The Glass Bead Game: An Architect's Agenda

“Style is a function of theme. Style is not imposed on subject-matter, but arises from it. Style is truth to thought. The correct [gesture], the true [color], the perfect [form] are always ‘out there’ somewhere; the [architect’s] task is to locate them by whatever means she can. For some this means no more than a trip to the supermarket and a loading-up of the metal basket; for others it means being lost on a plain in Greece, in the dark, in snow, in the rain, and finding what she seeks only by some rare trick . . .”

— Julian Barnes, FLAUBERT'S PARROT
[Adapted from the writer’s to the architect’s purpose]
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Architecture is a moving target.

This is as true for me today as it was when I began my formal study of architecture many years ago. Now, as then, my moments of clarity about what architecture is are in a near-constant flux with moments of doubt. I quite willfully celebrate this flux, and those with whom I have built and will build are, while also necessarily attending their own needs and desires, my collaborators in this search.

Why a search? I began trying to make architecture in the late sixties, at what happened to be one of the seminal moments in architectural thinking. Robert Venturi had just cast his extraordinary book COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION IN ARCHITECTURE as a gauntlet to architects whose ideological complacencies relegated the practice of architecture either to formalist jigsaw puzzles or to the selections of “styles” in which to build, as though the promise of architecture could be easily selected, as from the rack of current fashions at Bloomingdale’s.

Architecture is more, said Venturi. And I attended carefully to his more.

Coinciding with my first reading of COMPLEXITY was another book that was on my mind and that of my peers, one which just as irrevocably motivated me toward my future course. Hermann Hesse’s THE GLASS BEAD GAME fixed in my imagination the notion of, or at least a symbol for, the gathering of the infinite and ever-changing movements in one’s mind toward the task of making buildings. Hesse’s was simply a GAME of thoughts. Of associations that, in our thinking beings, we never can escape. Themes arise in our minds . . . musical, philosophical, literary, visual, unnameable . . . and as the GAME proceeds their linkages become deeper, even more varied. Hesse offers a model of the maker’s mind at work. And speaking to Venturi, this working mind is also an act of synthesis through which the spiritual values of all times are simultaneously present. This synthesis is architecture’s promise, and a reason for making architecture.

As evidenced in the photo above, I had actually begun to play Hesse’s GAME at a very young age. I believe I have often deployed the GAME to some advantage over my life. Though the shovel and the hose have probably been used more often, and to greater effect.
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CURRICULUM VITAE

I grew up in the South, received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Auburn University in 1972, and after apprenticeships with Harry Wolf in North Carolina and Robert Hecht and Ed Burdeshaw in Georgia, returned to my native Mississippi in 1976 to begin my own practice. I forfeited my aspirations for becoming the William Faulkner of southern architecture in my early thirties (though I always come back to that thought), and left Mississippi for Harvard University, where I received a Master in Architecture degree in 1984. I was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard, subsequently taught for two years at Tulane University, and then until 1994 directed the architectural studies program of the Wesleyan University Art Department, teaching architecture as well as drawing courses. I have lectured and been a visiting critic at numerous schools of architecture, and have been architect of record for over sixty completed buildings.

Currently, I am on the Board of the Collective Consciousness Theatre in New Haven. I am also on the Board and the Housing Committee of Columbus House, Inc., a not-for-profit whose mission is to serve people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless by providing shelter and housing and by fostering their personal growth and independence. At Columbus House I am the Client Liaison to the Yale School of Architecture First Year Building Program, which each year builds a duplex or triplex for Columbus House's clients.
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What follows is a montage of sorts of my interests. All images and photographs surround the idea of architecture, in one way or another. For another view of these interests you might also visit my website, which, like this Flickr stream, is a work in progress:

www.benledbetter.com

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Taken on: August 11, 1953

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