Once Modernism and Relativism showed us that pattern and meaning were a matter of choice, and once the White Box got boring, the world of design was plagued by this challenge:
If I can choose to evoke anything in the design and decoration of the man-made environment, what would I choose?
Confronting this challenge early in my career, I found the answer in the ancient science of archeo-astronomy: the tradition of integrating into the built environment the unique patterns of the movement of sun, moon and cosmos around a chosen location.
It seemed to me that this design tradition pointed us towards a powerful paradox, one that might serve as a gateway for connecting folk with the patterns of life both local and global. I call it The Paradox of the Universal and the Unique. When one chooses a very intimate location, a point on the globe, and unfolds around it the pattern of sun, moon, stars, weather, and the comings and going of life forms, one is instantly connected to the larger patterns of life, far beyond one’s location.
It seemed to me that we can all agree to the wonder of sunrises and sunsets, the cycle of the seasons. We can also see that these wonders happen everyplace, but are different everywhere.
For example, look at the eight Sun-Path Glyphs surrounding this mandala.
Sun Path Glyphs - 1986
Each shows the pattern of the seasonal extremes of sunrise, sunset and the sun path in between at various latitudes of the earth. Consider the mandala the earth. Her poles are at the top and bottom, equator at her mid-points, and the temperate latitudes in-between.
Six of the glyphs show a red line representing the axis mundi or meridian line, equivalent to a line of longitude. But at the poles that axis is merely a point. At the temperate latitudes the sunpath is a parabola arcing towards the equator, but in north and south the arc is southerly and northerly respectively. At the equator, those arcs are straight up and down, while at the poles the sun path skims around the horizon.
All show the same phenomenon as experienced in different places.
This pattern is a fundamental aspect of the pattern of life everywhere. It is universal and also unique at any time and place. Simultaneously different everywhere.
There is a wonder in all this. It moves me to art.
This folio shows some of my work exploring this paradox over the past 38 years, striving to create those gateways where folk can connect with the patterns which connect us to all life on this earth.
Football Floor Mandala – 1981
An exploration of the coinciding patterns of the proportions of the human body, our 12-based time keeping tradition, and the sacred geometry of a circle drawn at the radius of a person’s height. Turns out such a circle, made using anyone’s height, will have a circumference of about 6 of their spans, 12 of their yards, 24 of their cubits and 36 of their feet. The triangle you see at the center is one megalithic yard to a side. Where a common yard is finger tip to center of chest, a megalithic yard (common measurement of many megalithic structures) is from finger tip to shoulder, the way you measure string.
This same pattern can measure the day, by hours, from sunrise to sunset. In the Latitude of NYC it happens that, from any standing place, the most northerly summer sunrise is 30 degrees north of east, coinciding with the actual times of sunrise and sunset on a 24 pointed mandala.
Installed on the floor of the Governor’s Island Ferry Terminal in 1981 as part of the installation of art for the Foot Ball, an art party celebrating the body-based logic of the foot-inch system of measurement.
I have drawn dozens of these mandalas, generally by scratching into the earth someplace. Each time I begin by finding, as accurately as I can, a line on the earth parallel to the axis mundi, the meridian line – i visualize a specific line of longitude through whatever point i have decided is the center of the circle.
And then, using sticks and string, i unfold the sacred geometry that manifests the pattern of life in that place, on those days when we gather.
My Mandala of the Seasons and the Days
It's likely I've drawn this mandala a thousand times: In pencil on paper. On computers. With a stick in the dirt. In the sand and in the rime of shallow snow on a winter lake.
It revealed itself to me as we designed the Football Floor Mandala, and has been unfolding itself to me ever since. In the latitudes where I've spent most of my life it happens to work as a diagram of the solar year. Elsewhere, in polar regions or in the tropics, the shape of the star showing the solar extremes would be much different
This is the one I know. What would it look like where you are?
This 4-fold Yin / Yang cycle expresses the waxing and waning of each season in the context of the Quarters and Cross-Quarters of the year.
The Quarters: Solstices and Equinoxes. The Cross-Quarters: less well known but to many of my ancestors more important for ceremonies to influence the coming seasons.
At the quarters - Up, Down, Right and Left, the old season is fully past and the current season is coming into its own. Mid-Summer, Mid-Winter, Mid-Fall and Mid-Spring.
At the Cross Quarters - at the diagonals, the current season is at its maximum while simultaneously its successor is just being conceived. May Day, August 1st, November 1st, February 1st. In the fullness of spring you smell a summer breeze. At the height of summer the harvest begins. In the crispness of fall, a winter afternoon. In the depths of winter, life stirs deep in the soil, beginning.
And at the center of it all the yin / yang of the year - in the darkest of winter, light returns. At the height of summer, darkness returns.
Been doing that reliably for a while, but we can't take anything for granted.
Naked Eye Observatory Dome – 1984
To pick some Place, and to then unfold around that point of longitude/latitude on our earth the pattern of observable phenomena.
To express that geometry in architectural form.
Coursing up out of the earth is expressed the Axis Mundi – everything that rises and sets rises and sets symmetrically around this axis. The angle between our ground and this axis is the precise angle of latitude of the Place where we stand. On the equinoxes we can observe the sun arcing perpendicular to this axis, representative of the sun’s movement above the equator on those days. On the solstices we can see, anywhere on earth, that the sun is moving 23.5 degrees above and below that equinoctal plane – 23.5 degrees being the latitudinal distance between the equator and the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
In this way the dome is a model of our earth, and we are always seemingly at the center of it all.
Solar Meridian Arcs – 1987
Working with the sculptor Robert Adzema I entered a competition for pieces to be exhibited at the Philadelphia Horticultural Society. We picked a spot along a pathway between the greenhouses and the japanese teahouse where we created two arc'ed walls which enclosed three gardens: to the east a wall ran from the most northerly sunrise to noon, embracing all the mornings of the year. To the west a wall ran from noon to the most northerly sunset, embracing all afternoons, and to the north was a garden embracing a horizon the sun never occupied, the shadow garden.
No plaques explained the phenomena expressed by the art. One would simply experience the patterns, season after season until one day one might realize that they repeated, year after year, and had some meaning - if only one could understand them.
Might make you curious. Might lead to an art experience.
MIANUS BIOREGIONAL PLANNING PROJECT - 1990 -1992
The patterns of life are in our geography as well as in the sky.
To see these aspects of the pattern we must choose a frame of reference.
For some years I have been working with the frame of reference of Bioregions, a simple, powerful idea: Underlying all the gerrymandered domains and jurisdictions we have overlaid on our earth rest biologically defined regions that have tangible eco-systems we can mindfully inhabit.
This is the context within which we might think globally and act locally.
This idea grabbed me in the late 1980s. It offers a framework for relating to Place. Realized, it provides a gateway for connecting with the pattern of life wherever we find ourselves.
At that time I became an Associate of the Westchester land Trust. Working with it's founder Louis McCagg we undertook the Mianus Bioregional Planning project. The Mianus Watershed is 36 square miles. 60 different human jurisdictions control portions of it, each within their own frame of reference.
Using early Geographic Information System software we assembled the mapping of many of those 60 jurisdictions into a watershed frame of reference. Folk could see the whole. It caused the formation of a watershed council, joining the many jurisdictions in one context.
The project was later chosen as an exemplar of the use of mapping to engender social change by the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design for their exhibition "The Power of Maps". I also received an American Institute of Architects Urban Design award for the work.
Here's a link to an article I wrote describing the project and the exhibit:
In blue is Westchester NY. This map shows the many watersheds in the Westchester / Fairfield County region.
There is no Place on our earth which is not in a watershed - your yard, the building where you work. Every where, when you pour something on the ground, it is conveyed through the watershed where you are through river systems and aquifersinto our oceans.
The area in green can still drink water right out of a well.
The areas in blue have land so contaminated with waste that communities must create and maintain municipal water systems. Notice the difference in area compared to the sewage treatment areas mapped below.
All the water that ever will be exists. We use the same water as the dinosaurs did.
Outlined in red, the Mianus Watershed. The grey hatching shows the areas in the region where human habitation is intense enough that municipalities have been forced to create public sewer systems. The areas without hatching stiil put their waste directly into the land they inhabit, trusting the earth to digest that waste and render it safe.
THE MERIDIAN MUSIC PROJECT, OR, SO - HOW'S IT BY YOU?
No date on this one. It's my life's work. Been going on, will go on.
Imagine your community chooses a spot in the commons where, over generations, they unfold the Pattern, starting with a naked eye observatory. Once a spot is chosen as the center, the axis mundi and equinoctal line found, a place moment sculpture is created. This sculpture sits patiently all the time, as the sun first sees it in the morning, then rises until, at High Noon, the sculpture knows the sun is as over-head as it will be that day, and causes a bell to ring, an image is captured and shared, and a burst of geo-data (collected by local students of Place) goes up on the web, adding to a living map composed of data tiles from all the places, east and west, that have similar installations.
This is a mapping of all the middle schools on Manhattan Island in the year 2000. We've drawn through each of them a line of Longitude, and cast them up to a musical bar which illustrates the instances when each of their bells would ring each day over the 26 seconds it takes for High Noon to cross Manhattan (if there were no clouds). Yes, High Noon takes 26 seconds to pass across the island every day.
The intervals between notes expressing the time it takes the earth to rotate from longitude to longitude daily.
The poignant counterpoint between two place-sets: The upper bar is the rhythm of the clusters and intervals of bells ringing at observatories located at all the UNESCO World Heritage Sites existing in 2000. On the bottom, the rhythm of all the refugee camps then managed by the UN High Commissioner of Refugees. (there are many more these days).
24 Hours of music, capable of expressing any place-sets that have chosen to have these observatories created on them. Colleges. Marketplaces. Memorials of one sort or another.
A PLACE TO SIT- 2010
A 6' x 6' canvas mandala with a zabuton and zafu (zen sitting cushions) on it. Radiating out from it's diamond center are the planes of Longitude and Latitude intersecting just where you are sitting. The mandala shows the places on the horizon where you can expect to see the sun rise, reach High Noon and set on the days of the exhibit.
A Place to Sit - installation at the Empty Hand Zen Center in New Rochelle, NY.
Many sat there, some for quite a while. And as folk often do in these settings, when they GOT IT, their shoulders relaxed, they smiled, and they would say "Oh, yeah, I knew that", or something to that effect.
A PLACE TO SIT - 2013
In the Bronx River Art Center's temporary gallery, a 6' x 6' paper, felt and string mandala, with sitting cushions, casts that place's longitude and latitude across the floor, up the walls and across the ceiling. No sky to be seen, only my promise that, if the city wasn't there, and you sat on the cushion, you would see the sun rise, reach noon and set at the marked places on the horizon circle.
So many sat on the cushion. Families came back to bring loved ones to experience what it was like to ride the earth.
Folk got it, and their hearts felt good.