POETICS OF BUILDING/POETIC EXPRESSION BY LORI RYKER
Biography Lori Ryker is the founder and executive director of Artemis Institute. After a decade of teaching at universities, she left the traditional academic environment to focus on her belief in immersion education and first hand experience, founding Artemis Institute in 2003 and launching Remote Studio under its umbrella in 2006. She is also principal of studioryker. Dr. Ryker was educated at Texas A&M University and Harvard GSD. She has written several books; Mockbee Coker: Thought and Process, Off the Grid, and Off the Grid Homes, and published her writing in national architectural journals. She lectures regularly on the topics of architectural design, sustainable design, her design work, and education.
Without beauty, what would become of being? — Plotinus Poetry is expressed through the variety of art. But what is poetics? To be certain, poetics is no simple cultural consideration, but lies in the deep arena of metaphysics; how we are to be in the world. Poetic expression means to aspire to create poetry, the expression occurring in beauty. Beauty is not manifest in the thing. Rather the poetic expression we make and experience is engendered in beauty. According to the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, beauty occurs through “a particular mirroring of a transcendental or an infinite” arriving from the source of poetry.1 Therefore, when we aspire to create “poetic” building, we aspire to manifest the experience of beauty, embodying the spiritual universal through a particular poetic material expression. Engaging poetic expression is a challenge for creators living in a society that is more and more dominated by the profane. This difficulty is recognizable in the practice of architecture. While architects are educated to be keenly aware of their sensual experiences they seldom are provided the understanding of the necessary relationship of spirituality to their creative work. The consequence of this missing understanding is a loss for finding the way to poetic expression, poetic building, and the experience of beauty. When considering building as no more than the simplistic act of making a design a reality, we overlook the power and value of making. We lose the link between creative idea and expression that also carries the link between aesthetics and transcendence. The consequence of designing from within a practice that does not consider the spiritual along side of the sensual is that we neither create poetic expression nor experience beauty.
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Building is where the poetic expression of architecture is recognized and experienced. From understanding the aspirations of poetry, embodying the spiritual universal through a particular poetic material expression, we can understand that the practice of building is more than a knowledge of details, budgets, collaboration, scheduling, and materiality. Poetic building may come about within these parameters, but its essence lies in the transcendental relationship between material and spirit, our understanding and consideration of this relationship, and ultimately recognized through the experience of beauty. The materials from which
poetic expression is built requires a deep knowledge of how these things exist in the world and how they are changed from one form (as it exists) to another form (what we make.) To gain this knowledge, and to create poetic expression, poetic building, we must be in the world, we must live beyond the profane and in a poetic state experiencing the world andengaging our poetic intuition, both sensually and spiritually. Deeply knowing our world as it exists and the significance of its transformation relative to the aspiration of poetic building requires a life-long pursuit of the crafting of buildings.
Image “Alyssa at the Snake River,” Photo by Kailey Peters.
Note 1. Maritain, Jacques. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), p. 173.