Architecture as eternal delight: reflections on the attack of the World Trade Center

Cross Currents, Fall, 2002 by Jean Gardner

Why has modern culture forgotten the human capacity, which other societies practice, that enables them to relate to nature in ways other than through control? Visiting Ground Zero, architect and critic Michael Sorkin could not help worrying whether his habit of aesthetizing experience was standing in the way of his taking in the full enormity of the wreckage of the two mangled deathtraps. "Visiting the site of the disaster in its immediate aftermath, I struggled to take in the somber beauty of twisted steel surrounded by the smell of death--the pulverized rubble that seemed too small to contain all of what was there before. I worried that something in me also had to die, some capacity for enjoyment, if only that shopworn sublime." (22)

Has the habit of aesthetizing, of naming even the most horrible of experiences, blinded us to the "awe" in the awfulness of the forces of nature? Has the belief that the forces of nature, such as energy, are solely catalogable entities convinced us that naming is synonymous with the wisdom that is gained from experience?

Modern descriptions of energy use the word to mean a measurable entity identifiable in the language of science. In Webster's dictionary, the word "energy" refers to the work that a physical system is capable of doing in changing from its actual state to a specified reference state. In the mid-nineteenth century the laws of thermodynamics codified these physical changes. Before that time in the West, the word energy denoted more than a quantifiable entity. It also referred to non-physical phenomenon, work that can't be quantified, such as opus dei, the liturgical work of God that monks performed in the Western tradition. Many cultures recognize this more inclusive meaning of energy: Incan, Ancient Egyptian, Hopi. Words such as chi in Chinese and prana in Sanskrit denote in English both physical and non-physical energy.

There are voices in modern Western culture reminding us of these more complex experiences of energy. William Blake in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell writes "Energy is the only life.../ Energy is Eternal Delight."

Based on the possibility that energy is more than a measurable phenomenon, I would like to recover a broader, more inclusive definition for it. Energy is the medium that binds us one to another and to all members of the Earth community. It is a primary force of nature--of life. Energy is the connecting tissue of life, merging us into the cosmos with the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the thoughts we think, the feelings we experience, and the constructed world we have created for ourselves.

I would like to recognize that a truly ethical, life-sustaining architecture is not only energy-efficient in the sense of using fewer kilowatts per hour or having renewable energy sources, but that a sustainable architecture is also an "eternal delight"--that which attunes us to the universe through binding experience. When our cities are truly life sustaining, they will help us, as Wallace Stevens writes, to: