Remembering What Matters
Christopher Alexander is an architect who, for
thirty years, has been arguing to bring feeling, humanity
and beauty into construction of the built environment.
His writing about buildings is really a set of beliefs
about the way we construct the world around us. Here is
how he begins his 1985 book entitled, “The
Production of Houses.”
“In the modern world, the idea that houses
can be loved and beautiful has been eliminated almost
altogether. For most of the world’s housing, the
task of building houses has been reduced to a grim
business of facts and figures, an uphill struggle against
the relentless surge of technology and bureaucracy, in
which human feeling has almost been forgotten. Even in
those few houses, which openly concern themselves with
their appearance, beauty has also been forgotten. What
happens there is something remote from feeling, an almost
disgusting concern with opulence, with the taste of the
marketplace, and with fashion? Here, too, the simple
values of the human heart do not exist.
The real meaning of beauty, the idea of houses as
places which express one’s life, directly and
simply, the connection between the vitality of the people
and the shape of their houses, the connection between the
force of social movements and the beauty and vigor of the
places where people live—this is all forgotten,
vaguely remembered as the elements of some imaginary
golden age.”
When I read these words, they seemed to be
describing the modern workplace. If you simply replace
the word house with the word organization, and reread
these two paragraphs, you find a description of the
institutions where most of us dwell. It is becoming rare
that people express any love for their workplace. Our
organizations are being driven by facts and figures,
pulled by technology and the taste of the marketplace.
Remote from feeling, distant from words connoting beauty;
the ideas of loyalty, long-term commitment and care seem
to be disappearing from our vocabulary.
The idea that our workplace might be a place
worthy of long-term commitment is increasingly quaint. We
now have evolved to an instrumental relationship with our
employer, if we have one at all. The relationship between
employer and employee has become commodified, defined by
barter and open to constant re-negotiation from both
sides. We have free agency, staying and signing bonuses,
outsourcing, full-time temporaries and on it goes. We
even speak with pride of the virtual organization, one
that exists only on paper, which can be born in an
instant and dissolved in a day.
This all comes with a cost that Alexander’s
words warn us about. What we create in the outer world is
eventually reflected in our inner world. When we create
houses or organizations that eliminate love and beauty,
and where human feelings are considered an unaffordable
luxury, then we have created that same landscape within
ourselves. And this will also be the defining feature of
our relationships.
In a virtual work world, I experience myself as a
virtual being, one whose value is primarily defined by
facts and figures, and is constantly open to reinvention.
I begin to expect myself to change as rapidly as the
marketplace, finding my identity coming from the product
I have become. I begin to substitute networks for
relationships. I think of intimate conversations as
taking place “offline” instead of being the
point. This virtual and instrumental culture is reducing
the experience of our own freedom, even though it is
supposedly our freedom that this virtual world is
offering us.
Freedom vs. Liberty
It is common to confuse the experience of freedom
with obtaining our liberty. Liberty is about the absence
of oppression; the lessening of external constraints on
our actions. The virtual and instrumental culture may, in
fact, give us more liberty and reduce constraints. We
have no boss or many bosses, we work more at home, we
dress casual, we have portable pensions, no loyalty oaths
and soon we might be able to manage our own social
security accounts.
These liberties, however appealing, have little to
do with our freedom.
Freedom is an inside job. It is having the will to
construct our own house, our own way of seeing reality,
and having a mind that runs independent of convention. It
is the capacity to define the world as we see and
experience it, rather than to follow fashion and let
others define it for us. It is finding a calling and
vision from God or from within ourselves and not from top
management. No job structure can create or restrict the
integrity of our own experience. Our freedom has to be
given away, it can’t be taken. Freedom is having
the courage to pursue meaning and beauty and has more to
do with our subjective experience of what Alexander calls
the “simple values of the human heart.”
Alexander speaks of houses that “can be
loved and beautiful.” This would be strange
language to apply to the new economy, but maybe these are
appropriate words to
use if our freedom were the point, and the marketplace
were just a place to discover
it. The importance of freedom is that it creates real
accountability: I will care for what
I have constructed. For example, what we need to
recapture in the midst of this new economy is to care for
the whole even though the whole no longer seems to care
for
us. Who will care for our institutions if not us, even if
the old threads of loyalty and
a long relationship have disappeared?
Fashion or Fate
While a virtual and instrumental world may seem
inevitable, and a requirement of the marketplace,
Alexander also suggests in his statement that our
attraction to technology and a virtual existence may be
driven more by fashion than necessity. This is especially
true in the business world where a herd instinct towards
popular ideas is common. Every organization says it wants
to be a leader, but is reluctant to try anything that has
not been proven first by others. It is possible that all
the language about free agency, the exponential rate of
change, the need for agility, and the fundamental shift
caused by the Internet are a sea of modern fashion that
we happen to be swimming in.
What Christopher Alexander has given his work-life
to is stated in another beautiful passage in his book,
where he offers the possibility that we can create houses
in which, “Human feeling and human dignity come
first; in which the housing process is reestablished as
the fundamental human process in which people integrate
their values and themselves, in which they form social
bonds, in which they become anchored in the earth, in
which the houses which are made have, above all, human
worth, in the simple, old fashioned sense that people
feel proud and happy to be living in them and would not
give them up for anything because they...are the concrete
expression of their place in the world, the concrete
expression of themselves.”
Our workplace and organizations are the daytime
social houses in which we dwell. Why would we not build
more permanent, rather than virtual, places for our
selves, in the face of our infatuation with modern
fashion and a dot.com address? It only requires that we
understand the existence of our freedom and know that our
organizations can still become what we decide to imagine
them to become.
September 2000 NFC
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