CHAPTER 5
THE FAILURE OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE
AND THE VISION OF ECOCITIES
Introduction
As we have detailed in the previous chapter, the temple was
the fusion of the aedicule and the trilithon. Allsopp believes it
is precisely the problem of modern architecture that it has tried--
however unsuccessfully--to fuse the two archetypes together.
Modernism was an attempt to break free from the classical past and
to build an alternative language which "enfolds the heresies and
dissonance of history" (Zevi 65). In order to do this, modernists
rejected the authority of the academic Ecole des Beaux, and favored
mass production over craftsmanship and handworked buildings. The
flat roofs of the modern buildings were an iconoclastic protest to
the archetypal pitch roof aedicule. Another stylistic and
philosophic change from classicism was that modernism no longer
followed the rules of symmetry.
The Rule of Symmetry
In Bruno Zevi's book _The Modern Language of Architecture_, he
explains that symmetry equals passivity, "a spasmodic need for
security, fear of flexibility, indetermination, relativity, and
growth--in short, fear of living" (17). He believes symmetry is a
language of homologous parts, i. e., of the same parts. These
repetitious patterns in architecture constrain people into thinking
in conformist, uniform, and rigid ways. Zevi points out that
symmetry can be thought of as a "tumor whose cells have
metastasized everywhere in geometry." Throughout the history of
cities, these age-old cancerous tumors have spread into chessboard
urban patterns around the world. Although there may have been an
illustrious remission during the medieval ages, Zevi thinks the
cure of the cancer will only come about through an iron will.
Western medicine perceives a mind-body duality in which
illness is perceived to be the result of an external virus or
bacteria invading the body. Health is maintained by driving out or
killing the foreign invaders. Following this same pattern, Kisho
Kurokawa, in his book _Rediscovering Japanese Space_, asserts that
Western philosophy, which is believed to be wise and healthy, does
the same thing. It drives out any different way of thinking in
order to protect itself, which is exactly what dictators or
bureaucrats do. They kill or ignore dissent, justifying their
actions by designating the dissenters as insane and criminal. In
order to recover, we must make a critical archetypal shift in our
way of thinking so that we are whole once again.
Symmetrical architecture is a fixation with the past,
repressing death by denying separation with the primordial mother.
It leaves no room for anyone to wander outside the traditional
form. Symmetry is the language of rationalism, not of romance.
Because of this lack of unique identity, people are easily
controlled by despotic power. In Freudian terms, Zevi calls
symmetry a language of homosexuality. He points out,
Perhaps the whole history of architecture could be
reviewed in terms of symmetry neurosis...It has always
been like that: symmetry is the facade of sham power
trying to appear invulnerable. The public buildings of
Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinist Russia are all
symmetrical. Those of South American dictatorships are
symmetrical (17).
Let me add that the governmental buildings in Washington, D.C. are
symmetrical. Hitler's architectural plans for Berlin were to be
modeled after that "monumental city": Washington, D.C.
In its most revolutionary designs, modern architecture is the
language of heteronymous parts. "Hetero" means different. Its
language is asymmetrical and antiparallel, not needing the tools of
symmetry--compasses, drafting machines and T-squares. Zevi writes
that symmetry is the
infantile fear of the father--the academy, in this
case, is a father figure, protective of the cowardly
child--who will castrate you if you attack a heteronymous
figure, the woman, the mother. As soon as one becomes passive
and accepts symmetry, the anguish seems to subside, because
the father no longer threatens, he possesses (17).
Could we then conclude that asymmetrical design is an
architecture of the feminine which breaks through the homologous
design of the male order which made women into slaves? Certainly,
the modern change from pitched top roofs to flat roofs was not the
archetypal revolution which would cause our liberation so that we
no longer fear the father and have the courage to separate from the
mother.
Slaves to Market Forces
Now back to our tragic past. Architects in the 1920's
believed that they were no longer the tailors of society, but its
doctors who could cure the plagues of the world. They saw
themselves in the role of prophets who believed we must build a
single homogenized global structure based on the International
Style. These social-methodologists believed modern architecture
could cause social regeneration. However, this was still within
the value system of the mainstream. The International Style was
erected and directed according to the standards of Western
Civilization. The visions of these social architects were not
profound enough to go beyond the dualistic society which had
divided the world into citizen and foreigner, ruler and ruled, man
and woman, nor capable of entering the "nondual core of being and
knowing" (Kurokawa 118) necessary for cultivating "the empty spaces
in the human soul" (Mumford 570). Modern architecture is clearly
constructed on the paradigm of spacial divisions which separate
"interior from exterior, environment from building, private from
public, historic from contemporary" (Kurokawa 30).
Kurokawa points out that Western democracy, as well as
science, is based on such dualities. He writes,
The yeses and nos are tallied, and whichever is
greater, if even by one, determines the course taken.
This is the principle of majority rule. But the doubt
must crop up whether this method, which ignores the
reality of existence as something that is not simply
black or white, yes or no, is really a proper one (19).
Norman O. Brown points out the mysteries
of life which are intrinsically esoteric are offensive to
democracy. In the democratic principle it is believed that
everything can be seen by the people; there is no esoteric
knowledge. The secularized democracy has become a civil religion,
with the political party in power becoming its priesthood. The
president is the hierarch who swears to God at his inauguration
that he will defend the national constitution. M. N. Roy observes
that under this system, the helpless individual is made to believe
that power can only be generated by following the party leaders,
and so the citizen is directed by the external voice of the
presidency. Marxism failed to produce a world revolution because
it, too, asserted in a secular salvation produced through science,
technology, and material progress. Kurokawa says that the
scientific method, on which Marx based his social theory is born in
the same piecemeal fashion.
In the academic democracy, the empiricist believes the world
to be made of empirical stuff on the basis of data deduced from the
scientific method. Truth, then, is subject to public verification.
The so-called scientific method is "the attempt to substitute
method for insight, mediocrity for genius, by getting a standard
operating procedure" (Brown 1965, 9). In this worldview, material
gratification is seen as the way to human fulfillment, and material
progress is achieved through economic growth. In order to justify
one's claim within this one-dimensional worldview one has to accept
the terms of empiricist methodologies, which of course exclude the
spiritual or transphysical dimension of life altogether! The
multi-dimensional web of life's interelationships is completely
ignored leading to a de-sacredness and devaluation of life.
Law and justice, then, is based on an adversarial system. In
this domination model, the good government is the one which emerges
from the pluralistic groups "pulling and hauling among competing
interests" (French 402). The group, individual, or institution
with the most wealth eventually wins. Marilyn French in _Beyond
Power_ writes that this adversarial system
redefines justice as victory, and transforms judicial process
into a game which one wins or loses. It arises from the old
patriarchal assurance that God grants the victory to the good,
even as those who lead wars fought with this claim knew that
might makes right, victory accrues to the more powerful and the
powerful decree what is good" (402).
In architecture, during times when general systems of
religious inspiration break down, as during the Industrial Era,
pluralistic notions of architecture create personality cults as
architects rival one another for fame, fortune, and the most
prestigious contracts under the Law. These modern architects were
sons of the Enlightenment. Rationalism, behaviorism, and
pragmatism fed the ink in their drafting pens as the monopolists
and big business financed their projects. Peter Blake, in his book
_Form Follows Fiasco_, points out that without being aware of it,
modernist architects became the advocates of ugliness, greed,
venality, social disintegration, and exploitation of the land.
Frank Lloyd Wright remarked, "Doctors bury their mistakes, but
architects can't." Hence, we are surrounded by sick, decaying
buildings as landscapes of Eros have been transformed into
landscapes of Thanatos (Gablik 79).
Blake ponders why modern architects failed to become the
doctors and prophets who could have solved our planetary problems.
His first consideration is that architects were corrupted from
their own greed. Nevertheless, he realized that it was not the
architects who were making the money, but the contractors and
financiers. He explains,
The Modern Movement, with its shining dogmas, its
exciting slogans, and above all, with its absolute self-
righteousness, was and is, quite clearly, a religion.
The cult is doubly seductive in that it not only insures the
believer a place in heaven, but also a more or less permanent
place on Earth. No other profession leaves such large and eminently
visible monuments to itself (and to its clients) (149-150).
Modernism was, afterall, really an extension of the cult of the
dead and the patriarchal revolution.
In his essay "Modernity verses Postmodernity" Jurgen Habermas
points out,
The word modern in its Latin form "modernus" was used for the
first time in the late 5th Century in order to distinguish the
present, which had become officially Christian, from the Roman
and Pagan past. With varying content, the term "modern" again and
again expresses the consciousness of an epoch that relates
itself to the past of antiquity, in order to view itself as
the result of a transition from the old to the new (54).
It seems clear that modernism has been, and is, a perpetuation of
the Christian Epoch. Being stuck in the perpetual new, it has
failed to revolutionize the future. However, today, postmodernists
no longer believe in the messianic faith in the new. They are
antimodern. They no longer believe that architects can solve
social problems through innovations in technology and design. To
them, art does not have the power to cause social transformation.
The only thing they can do is deconstruct society.
Postmodern architects now embrace all "period styles, whether
classical or vernacular" (LeLeod 19). All styles are opened to
their imitation and reinterpretation. Postmodernists believe the
modernist movement was an unfortunate divergence in the history of
Western architecture, one which prevented "cultural continuity or
social expression" (LeLeod 19).
In Mary LeLeod's essay on architecture, she says that since
the preoccupation of postmodernism is whether or not architecture
has social meaning, then, if it does, what kind of meaning what
does it have? Postmodernists ask if a visual architectural
language can express values and ideas. She writes, "The evolution
of postmodernism in architecture thus raises the question of
whether the utilization of past styles has insured more meaning, or
whether it is a nostalgic refusal to recognize architecture's own
situation in history" (42). I might add that past styles, from
classicism to postmodernism, have not given us a sense of organic
meaning, nor connected us with the cosmic forces in life.
Postmodernism can be seen as part of the refusal to acknowledge
death and the powers of regeneration.
The meaning and spirit of the trilithon was first corrupted,
then completely lost by the materialist values of the society.
Allsopp calls the use of monumental architecture for commercial
aggrandizement "ridiculous and monstrous." He feels we must go
back to structures which are purely aedicule or trilithonic and
wait for a time of a new faith when monumental architecture can
reflect a new value system.
In Oscar Newman's essay "Whose Failure is Modern
Architecture?" the failure of modernism is attributed to poetics.
He says that the problem with the social-methodologist school was
that it was not poetic enough. In its prosaic form, it was
subservient to cost, building programs, and materials. This
resulted in its form being rigid, not allowing an inner lyricism to
direct the architectural language. In its attempt to fuse together
the aedicule and the trilithon, modern architecture made the home
into a factory, "a machine for living in."
For the wealthy, this meant the house was a custom-made work
of art which was hand-crafted with the most advanced technology and
communication systems. For others, housing was an industry-made,
inexpensive shelter. And so, housing adopted the ideology of mass
production, mass communication, decentralization, mobility,
structural rationalism, and the sanitation of a hospital. This
resulted in shoebox-type apartments made of concrete slabs which
were called Siedlugen. These apartment buildings were well
designed for "garbage or rent collection" and for "crowd control
and police functions" (Blake 125). Mass housing serves
bureaucracy, industry, commerce, and government. It is a way to
keep the poor in their place, confined to their undeclared prison
cells in the most toxic parts of the cities. Furthermore, mass
housing does not fuse together the audicule and the trilithon. The
city and the landscape are still divorced. Allsopp writes about
mass housing and its monumental emptiness,
It would be silly to argue that the triumph of democracy
and the rule of the people should mean that their homes,
numbered in millions, should be treated as monuments, which
is what we tend to do. Slabs of housing do not symbolize
democracy; their meaning is very plain to read--it is the
subjugation of the individual, the suppression of freedom.
If they are a monument to anything it is to bureaucracy
(Allsopp 1974, 71).
John Dewey held a view similar to Allsopp's criticism of
modern housing. He believed architecture in our cities is
unworthy of being called fine art. He observed that the
architecture of both the rich and the poor are essentially
aesthetically repulsive because of it's lack of imagination.
Even though we have the technical know-how and materials to build
beautiful cities, Dewey, believed the reason why we have failed
to do so is the profit-motive economics which determine how the
land is used. He prophesies, "Until land is freed from this
economic burden, beautiful buildings may occasionally be erected,
but there is little hope for the rise of general architectural
construction worthy of a noble civilization" (Dewey 1958, 334).
Peter Blake quotes political science professor Marshall Beuman,
who says, "it seems virtually impossible today to feel or even to
imagine the joy of building, the adventure and romance and
heroism of construction" (Blake 149).
In _The History of Postmodern Architecture_ by Heinrich
Klotz, a similar sentiment is expressed in the words of visionary
architects Krier and Scolari. They believe that "architects who
build are corrupt" because local bureaucracies are controlled by
"thieves and murderers who are the only ones who still have money
for building" (404). Hence, "an architect should not build but
should record his concepts in drawing." Krier states the
postmodern paradox; he writes, "I can create architecture because
I am not building. I am not building because I am an architect"
(404).
Visions of Ecocities
Postmodern architects must stop looking to the historical
past for their source of inspiration. The times call for us to
fully and nobly embrace a new archetypal form of intelligent
architecture which is based on a truly new feminist value system.
Blake describes this new fusion as a reintegration of horizontal
and vertical space which will cause passages in any direction.
He calls the fusion "urbatecture," an architecture which
reintegrates the city and the countryside. Urbatecture uses
curving--oblique, and inclined lines in a fourth-dimensional
fashion--so that there is not one static viewpoint as in
classical architecture, but an infinite movement of viewpoints.
Kurokawa asserts that on the journey of finding one's purpose in
life, people do not proceed on the straight and narrow path,
which the symmetrical line of classicism induces. Evolution
happens through curves, not on straight lines. Instead, people
"wander through complex mazes, digress down meandering
rhizomelike passageways in order to discover their purpose" (38).
He believes it is time to transcend both linearity and literalism
in order to begin building a world of symbiotic cities. Maybe it
is indeed time to move from being homo sapiens, to hetero-techno
sapiens.
This is not to disregard our sameness, but to finally
acknowledge our differences and diversity in order to come to a
deeper understanding of our wholeness. There are two basic parts
making up the human species, female and male, which are made up
of a variety of different organisms, both organic and inorganic.
This basic duality is in a continuous flux and change of birth
and death. The body-mind duality which has inflicted Western
Civilization was a deception to hide this natural unity, so that
women could be kept in an inferior position, ignoring the
romantic reality of nature. Hence, this will create a system of
a pluralistic duality made up of a variety of individuals with
different talents and gifts, who, with the proper understanding,
fit harmoniously together to create a universal Oneness. A
monist outer shell made from eternal organic forms, which is
subject to improvement as knowledge increases, is determined
through the ecological requirements of the given location. The
human race is then, in "a state of evergrowing perfection."
The outer shell or skin of an arcology would be composed of
the collective dreams and necessities of humanity. On the outer
skin would be the place for personal dwelling space, turned
outward towards nature. Along the central spinal axis inside the
arcology would be located the civic space, the place where people
turn inward to find the internal language of humanity. As we
turn inward, an organic planetary hagiarchy (governance by holy
woman and men) can evolve to create a superior form of social
coordination made up of individuals who have discovered their
innate role in the cosmic web of life. When we find the symbolic
queen and king of the planetary organism, a new Vision can come
forth.
In Constantinos A. Doxiadis's book _Between Dystopia and
Utopia_ he writes,
What humanity needs is the realization of common dreams.
What each of us needs is the realization of his [sic] own dream,
within the framework of the common dream...For the first
time in history, man [sic] will need a greater ability to
dream in order not to become a slave-machine" (51, 54).
Inside the interior of the shell, personal dreams are realized
with the flexibility of the new technology to change the
surrounding environment to fit personal moods and desires. Walls
will no longer be fixed, difficult-to-move slabs, but may be
"curtains of light, sound and air, both visible and invisible,"
not walls, but membranes. They may be "dynamic interiors,"
holograms creating visible barriers, qualities of color and
texture, and optical images" (Kroner 330). There is even a
belief that everyone's nervous system could be connected to the
electronic global network so that personal input and output is
possible which we are in fact witnessing today as more people tap
into the information highways of the computer age. Through this
higher level of communication David Bohm "proposes that by
creating situations where people can learn to dialogue with each
other, we might succeed in generating a kind of social
"superconductivity," a higher state of social intelligence"
(Gablik 162).
No one will be an outsider. No juno or genius will be
wasted as humans evolve away from being consumers and producers
who waste nature's resources, and evolve toward the realization
that the Earth is a "closed circuit where every natural resource
will be used and reused but never destroyed." The new "wo\man"
becomes the great conservationist "who controls the use and
conversion of all natural elements of inanimate and animate life
in a circle ever renewing itself" (Doxiados 71).
One of the most beautiful descriptions of the city of the
future and the post-historic wo\man is visualized by Lewis
Mumford in his book _The City in History: its transformation, and
its prospects_. He states that it is now the whole world which
needs to be humanly ordered, in order to be able to control the
infinite amount of energy we have tapped. We must harness it
before it destroys us. We desperately need to create the balance
between advanced technologies which have brought the elite
instant globalism, and the people who at this point remain for
the most part voiceless. This is the time to enact a new form of
governance, what I call the democracy-meritocracy model, where
the visionaries guide the collective dream for the good of all
the world's people. To achieve this vital balance between social
order and individual freedom, "the smallest neighborhood or
precinct must be planned as a working model of the larger world"
(573). The blueprints of arcologies have done this for us.
We have evolved from the Greek idea that the agora was the
center of the Greek polis, into the gothic period when the church
and the religious spirit were the instruments of authority around
which the city revolved, through the public square in the
Renaissance city which had on either side the church and the
palace who controlled both financial oligarchies and military
dictatorships, and then to the Baroque when the established
religion joined forces with the centralized monarchies, and
finally to the modernist period of the International Style where
the seat of governance is the municipal building and industries
control the money. Now, the entire world is becoming a global
amphitheater in which the religious symbolism of the thinkers of
the age determine the evolutionary course of architecture.
Science is now ready to build the living temples to the ideal
social ethic, the home of the world citizen.
With the shift in paradigm moving away from the two-
dimensional chessboard city design, to the designing of ecocities
with four-dimensional space, the main function of the ecocity is
"to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter
into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into
social creativity" (Mumford 571). "Thus," Mumford continues,
"slavery, forced labor, legalized expropriation, class monopoly
of knowledge, have been giving way to free labor, social
security, universal literacy, free education, open access to
knowledge, and the beginning of universal leisure, such as is
necessary for wide participation in political duties" (571). The
purpose of the city is, then, to help foster the individual to
develop the self-knowledge needed to find human happiness.
Professor Jon Huer in his book, _The Wages of Sin_, defines
happiness as a social event, what he calls the "Social Ethic."
Its antithesis is the greed created by the "Profit Ethic" of
self-interest which takes no responsibility for the public good.
He says that one can not be happy alone, even though one can
survive alone. Huer writes, "happiness _depends_ on one's happy
relations and relations among all with all...Society--unlike the
state of nature--exists to make _everyone_ happy." Ecologist
Noel Brown sees three components to happiness. The first is to
recognize life as a gift. The second is to have the opportunity
to live a purposeful life. And thirdly, happiness can be
achieved when we take a responsibility for sharing the gift of
life with our community (Brown 1989). Our means to happiness is
through seeking art and love. Huer goes on to state,
the Social Ethic assumes that society is the means of
happiness and justice its end. To be human and social is to
be at once happy and just. If happiness is the purpose of
life, then justice is what validates that happiness as true.
Happiness requires justice, and justice makes happiness
possible (9).
Unlike industry and business in the Profit Ethic, education
of the Self is the center of activities in the Social Ethic, a
center without a center as the classroom becomes a global network
of poetic reality. To become a member of one of Buckminster
Fuller's world management teams will be a new leadership goal for
children. Ecocities will give form to social egalitarianism so
that hereditary privileges, (i.e. individual inheritance) of the
Profit Ethic (aka the Profit Motive) no longer exist.
Intelligent Architecture
Walter M. Kroner in his article, "Intelligent Architecture
through Intelligent Design," states that we now have the
technology to create intelligent architecture, an architecture
which uses artificial intelligence. The essence of intelligent
architecture is that various systems like communication, energy,
transportation, information, etc., are effectively coordinated
through an automated and electronically controlled management
system.
Present day buildings are not designed to enhance this
technological revolution so that technology is used to liberate
us all; rather, it is used to keep us in a state of slavery.
Advanced technologies are made to fit into traditional designs
rather than envision a revolutionary architecture. Smart
technology is packaged into "an already designed container." And
so, the possibilities of designing a completely revolutionary
smart architecture which uses alternative energies in ecological
ways goes virtually unheeded. For the most part, Kroner writes,
architects relegate technological issues to
specialists without understanding problems and opportunities
for integrated and holistic thinking. The humanist is not a
critical part of the design team, and the user's needs are
secondary to budgets, construction schedules and energy
management. Instead of designing an architecture in harmony
with nature, we continue to see nature as something to be
overcome or conquered (324).
The design of houses and skyscrapers is the same as it was
forty years ago. Kroner writes, "the smart technology lies
hidden in the floors, pipes, ducts and ceilings, so that there is
no visible evidence of a changed architecture" (322). An example
of the way technological changes are made to fit into the
existing structures was provided when President Bill Clinton
announced to reporters that the White House needed to update its
telecommunication system. He didn't have the technology to even
conduct a telephone conference with his staff! The telephone
system had not changed since the Kennedy Administration accept
that phones with dials were changed to push buttons. Clinton
said, "There's not even any E-mail. It's a yesterday place, and
we need to make it a tomorrow place." But I don't see a way to
ultimately reform the White House into a tomorrow place without
the use of dynamite!
The Need for a Lovolution
Of course, this age of symbiotic intelligent urbatecture
will require the collectivization of land, but Peter Blake warns
that, once the land is collectivized, a new architecture must be
built or else nothing will change as was the case in Soviet
Russia. With the bureaucratization of state capitalism in the
"East," modern architects were left without a social idealism to
structurally symbolize. The practical became detached from the
poetic inspiration. Blake says that urbatecture "demands a new
beginning, as if no linguistic system had ever existed before, as
if it were the first time in history that we had to build a house
or a city" (7). He continues to say that creative spirits have
always started from scratch.
For, all around us, the environment we have built over
the past century or so with supreme confidence is
literally collapsing: the walls of our buildings are
crumbling--literally; the well-intentioned zones
mapped by our city planners are creating the worst
ghettos in recorded history--literally; the best-
planned schools by the world's most idealistic architects
are producing a generation of zombies-- literally; the finest
public housing projects to be found anywhere in the world,
and designed according to the noblest precepts, are turning
into enclaves of murder, rape, mugging, and dope addiction,
with the only way out a charge of dynamite to reduce those noble
precepts to rubble--literally (11).
So on July 15, 1972, dynamite was used to implode the Pruitt-Igoe
Housing project in St. Louis. It was declared that the basic
design of the mass housing units were responsible for the high
crime rate because of the sense of anonymity and the lack of
community felt by its inhabitants. This was the day when
modernism in architecture officially died. Nevertheless, without
creating a new morality of a living mythology by building a new
archetypal system in architecture, crime will persist, resulting
in the imprisonment of the lower-classes. The land owners will
continue to be rewarded, while their victims will continue to be
punished for their addictions, such as crack cocaine which "numbs
the pain of archetypal starvation and the vacuum of meaning"
(Gablik 51).
Addictions keep one unaware of the pain and anger of living
in poverty, injustice, and the lack of feeling joy and love about
life. Addicts stop using their internal knowledge of the senses
and become deluded by confused perceptions allowing one to remain
addicted. As Elaine Pagels points out in her book _The Gnostic
Gospels_, self-ignorance is a form of self-destruction (126).
Most people live oblivious--or, in contemporary terms,
unconscious--of their true natures. Their lives are led without
fulfillment as they "dwell in deficiency." Anne Wilson Schaef
writes in her book _When Society Becomes an Addict_,
By robbing us of the freedom to experience and reveal our
feelings, the Addictive System robs us of important
information about who we are. It also robs us of life;
repressing our feelings long enough can eventually kill us
(89). The Addictive System encourages addictions to keep
people so far away from their feelings and awareness that they
cannot challenge the system (145).
Because society conditions us to lie about our unjust reality
while training us to become addicted to our own self-interest,
explains why artists and writers who have risen above the
addictions, and have found their true identities, remain a
suppressed minority. The moral vision, expressed through their
art, become a target of censorship in the Addictive System.
Marilyn French states, "To change the way we handle crime, we
have to change our morality" (404). In order to do this, there is
no other way but to radically change our money and power
relationships, so that the rewards of success are not based on
the domination values of the market place--competitive
individualism and economic striving of the Profit Ethic.
Le Corbusier, the man whose architectural ideas in the
International Style have had such a great influence throughout
the world, was addicted to power. He believed power was more
important than morality. During the 1920's he was a member of
the Redressement Francais, a proto-fascist organization. He
tried to work for the Soviets, wrote highly of Mussolini, and,
beginning in 1941, he spent eighteen months trying to persuade
the Nazi-sponsored Vichy government of France to adopt his plans
for Algiers (Barnett 115).
Le Corbusier drew from classical antiquity for his
inspiration, as did Hitler. The foundation of Greek society is
sexist and based on war, so classical antiquity is hardly the
place to look for ideas on how to free the world. But the
megalithic architecture of the Great Goddess civilization, which
was non-sexist and non-combatant, can provide us with the vision
and inspiration to build the New Cosmology--in a sense, to our
"archaic future!"
World of Arcologies
The task for our species is to reunite the three basic
architectural archetypes together--the aedicule, the trilithon,
and the nomadic tent--by building a world of arcologies. This
epic task is to restore true poetesses and poets to their
primitive position as the magicians of the collective desires,
the mediators between the "individual consciousness and the
collective unconsciousness." The task is not to introduce a new
architectural style of individual architects, but to usher in a
new way of life, to ride the wave of the ecological (global
warming) and social (women's liberation) changes which are
creating a new general system of universal human rights based on
biospheric designs. Herbert Read writes in _To Hell
With Culture,_ "Poets should not go outside their own ranks for
policy; for poetry is its own politics" (9). Through the
politics of Neutopian poetry, we will find the way to create new
linguistic, cultural, and religious symbols to reconstruct our
thinking so as to understand that all the Earth is sacred; there
is no separation between life and art; the macrocosm and the
microcosm are one; intelligence can not be creative without
being guided by intuition; rationalism cannot survive without
the mysteries of romance; and religion is the deep understanding
of the natural cycles of death and life, not barbaric animal
sacrifice and the worship of the dead.
Therefore, the mission of the Poetess is to lead us to a
proper perspective of the Universe, so that we can rebuild Gaia's
Temple, a planet of symbiotic ecocities which has reverence for
life. In this Gaian paradigm, love and cooperation, not power
and competition, reign supreme. A wise saying from Carl Jung
reads as follows: "Where love rules, there is no will to power;
and where power predominates, there love is lacking." In the
Gaia perspective, love is the saving power, the core of creation,
which blesses us with the necessary transformative vision.
It has been said that in this new paradigm the leadership of
individual juno and genius will no longer be relevant as we all
become co-creators of the dream-body. I read Gablik to say,
however, that the _individual_ is the source of creativity in
society. Social transformation occurs when there is a "personal
breakthrough to a new way of seeing." The individual then works
as an organ of the collective dream-body, whose personal ideas
have planetary consequences (Gablik 23). Erik Erikson describes
these individuals as paradigmatic figures whose personal neurosis
and crisis correspond with the universal problems of humanity in
order to produce "a new form of human awareness" (Charme 1984,
109).
In Henryk Skolimowski's book _Eco-Philosophy_, he explains
how it has always been the creative minority, the deviant few,
who are the change-artists. This is true from "time immemorial,
when the first amoebas started to multiply themselves and gave
birth to more complex organism" (114). Skolimowski says that the
story of life is the story of the deviant minorities who refuse
to conform to the established order. These deviant few create
new mutants and new form of life both biologically, culturally,
intellectually, and spiritually.
The Greeks called these times of mutation, _kairos_.
_Kairos_ is the exact moment for a "metamorphosis of the gods,"
transformed by the wisdom of the goddess, in order to change our
basic symbols and principles about ourselves and the world. The
world depends on these infinitesimal units of charisma that tip
the scales of events. Doxiadis asks, "Don't we know by now that
man [sic] creates theories before he [sic] creates tools and
solutions and that the builder has the image of his [sic]
cathedral in his [sic] mind before he starts building it?" (52)
However, now the question is: Don't we know by now that woman
creates the sovereignty, in the form of epic poetry, to allow
both man and woman to unify their energies into the founding of
Neutopia? Monique Canto writes, "Values are, as it were,
constituted by women, who are the foundation of the political
order. A real woman's politics is what makes possible the
transition from nature to the city" (Canto 1986, 347).
For one, I am personally preparing for the change. I can
almost taste the fresh air of the ecocities that are so deeply
implanted in my brain. It has become difficult for me to even
walk on these twentieth century streets in this cold New England
town when I know we now possess the technology,
knowledge, and theory to finally live in a beautiful, free world
society. The life-energy is bursting to grow from my root-bound
pot!
The great American architect, Louis Sullivan, who invented
the skyscraper, once said that architecture is not an art, but a
religion. He was absolutely right! Religion is created through
our individual self, the divine spark within us, in relation with
the environment. Consequently, religion exists because we are
part of the environment and can not be isolated from it.
Therefore, religion cannot be accepted or rejected, but needs the
"relentless scrutiny of science" and the "illuminating sincerity
of art" in order to survive. Our relationship with the
environment determines the quality of life (Coggin 1962).
Now, we have the planetary religion we need to set up the
management committees to actualize the magnificent blueprints of
our most creative architects who have envisioned an ark of
salvation. I end this chapter with the following stanza from
_Leaves of Grass_, the epic in honor of American democracy
written in 1855 by Walt Whitman. Whitman understood that the
epic and the city are one body politic.
When the materials are all prepared and ready, the
architects shall appear.
I swear to you the architects shall appear without
fail,
I swear to you they will understand you and justify
you,
The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you,
and encloses all and is faithful to all,
He and the rest shall not forget you, they shall
perceive that you are not an iota less than they,
You shall be fully glorified in them.
The materials and communication networks were not ready in
1855 to create the great democratic\meritocratic ecocity, but
they are now. Long-live the epic of the Gaia! The natural
sovereignty of womankind, forever live in peace!
Summary
In this chapter we have seen how the traditional designs of
symmetrical architecture are built in forms which keep people in
their place as slaves to totalitarian regimes. The modernist
movement challenged this hegemony by attempting to build public
housing for the masses, but it became the religious cult of the
International Style which ultimately gave a new facade to the old
totalitarian mind-set. Hence, modernism failed to achieve the
fusion of the aedicule and the trilithon as it succumbed to the
pressures of the Profit Ethic. For architecture to become a
vehicle for social liberation and human happiness requires that
our cities be rebuilt in radically new ways.
CHAPTER 6
HOW CHILDREN VISUALIZE HOME: A STUDY OF AN ARCHETYPE
Introduction
This chapter focuses on the artwork of children,
particularly on how they are trained to draw pictures of home.
By focusing on the way children draw the built environment, we
can begin to understand the urgent need for a spiritual
revolution to restructure the physical environment and to provide
us with an image which will revolutionize education. There is a
major shift in consciousness occurring presently on this planet.
It is essential that educators take a leadership role in this
world-wide evolutionary movement so that the biosphere can be
saved. A new archetype in architecture is emerging which will
begin the process of deepening our awareness and our sense of
home and change our life-style.
The American Dream
The founding father of the American Dream, Thomas Jefferson,
had a vision of land development which corresponded with the land
development theory of the first European colonists of the New
World. The cultural changes caused by the European colonists
cannot be fully understood without looking at the ecological
changes which resulted from their practices, especially the
effects caused by their domination of the land. It can easily be
concluded that "capitalism and environmental degradation went
hand in hand" (Cronton 161).
The native Americans had a different approach to the
ecosystem than the European settlers. They loved the land and
respected it. The New England Indians had developed an
equilibrium between the ecology and the human community. Their
life-style was not centered around a permanent settlement like
that of the homesteaders. Instead, they were nomadic, traveling
to different locations depending on the season. Their kinship
networks formed villages, but as William Cronton points out in
his book _Changes in the Land_, villages were not "fixed
geographical entities: their size and location changed on a
seasonal basis, communities breaking up and reassembling as
social and ecological needs required" (38). Their houses, made
of wooden frames covered with grass mats, could be broken down
and reconstructed in a new location within a few hours. Their
relocation reduced their impact on the land enabling them to work
less and enjoy the natural diversity more. When they used other
species, they "made sure that no single species became overused"
(53). The American Indian's seasonal mobility made surplus
property undesirable. They were confident that the environment
would provide them with what they needed. As Cronton notes their
willingness to give property away, was not a sign that property
did not exist, but, by giving, they received social prestige and
social position within their culture.
Cronton states that the real struggle between the Indians
and the settlers was between the mobile, seasonal and communal
use of the land, and the fixed impact of permanent settlements
and private ownership of the land. These different approaches
expressed the different value systems of the two people in the
ways in which they conceived "property, wealth, and boundaries on
the landscape" (53). Colonists such as John Winthrop
distinguished between the two ways of inhabitancy as being either
natural or civil.
Winthrop believed the superior approach was the civil right
to land ownership which had evolved beyond the natural way where
"man" sowed and fed wherever he pleased. Winthrop's philosophy
was an extension of the biblical thought that an individual
should possess as much land as he could "subdue and make
productive" (73). In the anonymously authored "Essay on the
Ordering of Towns," it was declared that the individual should be
given the amount of land which was his due proportion based on
how many servants and cattle he had to "improve" the land. These
colonial theorists trivialized the Indian economy and ecology,
and thus paved the way to destroying their culture. Cronon
writes, "In this way, the social hierarchy of the English class
system was reproduced, albeit in a modified form, in the New
World" (73).
The values behind the drawings of the single family detached
house are derived from the patriarchal/matriarchal tradition
responsible for our attempted domination of nature and other
people. Jeffersonian democracy had a vision of creating an
agrarian society by dividing small parcels of land throughout the
United States. Jefferson's plan, in reaction to feudalism, was
devised to create a democratic land ownership as a base to the
political system which became a "property-owning democracy" where
political and economic freedom was equated with land
ownership.
His vision of the good society differed from his adversary,
Alexander Hamilton: Jefferson wanted to decentralize power
through small family farms and Hamilton wanted to develop the New
Republic into a great industrial nation. In order for Hamilton's
vision to be realized there needed to be a centralized government
which would have economic control. Hamilton did not believe that
democracy was created by an equality of wealth, whereas Jefferson
thought economic equality was essential to maintaining a
democracy. In order to avoid autocracy and coercion, Jefferson
believed economic independence gained by property ownership was
just as important as political independence gained through the
ballot box. Farmland was the only available means for the
citizen to gain economic independence, allowing families to
become self-sufficient in terms of substance and trade.
Jefferson taught that farming and property-owning were
democratic, just ideas, while industrialism and city life were
undemocratic and corrupt. Certainly, the European industrial
cities such as London, at the time were unpleasant, even
unhealthy places to live.
Womens' rights were not even considered important under this
vision of land development. Jefferson believed that the good
women's life was centered around the home and the children. The
house was also believed to be a symbol of the female womb. One
can see how easily this vision could connect to the old saying "a
woman's place is in the home." Jefferson's vision was
flawed by the very nature of land itself. Some pieces of land
are far more fertile than others, consequently, some pieces were
more valuable for agriculture than others. He also did not take
into account that some people have no desire to become farmers.
And no matter what Jefferson wanted for the United States, the
forces of industrialism would assure its becoming the wave of the
future. Even though he made sure land could not be monopolized,
other businesses such as transportation, storage, and marketing
were able to establish monopolies (Green 1977).
Jefferson's vision was, of course, insensitive to the
philosophy of the Native Americans. The Indians had an economy
based on hunting which needed vast wilderness areas in order to
be renewed. They could not understand the cutting down of
forests in order to build houses. In 1663, the Indians were
offered individual land allotments by the Massachusetts Bay
Colony. As long as they conformed to the establish order they
could have the same terms of ownership as the settlers. Since
that meant giving up hunting for agriculture, they could not
accept the offer. The Indians preferred "tribal ownership and
corporate land-use" over individual and nuclear family form of
land development.
In order to better understand the thought pattern which
caused the "American Dream" to have been established and spread
throughout the world, let us proceed by looking into the
psychology of children's drawings.
Universal Patterns
Rhoda Kellogg in _The Psychology of Children's Art_ states
that children all over the world draw houses that look alike.
She writes, "Each makes a square to form the walls, a smaller
square to show a window, and elongated square for the chimney, a
curly scribble to indicate smoke. Indeed, the houses are so much
alike that the national origin of the young artists might well be
the same" (11). In his essay, "Cross-Cultural Research in Arts
Education," Elliot W. Eiser considers the first five years of
life--when nationality in children's drawings cannot be distin-
guished--to be the "universal years" in which specific culture
has little or no influence (Eiser 1984).
Even though there seems to be a universality to children's
early drawings, interaction with the environment does impact
these universal years. This universality indicates a basic
cultural structure and myth throughout the world. Only through
further development do children pick up the specific cultural
symbols and the particular drawing formulae of their respective
societies. A young child does not draw a particular dog or
house, but the archetype of a dog or house, the ideal type.
Consequently, we have a fundamental global culture, created
through our basic interaction with the environment, which can be
witnessed in the early drawings of children. Kellogg
acknowledges that children "are building upon the creative
impulse which is the heritage of all mankind [sic] and is limited
to no one land and culture" (Kellogg 1967, 77).
Carl Jung attributes such universality to a common human
heritage of archetypes, the range of which comprises the
collective unconsciousness. These archetypes make up the
essential psychic energy of brain patterns common to the human
species. Herbert Read notes that "as consciousness develops,
these archetypes sink below the level of consciousness, where
they exercise an unconscious control of our modes of imagination
and thought" (Read 1966, 247). In these patterns our emotions
and fantasies automatically fit. A series of archetypal forms
create myths, what Jean Houston in her book, _The Hero and Her
Goddess_ calls, "the DNA of the human psyche" (7). She further
explains, "these primal patterns unfold in our daily lives as
culture, mythology, religion, art, architecture, drama, ritual,
epic, social customs, and even mental disorders" (7). Herbert
Read emphasizes that archetypes are not phantasms of the
imagination, but are the built-in structures that give direction
to our mental activities and amorphous feelings. These
structural feelings are what we call works of art.
Jung observed that when archetypes are at their best, the
mysteries of life are unfolded to us, bringing together the mind
and body, the individual and community, and the self and the
universe. When archetypes are repressed, alienation occurs,
cutting off our ties with nature, the individual with the
community, and the self from the Infinite. When an alienated
culture begins to use this archetypal energy, as in the case with
Nazi Germany, the energy can become brutal. However, as this
paper will point out, the archetype we use for shelter, the home,
is just as brutal. As Jean Houston explains, "For the real
question behind the prevailing fear is not about economics,
politics, or even militarism--it's about archetypes" (13).
Therefore, we should not blame the architects for the destruction
of the land before we blame the underlying cultural assumptions
which have forced the architects to build such a dysfunctional
environment. Suzi Gablik declared the metaphor of our epoch is
the bulldozer. The ultimate end of the bulldozer is the house.
The Image of Home
Do children's drawings of home indicate that there is a
world-wide conformity to certain ways of land development-- in
the form of the single-family detached house--which is impressed
upon the child early in life and which directs her or his values
towards land development? James L. Peacock states in
_Consciousness and Change_,
Adults learn systems of symbols beginning in child-
hood, but they postpone learning their adult roles
until adulthood. Only as adults do they become fathers,
mothers, voting citizens, and full-fledged workers, though they
may have played at such roles in childhood. But children begin
to learn the rudiments of myths, beliefs, totems, theologies,
worldviews, and aesthetic convention as soon as they are
born, if not before. Accordingly, such systems of symbols are
imbedded in the experience of childhood, with all of its
"magical thinking," fear, loneliness, and worth (225).
The dream of home, in a single-family detached house, which
children draw throughout the world, regardless of whether they
reside in a high-rise apartment in an urban environment or in
temporary housing shelters, is a clear sign that these children
are receiving certain land development values which they will
strive to obtain during their lives. House mortgages are the
main debts that people in the United States work to pay off.
Home ownership is an economic slavery for those who are upwardly
mobile, while those who are renters are slaves to landlords,
that is, if they can afford housing at all. In _The Palace or
the Poorhouse: The American House as a Cultural Symbol_, Jan Cohn
observes that, "Both as an objectification of tradition and as
the realization of property, the house has been a bulwark against
threats to political stability and, therefore, a profoundly
conservative institution in America" (214).
It is not just in America where the cultural symbol of the
house perpetuates, but throughout the world. The global
corporations controlling the mass media have indoctrinated the
entire world with this image of home, that is, the consumer dream
house, and, in turn, this image dictates who we are, our social
status, and how we must conform in order to gain the American
Dream. Perhaps, their goal is to indoctrinate the world with the
image of the "global shopping mall" as the pattern of
development. This consumerist image of development is a danger
to the delicate biosphere which is planet Earth; it must be
stopped! A new image of development is imperative for our
future.
A surprising correlation to this image of home is that
romantic relationships are also molded to fit into this
archetype. In 1926 Edward Carpenter, in his book _Love's Coming
of Age_, writes,
The man needs an outlet for his passion; the girl is
looking for a "home" and a proprietor. A glamour of illusion
descends upon the two, and drives them into each other's
arms...But at a later hour, and with calmer thought, they
begin to realize that it is a life-sentence which he [the
priest] so suavely passed upon them--not reducible (as in the
case of ordinary convicts) even to a term of 20 years (75).
The fairy tale marriage becomes a nightmare of co-dependency when
the couple becomes totally dependent on each other for their
sense of security. They cannot act independently for fear of
causing instability within the relationship. The male is
dependent on the woman in the traditional female role for
emotional and physical support. The female, or one who is
playing the traditional female role, is dependent on the male to
make all the public decisions and to provide shelter. Anne
Schaef writes,
An addictive relationship is, by definition, a _permanent_
parent-child/child-parent relationship. It cannot survive if
either person becomes a whole person or a full adult and takes
responsibility for her or himself. It is jeopardized if
either person begins to grow or change (28).
In order to free ourselves from these destructive co-
dependent relationships ecologists throughout the world are
demanding that we radically change our life-styles. However,
this change would mean a new architectural design which is based
on solar energy, recycling, miniaturization, communalism, mass
transportation, harmony with nature, and a new educational,
ecofeminist philosophy based on equal access to knowledge.
Worldwide rain forest loss and ozone depletion are directly
linked to land development and, as this paper is pointing out,
land development is directly linked to child development.
The adult world imposes the single-family detached house
worldview on the child and this has resulted in the growth of the
carcinogenic megalopolis around the globe. This unhealthy growth
can be seen as children begin drawing their dream house. In
_Children Drawing_, Jacqueline Goodnow remarks, "The child is
developing not just a type of line but also a concept,
discovering similarities, and realizing that many separate items
may be represented by a single symbol" (141). The hypothesis of
Wayner Dennis' book, _Group Values through Children's Drawings_,
is similar to Goodnow in that he also theorizes that children's
drawings not only mirror the environment but reflect values or
preferences (4). He writes, "the drawings of children show not
only the values of children but also the values of their society"
(7). Herbert Read also notes that the development of art is
parallel to developments of thought and both are directly linked
with social and economic forces. When there are changes in the
laws of art, the laws of the state are likely to change with them
(Russell 1981, 26). The law of art which must change is the way
we perceive home and the role art plays in making our planetary
abode a good, healthy, and beautiful place.
The Changing Laws of Art
Suzie Gablik explains Kaprow's theory of the two contrasting
art traditions within modernism: it is "artlike" art when art is
seen as separated from life, making it a mere egocentric object
in the buyer\seller marketplace, and it is "lifelike" if it is
connected with life and everything else, playing a vital role in
building community. "Lifelike" art revolves around the formation
of our relationship with the ecology and with each other, fusing
together values and knowledge. The "lifelike" artist embodies,
and thus, becomes a work of the earth spirit, where as the
"artlike" artist is seen in terms of her or his "competitive
individualism and economic striving." Artists who have succeeded
in the old path of "artlike" works, receiving money, fame, power
and glamour, have failed to meet the challenges of the times.
Gablik writes, "The need to transform the egocentric vision that
is encoded in our entire worldview is the critical task that lies
ahead for our culture" (141).
In order to do this, Gablik urges artists to quit playing
the marketplace games of the "art world" which are only
destroying us. Only by taking a new path of health, vision,
interconnectedness, and participation may we find the self-
fulfillment and happiness necessary for creating a better world.
Art then becomes a release of the power of the life-force itself
as the artist becomes the avatar, prophetess, or teacher of a
divine message. In this way art becomes a work of wisdom by
relating to the whole. Gablik writes,
Once we have changed the mode of our thinking to the
methodology of participation, we are not so detached.
For the participating consciousness, things are no
longer removed, separated, "out there." Objectivity
strips away emotion, wants only the facts and is detached
from feeling. Objectivity serves as a distancing device,
offering the illusion of impregnable strength, certainty and
control. Knowledge can then be used as an instrument of power
and domination (178).
The world of participating consciousness does not destroy
the autonomous vision of the artist, but makes her or his vision
grounded in the social and ecological responsibility necessary
for the founding of an ecocity. The production of art objects
will no longer be the primary function of artists, but will be
replaced by a new primary goal of becoming teachers of self-
knowledge in the New
Cosmology. Jose A. Arguelles writes in his book _The
Transformative Vision_, "If art is no longer specialized, then it
becomes a means of relating to the whole; that is, it becomes an
activity that responds to and helps direct environmental impulses
rather than an art (or a technology) that is imposed on the
environment" (285). Money will no longer be the goal of life or
art. The invisible, non-material, and non-measurable values of
the creative and courageous spirit will be highly rewarded as
society begins to realize that our natural resources are both
objective and subjective, and each is necessary for the survival
of the species.
It is now economically possible to give value to this vital
balance between the invisible and visible world. We now have the
means to create a perfect balance between supply and demand, a
new system where nothing is wasted. Jon Huer equates this
"perfect state of economy" as the aim of all societies to become
self-sufficient. Now we have the means to maintain society's
survival needs and life's comforts. What people need can now be
supplied. In this perfect state, no one will demand more than
what they need, and nothing will be supplied more than it is
demanded. Huer writes, "demand is determined through necessity
and supply by (1) the extent of demand and (2) whether the
society has enough resources to meet the demand" (Huer 1991,
277). Also, all products must be ecologically sound. And so,
through this balance all things will become free. With all human
wants satisfied, the misery and pain of human poverty is no
longer a problem. A time will then come when "our individual
life begins" as a true meritocracy based on virtue and talent is
established. Non-economic values will then replace market values
and purchasing power as people's goals reflect non-material ends.
Huer foretells, "the societies basic obligation thus fulfilled,
it enters what we might call a post-economic era of high
civilization and lofty humanity" (283). Our surplus energy can
then be used for the creation of ecocities, the formation of a
society of art and new science, and the learning of how to love
one another. Carpenter writes,
When mankind [sic] has solved the industrial problem so
far that products of our huge mechanical forces have
become a common heritage, and no man or woman is the
property-slave of another, then some of the causes which
compel prostitution, property-marriage, and other
perversions of affections, will have disappeared; and in
such an economically free society human unions may at last
take place according to their own inner and true laws (138).
A panelist at a Earth Day conference in Amherst several
years ago said that in the new epoch the value which will replace
profit will be nourishment, the idea of progress will be replaced
by sustainability, power will be replaced by fulfillment, and
products will be replaced by relationships.
Drawing Development
Some psychologists are of the opinion that children go
through five stages of drawing development. Children are
autodidactic, that is they teach themselves to draw. They begin
by scribbling, then begin drawing abstract forms very much like
primitive drawings. These drawings are enchanting and
spontaneous. Rhoda Kellogg observes that children, who are not
coaxed by school teachers and parents to draw real-life objects,
develop a "store of knowledge which enables them to reach their
final stage of self-taught art" (17). She believes that
confidence in one's self-taught art is necessary for the growth
of the creative spirit (17).
Teachers and parents who rate a drawing on its realistic
similarity to the object may stifle and kill the confidence of
the child. Kellogg believes adults rob children of the joy of
their self-taught non-pictorial work by encouraging a representa-
tive form of expression. Buckminister Fuller expresses similar
sentiments: "Every child is a genius until it is degeniused by
education." According to Ellen Winner in _Invented
Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts_, these earlier stages lead to
greater desire and skill in representing the world in a
naturalistic style. By the age of nine or ten children draw for
optical realism. By adolescence most children in industrial
societies have given up drawing altogether. Helga Eng, in _The
Psychology of Child and Youth Drawing_, is also of the
opinion that naturalistic drawing is the natural form of drawing
development and that abstract art is a regressive movement away
from the evolution of art. She explains,
...child and youth drawing does not fraternize with
art that is moving away from realism, away from human-
ism, away from culture, away from nature, away from life.
The free, spontaneous drawing of child and youth is akin to
Greek Art, "the most natural art ever found." This kinship
seems to indicate that the evolution of Greek art is an
instance of the natural growth of art (13).
Other art educators and modern artists argue that naturalism
is not the natural form of expression, for everyone expresses
themselves in different ways. In _Education Through Art_,
Herbert Read emphasizes,
We must realize that the child's graphic activity
is a specialized medium of communication with its own
characteristics and laws. It is not determined by
canons of objective visual realism, but by the
pressure of inner subjective feeling or sensation.
From the very beginning the drawings of children are
wholly and spontaneously of this kind. They only
change because a naturalistic attitude is gradually
imposed on children, first by the necessity of coping
with an external world--by the need they experience of
objectifying their perceptual world so that they can
measure it, assess it, deal with it, _subdue_ it;
and secondly, by the impulse to imitate the naturalistic
modes of representation which they see practiced by their
parents and teachers. In so far as the former need is met by
conceptual modes of thought, the image merely disappears, or is
devitalized, and no need for representing it graphically or
plastically is experienced; and in actual fact only a few
children, belonging to a specific psychological type,
acquire any considerable skill in naturalistic representation
(135).
Read stated that nothing could be more unnatural for
the majority of children than naturalistic drawing. Raphy M.
Pearson also expresses a similar view to Read in his book _The
New Art Education_. He asserts that "children are born creators
and remain so until their native art impulses are killed by the
imposition or imitation of adult standards concerned with skill
and literal fact" (206). And, similar to Rhoda Kellogg, Pearson
believes we cause spiritual poverty to children early in their
lives by consciously or unconsciously demanding that they mold to
the established pattern of design. Howard Gardner asks in
his book, _Artful Scribbles: The Significance of Children's
Drawings_: "Is our picture of the development of drawing
following the initial stages a genuinely general account, or is
it rather a caricature obtained through the technologically
tinted lens of our own culture?" (159) He believes children
follow a natural progression towards literalism because they need
to know whether the rules of that culture "promote realism or
abstraction." He observed that alternative schools which
promoted abstract expressionism became just as dogmatic and rigid
in their own ideology as the traditional schools promoting
realistic expression.
However, I believe the image of the house is an example of
how children around the world are molded with the naturalistic
indoctrination corrupting their subjective and objective lives at
early stages of development. In _Beyond Alienation,_ Ernest
Becker concluded, "not nature, not instinct, but society, social
fiction, early training of the child--these were the sources of
constricted behavior, of evil in the social realm" (157). Becker
believed that parents start the social indoctrination. Schools
and the universities carry it on. Even the spacial environment
within the traditional classroom setting of dividing the chairs
into rows composing a grid, reinforces totalitarian values. The
purpose of the partitioning is to monitor and interrupt
communications as well as to isolate the student's individual
performance, training them to fit into the competitive job market
as they consume the objective knowledge of the school system.
Teaching students to choose the right mate is not even part of
the school curriculum. James Hillman points out in his book
_Insearch: Psychology and Religion_ that "eros is cultivated
through intense internalization." People reach intimacy with
another not so much through horizontal connections, but through
"parallel vertical connections of each within himself [sic],"
creating a spiritual communion with the other (82). But in the
totalitarian system, eros is not even an issue to be discussed
and is certainly not acknowledged as the supreme reality
underlying all life!
Some psychologists are perplexed as to the reason why the
majority of adolescent children stop drawing. According to Eng
there is "little agreement among drawing psychologists either as
to the age at which this stagnation generally sets in, or the
cause of it" (1). It is known that in non-industrial cultures
where art is not separated from daily life this period of decline
does not happen. Kellogg, Pearson, and Read seem to agree on why
children become alienated from drawing when so few have an innate
drive to draw naturalistically.
This drawing stagnation is caused by the false objective
base of naturalism. Drawing is no longer a source of spiritual
joy for the adolescents, but limits them to materialism. The
drawing style passed down to them by the adult world is not a
form of liberation, but a form of domination. The dream house
has become a symbol of drudgery even though most of us are not
consciously aware of it. The symbol of home breeds isolation and
a competitive mentality rather than a sense of community and
love. It divides people into ethnic and kinship groups, rather
than creates a culture of the united family of wo/man. The child
becomes alienated from the self, as most children strive to
conform to the social norms of the group, losing their subjective
spirit which connects one with the universal symbolic language of
creative mythology.
Throughout sacred time, myths have been "written" in a
universal symbolic language. But modern people, for the most
part, have lost this language, not when they are asleep, but when
they are awake. The dream world is rendered senseless to the men
who build the machines and systems which are so destructive;
their world is reigned by the rationality of logos. Could it be
that the symbolic inner life constructs the good world, and, now,
it must be emancipated? (Fromm 1951)
Logos and Mythos
Logos is speech in the sense of sequential development,
causality, reasoning grounded in the subject of the knower and
the world as objectified for knowing. Logos can be described as
gathering, counting, reckoning, explaining, reasoning, and the
categorization of stable systems. It is a thinking mode which
can be demonstrated, measured, and verified. It is a process
defined with precision and can be fit into single modalities.
Meaning is disembodied from the reality of change and flux.
Logos reduces the complexity of mythos into a purely mechanical
and computable certainty.
There has been a long standing intellectual debate on which
mode of thought, logos or mythos, is the mature and better way of
thinking. The established thought is that logos and its
reductive inquiry is the better way and mythos is only "an
immature degraded version of logos" (Sternberg 1990, 56). The
personal and inner dimensions of life are seen as less real than
the collective and outer way of relating to the world. By the
outer world, I especially mean the world set up by the
patriarchs, such as Aristotle, who divides the mind from body,
the inner from outer, the universal from particular, and the
sacred from the profane. Aristotle's sexism can be seen in his
description of human reproduction. He denied men's contribution
to reproduction was of the material sort. The woman's ovum was
material and primitive, while a man's sperm was more spiritual
and divine. For this reason, it was believed that women were
unable to sublimate from their bodies to be able to create
culture or comprehend science. In the Enlightenment worldview,
man was able to remove himself from what he was observing and
rationally analyze what was under his observation, whereas woman
was stuck in the material body unable to become an objective
observer. Women were considered unable to distinguish between
subjective and objective and therefore could not know abstract
scientific knowledge. The female experience was thought to be
inferior to that of the scientific male. Susanne Langer states,
Everything that falls outside the domain of analytical,
propositional, and formal thought is merely classified as
emotive, irrational, and animalian...All other things our
minds do are dismissed as irrelevant to intellectual
progress; they are residues, emotional disturbances, or
throwbacks to animal estate and indicated "regression to a
pre-logical state" (Labouvie-Vief 1990, 65).
According to Gisela Labouvie-Vief, educational theorist Jean
Piaget believed reality was the impersonal, external,
collectivity of the outside world. In order to connect with it,
the mature adult had to submit to the processes of logos. Piaget
thought mythos was a childish and immature state of mind which
the normal child outgrew with the desire to function within the
social framework. The inner symbolism of the child was degraded
and thought to have no objective meaning to the outside world.
Therefore, the child is forced to forget her or his inner life in
order to fit into the status quo. Self-knowledge, the interplay
between subjectivity and objectivity, is lost, as is the child's
natural juno or genius. For there to be an evolution of wisdom,
a reintegration of mythos and logos needs to take place.
Labouvie-Vief writes,
What makes the artist, the poet, or the scientist wise
is not expert technical knowledge in their respective
domains but rather knowledge of issues that are part of the
human condition, more generally. Wisdom consists, so to say,
in one's ability to see through and beyond individual
uniqueness and specialization into those structures that
relate us to our common humanity (77-78).
What then do we mean by wisdom? Wisdom is the mythic,
holistic, Gaian perspective which is found through the intuitive
knowledge of our archaic selves. Skolimowski says "wisdom is the
possession of the right knowledge" which is "based on a proper
understanding of the structural hierarchies within which life
cycles and human cycles are nested and nurtured" (38). This
intuitive knowledge calls prophetesses and prophets to the task
of creating a compassionate world. Colin Wilson writes,
What I wish to emphasize here is that a highly developed
reasoning faculty has nothing whatever to do with genius.
Nothing was ever _discovered_ by logic. All things are
discovered by intuition, as the lives of the great
mathematicians and scientists prove again and again. Logic
plods after intuition, and verifies discoveries in its own
pedestrian way. Logic is a mere servant of the imagination.
To exalt it--as modern thinkers tend to--is to invite spiritual
anarchy (Wilson 1957, 102-3).
Mythos and Love
Mythos, the force which brings things together in a holistic
picture, is a motivating force for love. This intuitive
"knowledge of the heart" when focused on the image of a creative
humanity is essential for planetary salvation. It is the guiding
microbial force that creates harmony between the sexes and gives
logos, science, and technology an ethical basis to explore nature
and the mysteries of the universe. Love takes us to the origins
of life and creates new worlds where our dreams become the
surrounding culture. In _Becoming Human Through Art,_ Edmund
Burke Feldman writes,
Love has to be a dimension of everything that education
means and does because of the crucial role it plays in
bringing about wholeness of human character. Whether love
is an instinct or a type of spiritual reaching out, it is
nevertheless the force that generates all human effort,
especially educational effort, striving always to bring
about oneness among the things it touches (128).
Without love as the nucleus of education, logos will
continue to dominate our culture with the one-sided perspective
of scientific realism. Without mythos as the basis of education,
educators will remain impotent in their ability to create the
radical social change necessary for our survival. Edward
Carpenter writes,
the conclusion is that the inner laws in these
matters--the inner laws of the sex-passion, of love, and
of all human relationship--must gradually appear and take the
lead, since they alone are the powers which can create and
uphold a rational society; and that the outer laws--since
they are dead and lifeless things--must inevitably disappear
(143).
There is no reason to believe that children need to confirm
to naturalism in order to develop higher stages of reasoning. In
conforming to the status quo there is certainly reason to believe
naturalism is necessary. But this conformity is not an education
to produce self-reliant thinkers and doers, but to produce
neurotic middle-class workers striving to make home payments.
Read notes that when children are exposed to abstract design and
paintings, they will develop an abstract style. He writes, "it
has not been proved that the normal child has an irresistible
desire to make naturalistic representations of objects" (125).
The Origins of Art
In Arnold Hauser's book _The Social History of Art_, he
explains his theory of why the transcendental or naturalistic
state was favored over the abstract expression. He believes the
domination of realism originated during the Paleolithic age when
people were hunters and gathers, eating hand to mouth. Because
hunting was so important to the survival of the group, it
required an acute awareness of the natural world: all five
senses of the hunter had to be directed outward into the
objective realm.
George Bataille writes, in _Prehistoric Painting, Lascaux or
the Birth of Art_, that the two capital events in history have
been the making of tools, from which work was born, and the
invention of art, in which play began to delight our minds with
wonder. Wonder is the source of philosophy which attempts to
comprehend the intrinsically esoteric secret mysteries of life.
In the world of work the homo faber man was not yet human. He
became a homo sapien when he began to practice art, not only for
a utilitarian activity, but as a protest to the existing world.
Here began the rivalry between the world of work and the realm of
sexuality and death--the world of art and the goddess tradition.
Hauser asserts that the Paleolithic cave paintings represented
the monistic concrete worldview of the empirical reality of the
world of work, not the abstract designs which appeared during the
Neolithic Age when animism began to appear.
The animist world view saw the world divided into a duality
between the natural world and the spiritual world. No longer was
the artist an imitator of nature, but its antagonist, opposing
the appearance of things with his own homogeneous pattern. With
this shift of perspective came the change in our economic
relationship with the ecology as a result of the agricultural
revolution. We were no longer totally at the mercy of nature
since we had learned to produce our own food. Art, then, no
longer had to be a naturalistic representation of reality. It
became a sign of an idea or vision. This changed art into a
pictographical sign language.
Primitive and Modern Artists
According to Otto Rank primitive artists did not have a
sense of individual fame and personal immortality that modern
artists strive to achieve, but their art sought to create a
collective immortality. The art work was a picture of the
collective soul. The collective soul was the aim of art, in "the
continuation of the individual existence in the species" (Rank
1968, 14). The soul needed to be represented by an abstract
idea. Art, therefore, was spiritual, not concrete and practical.
Art historian, Lucy Lippard writes in _Overlay,_ "Art in fact was
the concertizing vehicle that permitted the abstract ideal of
religion to be communicated and thereby survive" (10).
Neolithic artists were concerned with the presentation of ideas
and less concerned with the imitation of nature.
Lippard states that primitive art and modern art are
ideologically opposed: primitive, or primal, art is integrated
with daily life while modern art is set totally outside daily
life. In the primitive world, both art and religion were once
inseparable aspects of collective life. Lippard writes,
"Conflicts between nature and culture, between historical
awareness and supposed universality of art, clearly did not exist
in prehistory" (5). In certain historical periods non-figurative
art has prevailed: the Neolithic Age, as well as the Celtic and
Arabic civilizations. Read says that "such periods prove that a
non-representational tradition can be "natural" or "normal" at
all stages of individual development" (125).
In _Modern Art and the Modern Mind_, J.P. Hodin states that
the problem between abstract art and figurative art lies in the
philosophic difference between Plato and Aristotle: Plato
believed reality could be found in the world of ideas, but
Aristotle believed reality was experience through the senses
which are part of an indivisible whole. Abstract art represents
the ideas of Plato and figurative drawing represents the thinking
of Aristotle.
In Aristotle's philosophy of art the elements of beauty took
different forms: taxis, summetria, and horismonon, which are
prevalent in mathematics. Taxis means order; symmetria means
measured together; and horismenon means restriction. These
rationalistic modes of order and beauty have prevailed in Western
civilization throughout the ages. Skolimowski writes, "the
architecture inspired by the mechanistic logos has demonstrably
failed us" (90).
Modern painters also may have achieved a level of
abstraction somewhat akin to Neolithic painter. Gottfried
Richter in _Art and Human Consciousness_, has written that
"modern art proves that the world of the senses is only
foreground and that the spiritual world is the real, essential
one" (250). Modern artists saw nature as a manifestation of the
self; Jackson Pollock even declared "I am Nature" (McShine 1976,
125). Arshile Gorky, who also painted to express the nature
within himself, agrees,
Beloved, abstraction is therefore the probing vehicle,
the progressive thrust toward higher civilization,
toward higher evaluation of the finite by tearing the
finite apart, exploding it so as to thereby enter
limitless areas. Mere realistic art is therefore
finite and limits man only to the perception of his
physical eyes, namely that which is tangible. Abstract
art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible,
to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the
emancipator of the mind. It is an exploration into
unknown areas (McShine 1976, 127).
Modern artists felt estranged from society since they had no
integral social role in daily affairs. In _Abstract
Expressionist Painting In America_, William Sietz writes of the
modern artist that, "society connotes to him not a social
organism of which he is a part, but a huge middle-class world of
property, manufacturing, buying and selling--a society to which
he is alien" (139). The painter Robert Motherwell felt the
artist was a spiritual creature trapped in a property-loving
world. Shortly before his death, Vincent van Gogh said that the
great steps in the future of art would be taken collectively, for
no one would be able to bear the burden alone (Russell 1981,
104). What is this collective burden? Isn't it to create a new
world? Modern and post-modern artists seem to yearn for a
position in society which directs culture, rather than being
received into the market place.
The modern painter rebelled from the scientific experiences
of the senses and returned to the archaic out of the inner
necessity of creating a new civilization. It was hoped that this
civilization would foster a new relationship between the
collective and the individual, in other words, between the social
myth and the artist. The modern artist was in conflict with the
collective myth, but unlike the primitive artist who perpetuated
the collective myth, she or he aspired to achieve individual
immortality through creating a new collective myth, a new
dreambody.
Unfortunately, the modern period did not experience the
total revolution of a new way of collective living, even though
it did provide us with a new way of visualizing the world. This
new way of seeing did not fully revolutionize art education.
Modernism failed to provide us with a political philosophy of art
which could link our imaginations together.
Plato is one of the few philosophers who realized that art
and society are inseparable concepts. Government is not a
science, but an art having the power to fuse the divided world.
For there to be an effective revolutionary movement, a visual
plan of action, evolving from the arts, must be implemented at
the pre-school level and be allowed to continue to develop
throughout life. Education must change its perspective of home
by presenting images of futuristic high-tech ecological cities,
or arcologies, in various bioregions on our home planet of
Spaceship Earth. In this plan, both the practical skills of
realism and the spiritual qualities of abstract art will be
needed to deconstruct the present system and visualize the
reconstruction of the world. We can no longer afford for these
two viewpoints to be antagonistic towards one other.
The real images of our archetypal home are uniquely
different for each individual, for it is inside the mind where
the self resides. Liberation from the naturalistic way of
self-expression for those people who are not innately inclined to
it is required so that they can reconnect with the mythic
universal language, while providing a new visual model of
collective behavior from a concrete architectural plan. This
will offer us the foundation for a new artistic and educational
philosophy. Becker writes, "We need a unified world picture,
founded on a living myth and vital belief; and we need in
addition knowledge that is personally liberating, that makes our
action less automatic and more free within the society that
follows that belief" (128). He believes human freedom comes
about in a community when it nourishes the highest development of
both the individual and the community. In this community,
unlimited knowledge is the goal as the mysteries of life guide
the communal action. The community's concern will be the best
way to free the energies of all people, and the communal meaning
will be the "celebration of the broadest and deepest meanings of
the universe" (219). From this new place in the universe, the
value of the human soul will be rediscovered and the divine self
will be found as the illusion of the commercial society fades
into history.
Modern science has not been able to explain the mystery of
life, nor answer essential questions about the nature of the
cosmos and the origins and meaning of human life. Nor has it
been able to discover the "mechanism of the imagination." Yet
these mysteries reveal themselves through the symbolic nature of
the intuitive arts. A symbolic order is necessary for us to know
our individual place in the organic-cosmic universe. Herbert
Read observes, "science has in no means replaced the symbolic
functions of art, which are still necessary to overcome the
resistance of the brutish world" (Read 1967, 22).
Albert Einstein realized that science did not have the
knowledge needed to solve the worlds critical problems. He
believed that the problem of the survival of our race would be
found within the dimension of the arts and theology. Jean
Houston writes, "Myths and archetypes communicate from the poetic
level of mind and thought, allowing Nature to speak to the
imagining soul rather than just presenting us with scientific
laws and probabilities" (20). She sees a new world myth arising
from Gaia. From this new myth, we can begin to build the
architecture of the Imagination, so that the temples of our
legacy are not the nuclear power plants, toxic waste sites,
shopping malls, and suburban sprawl of the Modernist Era:
clearly, these must be replaced by the visionary architecture of
ecocities.
By means of the suppressive visual formula of home, children
first become trained to conform to the brutish world ruled by
modern science, and it will be through a liberated artistic
expression of a universal order where we will collectively find
salvation. Our brutish culture divides the society into
pluralistic subcultures. Read explains, "The culture of an
artist or a philosopher is distinct from that of a mine worker or
field labourer; the culture of a poet will be somewhat different
from that of a politician; but in a healthy society these are
all parts of the same culture" (Read 1967, 23). Instead of each
individual pursuing her or his own dream house and personal
pleasures, in a new cultural myth, people will begin to share
meaning, communal goods, natural resources, and social justice,
so that everyone will have the means to pursue human happiness
for the betterment of humanity. In his book _The Redemption of
the Robot_, Herbert Read writes, the "imagination seeks and
finds archetypal forms. Civilization is the search for these
forms; civilizations decline when they relinquish the creation
of form" (252).
The first concern of politicians and dictators has always
been to control and manipulate images so that they serve the
interest of the ruling class. Parents and teachers must stop
being the unwitting, yet sinister administrators of the social
dogma and archetypes, which are destroying the ecology, by
perpetuating the false image of the socio-economic structure of
the ruling class: the private house. It is imperative that the
censorship of the poetic vision be stopped. As the houses of
history collapse, the "blueprint of the archaic" may once again
come forth to give us an eternal beginning, which "calls for a
totally different design and points of stress." Educators must
begin to enact this great paradigm shift of understanding and
communal living by revolutionizing the way we perceive and draw
the home. With the collapse of the inner house of the soul, the
outer walls of the built environment will soon lose their support
and the square house will collapse (Arguelles 1975).
To be locked into the square house, is a prison cell for the
mind. One of the basic messages of Buckminster Fuller's
teachings is that the square is an unsound form on which to
structure civilization. The triangle, which is also integral to
the circle, is the basis of universal order. North Americans can
no longer delude themselves that land ownership is the way to
insure a just democracy, for it is clearly not. The pluralistic
ideology that has emerged from the democratic society is unable
to create the new social myth which we need in order to evolve
and save the species. Our future rests in the new social vision.
The social mission of education is to offer an alternative vision
to students.
The Collective Wisdom
Advocates for the homeless building their own houses, as
opposed to their living in makeshift shanty towns on the edge of
megacities, or government planners building anonymous mass
housing for them, need to accept the new communal archetype in
architecture. Advocates for a people's architecture must begin
to realize that we can no longer live with Plato's belief that
every man should build a house before he dies, that somehow it is
one's divine right to build one's own home. No longer can we act
as if it is environmentally and socially desirable to house one's
own biological family. As I have shown in previous chapters, the
notion of private ownership of land and the acquisitive instincts
are part of the dysfunctional matriarchy-patriarchy relationship
and are environmentally unsustainable. The myth of building
one's own home has lead to a mediocre and unhealthy environment
which lacks any artistic merit. Skolimowski writes,
In our lowbrow culture, which is so often proletarian in
the worst sense, the architect must assert his [sic] role as a
patrician, must lead instead of bowing to acquisitive and
materialist preferences. Only when people transcend their
obsession with material acquisitiveness--which is one of the
chief causes of environmental destruction and of our inner
emptiness-- will it be time for the architect to relinquish
his [sic] role as the designer of a complete environment
(101).
Advocates for a people's architecture say shelter- making is
a basic human drive. Let's hope it is so, since shelter-making
is what we desperately need in order to build magnanimous
ecocities. This new orientation will require a massive effort on
the part of everyone. For ecocities to become reality, all
members of the world community must contribute to their spiritual
and material construction in a variety of ways, re-linking people
with nature's source.
The same is true on another forefront of human habitat, the
biosphere. The biospheric technology (e.g., the Biosphere II
experiment) merges together ecology and technology, the organic
and the mechanical. The enclosed pod of Biosphere II, is clearly
an opportunity to finally fuse together the two basic
architectural archetypes in order to radically change power and
economic relationships. However, there is discussion about using
this technology for individual housing units. In an article
entitled "Biosphere 2 at One" Kevin Kelly writes,
A personal biosphere is only a couple of jumps away
from a long American tradition of self-sufficient
homesteads...A personal household biosphere is the
pinnacle of self-sufficiency. You drink your own
recycled pee, breathe your own recycled farts, eat your own
recycled shit. Not only do you make your own
granola, you make your own atmosphere! (104)
Biospheric technology used in this fashion would only further
nuclear family isolation, making the home into a high-tech
cocoon. Of course, the poor who could not afford the new kind of
shelter will be left without the protection of the clean
environment in the life underneath the dome. In this model,
biospheres will be built to make a profit, and so the capitalist
system uses another technology to serve the greed and self-
interest of the few in clean, environmentally safe ways.
Using biospheres for individual housing units is absolutely
unethical as well as impractical. Using biospheres as nuclear
family units will only perpetuate the domination model of the
dysfunctional matriarchy-patriarchy relationship. The Greeks
believed the idion or individual domain was the province of
idiocy. The evolutionary path we must follow is one which uses
the technology to build shelter which is based on justice and
equality for all. We have the architectural and technologic
know-how to build ecocities, and it is our moral duty to do so,
to end poverty forever on this planet!
Future civilization lies in visualizing, and eventually
creating new urban environments of biospheric arcologies. It is
our adult responsibility to prepare children for this new way of
living. It is time to abandon our old concept of housing, which
has divided the world into master space and slave space, and move
towards a planet of arcologies interconnected through
telecommunications. Arcologies will provide us with the space to
build community again, so that women and men will have places in
which to "circulate, meet, and enter into union with one another"
(Canto 1986, 344). Nature's aim of bringing about an image of
reproductive primal unity can then transform the world. Gyorgy
Kepes writes in _Structure in Art and in Science_, "To reach what
we all hope for, to become worthy of an environment worth living
in, we must do what we can to bring our outer and our inner
worlds together--renew the ancient marriage of art and science,
art and nature" (vii). In Greek, ecology literally means home,
and by building arcologies, planet earth will become the temple
of harmony and balance between psyche and techne.
Summary
In this chapter we have seen how the Jeffersonian American
Dream is based on a concept of land ownership which was brought
over by European colonists. The lust for private ownership of
land destroyed the Native American way of life that for eons had
lived in balance with the natural forces. Throughout the world,
children learn to conform to the American Dream house as they
adopt the traditional patterns of drawing behavior based on Greek
perspective. This destroys their subjective, inner voices, as
well as the external world of the global ecology. Under this
worldview, children lose the joy of drawing and love for art as
they begin to conform to the rigid rules of naturalism. Modern
artists sought to liberate humanity from this three-dimensional,
scientific perspective by developing an inner voice through
abstract art. However, Modernism did not become a powerful
revolutionary force which could change the way children perceive
home. What is urgently needed now is a new image of home which
respects the interconnectness of all things.