I have said before that you don’t need a beautiful place to make good relations or a good life. I won’t back off that. Which leads to asking why I mention it in the first place? Because buildings are an opportunity to express our love for others. They represent an ethos, a moral imperative to the betterment of those we have never met.

I make the statement because the affordability of making beautiful places is out of reach for so many of us. It’s a reassurance, a statement calling forth our faith and identifying the pathos of the moment so we can experience it, listen to it and move beyond the immobilization of it. If we are not constrained by finance, or time, we are impoverished emotionally, we are distressed by what we see happening on our world. A result of reporting from every handheld device? Maybe so. But it leaves us in an emotional state that does not allow us to think beyond emergencies.

This morning I was brought to tears by a video. Remarkably, as an architect, I’ve only sat through maybe five of these in as many years of my YouTube patronage. The format is a time-lapse of construction. The ones I sit through are not the professional, commercial construction ones. I see that every day. No. It’s the DIYers going to town. In this case a couple taking four months to update a pair of dilapidated masonry sheds. It was a thing of beauty watching their industriousness and the end result. Every second-year architect student would critique that result. What I hope is that such critiques come with a healthy dose of compassion.

Thanks to book touring by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson about the new book “Abundance”, Klein reminds us that although the robber barons were violent in the markets, they left us colleges, universities, arts centers, museum, botanical gardens, research institutions. As obsessed as the Gilded Age was with money, there was a sense of social responsibility, even if it was posturing. This frame, of giving back to society, carried into the mid-20th century. And no doubt it continues today. Except that the wealthy that make the news don’t seem to be adding to this bounty of public good. Stamford and Rockefeller invested in the next generations making college cheap for the largest number of people. And to pursue those goals was also lofted. Perhaps during robber baron times, their future acts were as obscured.

Never-the-less, the result was the American Dream. In the 1950s I could have chosen to teach at UC Santa Cruz, bought a house on a modest professor’s salary, with a car, kids, and time every weekend and evening to pursue building stuff in my garage or wandering the windy coastline of the Northern California. Even taken in the live performances of the UC majors in the arts, or any local members of the scene, relaxed by the assurance that the bounty of our times extended to all persons.

This is a portrait of affordability. It had nothing to do with American manufacturing or cheep goods locally or abroad. It had everything to do with the temperament of society which translates to the role of government safety nets. That I am a white male had a lot to do with it too. So, to me, the obvious next move in an alternative timeline would have been to not only vote for expanding this dream to the largest number of people regardless of race, creed or gender, but to heavily invest in two systems.

System 1: locking in the governance systems that made quick work of expanding safety nets while defending and elevating self-reliance and free choice for individuals. This stems from an ethos, ethics and morals about seeing all individuals as worthy of love and belonging. This is an ethos of compassion and empathy. It results in the long run endurance of not just our species, but all species. (What happens with immigration if personal economics is less at issue for families?)

While Klein & Thompson make me wonder if Reagan may have been right about the over-regulation of markets as a general principle, or talking point, he was dead wrong about who he allowed to be de-regulated. The de-regulation had to favor the public good. The promises of finance institutions to circuitously benefit all people was not enough. Results, replicable, commercial-ready, policy-ready results matter. Even localized pilot projects would not have been sufficient because once a financial system scales beyond the capability of proper scrutiny, the temptation to manage mirrors of expertise and obfuscation to siphon off capital are too great. That’s just one hypothesis, that barely even qualifies as more than an opinion. (See Notes On Certainty.)

System 2: deep investments in the necessary physical infrastructure no single corporation had the time, revenue or expertise to develop. High-speed rail, interstates, telecommunications are all quasi-glamorous, high-profile examples. But so is power generation, clean water and clean air. And so is a minimum bar, times three, for housing, sustenance and health.

Feeding those deep investments is not first a question of capital. Because capital is neutral. It is a tool. Like a hammer, capital doesn’t care what it hits. It doesn’t even care if it’s used. It might to the managers of that capital, but there is so much destructive capital in the world right now, I can’t even imagine those managers care the outcomes, just that their capital is growing. Period.

There is another requirement nobody focuses on: our ongoing visions of a better society.

Today the first question is, “for who?” And who makes the determination? It is a devilish tangle that requires not a policy, or a political response, but a philosophical one. Why? Because the first thing this framing does is divide us. From that lens, they are the wrong questions. They have already been answered. For who? Everybody. Every Body. Who decides? We all do. Locally, regionally, then globally. How? Ethics. Compassion. Connection.

Not only am I an architect, in the business of “improving” our environment, but from a very early age it was clear I was sensitive to physical space. So this seems a secret I should keep to myself. Indeed, it feels risky to say anything about it.

Farfetched to say I am highly sensitive, or I have an amplified sixth sense. I just pay attention to, and have emotional responses around space. I am the same way with drums. There are songs I loved, not because of the lyrics, or the melody, but because of the drums.

As I’ve grown older, the emotional experience has expanded. I have a series of associations with differing regions of architecture as well as specific structures.

And like a fair few songs with awesome drums I can’t listen to anymore because the lyrics are vile, there are cathedrals of construction I wholly reject despite the intense amount of blood, sweat and tears that goes into their construction and the handful of stunning qualities that could redeem them. Because they were born of intent I cannot brook.

Buildings are immensely personal in the sense that each one is unique. It’s not like cars or airplanes. Even in “cookie-cutter” subdivisions, the closest thing to mass produced buildings we have, each building has a distinct orientation, place among others, even before the inhabitants make it their own.

This is why the reminder from Klein is so important. I absolutely idolize California. I mythologize it. I don’t have a clue what Reagan meant by “a city on the hill” in practical terms. But I do know what “California” represents: a just, generous society with room for everyone, including the Environment. And for decades they delivered. California, The Place is awesome to me. But California, The Idea, is the obvious evolution of the American Experiment that until recent political events, has been a welcome blueprint for others to follow.

Klein and Thompson’s critiques are a practical call to restore that effectiveness to the democratic model. Notice this emphasizes both intent and results. We have proven since the Pyramids of Giza that we can systematize and mechanize things. It’s astonishing that is even a question. Again, it’s not the tools, the gear, the medium that makes the artist.

It’s the heart.

A beautiful place is a group project. It comes about not as an act of courage, per se, but as a communal act of devoting the time and energy to creating welcoming environments. That is an emotional, pro-social construct. It’s not to make money, though revenue can be generated. It’s not to solve problems, though many practical issues are resolved. It’s not about pride, or ego, though one can be proud of hard work well done. It is about hospitality, it is about welcoming, it is about generosity of spirit and faith in the inherent goodness of each other, of our very being.

We get to choose that point of view. So, if you choose cynicism, if you choose the view that we are all greedy, self-interested little creatures, a disease on the planet, that is a choice you make. Just be careful. Because these sorts of choices, these sorts of lenses, are systemic. They become principles you live by. My choice is that we are all capable of apprehending and creating not Instagram or Loreal beauty, but the beauty of a generative life.

I choose to see the American Project as that. And though we have heaps and heaps of failures, of falling short, of cruelty, blind destruction, idiocy and an incomprehensible vein of malevolence – none of which I can fucking account for, or offer a practical way out of – I believe that the very heart of what created the California mystique, that I see in so many other places around the world, is the competition to make a better place for all. Because, when that project is done, and everyone has affordable access to create the beauty of a generative life, then we can move on to the next project, whatever that may be.

I am going to do some gardening.

Notes On Certainty

I am making up a scale of certainty that passes the Bullshit tests and survives into practical use that does little or no harm. These days that seems a set of lofty goals. It goes like this, ranked in increasing usefulness: opinions, experiences, ideas, hypotheses, theories (aka replicable results under tightly controlled conditions, aka science), commercial ready, operationally ready and policy ready.

Notice the word certainty does not land anywhere in that list. Notice that “the right way” to do things is also not on that list. There are no judgements. Just what works and what doesn’t.

You can also group this as personal, scientific and applied sciences. All of us use the “operationally ready” every time we bake cookies.

Post Script – Virginia

Virginia, it turns out, also has one of the best state college and university systems in America. We also have an excellent highway department. Excellent parks systems. Our state works pretty well on a number of public good fronts. I do not know our history, how that came to be. Was it tobacco money? Was it coal money, or forestry, farming or Department of Defense? Crucial. What was the ethical motive? Did the SimCity team have it right about the variables that make for a good world?

California as a practical matter, is shedding people and I believe the critique is a strong hypothesis – we overcomplicate things, we don’t trust the guy next to us. I have lengthy screeds to offer about what happens in my practice because of this. It is not a set of smart developments we find ourselves in. It is a transitory time with transitory methods of ensuring quality.