Lost: The Essential Spiritual Thread
Our culture emphasizes “building wealth”
not “building places,”
self-service over community life.
Pragmatics, efficiency, metrics,
metropolis.
We have been sold
a new vision of architecture,
centered on convenience,
comfort, the car.
This vision erodes our connection
to the land, and it is from the land
from which we ultimately draw our
vitality and viability.
We live in un-places, built of cheap materials,
ignorant of scale and proportion,
executed with little care,
Imbued with no trace of the human hand.
The effects of our atonal built environment eludes
the study-obsessed, data-focused analytics
on which we depend for informing us
of current and future reality.
Evolving into sedentary,
narcissistic, ill-informed,
soulless consumers will,
regardless of our standard of living
or the characteristics of the places we now
consider normal, — make all other
potential achievements mostly pointless
because we have lost the essential
spiritual thread of our human heritage –
our connection to place.
Bill Beard, Architect
Grand Junction, Colorado
WILLIAM BYRON BEARD II September 7, 1947 October 12, 2019
Bill will be remembered for his life long passion for
sustainable architecture and ongoing desire for learning. Bill will be deeply missed.
I saved this statement after reading it many months ago. The words seemed to be transparent common sense. Though I realize a common sense of things, or of places, of human nature is absent in a time, in a society that does not celebrate the sacredness of place, and of people. These words will always speak for themselves.
