Zen Cast

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It's the beauty that moves me.


What you may see is cold. Boring. Even, dull. What you sense might be de Chirico's Melancholy.
What I see is Order.
Intent.
Design.
Peace.

It's birth, like all births, is violent. The earth is scarred, the workers exhausted, fighting with gravity and the sinfulness of humanity.

But in maturation, peacefully the structure sits in space. Stable. Gracefully it hovers. Reflecting its surroundings. As if to say, "Yes, I exist. Yes, you exist and I am listening." Not piercing violently. Not showing off with stars and gold and pinnacles. Like a monk in gray robes, in prayer.

Our close friend who works there and got us past the food court and video screen sees the guts of the building. In the most grotesque of terms, I am sure.

As an architect, at every line between floor and wall, panel and door, frame to frame, I see the dream that disseminated to a team that spread through fingers and nerves to pens and keyboards. The realignments, the corrections, the red slashes, the late nights, the power play, the anxiety, money changing hands reluctantly, the resentment of one trade for another. I see code books and officials and council meetings and insurance agents and accountants. I see the welder who gets it right, the scheduler, the trucker, the crane operator, the erector, all getting it right. Or wrong. And the ensuing angers.

I see how two lines on a drawing came to exist as two lines on a wall hundred of feet in the sky that only an architect would notice and love and honor and cherish.

Robert A. M. Stern, Architect.

OCD? Anal Retentive? Personality disorder? Control freak? Yes. Manifest in our frail humanity, yes, yes, yes and yes. In God? He ordered the universe and knows the number of hairs on our head, and yes, calls us by name. Order and beauty.

So I wandered in the peacefulness of line meeting line, panels hugging frames. Sculptural elements, a shock of color here and there. Tone on tone, maizes, creams. Sky.

Cast in clouds and dreams.

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