" grounded beings. We know realness because of our own physicality, as springing from earth. The tangible bodies sense things -- it sees them, touches them, walks through them, lives in them, moves about them -- it's the only vehicle from which we experience the physicality of our surroundings. Because of our fleshly physicality, we are inextricably a part of earth, forever wedded to it. Earth is everywhere and at all times in the deepest recesses of our psyche. We carry it through life to all corners of the earth, as the source of our deep sense of belonging, the connectedness, and the tie that makes us one community. Earth, as this collective realm of presence, prefigures any technological sense of progress; it is decidedly anti-scientific, boundless and incapable of being categorized. 

When thinking of community and the future buildings it will make, earth-based work resists reductivist thinking; it shies away from categorization and specialization. Earth-based work, while concerned with location resists nostalgia and withstands becoming a shallow receptacle for memory. While thinking locally, earth-founded work is constructed on a revitalized global-ground, ceaselessly evolving and dynamic, yet not forgetting its roots. In reflecting and responding to community, earth-based work embraces each new responsible technology in a caring and reflective way: civitas futurus -- caring, cultivating -- cultivating caring citizenry.

There are two ways earth-based building responds to the deeper civic need of community. The first is achieved through building reflectively. Reflective building takes into account our place in the world, how we are on the earth and what it means to be this way. Building reflectively clears the way for a belonging to the earth, gratefully accepting earth as its ground, centering itself on earth, to make place (topos). Revealing "earth" through a built work brings forth the topology of the open, that which is made topographic through building. While reflective building discloses this way, it simultaneously remains impenetrable. (That is to say, for it to be preserved reflective building is of necessity undisclosable. To penetrate it means to destroy it, this is what is meant by the poetic in building.)  Earth-based building is not something outside or applied to the primary structure of sheltering. Instead, it is the very foundation of authentic building, the primary concern of building. That's because to be human means more than fulfilling our instinctive needs for comfort as provided in sheltering alone. Being human encompasses the need to ask. Being human centers on the question of what it is to be human. Earth-rooted building gives us the ground where such questioning takes place. In the end reflective inquiry is the deepest value that building in the future may offer. 

Second, earth-based building undermines the gestalt. That is, the figure-ground separation that defines the way we apprehend ourselves in the world, we humans as figure and nature as background. Building, which has its primary concern rooted in production of space-making, blithely regards itself as providing separation between humanity and nature. Outside is the location of vulnerability, where we are put in harms way; we come inside for the protection and comfort that habitation offers. Inside and outside: nature on the outside and the human gathering on the inside, habitation setting us apart from the outside. Inclusive earth-based work allows us to step beyond that collective image where the primeval family is huddled around the fire in that proverbial darkened cave. When "earth" is the ground, floors, walls and roofs no longer need be represented as barriers, protecting us from the perils of outside. Windows need not be openings that let the outside in, doors as passages that permit us to move from inside to out. Earth-founded work rejects this metaphysics and epistemology of the representational. It acts as an affirmation of our humanness, as confirmed in our capability of not merely reshaping and rearranging what we take from nature, but instead reflecting and responding to it in foundational ways, that which speaks to our own being constant with the world.

Earth-grounded building does not separate us from the world, instead it acknowledges and completes our deepest connection as humans to the earth, as beings wholly unseparated from the world. In this then, dualities such as inside-outside, figure-ground, interiority-exteriority become irrelevant. Earth-based place-making doesn't separate, all is within, all things joined within the foci of building, with no thing excluded.

This constancy of inside and outside shapes the world as constant, as the unified field on which community might construct its future. If we regard constancy accordingly, then we might recall Aristotle's description of how techne (building) is interrelated with physis (nature), responding to the wholeness of our being in the world and permitting us to act in a natural way when we re-make nature in response to our need. Techne frames humanity's ability to complete what nature on its own could not do. If we are, as Aristotle tells us, nature's highest achievement (admittedly an anthropocentric viewpoint) and if we act in concert with nature to bring things forth into the world that would not otherwise be, then we begin to see ourselves as being in the world, not in sentimentalized harmony but more in accord with the full physicality of the world, as constancy injecting us into that world. In this unanimity, we might even learn to listen more and act less. A future in which we reflect instead of react regards things as they actually appear and not as they are supposed to appear, as prescribed by analytical prospect and rational supposition. If nothing else, the community that builds its world on "earth" undermines the Minskian appeal to leave this place behind, it never even becomes a consideration at all.