Life seems impossibly fragmented, like a defective puzzle. The pieces won’t fit. Cognitive dissonance.

Maybe the puzzle isn’t defective; maybe it’s actually 2 or 3 or 12 different puzzles; pieces all mixed together. Sort it out. Balance.

Balance = schizophrenia. The compartmentalization of things is not healthy. I think I believe this, but I’m afraid of its implication: there is only one puzzle. Synthesis.

Have I painted myself into a corner; has logic sent me to an impossible end? Emotion tells me NO. Synthesis is very important. But not at once, not over years, not in absolute terms. Gently.

How? The one puzzle’s complexity is overwhelming. There are too many pieces. I can understand a few, some, but not all.

An ability exists in each of us, intuitively rising: We can understand the whole.

The world, life, is not a puzzle at all; there are no pieces. Only a single flowing whole. This is the only way I can understand its complexity and its synthesis.

I innately understand your complexity as a whole via our relationship, our interaction. I hold you in my mind whole, not a set of parts, not a machine. You do the same; separate and not separate, interrelated wholes. I understand everything this way, not only you and me.  I am a subject in a world of subjects. No absolutes, no distinct parts. Flow, change, degree.

Back inside myself, I see synthesis as woven relationships.

I am learning how to weave, gently.

Things are busy at home. We started raising chickens this spring, and we learned the hard way: NEVER buy chicks BEFORE you have built a coop! (as in, “I’ll just keep them in the brooder until the coop is ready.”)They grow too fast! This is the beginning of Hilarie’s and my plans to revive the family farm. First chickens, then turkeys and pigs, cows…older neighbors have told me my great grandmother made the best butter around. Wouldn’t it be great to regain that reputation?  We are excited, and I can think of no better way to bring us and our children in touch with what we value. And this is a major part of bringing my life from balance to synthesis. A work always in progress…

In between traveling and things at home, I have been developing a way of understanding the unique qualities of our current time called Life in the Overlap, founded on this big concept of synthesis that you read about here and there on this website. This began last year, and I have been talking to others about how best to get these new ideas out, as well as tuning it via presentations. Should it be a separate website, or should the BD website evolve? One thing we know for sure: this is going to make a great book, and Nick, Anitha and I are working to develop it now. We have it all laid out on a wall in our office. A breakthrough was our understanding the task as a whole system, rather than a linear activity (first write page 1, then page 2, etc.). That’s just good design. More to come on the Overlap!

And we have some inspirational things going on at Ashley McGraw, related to both Blue Design and the Overlap. We have a project at Sadler Hall on the Syracuse University campus where we are translating BD’s Control and Variability topic into a real world case study, and we are visioning a new K-5 school in Binghamton that builds on the work started in the Good Design post. Creativity!!!

Speaking of creativity, I’ll leave you with a final set of deeper thoughts. Yesterday our Binghamton project team engaged 240 third through fifth grade students to imagine a new school. Children are our most unfettered creative resources. We unrolled an 80 foot long roll of paper on the floor to let them draw their ideas. An interesting thing happened: the first thing most of them did when asked to draw something on this big blank sheet of paper was to draw a box within which they would do their work. Why? Were they marking their territory separate from their neighbors, who were doing separate drawings. Or were they conditioned by drawing on smaller, rectangular sheets of paper?

I have another theory: that even at a young age, many of us are afraid of the blank sheet, afraid of possibility without limits. And given this sort of situation, we automatically look for frameworks and systems to operate within, which as a result limit that first possibility. The boxes the kids drew symbolize that to me. Whatever we do, it seems so hard to start with a blank sheet. I may be able to fool myself into thinking the sheet in front of me is blank, but the more I look within myself the less space I realize I actually have: it is already filled with convention, preconceived notions, inherited value sets, and all kinds of human-created systems we too seldom question. Now we’re in a time (and this is the Overlap concept) when we need to be aware and critical of the systems structuring our lives; the things already written on the paper, and we need to work to bring those systems into synthesis. I was heartened when I saw many kids moving outside of their self-imposed territory to collaborate with their neighbors, linking their drawings together.

Springing forward!

-Pete

(Spring Butterfly watercolor at the top of the post copyright Grace Larson, 6 years old and entitled to all royalties)

(photo of Henry Larson, 3 years old and thinking out of the box was not staged, honest!)

Rex Giardine, Assistant Director for Capital Projects at Syracuse University, Calvin Ahn, Project Manager  at Ashley McGraw Architects, and I will be speaking at the Smart and Sustainable Campuses Conference hosted by the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland on April 16.

The title of our talk is “Lifecycle: A Holistic Conversation.” It’s ostensibly about sustainable construction materials, but as you can guess, we’re using this topic as an opportunity to talk about big ideas: the Blue Design concept of synthesis, the disconnect between today’s qualitative and quantitative value sets, and a way of understanding the time we’re in called “The Overlap.”

This one is going to be so much fun, with lots of new material. I hope to see you there!

]]> http://peterlarson.org/speaking-at-the-smart-and-sustainable-campuses-conference/feed/ 0 http://peterlarson.org/the-old-normal/ http://peterlarson.org/the-old-normal/#comments Thu, 29 Mar 2012 18:21:58 +0000 Peter Larson http://peterlarson.org/?p=3214 My Grandfather was a thrifty man, as were many of his generation. I find the things he taught me have great relevance to this odd present we’re in, post 2001 and post 2008. This seems to be a time when many are holding their breaths, waiting for the next new bottom to be found...]]> My Grandfather was a thrifty man, as were many of his generation. When his boots leaked, he put bread bags in them. When rats ate holes in his farm’s wooden corn cribs, he patched them with tin can lids. He never had much money, and his happiness didn’t depend on it. Clichéd and true.

I admire my grandfather’s life, through the filter of my knowing him as a child (he died when I was nine). He taught me more than his thriftiness. He also taught me how to be still and listen to the world, and to know it by getting my hands dirty. 

I find the things he taught me have great relevance to this odd present we’re in, post 2001 and post 2008. This seems to be a time when many are holding their breaths, waiting for the next new bottom to be found, or trying to hold out until the good times return. My grandfather is whispering something in the back of my mind…we can find pride in making the best of our current situation. After all, we may not have a choice in what the world gives us, but we do have a choice in what we make of it.

I was at an interview with a new K-12 school client last week, and wisely they had moved past the breath-holding phase and were calling their existence “the new normal.” Here in New York, school districts have taken a beating from state funding cuts. Hmmm, the new normal looks something like the old normal my grandfather lived, and that had some good qualities.

In fact, I think those who learn to see the good in the current time-between-times hold the key to our future. We need to grieve for the difficulty we have gone through, and move on to embracing what our new world looks like, and where its new opportunities lie. I’ll tell you what, we’d better quickly learn to look for those opportunities in different places than we used to, because they’re not there anymore and it’s useless to linger looking for them to return.

In my K-12 school example, school districts need to find inspiration in thriftiness, in the small things. They need to dig to find deeper meaning in what may have been overlooked in larger times. My firm needs the same; really everyone needs the same. We need to find the new things that make us proud of what we do and who we are. And I think my grandfather may have already taught me how to find them.

In times like these, we tend to focus on getting the necessary and putting off the optional. Both architects and school districts can get discouraged by this mindset. But we can find new ways to look at the necessary! Roof replacements, boiler repairs, flooring replacements; so many fix-it lists, maintenance that can no longer be deferred. Don’t just execute the list; bring some deeper thinking to it!

Do a little alchemy. Find something on the list, hold it up as something to take pride in; not glamorous: thrifty, practical, and speaking of my grandfather’s old normal. Get the community and faculty excited, they need something bright these days. Putting in a new and efficient boiler? Install some simple monitoring software so students, staff, and community and take pride in the energy you’re saving. Renovating the finishes in a suite of rooms? Use some materials you haven’t used before, green, reclaimed, recycled. Teach; use it as a testing lab; get your students involved! You can always find meaning in ordinary things!

And FIND the opportunities; they will not come to you, you need to look for them, and you cannot see them unless you change your vision to see the positive side of our current situation.

NESEA was great this year. My personal highlight was having the privilege to spend a half hour talking to Bill Reed, an architect I admire very much. I also had many inspiring conversations with other attendees. NESEA draws a great crowd: skeptical and independently minded. The debates are the best part! (but not the easiest, speaking from experience as a presenter)

As a whole, this conference tends to favor discussion of the measurable: building energy performance data and proven efficiency strategies. But what I take away from NESEA comes from the discussions of things that cannot be measured easily: Bill Reed’s talk about understanding wholeness and place, Tyler Volk’s insightful assessment of the climate change/resource availability big picture, and John Cavanaugh’s contentious assertion that the next economy will be driven by the common good.

Conferences are an intersection between what we’re interested in at the time and the speakers’ content. In other words, what we hear is tinted by what’s on our mind. The following are some of the things said at the NESEA conference that made an impact on me at this particular time in my work. I offer them to you in that spirit of inspiration, as oysters containing pearls of wisdom (sorry, I couldn’t resist). I have attributed the ones I could find or remember sources for, and the unattributed ones are the results of my hasty notes from various conversations.

——

Life doesn’t present itself to you the way you think it should.

——

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
-Antoine de Saint Exupéry

——

Social architectures drive physical architectures.

——

We each have many different seeds in our heart, and only those we nourish will grow.

——

Construed ecologically, from the standpoint of the holistic science of natural, evolving systems, the perception of beauty is the perception of wholeness.
-Christopher Alexander 

——

Today, everything’s a conflict of interest.

——

If I’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.
-Henry Ford

—— 

In the deep jungles of Africa, a traveler was making a long trek. Coolies had been engaged from a tribe to carry the loads. The first day they marched rapidly and went far. The traveler had high hopes of a speedy journey. But the second morning these jungle tribesmen refused to move. For some strange reason they just sat and rested. On inquiry as to the reason for this strange behavior, the traveler was informed that they had gone too fast the first day, and that they were now waiting for their souls to catch up with their bodies.

This whirling rushing life which so many of us live does for us what that first march did for those jungle tribesmen. The difference: they knew what they needed to restore life’s balance; too often we do not.

-Mrs. Charles Cowman

——

Why do financial markets ignore the things we value most?

——

Technology-based short-term fixes (to climate change and resource availability) buy us more time to prepare long-term, more effective, socially-based fixes.
-Tyler Volk (paraphrased)

——

We live in the places we live, and then we try to figure out why.

——

In relationships, we should work to reconcile rather than compromise.
-Bill Reed (paraphrased)

——

The more I listen, the less I know.
-Pete Larson

First through my own property, what used to be a half dozen small fields separated by hedgerows made into one big field when I was a kid.

I cut across the edge of the property and into a wide hedgerow. Like most, it had stone picked from the field piled down the middle and trees on either side. I saw a fence and posts older than me in the middle of the hedgerow.

And a chair hung on a sapling by a hunter for safe keeping. Looks like it’s been there a while.

Out of the hedgerow and down the diversion ditch, into the big field behind mine. Cut the corner of the field and into the neighbor’s woods where I saw a woodpecker’s work.

And took a photo of myself.

Through the narrow woods along what used to be the edge of a field, still marked by a stone wall. It started sleeting and I stopped to record the sound. You’ll have to turn it up to hear the sleet bouncing off the leaves on the ground.

Then I turned into a swampy piece.

Through the swamp and through the woods long-ways, breaking through to the farmer’s cut.

Down the cut and back into the big field I left earlier, turning to look back the way I had come.

And back up the edge of the big field heading towards my woods, barely seen on the left.

Into my woods, one tree still wearing fall’s leaves.

And up the field to home.

Back at my back door one hour after I had left…and changed!

There are new narratives on the Blue Design and About Peter pages, the Institute Development page has been removed, and there are small changes in layouts and narratives throughout the site. In the coming weeks I will be making the Blue Design page the home page, and making a few other small changes.

These revisions are in keeping with the changing tone and purpose of Blue Design, as reflected in the Building Bridges posts of recent months. It is more personal and less top-down, more a set of investigations than a comprehensive system, less focused on sustainability and more focused on living in our unique time. I still care very much about natural resources, architecture, and sustainability in general, I just have come to see them as the product of larger things in life, and I want my exploration to focus on those larger things. It’s all about finding the biggest levers…

So please check out the changes, give me any feedback you have, and stay tuned for further changes!