David L Thomas
Student # 82644
As a longtime denizen of the drafting room, of course, one of my favorite Pirsigism is:
" The pencil is mightier than the pen"
It's drafting room corollary; "Never draw more in the morning than you can erase in the
afternoon." preceded it by decades, and answers the question why this is so. Change, glorious
change, can't live with it, can't live without; while the consequences, like John Brown's truth,
just keep march'n on.
Ashle Dunn in the Los Angles Times. unknowingly brings us up to date in her recent blurb on
transistors by reminding us, " In the summer of 1948, a tiny electronic devise called the
transistor -the size of a pencil eraser- was announced by Bell Labs..." Now a mere 51 years later
most drafting is
aided by these devises decedents and the power to erase has been amplified many thousand fold. Now
we can erase an errant pixel, a tiny snippet of a line, a complete drawing, or a thousand man-hours
of work all in a nervous tic. Ah...... Change.
As an architect, change is what I do professionally. I help people change how they dwell. Dwell
seems such an archaic word and even thought Pirsig rarely uses it, he has quite a lot to say about
it. The whole "Giant" section and the parts on the Victorian mansions are just a few instances.
German philosopher Heidegger asked, "What is it to dwell?" ..... and answered in part:
"To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell.
"To dwell authentically ...is to dwell poetically..."
"To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free
sphere that safeguards each thing in it nature. The fundamental character of dwelling in this
sparing and preserving.. "
"But 'on this earth' already means' under the sky'. Both of these also mean 'remaining before the
divinities' and include a 'belonging to men's being with one another'. By primal oneness the four
-earth and sky, - divinities and mortals- belong together in one."
"Mortals dwell in the way they preserve the fourfold in its essential being, it presencing."
If we use Heidegger interpretation, how we dwell (in the broadest of senses) is inexorably linked
to who we are. But in our common use dwelling is almost synonymous with building. A Dwelling is -
A Building. Dwelling has lost it's true nature. Language trapped it, just as it's trapped quality i
n
our built world with the likes of "quality built" and "quality discount carpet."
Many have questioned whether the MoQ can be broadly and effectively applied to life in general and
that I truly don't know. But it does, IMHO, have the potential help us free "quality" from it's
trap in terms of the built world.
When a client asks, " Will my building have Quality?" he's in the same boat as Rigel when he
asked "Does Lila have Quality?" The answer is "Of Course .......but do you really understand your
question?" And wouldn't you really like your building to be like Lucky or John Wooden Legs' dog?"
"Where was Lucky?" ...."She looked for him and she didn't see him. She called, but he didn't
come."..." When she got around the corner, there it was..... Lucky had found it!" "What a GOOD dog
!
he was always so GOOD." Lila Bantam 1991 hardback p 292-3
Then LaVerne asked John, "What kind of dog is that?'
John thought about it and said, " That's a GOOD dog?"........
What was significant, Phaedrus realized, was that John had distinguished the dog according to its
Quality, rather that according to its substance. That indicated he considered Quality more importa
nt.
Lila Bantam 1991 hardback p406-7
It was not a black dog, a fat dog, or a bad dog, it was a GOOD dog.
If mankind, as a whole, could get to that level of understanding about our dwelling on Earth, we
then would be far down the road to a GOOD world.
THE END.
PS:
For those interested in a complete analysis of the word dwelling, roots and all, I would recommend
Heidegger's essays "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" and "...Poetically Man Dwells..." from which thes
e
quotes were extracted.
------- End of forwarded message -------
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