2026.0311 / Notes On Tribalism and Modern Society: Sebastian Junger's Tribe

• I found some of the notions in this book quite painful. It's not about rallying around a common cause so much as having individual purpose. The book seems to take individual autonomy out of people's hands and assumes people are being led by a mass purpose. The examples of self-sacrifice are commonly stretched to justify collectivist group-think societally. Under normal, peacetime, circumstances these collective notions need not apply, as people enter into voluntary (which is most important) choices, trades and relationships with people. That is the foundation of a truly free, individualist society - where each person is allowed to be free and live their life how they choose, not by a notion of a "common good". What is common may not necessarily be good for everyone. Individual choice matters, but not as much as altruism (self-sacrifice) according to Junger.
• I would gladly live in an individualistic model of society where everyone is free and thereby takes on the responsibility of living a good life and learning to deal with adverse side effects, conditions and situations on their own terms, rather than being a resident of a supposedly more noble and sympathetic "community of sufferers" that operates on collectivistic, altruistic notions of societal organization.
• What we can learn from Tribe has less to do with social, economic or political reform, as I think Junger is almost hinting at, than just re-learning how to respect people and how to restore their dignityas individuals. Rather than by notions of self-sacrifice, we can learn to respect people by fully taking the reigns of our individual selves, our individual agency, and taking responsibility for our lives and actions. We do this by learning how to find purpose - not common purpose, but individual purpose. When we have the understanding that we are individually efficacious, when we have that self-respect, it becomes a real value to each of us to respect that capacity in others, and particularly in those who demonstrate it. Perhaps the "common" aspect that he at times refers to has more to do with heritage than with common purpose or a common goal, but whether its heritage, tradition, or blood they are just as superficial as nationality, ethnicity or race. Tribalist and egalitarian thinking can be and is more often dangerous or at least harmful in the way it undermines the reality of individual efficaciousness. It's a shame he doesn't even give examples of all the world's attempts at socialism and communism, which were attempts at collective, more economically egalitarian societies.
• To be clear, I can get behind the idea of a "community of sufferers" and "brotherhood of pain" so long as it is not accidental or forced upon me, so I enter into either voluntarily. There's something to be said of the motivation or adrenaline derived from simply the knowledge of struggling with a team - that you're not alone in your struggle. One might think of a such a community in terms of the character of a sports team, or any team collaborating with (not sacrificing for) each other in the achievement of a particular goal. I think there's validity to the concept at the psychological or motivational level, but never in the realm of societal or political organization, to the extent he was suggesting that. I don't live in a society where everyone is merely struggling - even though many may feel that way and many are. I live in a society, a free society, in which I have an abundance of possible choices, opportunities and things available to me to achieve and flourish, I simply have to make the proper choices for myself. Fundamentally, I live in a flourishing society. To view it as a community of sufferers is far from reality, unless I lived in North Korea or another oppressive and/or poor country.
• Why do all the social "benefits" of war that Junger mentions exist? It's not only or just because people have a common goal, namely that of survival. It's because the lack of choice, the constraints of their situation in which they volunteered, necessarily require that they cooperate under strict disciplinary rules (to the extent they are actually followed, and they are typically in elite militaries). When there isn't much choice, in terms of jobs, food, supplies, shelter, etc. of course people will necessarily and naturally collectivize to say nothing of the structures and protocol of the military bureaucracy. Each person is better off in a scarcity situation when things are shared, but under normal circumstances, living in a normal, modern, Western democracy is nowhere close to such scarcity situations, and arguably developing nations wouldn't be better off under collectivized societal arrangements either, even less so under militant arrangements.
• Clearly the takeaway from the stories about how happy people were in adverse situations - disasters, wars, etc. is the importance of social bonding. Junger isn't suggesting that we regress to a primitive state, nor necessarily that we should collectivize society, but rather that we rediscover within ourselves the capacity for empathy. It's nice to be charitable, generous and helpful when we can, but I would add and stress that all of it should always be voluntary, otherwise it's neither of those things. It is always morally wrong to be being forced or coerced by someone authority, by your community or by your government, to do something claimed to be good simply because the authority said so. Independence of thought is paramount, as are consistent and objective moral principles. Side note: just because something is law, does not make it moral.
• To blame PTSD on the whole of modern society is a lazy accusation that has the effect of taking responsibility out of the hands of veterans and those who care for them. It is like saying that they have no choice, that society (collectively) is responsible for (or for carrying) their burden, and that the society they attempt to reintegrate has a kind of hostility akin to the war they return from. The individuals that care for vets and the vets themselves are the only ones responsible for their healing, and that can include the military itself indirectly in the sense that wars or armed conflicts should be generally planned to minimize casualities by utilizing the quickest (and most often brutal within reason) ways to end the war, not fighting wasteful and costly "just wars" that prolong conflict, create conflicts of interest between those in combat, the military bureaucracy, and politicians and therefore create more casualties (including PTSD sufferers).
• Under normal, peaceful circumstances, inequality is a feature of freedom, not a bug. You can't have wealth without inequality. The moment one tries to forcibly equalize a society, many people suffer, minority groups especially, and society suffers as a whole. Political equality, equality with regard to individual rights, which is the equality we should be concerned with, suffers. If, by force of government, a single person is not allowed to rise above the level of her peers, legally and honestly, or is forcibly chopped down to equalize a partiucular economic outcome, that is tyranny plain and simple. Inequality simply means everyone has different abilities, and earn wealth in proportion to those abilities, so long as everyone is politically (not economically) free to pursue opportunities. Economic equality - the rationing of outcomes of money, wealth, goods, etc. - necessarily requires force, submission and discrimination to implement. It requires government granting favors to specific groups, or the groups who scream the loudest. Economic equality requires government tyranny. Political equality requires the protection of individual rights.
• I recommend reading this book for its important points about the values of empathy instilled in close-knit communities, and not for its poorly-elucidated emphasis on the ills of modern society. On the latter point, Junger fails. Junger could've at least presented a more balanced viewpoint, but he mostly downplays if not outright fails to recognize the value of competition, societal norms and standards that are equally if not moreso part of the reason for the achivements of modern society - not just feelings of empathy or "unity" that emerge out of extreme circumstances. The truth that Junger fails to recognize or at least acknowledge is that modern society as it exists does not function with a populace in "isolation" from each other - that is a naive perception, a surface-level observation. The reality of life, of work, of our communities and of the very structure of the capitalist economy (to the extent it is capitalist given that the US economy is a mixed, part statist, economy) tells us otherwise. The reality is that we all actually cooperate every day in very deep and integrated ways, but the feeling of empathy of unity, perhaps a national unity, is what is lacking, but that is simply the consequence of what happens when individualism becomes the basis for freedom, and rightly so. We have millions of people choosing, for their own purposes, what they want to do with their lives. What we should be unified around is really the idea that we're all able to pursue our lives to the fullest under that freedom to the extent that we have it. Millions of people are doing their own thing, and everyone is better off because of it. There's nothing better than that in terms of freedom and still the country remains unified in a more real sense than what Junger refers to. There's an underlying social contract that keeps us together despite the differences in perception, opinion and objective. Junger is after aesthetics: the feeling of unification - something like that of a primitive tribe or a military unit, but at the societal scale, and this is plainly a tyrannical suggestion, but I'm not sure he understands that or chooses to view it as such. He wants us to actually see each other acting out our kindness. No one can blame him of course as often we see on the news everything antithetical to civil society. Tribalism at the scale Junger might suggest is dangerous. We have seen it in the examples of all countries that have ever attempted a socialist, communist or fascist state on the basis of "equality", "unity", or "brotherhood". These ideas might seem to work well at the scale of a small group of people and maybe a small community but those don't come close to the consequences of such on a national or even municipal scale. Unlike Junger's pessimism about modern society, individualism is not brutalizing to the human spirit, but rather the best way to lift the human spirit. This doesn't mean you act at the expense of others, but rather you act to better yourself such that you remain in a position to help others when necessary or desired. Of course bad things happen when people are free to make their own decisions, and that's why freedom requires responsibility. You are ultimately responsible for your successes and your failures. You can't always hold society or other individuals hostage by blaming it on them. Unlike Junger, I believe the individual is the basic measure of what determines freedom - not a tribe or a mob.
• That's another thing Junger just barely mentions - plenty of people feel empowered in mobs and gangs, and those are rarely, if ever, good modes of empowerment or unity. Groups of bullies count as tribes, and not all tribes have the best intentions, or some of them may have good intentions yet act at the expense of other tribes and even their own constituents, but Junger doesn't bother to expand. Tribes are best, and always will be best, as voluntary subcultural groups - never as enforced social organizers. Unfortunately for Junger, a tribe, and therefore tribal unity, is never something to be enforced without becoming tyrannical and disadvantageous for everyone in the tribe in the long run.
• Tribalist tendencies in our politics is exactly what is leading to the divisiveness so many Americans talk about today. It's not individualism at fault. Many people today don't even hold a proper idea of what it means to be an individual. Many only stop at aesthetics or simply a combination of your sense of fashion, tastes, interests, job, etc. There's far more to being an individual than those, even before the more abstract values like love and happiness and before emotions themselves. Being an individual means understanding you exist in a world that exists, having volition, being self-conscious, introspective, being rational, using reason - all this to be properly selfish in pursuit of those abstract as well as concrete values. What most people mean by individualism today is far from this understanding.
• Junger says that the growth of individualism in the US is a result of its immense wealth. This is patently false. The truth is the opposite - America is rich because it secures the rights of the individual politically and economically represents that individualism through the best possible socioeconomic system for it: capitalism. Of course it leads to all kinds of side effects, but the benefits of the system has outweighed all its costs, including tribalism. Imagine a completely collectivized society where everyone shares everything all the time. There is no privacy. There is no private property. Do you think it could never devolve into tyranny? The alternatives to individualistic, non-capitalist societies is always collectivist, statist economies that arbitrarily determine what is best for everyone or specific groups of people instead of every person determining for himself what is important in his life. Of course an individulist, capitalist society is hierarchical - nature itself is hierarchical but that's not a bad thing! One might even view embedded in a capitalist society is the very structure of nature itself with a rigid order that allows for flexibility, independence, diversity and choice. Collectivism - tribalism - enforces conformity at the expense of individuals. It tells you that you have little choice because what you want to do in your life you need to do for the "common good". Under an individualistic society you do those exact things for yourself while producing for people in the process, just not under coercion or bullying.
• I agree with the tendency to label vets as victims and treat them as such with token gestures. This is the same issue with the welfare state in general. It's not extreme in the US as in Europe but its presence is growing by demand. For at least 70 years we've propped up entitlements and other welfare state patronage schemes. We've paid countless taxes, the opportunity cost of which is all the lost innovation from private enterprise, and in all that time it has mostly achieved a bigger, more bloated welfare state bureaucracy. It's aim, the war on poverty, among other things, has largely failed. Across different markets or domains the government is taking choice, inch by inch, out of individuals' hands and putting it in the hands of the anonymous public, the tribe, the "common good", so it can dictate our lives the way it sees fit. These are the economic consequences of tribalism at large scales. Interestingly, Junger even argues that lifelong disability payments for PTSD "risks turning veterans into a victim class that is entirely dependent on the government for their livelihood." I agree with this. What more of the millions receiving welfare state benefits, many of whom are known to exploit them? Are they not stripped of their dignity as people and reduced to a victim class as well? The welfare state is the tribal economy - the allegedly benevolent entity that distrubutes based on need - the apparatus that serves the tribal function of "sharing" in society, but Junger does not make this connection.
• What Junger hints that is more critical, but never bothers to elaborate on, is the need for returning vets to find purpose. Purpose is the key to many of the ills of modern society outlined the book. Of course people suffer from depression and anxiety in modern society. When we're being pushed and pulled in different directions, when we make ourselves so dependent on external validation and social pressure to determine our internal conditions, perhaps its no surprise we lose our sense of self. We lose our sense of individual autonomy,agency, efficacy, our sense of individualism. The corrective is a deep re-examination of our purpose - not mainly a further outward longing for social connection. Social connection is important but not critical to determining an individual's own purpose in a moral sense. It's the tribal mind, the need for social association that is the culprit here. The attempt to always need approval from other people to validate or legitimize one's own thoughts, actions, beliefs, perceptions, or opinions is a toxic way to live. Those must be determined for oneself. The shift in one's priorities away from the external, social and political to the internal, individualistic, and personally meaningful is what necessitates the need for individual purpose. Purpose is not found "out there" among everyone else and what they're doing. A person's ultimate purpose is closer to home, deeply within, that only he or she can figure. Purpose is not in some kind of ethical dependence or self-sacrifice to a tribe, which would be an attempt to only vacate, and even destroy, the sense of self. We've seen in the past What happens when we place the priority of our values external ourselves, into politics and social issues - tribalism and divisiveness are no surprise: Rich versus poor, red versus blue, if you're not with us, you're part of the problem. What has played out in America in the form of these positions or sentiments is tribalism, and in essence, collectivism.
• On the last page of the chapter In Bitter Safety I Awake, Junger ends with a paragraph about America's low social resilience, which is what vets return home to. Resources are not shared equally, a quarter of children live in poverty, jobs are hard to get, and minimum wage is insufficient to live on. What is he proposing? Does he understand the consequences of the alternative? Now none of his arguments may necessabily be economic moreso than moral, but I'm not sure he even understands the moral alternative enough to pose an economic alternative. Yes, he's simply pointing to the issues of modern society again, but without presenting an economic alternative (seems he has the urge to say "socialism" but knows it's not palatable so says friendlier words like "sharing", "collective", and "common good"), and without presenting the reality regarding individual choice. People make their own choices to the extent that our society is free, and many end up choosing wrong for many different reasons - this includes many of the poor as much as the rich. I'd wager a guess that many of these people, people who chose tragically wrong at some point or multiple points in their life, likely fall into some of the statistics Junger's presented. Why do many vets keep receiving and relying on benefits instead of getting work? Certainly many of them may be in extremely limited circumstances, but also certainly many of them simply make the choice to. Modern society is at fault to the extent that it keeps giving handouts and spoon feeding our vets without any sunset on these welfare programs, so of course people take it without question. It's "free"!
• There was a point in human history at which hominids no longer needed tribal organization in order to not only survive but thrive. Things are lost, certainly, that are retained in basic, perhaps smaller, and more manageable forms, but certainly what is lost in total is worthy of being the price of progress. What is lost from tribalism is individual oppression. What is gained is individual autonomy - a more just, fair and equal basis for individual freedom. A tribal society has not only the issues of depression and anxiety, though alleviated in perhaps in the ways that Junger outlines, but also the issues of the suppression of individual autonomy. In a tribal society, if a person is more talented or works harder for more reward they may be forced to share, forced to make a sacrifice, at the expense of their own self-fulfillment. This is an injustice that is arguably as detrimental to an individual as any of the arguments Junger makes against the ills of a lack of unity.
• I agree with Junger to the extent that, in the areas of our lives in which we are suffering emotionally, mentally, economically, or socially, that there is a place for some tribal ethics in terms of our self-improvement - in the sense of an ethics of freely chosen generosity, cooperation and collaboration. I agree that communities are better and more efficient at organizing assistance than government. Strengthening our local communities, even starting with our own neighborhood bloc or the neighbors next door, is the best and most immediate thing we can do to bring a kind of empathy back to our communities. Doing so at these scales aggregates, compounds over time.

2026.0221 / Design By Intuition

Often, in my short architecture experience, I've observed a peculiar behavior by designers. I don't believe it's exclusive to designers, but perhaps everyone who has ever made an aesthetic decision, which is pretty much everyone in some degree. It typically begins with a visual observation of the work, a quick visual assessment of the thing's proportions, colors, composition, context, which varies based on that person's particular experience. The analysis, whether articulated or not, is often followed by a nudging of this or that edge, form, shape, substitution of color, removal or addition of some quality or aspect of the design, or some combination of all those and more, and critically, a final judgment that it "feels (or looks) right", without necessarily having done the tangible of work of designing, mainly opining. One might think of it as backseat designing while someone else has actually produced the design, though this is not always the case. I understand the ease of casually assessing a design, particulary if time-pressed, in this manner. What I take issue with is the subjective conclusion that it somehow "feels right". Whether it looks right is different, and can be objectively assessed by whatever established standards, but I won't get into that here.

When one states that something feels right with regard to an aesthetic outcome I sometimes wonder where that assessment really comes from. Some might regard it as intuitive, a sense, explained only, or purely as a feeling and nothing else. I think, even if justified as such, that feeling has something to do with at least some subconscious understanding fulfilled by some prior experience, even without an overt awareness or understanding of what led to the outcome. While it's common, I don't recognize such a judgment as legitimate in terms of a proper analysis of a design or a particular aspect of a design.

I don't think it's enough to just feel like a particular design or aspect of it is good. To be legitimate in this context, that feeling needs to be validated by knowledge, vetted by integrity to actual principles and standards. This is not to say you cannot make design judgments by "feeling" or that the feeling in itself is illegitimate, but it is to say that there is a misconception that feeling, or intuition, or sense, is primary or fundamental in those types of determinations. There are deliberate, rational decisions made to incite that feeling in the first place. Feelings, intuitions, those types of senses are all responses. Emotions are responses to particular experiences (including knowledge) that have already been captured by the conscious and/or subconscious. I believe that intuitive design judgments come from the individual's existing constellation of values regardless of whether or not the individual can articulate those values or the intuition.

What's the point of thinking of such design judgments in this way? The point is that I think design outcomes can be better articulated, true to the intended concept, if intuition were secondary to actual reasons, or if design outcomes were explicitly judged by rational criteria instead of an arbitrary sense. Satisfaction of a design outcome should properly emerge not from "random" sense, but from clearly defined principles, standards, procedures and goals. I don't know the extent to which this is significant relative to the alternative, but this isn't an issue of the magnitude of difference in design outcome, but of integrity to rational decision making in design.

2026.0217 / The Multi-Disciplinary Architect

I dug this out of a library of images I maintain, taken in 2019 at Virgil Abloh's exhibit at the MCA in Chicago. I took the picture because since I began my architectural studies, the idea of the multi-disciplinary architect has fascinated me. This isn't necessarily the future of the architect, who really knows what that is, but I believe has been the character of architects throughout history. Plenty of architects explore or cross over into the different fields of design in varying degrees largely because design skills and principles often transfer across fields, requiring specialized knowledge in the relevant field to fully pursue professionally. Many architects have some personal or professional background in other artistic pursuits, which are also often supplementary to their architectural work or in support of their general design philosophy or ethos. I think this diversity of skill, knowledge and experience is particularly valuable for the designer in any field. As an architectural designer, it's not a stretch to see how design applications in smaller scales of design can accommodate architectural practice or design methodology.

Kanye West is shown here as this multi-discplinary figure, not necessarily an architect, but a design generalist, and more than a dabbler by virtue of the substantiality of his individual pursuits. Say what you want about how he thinks about design, about YEEZY (a firm which I admire but for reasons I won't get into here, and has little to do with its approach to design or architetural wing, but does have something to do with the existence of particular wings under a singular umbrella), there is something fascinating about the fact that a single person can take on multiple interests, and take them all seriously in some significant measure. I think what's missing at the top of the image is businessman or entrepreneur. Not many architects or designers make it that far relative to those who work under an employer, but I do believe that is ultimately the way forward for the architect, the final frontier in a sense. The pursuit of other design interests with architecture at the core is an incredibly difficult dream I've held for a long time now, and examples like Kanye, the businessman and entrepreneur, tell me it's possible, even if I fall way short of that level of success. That's his success though - I define my own by my own standards anyway.

2026.0211 / Work-Life Balance Is A False Dichotomy & Work Passion

We've heard of all kinds of ideas for "balancing" life and work for quite a while now, but the notion they are compartmentalized - that work is somehow separate from life, or living - is flawed and rarely addressed. Having mostly gone unaddressed, many of us seem to accept that work is separate from life, but if we think about it, what we specifically mean is that our job is but one unique, and significant, activity among many activities within our lives. Work obviously does not somehow occur outside of life - it's clearly a part of life - so by life we're really referring to activities that are exclusive of our jobs, activities that may be related or unrelated to our jobs.

What we actually mean by work-life balance is, unglamorously, "job/non-job balance". From this we can understand how to properly think of our jobs as an integral aspect of our individual lives that we spend much of our time on, and as such should ideally form a foundation for everything else, as opposed to thinking of a job simplistically as a money-making endeavor that you need to mitigate as much as possible in order to "live life". This would otherwise be a negative attitude toward work - work is understood as just drudgery; something to get through or get out of the way or make as painless as possible so that "life" can be lived afterward, as if you're not living life at the job you typically spend much of your day and your life in. Our perspective towards work becomes one of making it pain or friction free, an evasive or avoidant attitude that seeks to reduce work to a less important role in life, rather than advocating for the benefits of the challenges it poses to us and the growth potential as a central area of our lives. Work understood in this sense, a sense that's actually very common, becomes a "necessary evil" more so than a necessary good.

We should instead frame it more positively because work is positive. It's life-affirming because it's life-enhancing. Work is a necessary and productive endeavor if one wants fulfillment and happiness in life - not just because one can make money it but because one can make oneself a better individual out of it, as work is an ambitious enterprise for individual growth. In this way we can begin to think of work, our jobs, as fruitful and productive endeavors that can serve as one of the primary sources of happiness in our lives. If we begin to think of work as central to our lives the idea of work-life balance is not feasible, rather an approach to balance in the way one lives life becomes possible.

In this case, balance is about prioritizing one's values, not necessarily equalizing them (as in many conventional notions of work-life balance), with work taking on its role as one of one's highest values. When one knows how to properly prioritize the multitude of values in his life, this is real balance, whether or not those values/activities are actually equalized in time or effort spent on them. Each value or activity demands a different amount of time and effort depending entirely on how much one values them. If that means work requires many late nights then that's what the achievement of that demand requires, same if work may require a long respite from work to recharge so as to come back renewed to take on more challenges. This highlights the importance of what one chooses to work in and toward. If one values work, then one necessarily has to find a job and career in which one can most value work - one requires a minimum level of interest, and has well-understood and ideally deep reasons for pursuing that career. This is how one maximizes his valuation of work - by maximizing one's ability to get the job his desires require.

How can you know where you ought to be and what you ought to be doing if you don't know who you are? If I don't know who I am, I'll just stumble blindly into a career and probably be miserable in it because I'm doing it for the wrong reasons. Money is never enough incentive to dread going to work every day... Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don't need to escape from. Business is way too hard to work at something just for money. Winning at business requires that you exhaust every ounce of spiritual, emotional, and physical energy you have. You won't put that effort in day in and day out, year in and year out, just for money. Money is great, but it is ultimately an empty goal. Bigger homes, bigger cars, and even more giving is just not a big enough goal to keep you creative and energized throughout your life. You have to have a passion, a higher calling, to what you engage in. Hard work is a prison cell only if the work has no meaning.

Every single job and career has tasks in which you have to work in the trenches. Relatively speaking, some trenches are dirtier, more physical than other trenches, which may be physically easy, but intellectually for more difficult, both of which clearly require different levels of experience and different skills. In any case, every job has a trench, and every job has it's front-facing/storefront, glamour task. The key to finding work you love is to finding which aspects of a particular job you would love to confront on a daily basis, that you would relish as a challenge, in which you would enjoy most of your time, despite the trenches.

When you're focused on and operating in your strengths and passions, nothing can hold you back. The secret of success in any career is making your vocation a vacation in the sense that When you love what you do, you will work like crazy, but it will never feel like work. In fact, it may feel like playing. Remember when you were a kid, just making stuff with whatever was laying around and the time passed with barely any awareness of it? That should be the experience of your work - an all-consuming enjoyment and obsessive exploration. This, in my opinion, is what it means to function at a high level because you know that the work you are doing fits perfectly with your gifts, skills and talents, and that's expressed in your heightened enjoyment and fulfillment from the day to day and into the future. You won't depend as much on external motivations because your interest in learning more about your passion naturally drives your curiosity and need to explore.

2026.0210 / Totem Field, Shadow Cache: A Sense of Creation, A Sense of Adventure

On my desk is a collection of items symbolizing or referencing movement, navigation, exploration, mystery, time and travel: A 3D-printed maze, a 3D-printed pawn and knight, a motorcycle pin, spark plug, a leaf from the arboretum, a weird medallion on a gold chain I found lying around the house when I was young, a cap from a bottle of tea I bought when I was in college with an excerpt from a now-favorite poem below, a tiny compass, a strange dead plant stem I picked up while walking around Lexington, KY on a sweltering afternoon, a 9mm casing, a .22 cal casing, a key, an hourglass. I collected them partly out of a reminder of past adventures, adventures I want to seek, things I want to do or acquire, an urge to keep exploring, uncovering curiosities, and most importantly a reminder to act - the clock keeps ticking, there's no time to waste.

Sea-Fever by John Masefield
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

2026.0207 / Thoughts On Building: Builders, Architecture & Business

What is architecture without its full context? It is what some may call building construction. Part of what makes architecture so is the understanding of a building and its spaces within the context of something (whether or not that context is deliberately ignored in a design). Arguably, the purpose of architecture is to express and advance culture and society at large in the direction the architect see fit through the practice of the building arts, by the individual expression of each building, unique as it pertains to its inhabitants and the values of its architect(s). Architects add something else to the building trades that the trades do not have, and every trade has its role. What does the architect add? Architects inform a building design with context. This necessarily means that all the decorative details, the form or shape of the building, the why behind its design, all come from specific value judgments by the architect - value judgments that come from a combination of the actual context within which the building sits, from personal experience and knowledge and from the culture at large. Architecture thus expresses something specific in its design beyond its obvious function.

Architectural expression is an artistic process, so architects add artistry - a different kind of attention to detail that, say, typical builders or non-architects do not have or do not care for (I'm not knocking builders for not caring, plenty of them do but there's often a significant difference between a builder's design and an architect's). This attention to detail comes in the form of a particular set of skills - skills related to geometry as it pertains to both art and science, skills related to context (cultural and social understanding), skills related to the use/function/experience of space itself (phenomenoloy, psychology), skills related to the why of designing something in a particular way (philosophy). These are the skills builders do not have or at least do not have to same or full effect as an architect. That is what separates typical builders from architects - not just an academic degree or a specific type of license, but a different kind of knowledge on top of the knowledge of construction, even if that construction knowledge is not complete, but complementary. There are plenty of builders who don't care that joints misalign, or that unsightly mechanicals are exposed in some view - only that a space "works" or is viable enough to meet a particular basic function. Architects are, or should be, skilled in elevating the minimum to include overall and detailed experience - this has to encompass more than the technical construction of a space and a concern for function (mechanical or otherwise), but a certain cognizance of the inhabitant's actual and potential experience - how something could be enjoyed, valued, now and in the future. To be clear, technical knowledge of construction is absolutely critical, not to be reduced or rejected by any architect, but here I'm simply placing an emphasis on the additional knowledge an architect needs to distinguish himself as an architect, and it requires that technological knowledge is the bare minimum of that knowledge. Most builders tend to reside at that bare, essential, minimum, but often lack the additional edge in terms of knowledge of architectural experience because their primary or only concern is the basic construction and function of the space itself, and maybe decoration at most, moreso than those additional factors that are within the purview of architectural design.

A designer thus needs to consider the most full possible scope of context in relation to what is being designed. Given this, I believe design is an inherently optimistic practice. There must be at least an implicit understanding that the work he is doing is intended to improve some aspect of the quality of life for individuals. The pursuit of a design requires that the designer himself not only has the skills and knowledge required to complete the job, but the integrity to deliver on his expertise as a designer, which means to go beyond the basic technicalities of construction, to find new ways of constructing, to bend the rules if necessary, to provide something of his own creation, something unique when and wherever possible, to posit new forms, functions, and experiences for the thing to be designed.

Taking quite a leap, I view business as the pinnacle to a designer's practice. Building a business is also a process of building oneself. One cannot build a legitimate business without oneself also growing. By necessity, such a pursuit brings out the designer's best by demanding his total energy and effort, by marshalling all his built-up experience, knowledge, skills and ideas and stress-testing them in the markets for architectural design ideas and services. Even if his efforts result in failure, there's so much to learn, and to be gained, from the process of building himself toward the aim of starting and operating a bespoke architecture firm, but to even start one requires a conviction that his ideas are worth pursuing, that the risk is worth it, and that he is more than a builder. An architect needs to be distinct in his motivation - he is not building for the sake of making a nice building, as good as that is. He is building for the sake of building the world he envisions, the world he wants to live and flourish in, and this requires a clarity of values, purpose, and philosophy. He builds for his own sake at least as much as he builds for the world.