Thought and the built environment

In the third series of article on thoughts and their effects, I choose to look at the connection of thought on our built environment.

It is a mistake to look only on the ‘form’ of the building and immediately pass comments on the same. It is also a mistake to think of a form (crystallize it in the mind) and produce it without thorough review of the same.

What leads to creation of ‘form’? This question will lead us to ask - what are thoughts, how are they shaped and do we structure them to visualize a built environment? To me, this connection can be stated as – thoughts (which are values or concerns or concepts) lead to deployment of a suitable process to create an appropriate form for the given situation. Thus, the emphasis is in what and how one chooses to think?

The how is dependent on why. The why is all about perceptions and conceptions of ‘space’ as a social construct. Meaning, social constructs born fundamentally out of understanding of geography, history and philosophy. Born out of interconnections, interdependence. Thoughts which acknowledge collective memory, collective wisdom, inheritance, evolution, pattern, transformation, continuity of intrinsic values and so on. 

In other words – dependence on the environment and being empathetic to Creation.

This needs to be highlighted in an age, where the nature of thoughts seem to make us more and more aloof to everything around us. There is profound disconnect with the experience of environment and what we seem to be solely dealing with is plain virtual stuff that may have got very less to do with empathy.

The changing nature of thoughts is resulting in the changing nature of the built environment – from the communal to the individual; from the multiuse to the exclusive; from the sustainable to sheer abuse of resources; from social/cultural to simply rational; from lateral thought of space to linear thought of space; from soulful to pure functional; from local to global imagery; from humble to overwhelming; from bare to overflowing; from simple to complexity; from wholesome to fragmentary; from hand to machine; from spontaneity to predictability.

Isn’t thought important to be considered (and to be understood as a precursor to creating built environments?)