The Last Barn Raising: Human Evolution and Building in Space

“To build is human. We have always been builders in space, and in building there has always been an ever-present opportunity to access more of the unlimited potential of both space and the space of the self. The true builder knows that he or she works not only to create a structure of innovative design, material function and purpose, but as an attempt at manifesting some link to an inner awareness that feels missing from what is now known and visible.”-Deborah A Goudreault

On a south facing hill in rural NH there is a well nurtured peach orchard, farmed by two physically, mentally, and spiritually strong women with a deep intuitive sense of Nature.  Many seasons I waited for the summer light to warm the face of that hill and call the fruits to ripen. I remember the spring I broke my leg and how in the painful months of recovery that followed, it was the peaches in late summer that reconnected me with joy in life.  Late last summer, feeling the end of the season close at hand, I drove up the steep, orchard-lined dirt road for the last of the harvest, and to express my gratitude to these women for the rich crop they had once again ushered into fullness. Growing healthy and abundant crops of any kind in the extreme conditions of NH was not for the faint of heart. Many urban defectors seeking a healthier, more balanced life had come to this area to start small boutique farming operations, and after a year or two returned to their cities’ more controlled and accommodating environments. Growing here required its own alchemical knowledge, secrets these women had learned over many years; secrets my parents also possessed and why I respected anyone who sought to understand the subtle aspects of working cooperatively with Nature.  Next to the peach stand at the apex of the hill was an open clearing from which you could survey the whole orchard, keep watch for harvest hungry deer, and see the sun rise and set unobliterated by the dark dense border of evergreen woods below.  It was a vantage of precious emptiness where to my surprise now stood a wood frame silhouetted against the sky.

When I asked what was going on, one of the women answered, “On the space of this hill, oriented toward the sun’s rising, we are going to raise a barn; a space for the procession of life to unfold as a celebration of harmony with Nature. It will not be a place of ritual, or crowded with animals and farm implements, but a place to keep close a connection to Light, peace, and to a totality beyond this physical earth where every day we toil and seek to grow.  It will be a place where my sons will marry, and where community gathers even at the darkest times to be uplifted by Nature’s offerings and the sun’s unfailing presence.”  Often mistaken by neighbors as common farmers, they were extraordinarily uncommon in their will and devotion, their faith and unwavering support of each other, and their trust that this was something they could achieve together. A mother and orchard owner, her contractor husband and their three sons. I was told they spent the previous winter and spring milling local trees into carefully marked beams and lumber.  One son was a fine woods cabinet maker.  It was his hands that carved the joinery and carried the vision of the whole into each part, crafting even the tiniest wooden nail peg as if it was the sole key to supporting the central axis of the barn and securing the integrity of the entire structure. With the care of temple builders, a bucket loader, hands tools, ropes, pulleys and immovable focus, they would with stripped bare design make of this space an homage to the Nature and Source that sustained them. From the outset their vision was complete, and they had carefully planned and timed their efforts, but it would not be easy to bring forth the essence of that emptiness into material form. Early on I watched as they discovered where each one of them was lacking in some practice or experience and the others were strong. A collaboration soon developed that would see them through any challenge. It allowed for unified agreement where everyone’s unique insight was sought and heard, and that human value would remain, like the great hewn beams, a part of the structure’s radiant completion.

On those first days, when what is yet to be is still more an architecture of the mind than the material, I crossed the threshold of the barn’s inception.  I stood still in the hopeful potentiality of the new and forming; a near nothingness where you are left to ponder more infinitely what can be achieved.  I was mesmerized by the emptiness of the early frame; how earth and sky, air and wood, subtle light and shadows penetrated each other as if discrete boundaries of separation were truly an illusion of dense matter and our physical sensory conditioned idea of forms a limiting misperception. Trying to stay out of the way of the builders, I felt a creative Will streaming through everything on the site, something universal even in the random lumber piles and skeletal remnants of the barn’s beginning. Many days drew me back to the orchard, to watch with wonder their strategic materialization of space. Even after the last peach was picked, I drove past the “closed” sign and up the hill, not to follow what was going to end up in an architecture and design magazine, but because these were ordinary people who found within themselves the confidence and capacity to build something of pure intention and simplicity, guided by the space around them. Their execution was neither raw nor perfectly refined.  One could not compare it to the works I so admired of Peter Zumthor, but I thought he would like it, nevertheless. There was something in its simplicity; a light and presence, a feeling you would want to come home to again and again that rivaled the greatest architectural splendor.  I returned not intending to make images, but because somehow they managed to escape the deeply rooted cultural pattern to fill space as if it had no purpose of its own but to support our endless inventions and accumulation, and that was something I wanted to be a part of.

Theirs was a careful process, austere in part due to limited resources, but also to an aesthetic free of the excessive frills and synthetic complexities so often misperceived as that which gives a space its beauty, power and sense of fulfilled purpose.  From years of farming the land, they knew the soil and landscape of the space as well as they knew themselves. They had learned to care for the earth that nourished them, and this barn was built with the same care. They saw the space of the land with their hearts, and that inner appreciation grounded their barn in a beautiful union of human work and nature. They rarely spoke while they worked, as if attuned to that silence which allows one to hear the sound of a space and its infinite dimensions, thresholds and transitions. They also seemed to intuitively know what few architects and builders grasp, that they were not only building a structure for its mathematical exactness, stability, innovative design and temporal function, but as a vessel which preserved an essence of the emptiness with which it now shared space. They seemed to understand without mentioning it that although on its surface it may be a barn, it must also stand to keep open a connection to a more universal totality rather than block or distract us from it. Within what contains space there is always the capacity to excel beyond its physical point; always the vortex openings where like a vacuum with a powerful center of gravity, we may be drawn toward a more refined Light and elevated consciousness and creativity. In the humble yet determined efforts of this barn raising, I felt this family found a way to embody a space of “emptiness” without diminishing its Light, and to preserve an entry to that void of infinite potentiality where freer from our conditioned tethering we are able to serve and respond more consistently to a universal network of Energy and Intelligence. At the very least, they were aware enough to feel a call to do so and courageous enough to try.

What is evident as local farming evolves in this area, and so many of the original 100 to 200 year old barns are abandoned to decay or re-envisioned as vineyard or micro-brewery destinations, is that this may very well be the last traditional barn raising in New England.  What it represents however, is not only the remains of an earlier culture and tradition, but the driving spirit to reach into space and discover through our expression in forms something unknown about the space and structure of Nature and the self.  In the constructive collaboration of one family, I saw all humanity as belonging to a timeless lineage of builders in space, following a call to build which has helped lead us forward along a path of insured survival and human advancement.  The call that we have answered throughout time and that ever endures within us to project our knowledge and awareness in material form. On that hill I saw it is the nature of the universe to do so and likewise the nature of humanity. Our innate desire to build as a force of creativity, illumination, and transformation is as much a part of us as breathing, and continues to draw us farther and farther away from the surface of earth, deeper into its oceans, beyond our planet’s atmosphere, the boundaries of our human identity and into the infinite space of an unknown universe and self. I was shown it is not  rebuilding the structures of the past or designing that which transcends the past that is of significance in our life as builders, rather our sincere attempt to reach harmoniously into the richly empowered “emptiness” of space and translate forms that reflect its essential nature and serve the needs of an infinitely evolving human totality. These humble builders excelled where every builder and maker should endeavor; with an understanding that each structure we bring forth must also nurture a realization of what transcends it, and that when we build in space we should reach further than our finite mind and egoic musings, further than a framework of economic, technological and scientific advancement,  in search of a more infinite and perfectly harmonized geometry of Energy and Intelligence. Where their barn beams were aligned and rose above the earth, there was a palpable sense of what the art of building should be; that it should draw us nearer the Source of all creativity and an experience of ourselves as a part of that universal Space of cosmic unfolding.  I was reminded it is human to create and human to build, not just for shelter or to have a place to work, worship, study, or rest, but to build a form which allows energy and awareness to flow from a focused point where we can explore and question, and be still and experience the nature and infinite potentiality of both external space and the space of the self. Whatever physical purpose it serves, everything we build, whether it is a barn, a space station, or images in my case, is an opportunity to realize what is yet unknown about the nature of space as an infinite bridge connecting all elements of life, our human form and all existence with infinite potentiality. Space is always more specifically engaged in the process of building whatever the scale, in constant transits back and forth between the architectural space, the space of the self, and mind as the intermediary between the material and the immaterial until what is manifest in an outer physical structure communicates both an experience of the space in which it is manifest and a space within us where we are ourselves built as part of a superstructure of more ascendant and infinite totality. The true builder knows that he or she works not only to create a structure of material function and purpose, but as an attempt at manifesting some link to an inner awareness that feels missing from what is now known and visible.  As humans we are increasingly compelled to build forms as containers of and oriented toward Light because ultimately they reflect a hidden truth we sense about ourselves, that we are those forms; houses of Light and unfathomed capacity, a human totality built for reaching upward into a space of infinite dimensions, Energy and Intelligence.

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“Borrowing” Space and The Responsibility of Builders

 “When in building we destroy the subtle integrity and potential of a space we destroy our own integrity, and when we endeavor to keep open that potential through conservation and space sensitive design, we are making more accessible the infinite potential within our own human totality. We borrow or are given access to space not only to build structures which serve physical needs and perpetuate known truths, but to open the way to a more unlimited experience of the universal network of Nature and the Self.”- Deborah A Goudreault

Tadao Ando said, “We borrow from nature the space upon which we build.” These words clearly reflect Ando’s reverence for Light and refined sensitivity to nature, yet also demonstrate and challenge the wide variance in our perceived responsibilities as builders and “borrowers” of space.  They lead us to question what should serve as a standard of building and constructive creativity within this borrowed access to space, and how our past and present objectification of space perpetuates misleading assumptions about our relationship and responsibility to it. The idea of “borrowing” space; of building in space as a process of sensitive, mutually beneficial exchange between humans and nature gets us closer to what is a more unlimited, universally networked relationship to space, but not yet beyond the shadows of a long accepted pattern of considering space as little more than a resource for building whatever serves our needs. When we buy a parcel of land, and/or air rights we assume with that ownership we have the freedom and right to take it from its natural state, from something vibrant and organic to something man-made, inorganic and void of its original potential if we so choose. Environmental restrictions buffering the building process are being implemented and accepted as necessary guidelines in many areas, but much of what we build continues to distort the innate flow of energies, frequencies and Light within space, and brings varying degrees of conflict not only into the architectural space, but those who interact with the site, and the whole of universal Space in which we exist.

While it is true that in current building practices, some degree of outer physical nature is unavoidably displaced, the greater our care and experience in establishing a continued expression of the essential nature of any space in which we build, the less its vital energy and beauty will be lost and the more wholly successful that structure will be. Cultivating an inner awareness and understanding that we are part of the space upon which we build, rather than owners or even borrowers of it is becoming increasingly significant and key to elevating how we bring forms into being. There are some who say, only when we can tangibly feel the pain of Nature’s destruction within and are driven by a desire to design and create in a way which balances and heals it, should we take on the process of building. We can no longer ignore that Its consequences of our building have far reaching implications and are universally shared.  To build is not merely an individual choice involving an unrelated field or object, and every parcel of land we build on should be approached with the same gravity as a decision to sacrifice a part of ourselves. In this idea we begin to see the responsibility of every architect and builder of the future evolving; an individual and collective responsibility to refine our awareness, perception, aesthetic and will to design and build what not only fulfills creative, functional, structural and economic goals, but advances and harmonizes both the landscape of human culture and Nature. A responsibility to effect only that loss in Nature we can compensate for with an applied understanding of the more subtle network of space, and designs that preserve and keep open the potentiality of its innate energies, intelligence, beauty, function, balance and Light. Concentrated urban or industrialized areas where Nature is already compromised demand the most adept building, and where the responsibility of the architect / builder is even greater, for to reestablish a connection to the essential nature of the space requires a highly refined awareness, experience, sophistication and sensitivity. In these spaces an ability to advance and implement higher standards of creative vision and accountability to nature and space is even more critical, a true test as to whether one can purify and restore life to a space as well as add function or merely cover its loss with something intellectually interesting and stimulating to the senses. 

The ongoing “Emptiness” movements so much a part of the last century’s modernism, like those resonating in Scandinavia, the dense outer circumstances of Japanese culture and increasingly throughout global society, are not simply a plea for simplicity or to leave open space, but to build in a way that gives us new room to explore and expand our understanding of the dynamics of space and its role in harmonizing creativity and enlightening manifestation. There are also well funded collaborations and growing efforts to preserve green space and natural environments across the planet but, for all their benefit, that is not enough if the majority of what we build now and into the future continues to distort and degrade the element of space. All manifestation is an evolute of space, passing through increasing densities of matter into form.  Understanding what energies, powers and operations are networked throughout the apparent emptiness of space and how to build in a way that magnifies, concentrates and consecrates rather than blocks them is increasingly critical if we are to permanently elevate and harmonize the space of our human experience on Earth and beyond. This call to evolve the awareness with which we design and build will necessarily bridge the work of science and architecture along new lines of inquiry and advance the endeavors of all who train and work as architects and builders. It will support them in integrating the variables not just of form and material function, but Light and the infrastructure and function of space itself.  Somewhere waiting to be cultivated and heralded, between the most enlightened works of current formal architecture and the simple barn of a farmer whose every act honors the Nature that sustains us, is the spark of more refined inner awareness and an aesthetic of emptiness which not only leaves space in design for light and physical life to expand, but space which continues to radiate its innate energy and elevates the experience and awareness of all who enter or inhabit it.  Waiting to be discovered in every human builder is the capacity not just to examine but to invoke the subtle nature of space in material form. To translate a sense of its immaterial structure and infinite potentiality through its physically perceivable substance in a way that leaves open and carries forth some of the underlying power of its infinite, multidimensional universally networked nature.  Much room yet remains for human advancement and evolving the mind’s awareness and perception, and with that for refining the fundamental principles and aesthetic with which we bring forms into matter.

 The Future of Space and What are we Really Building?

 “Architecture and the act of building gives us a point in space and time to expand our experience of our human potential to build beyond preconceived physical limits, but every structure even if we are not the builder should in its material substance also translate the energy and intelligence of space in a way that builds new awareness and helps the mind see beyond its preconceived boundaries.”- Deborah A Goudreault

While living in Arizona, I spent several years visiting Taliesin West and meeting and exploring the work of Frank Lloyd Wright’s protégé Paolo Soleri.  I often contemplated what Wright meant when he said, “Space is the breath of art.” and came to understand space not as a blank canvas to be necessarily filled by our own inventions, rather where realization of our totality continues to be revealed in increasingly subtle and potentiating evolutionary leaps. To build is human. We have always been builders in space, and in building there has always been an ever-present opportunity to access more of the unlimited potential of both space and the space of the self.

Through science we have evolved our understanding of the primordial elements as they function in the material; studying our planet and its forms of life beginning from the most dense to the most subtle, from earth to water, to fire and the air we breathe. As our knowledge expanded, our capacity to travel across and through these elements of space also expanded, and with greater access we built a diverse civilization and continue to build structures we feel serve our social, economic and political advancement.  But what have we learned from our building?  Have we learned how our thoughts and what we project into material form as builders can either harmonize and elevate our experience of the elements we build in or make them toxic and unsustainable? Have we learned that our actions can make Earth’s infinitely potentiating natural forces into threats to our survival, and now we are faced with having to transform those effects?  Where we have sought to divide, conquer and dominate the elements of earth, water, air and space, will we learn to harmonize our interaction with them? Will we take responsibility for those outcomes, elevate our intentions, and refine our efforts to become the builders of a universally positive transformation? Now as we are drawn further beyond the air we know to increasingly subtle and distant dimensions of space, our understanding of space; the relationship between structures we build in external space, the thoughts and feelings we build in the space within, and the infrastructure of space itself needs to be even more definitively considered.

We have a working understanding of the more dense elements and their properties, but what about space itself? Why does it continue boundless where material forms both exist and cease to exist? As we travel farther and farther into space, we will be challenged to learn more about the nature of its emptiness, because it is in the perceived emptiness of this least dense element of space that the infrastructure of creation itself operates in a network of subtle energies and frequencies. We will begin to understand how all that becomes manifest passes through the element of space; all forms in Nature, including our human form and everything we build, so our conception and experience of it, how we access and integrate it as we seek to evolve beyond our current limits is of critical significance, We are already increasingly aware that to advance we must excel beyond our past thoughts and actions regarding space, even if where that takes us is not yet widely apparent. We often continue to relate to space as if it were a measure of distance, a hurdle to overcome in achieving our goals for continued expansion and survival. But we can no longer treat its apparent emptiness as nothingness, like those who hold on to a false view of the lower forms in nature as non-conscious and inanimate, or we will never open the portals of its unlimited potential or the unlimited potential of the self. Especially as builders, we must open ourselves to consider space as much more than distance, a receptacle of matter and an unclaimed place holder for our own creative vision and inventions, or even as a conductor of energies and forces. In the future we will recognize space as a living multidimensional transformer, part of whose function is to couple energies from an omnipresent Source through its universal circuit system to every component of existence; material and non-material, including the self. We will know it as the field through which potentiality, cosmic Energy and Intelligence arise and become manifest, rather than a dark unliving realm that is void of it or our own domain to squander and pollute with aesthetic blindness and conditioned perception. In the future we will learn that all space is infinitely potentiated; that there is no “dead space” only limited access to it. And we will learn it is through the element of space within the self that we transcend our finite human limits and access our innate interface to a network of more infinitely potentiating energy and intelligence. Soon we will know Sound is the intelligence of space and Light is its life, and naturally relate to this immaterial medium through its frequencies of subtle sound and light.  We will understand it is where blueprints of infinite manifestation are continuously transmitted like cosmic DNA sequences of source Energy and Intelligence, in patterned waves of increasingly dense condensation creating unique combinations of elements we translate in what we call the creative process into physically visible forms.  In the future we will practice knowing what we build externally reflects our inner awareness of space and our openness to what makes our human form and all forms whole, unlimited in their potential and an expression of unbound Consciousness. We will understand that whatever we discover about an architectural space or cosmic space, we also discover its corollary in the subtle space of the self and vice versa. To become more adept builders we must know more about space. Some will say all we need is more information and more technologies, but to know more about space we must also practice becoming more open receivers, and to become more open receivers requires us to enter and explore the unknown constructs built within the space of the self. In this way we will become builders not only of outer structures but the architects of a more wholly integrated and potentiated humanity. In this future, we will come to realize what we are really attempting to build with every material construct is a reflection or representation of our experience of the structure of space itself; the lines of force and cosmic geometry of an Infinite Energy and Intelligence that transcends all outer appearances. We will realize that the ultimate act of every builder is to make tangible some quality and feature of a Consciousness networked throughout all forms, including our own, from which comes our breath, our life and the space to evolve our humanity as ever expanding radiance and potential.

May we continue to evolve as a humanity of builders in ways that both reflect our progress and draw us toward greater and more expanded awareness. 

Copyright 2020 Deborah A Goudreault. All Rights Reserved.