Stephen Gerard Dietemann Design

First, a quick introduction. I have been a practicing architect and artist for almost thirty years. Rather than view each as a separate pursuit, I have always seen them as opposite sides of the same coin. The visual artist, like the architect, is primarily concerned with seeing, truthfully and fully. Sadly, despite the fact that image proceeds language, our culture trains us only to recognize, not to see. Our eyes are reduced to blunt objects, allowing only the obvious to be seen. We only dimly, if at all, sense the subtlety of the world around us. As a result, we remain largely unaware of the impact the world is having upon us.

Architecture and Arcadia will be a column presenting my ideas, insights, and musings about the man-made environment of the Berkshire Region and the impact it has on our lives. “Arcadia” is used in the column title to describe the Berkshires in the mythic sense – a landscape both symbolic and divinely harmonious -- and to connote the region’s sequestered identity, a place that balances the needs of man and nature, city and farm. “Architecture” is used in the broadest sense to denote all man-made modifications of nature, including buildings, parks, farms, towns, villages, and even road systems. There is much to investigate here because the balance needed to maintain ‘Arcadia’ is delicate and easily disrupted. To paraphrase the poet and artist William Blake, the Berkshire Region, like innocence itself, is only maintained at the cost of great energy. We may well chose to disturb the balance – history is the chronicle of such disruption – but it is best done with our eyes open.

The column will focus on the built environment because like art it deeply affects our lives. However, unlike art the architectural context within which we live is seldom analyzed or even discussed publicly except in professional journals or other exclusive venues. This is unfortunate for us at best and dangerous at worst. Winston Churchill noted that while we shape our cities, our cities shape us as well. The same is true of all architecture. Each building and each component of that building – its materials, colors, windows, its relationship to the street, river, and the mountains, its use of power and its disposal of waste – create an intimate portrait of the culture within which it exists. The way older structures are selected for renovation and the nature of that renovation as well as the way new construction is assembled and where and how it is placed tell us who we are. Like each shard of a shattered hologram, each structure contains the image of the entire culture. Our structures are like a fabric woven into the natural world. Our homes are merely the thinnest threads of that fabric, private structures which attempt to a lesser or greater degree an explanation of who each of us are and what we believe constitutes the ever-changing concept of ‘family’. But every shop, government building, jail house, fire station, landfill, church, office building or mall tells a story about all of us collectively. Buildings are such a powerful cultural Rorschach test because – and here they differ from the visual arts to a somewhat greater degree than from other traditional art forms like theater and dance – so many people are involved in their creation. The architect, like the artist, may be the center of the action, but unlike the artist, his design efforts are greatly affected by many other external factors including the client, financial realities, code requirements, zoning requirements, material limitations, climate, technology, public services and time constraints. We may choose to celebrate some buildings, but every structure affects us and, as Churchill notes, shapes us as well. There is no protection in ignorance. In fact, the less we are consciously aware of the impact the man-made world has upon our lives the greater that impact precisely because we are most susceptible to those influences which we are not trained to interpret.

Building is and always will be about shelter, and shelter is about survival. Survival is the most fundamental of all instincts, the source of myth and archetype. Buddha meditates within the cave or beneath the Bo Tree, Saint Anthony is greeted by the devil outside the Saint’s hut in the desert, the Minotaur lurks in his labyrinth. Man (and his god representatives) has always shaped the world to his needs. I want to investigate how we are doing so today. Each column will focus on an aspect of the built environment -- a church, the center of a village, a walkway, a street, a new house, a renovated factory – not as a ‘travelogue’ or an excuse to awe the reader with a list of expensive materials or the amount spent on construction, but as a mirror reflecting our own image at the start of the new century.