Interview with Thomas Barrie on the Connection Between Architecture & Sacred Space

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MITCHELL: Today, I had the privilege of speaking with Thomas Barrie. Thomas is a practicing architect and a professor of architecture at North Carolina State University, whose scholarship focuses on architecture's symbolism, ritual use, and cultural significance. He's published extensively on this subject, including a couple of his books, which are “House and Home: Cultural Context, Ontological Roles”. Today our discussion focused on spirituality as one of the historical origination points of architecture and the future of spirituality's role in our contemporary built environment. We discuss ideas about the psychological significance of one's home, drawing on deeply embedded myths and stories in our cultures. The depth of Thomas's knowledge and the degree to which he has thought about these topics is commendable in a scholarly sense and I feel that it's deeply relevant to discuss in our contemporary world as many of us wander the world in search of purpose, meaning and a sense of understanding. Maybe architecture does have something to offer here. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

INTRO MUSIC

MITCHELL: Well, Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. I want to start off and just jump right in and ask, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your recent areas of interest and your research?

THOMAS: Yeah, sure. I mean, I have been in higher education for most of my career and I started off in the practice world as well. I worked in practice in Boston for over nine years. I had my own firm, but at a certain point I started teaching part-time in the Boston area and realized that that was more my calling was and where I felt that I could perhaps make a little bit more difference in the architectural cultures and also larger cultures than perhaps I could in practice. A little bit about my education is that I have an M.Arch. from Virginia Tech and that was a little bit of an unusual time at Virginia Tech, a very experimental school and curriculum. And I fundamentally studied Louis Kahn for three years under the tutelage of my professor, Jan Holt. 

Later, I did a Master of Philosophy at the University of Manchester working under Roger Stonehouse. And that was really focused on looking at the built environment in a very analytical way, pulling it apart, and in particular, based on Professor Stonehouse's own research, pattern-seeking and patternmaking. And out of that, I found an avenue to explore and eventually publish what had been a longstanding interest of mine, dating from Virginia Tech was an interest in what we might call the sacred component in architecture.

And I began with that really looking at religious, religious architecture, and the pattern seeking part of it was looking at, comparatively, I'm a comparative scholar, looking at Jungian archetypes, Joseph Campbell's universal mythology, and pattern seeking in the in the built environment and without going into further detail there was really cross-disciplinary and pan historical and cross-cultural and I the name of the book was “Spiritual Past Sacred Place: Myth, Ritual and Meaning in Architecture” and it grew from Campbell's work of particularly the myth of the hero's journey that the both communicative, narrative and kinesthetic experiential aspects of sacred places and particularly the past sequences and narrative function of architecture. And really, since then, I've built on that scholarship through other writings and books, and have expanded it as well, because at a certain point, I recognized that what I was really interested in, what was really underneath all of this, was exploring the power of the built environment, the power to affect our lives either positively or negatively, the power to uplift and support, ultimately, the development of human consciousness. And in that way, my inquiry has broadened.

MITCHELL: Sure, sure. I'm curious, is that interest into maybe the sacred or realms of psychology, was that present before university or was this something that kind of fully developed when you were in the academic world?

THOMAS: No, it dated for you know really from childhood without talking too much of a length of that, I was raised a Unitarian. And for those of your listeners who aren't familiar with Unitarianism, we're the smallest and most influential of the Protestant sects. They're very small, but Unitarians seem to come up a lot. And what I brought from my experience of the Unitarian Fellowship, was a very ecumenical way of approaching religion and that Unitarians, even though they're associated with Christianity, are embrace all of the world's major religions. And I remember Sunday school was dedicated to studying all of the great world religions. So, I think, well, I guess I know where some of that interest came from. And Unitarians are also very known, rightfully so, for their agenda of social action and of seeking justice in the world.

And so that's one part of it. I'm also a long-term Buddhist practitioner and that's been since I was 19 or 20 as part of the search that has been the subject of so many novels and myths and so forth that happens in your 20s of trying to make the sense of one's world and finding one's purpose in this world that we have been in some ways inexplicably thrust. And like so many things that we discover when we're young, I have no idea…. why.  

Except that Buddhism, which of course is a very old philosophical and religious tradition and can't be neatly encapsulated or characterized, but one might be able to safely say that it is much more oriented towards orthopraxy than it is towards orthodoxy. In other words, to invert that, there's not demands of belief and adherence. You demonstrate your understanding and experience of the dharma through action. I like to say the most important thing is what you do when you get off the cushion.

MITCHELL: Sure, sure. It's interesting. So, you have, you know, you have this background, then you develop an interest in architecture. And I think from the outside, many people would think that these two worlds are very different. But then somehow, you know, through your work, it seems that you’ve found a very close connection, as I think a lot of people have found between the two fields, but I think in the other outside world that these two fields seem separate desperate and that kind of leads me into this first question. It seems that one of our basic human purposes is to expand our own consciousness and to connect with the natural force and spirit. How can architecture help to facilitate that connection? And how has this been done throughout history?

THOMAS: Yes, well, the etymology of the world of the word religion is to bind together. And it speaks to, I would say a fundamental role of religions, which is connection. To connect us with what we seek, the power, the wisdom, the beneficence, and spirituality is part of religion, but it's not a religion, right? So, I'd like to make a distinguishing—distinguish those terms in that when we talk about religion, I think it's best to say, those are or are recognized historical religions.

But that spirituality is more syncretic in a way that it draws from not only religions, but from what we call wisdom traditions as well. And it's all part of what I would characterize as the human search for meaning and a search for homecoming. The much has been written about the existential human condition of separation, like in Daniel beseeching God, you know, why are you hiding yourself from me? These kinds of you know forces that really have driven humans to construct religion; to construct belief or practice systems and I'd like the word construct because that's what we do as architects too. And so, you think about the built environment you could say well, we bring- provide space, right, to bring together to co-join with our fellow human beings. And often in religious structures, certainly, a place that promises connection, the rarefied space of the inner sanctum of the Christian church or cathedral, where mysteriously Christ was present, wasn't represented in the medieval world, but was present. And so that's, you know, that's part of it, and also that the architecture and, you know, in the history of sacred places and sacred architecture also instructs. It has a communicative function that can be, you know, both taciturn and very or very garrulous. And that lastly, it can be discursive. It depends on our participation. And so, these parallels between religious practices, spiritual practices, and some of our fundamental tasks as architects seem to me to be naturally, naturally paired.

MITCHELL: Now doesn't, you had mentioned connection with the community architecture creates spaces that allows connection with community and helps us kind of establish that. Is, would it also be fair to say that architecture creates spaces to connect with ourselves as well? You know, and I think maybe I'm thinking about one of your essays where you had mentioned homecoming, the hero's journey that go out, experience the world, they come back. Home is a place to kind of reconnect with themselves, develop themselves, reflect on things. Is that, would that also be fair to say?

THOMAS: Yeah, it is. You can think about spaces of spaces that have the power to affect or to induce or to lead, acting both at a communal social cultural level, but also the individual. I mean, we can only experience the world as an individual in terms of how we receive the world, both in a communal setting or in an individual setting. And I think the other thing, too, is that there is, I think, a great need for solitude, and in terms of individual and places that can offer refuge and say comforting or productive solitude can have a really tremendous value. And so, you know I’ve had, you know wonderful experiences of being alone in places and in terms of that, there weren't other embodied beings with me, but feeling the spirit of the place and of feeling in some ways at home.

MITCHELL: Yeah, I think, and many people, when they go to such a place that you're describing, they maybe they don't register or realize how vital of a role that the architecture of this space is in facilitating or allowing for that solitude or allowing on the other side that community connection. They just kind of think this is, it just kind of happens, but I do think that there's some power in the space to be able to facilitate that and support that. And maybe that's kind of what I'm wanting to communicate, is that there's power in how these spaces are designed, and there's a purpose for them. And maybe architects, not suggest that we have this all-mighty power, but maybe we can help interject some of those types of spaces in a community or in a society which we feel that may be lacking. You know, for example, the places of solitude. I think that many of those spaces are possibly lacking, lacking in our contemporary world.

THOMAS: I think it's very important. And I just add that I talk to my students often about problematizing a you know a particular architectural assignment and that we all have in some ways a responsibility to go beyond what's handed to us and to problematize, in other words say I can see the deficiencies in this context, in this time, in this building type, and I will seek remedies.

MITCHELL: Sure, yeah, that's often a really difficult pitch in the real world to clients to say when they're looking at square footage, budget, you know all these kind of pragmatic requirements, you say, “hey, I'm seeing a society devoid or lacking solitude we need, we need this”, that could be a tough pitch, but I agree we do I think have that responsibility to have a bit of a bird's-eye view or at least an opinion on kind of a cultural, what we see lacking or needing in the culture and to try to interject an architecture that can maybe support that just a, just a hair.

THOMAS: Yeah, and it's it it's sometimes we can be subversive about that. I recall a place in Japan one of the famous rock gardens. It's actually in the Abbot's Quarters of the main temple buildings at Daitoku-ji, Zen Buddhist Monastery in Kyoto. And it's a very beautiful garden and like the other you know typical Zen dry garden style has a has a wall and when you sit on the veranda you look at the garden of course but beyond the wall is what the Japanese is called shakkei or borrowed landscape. And then the distance is Mount Hei, which is a very significant monastic site, and it becomes part of the garden at no cost.

MITCHELL: Right, right. As a layer.

THOMAS: Yeah. Yeah. As part of the garden, you didn't have to commission it. Nobody paid for it.

MITCHELL: Well, that kind of trails to the next question is why has one of architecture's original purposes to provide space that facilitates connection with the spiritual side of the human being, why has that perhaps been diluted in our contemporary world and what, if anything, do you think we should do about that?

THOMAS: Yeah, that's a question that, as my dear late friend Lindsay Jones used to say, "That's a four-whiskey question." You know, because the reasons for that, I think, are hard to encapsulate. I would accept, if you want to, you know, kind to go the route and I think it's fruitful of read people like Marshall Berman who wrote about modernism, modernity, and modernization and the rapid change of the modern condition, the in some ways incomprehensible rate of change and is writing still relevant to today. In other words, like other cultural artifacts, right, architects of the built environment both responds and reflects its time.

And I think how we start to seek alternatives is, first of all, to become very attentive to architecture, the built environment as a cultural artifact. What is it saying? How is it speaking to us? And for me, that's the connection between researching the communicative agency of sacred places, of religious architecture, and being able to hear the built environment in today's setting and what it's saying. And I talked to my students about this. I said, just go out and look around and get curious. Why do things look like this? Why do we seem to build in consistent ways? And so, I think that is the first step.

I think the second thing is, and that can be constitute a recognition of loss. On the other hand, I think it's safe to say that human beings are perennial meaning seekers. We're perennially trying to make sense of the world. And to be able to recognize that as unskillful as human beings can be. In essence, we can say but inside is a meaning-seeking being. And if we see the built environment as a place where meaning may either be conveyed, constructed or experienced, then we may start to find subtle shifts in terms of how we conceptualize and design particular places.

MITCHELL: Yeah, so it's almost like a process of reflecting and gaining awareness of what we've built, what were the values behind that, where were the motives behind that? And then subtly, course correcting. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is I almost equate that to a process of individual psychotherapy in a way where you go through this process, and you reflect on your individual history, and you find out why you make subtle shifts. And that's a constant process of reflection. And what’s coming to mind is, are we actually doing that in our current society? Or are there enough of us doing that to where we can shift things a bit? Probably an impossible question to ask

THOMAS: It's a good question. Yeah, well, I think, actually I think we're a little lonely at the moment.

MITCHELL: I would agree with that.

THOMAS: We're a little lonely. We're looking for more friends. But, our friends are out there. And you of course, know about the research and practice group I co-founded some years ago called the Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum (ACSF). And we formed what became a non-profit and organization back in 2007. It was four of us because we were lonely. We were all academics, and we thought, "Jeez you know it's not only the subject of spirituality, the spiritual roles of architecture not come up in our respective institutions, if it does, it's not very well accepted.” So, we created a home for those who shared in similar interests, and it's been it's been extraordinarily satisfying and edifying and inspiring. I have so many occasions I recall of someone coming to one of our symposia and just saying “I am so glad to be here. I'm so glad I found you.” Not that we're so wonderful. We're not, right? But that we created a place, right? Just like we constructed a place where we could gather.

MITCHELL: Yeah, well, I think the message that's being disseminated from your group is one that I think would be beneficial for more people to be aware of and be kind of clued into because you're right as our cities are, I love how you refer to them as our artifact. They are our largest artifact and this idea that when maybe we're not studying them or maybe we're not thinking about them to the depth and level that we need to be thinking and reflecting upon them, in order to progress them forward in a more constructive way. I just- I don't know if that's being considered by a large enough group of people. So, I appreciate what you guys are doing.

THOMAS: Yeah, and we're one of our vision statements is that is that you know, we believe the built environment can aid in the spiritual development of humanity in service of solving our most pressing problems. In other words, like many spiritual practices, you really can't change the world in productive ways until you change yourself.

MITCHELL: Right

THOMAS: And I think that I would extend that to what I would describe as reading the built environment, right, learning to recognize certain predominant aspects of the built environment as a cultural artifact and that we need skill to do that and it's learned skill and it is something I teach as well or what get called methods of interpretation, ways of looking at the world. One is, it comes out of the field of material culture, where you understand culture primarily through its artifacts and not the other way around.

So, I also very interested and been very informed by a theory called “Reader Response Theory”, where it's more important to recognize and document the range of responses to a particular piece of literature, than it is to analyze it according to the author's childhood, the author's influences, which is more of the, you might say, traditional way of analyzing the works of art in that way. And then additionally, and probably primarily for me, is phenomenology and hermeneutics. You know, hermeneutics comes out of the European phenomenological tradition, and hermeneutics is basically, you know, a practice of interpretation. It is in essence, a, it's a method, right? Not a, an ideology. There's no, nothing ideological about hermeneutics. And one aspect of hermeneutics is recognizing our prejudices, or what Gadamer called pre-understandings.

Hans Georg Gadamer was kind of a late 20th century, very influential, hermeneut as we get called. And in other words, to recognize that because of our cultural coloring and individual and cultural, we will see the world in particular ways and unless we become skillful in a certain distancing from that. And which is very related to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, in that mindfulness you observe the mind its activity without overly identifying with it. That's a similar thing. And then also in hermeneutics gets talked about what is the horizon of understanding, that you recognize a full range of aspects of a particular question situation you're trying to understand. And it's only in the middle between that or on the horizon where things perhaps become less distinct that any meaningful understanding might emerge.

And I think these are important ways of looking at the built environment, ways that I believe can disclose, right, to use Heidegger's term, who for all of his deficiency did offer some very valuable ways of looking at how we perceive the world that we are in. He didn't write about architecture much, actually, but he certainly contributed in some meaningful ways and for me the capacity of the built environment to disclose, in other words, reveal what perhaps was unavailable is, to me, a wonderful way of looking at the built environment. A famous essay of Heidegger's writes about the bridge, and how the bridge in bridging the river reveals the river and its banks and so forth. It's in, the bridge is only an agent to reveal certain aspects of a larger condition.

MITCHELL: Yeah, many architects, developers, contractors, building the built environment, but I think what you may be referencing is these people that reflect on the built environment and then can read it. We just don't, we don't seem to have too many of those. And if we do, they're not being kind of taken seriously and integrated into the industry I think in a way. At least that's my small perception on it. But I also think independently as architects and you may have gone through this, but if you look back and reflect on your own work. You can kind of read your own work and say hey this you know this project may have been influenced by this this and this. You can gain insight into how to put better work out into the world kind of maybe more in alignment with some of these societal needs that we talked about at the beginning, but reflecting and reading the work, whether it be yours, your own work, or society's work, or the, sorry, the industry's work, I just think is missing a bit.

THOMAS: Yes, I agree. There's a great benefit of reflection in many ways, but we need to take time.

MITCHELL: Right. I think one of the hurdles in that is that the economy of that is probably not great, you know, reflecting on buildings. And there's no...

THOMAS: They’re not billable hours

MITCHELL: That's - exactly right. Whereas, you know, if you're head down doing a project, you're just kind of trying to sometimes make the payroll, keep a business afloat. It's easy to just abide by really functional pragmatic requirements and miss maybe a larger picture beyond that. And it's a tall order to be able to do those things, the pragmatic things, and then also be able to deliver a product that maybe contributes positively.

THOMAS: Yeah, I've said this to many of my fellow architects. At NC State, we have a lot of, a lot of our studios are actually taught by local practitioners who run wonderful practices and whom I've co-taught with on occasions. And I just, I would just say I really admire my fellow architects that have created or run or lead their own firms.

It's, as you know more than me, it's a very demanding profession. And so just recognizing, yeah there’s, this takes a lot of balancing to be able to perhaps feel like you're not blown by the winds of, you know, of opportunity or failure, but are more grounded in intention, knowing that not every project will offer those opportunities, but some might. I mean, you kind of look for those pearls when you can find them.

MITCHELL: Right, right and we kind of touched on this but the archetypal myths. What archetypal myths do we see played out through the design, construction and habitation of architecture? Specifically, the home.

THOMAS: Well, the home is a subject that I got very a very interested in as in the in the context of home and housing, first of all, as a cultural artifact. And my peer-reviewed scholarship is about sacred places, religious architecture, and so forth. What I describe as my studio research is housing. And I teach housing in Raleigh, North Carolina, where NC State is, I'm a housing advocate as well. I'm that professor out there advocating for equitable development and affordable housing. And through that, I got to a point where I thought, you know, I'd really like to understand more about where our cultural presumptions and prejudices come from when in the realm of housing.

And as it turns out, there's a wonderful series of cultural influences that I traced back to, through the scholarship of others as well, mind you, to aristocratic England, 16th, 17th century notions of home as refuge, particularly by the aristocracy, which in turn was influenced by Renaissance Italian pleasure villas, and which drew from late Republic, early Imperial Roman villas. The retiring to the country for repose and restoration that I could, of course, give a very long disquisition on that, but in some ways get baked into the American preoccupation with the single-family home. And that just led to a much larger study of, first of all, asking questions about what we mean by home. What is homecoming? What is homelessness? How do we depict homes in literature that can reveal things about what we consider to be the “truths” of our culture.

‘Pride and Prejudice’ is a wonderful novel when it comes to houses. When Elizabeth Bennett falls in love with Darcy after all sorts of tumultuous young people back and forth. And she reflects with her sister later that she knew that she was in love with him finally when she visited his estate at Pemberley, right? That the estate reflected all of his attributes. So, you know, home as expression of self, what has been described as our third skin, right? Clothing is our second skin where we express ourselves. Our home is our third. And so, there are, you know, the popular mythologies, right, of what home represents that became a real interest to me. And then that moved into areas of homes for gods. The Solomonic Temple, it's got to be built right, or God will not dwell there.

Hindu temples, traditional Hindu temples, where the gods must be summoned and only visit. If they're not built right you have an empty, empty shell, too unary architecture, too modernist kind of idealization of the home and its deployment as a theoretical instrument. So much gets packed into what we call home or that is very revealing, not only about the cultures that produced it, but speak about the multifarious roles of architecture. And how does that relate to our current housing crisis, of homelessness, of our fellow dear ones living in substandard, unstable, dangerous housing, how can anybody be in a place where they can spiritually mature, where they can grow like all humans depend on growing if they are fighting for survival because of their housing? I think it strikes at the core of, you might say, our ethics, our values as a profession, to what I like to say do our little bit to solve the big problem.

MITCHELL: Yeah, it seems that the idea of home is so embedded into people that you bring up a really interesting point when they're not able to have a stable, safe place to return to their spirits, their nervous system, whatever it may be, cannot enter that state of kind of calm and peace and from there that can't develop because they can't think about other things are in this kind of flight or fight mode and I think it physiologically has an impact on them.

It also makes me think of you know, and you may have experienced this too in some of the work you've done, but clients that you do homes for I'm thinking that you know many of these meetings and discussions with them, it’s I guess emotional would probably be the best word, emotional, maybe can be charged. It's, it's, they're, they're extremely passionate about it as they should. And in kind of developing, at least in my own career, I start to, you see that there's this deeply embedded reason why these people are viewing their homes with such care and concern. And why it can be emotionally charged is because our society, our history, our literature has kind of told that myth or that archetype has been embedded into our society for thousands of years. And so it starts to make sense in that way.

THOMAS: And what it represents to them. Yeah. Yeah.

MITCHELL: And what's challenging is they might may not even know that it represents that to them. But we do know that it's a very important thing. I've actually started kind of mentioning to a couple of my clients too that that's this is a super emotional, very personal, spiritual endeavor in taking on a home because you're connecting with these really kind of primitive human pieces of you and sometimes that results in a blank stare, but other times that resonates with people. So, it's interesting.

THOMAS: That's right. I didn't buy into that. Just give me a house, right?

MITCHELL: Yeah, exactly.

THOMAS: Exactly. Yeah, but it is the process can be revealing. And yes, I've had those conversations with couples, and had similar, similar experiences when I, particularly when I, when I ran, ran my own practice. And, and I never said this, and I know that it wouldn't be well received. But the interesting thing about humans is of all the, you know, kind of beings in the world, we're really virtually almost the only one that lives in the houses that somebody else lived in before us.

MITCHELL: Sure. Sure.

THOMAS: Yeah. I live in a 1907 house. And it's very natural. You know, but you don't want to tell your client, “You know, you're not going to live here forever. Somebody else is going to live here.”

MITCHELL: Right, right. Yeah, you bring up a good point.

THOMAS: That changes the game, right?

MITCHELL: A bird creates its own nest. It doesn't live in a nest that another bird inhabited.

THOMAS: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's probably best not to practice on your clients there, but, you know, we build for future generations. We, you know, the affordable housing side, I mean, we exercise compassion caring for, in, you know, the caring, the, you know, being careful about where we direct our energies, certainly in the context of creating a sustainable future, you know, planning for the seventh generation, right, that we, we're not building for ourselves. And we’re building for others. And there's, that's, it's very difficult, especially in our bespoke, couture, you know, at least aspect of our, of the architectural profession. And I don't want to overly characterize it because we're much more diverse than that. But that is part of it. And we have to, we have to recognize and recognize that it can be, it can be an impediment to reorienting ourselves.

It reminds me, I designed a house some years ago for a couple. It was a vacation house out in the Berkshires of Massachusetts and it's centered on a wall, an 80-foot CMU wall that serves as a mediator between different components of inside and outside. It's also precisely aligned with the cardinal point, so it functions as a colossal sundial. And I wrote about it. I got asked to write about it at some point. And I quite truthfully said, I imagine this house as a ruin, with only the walls still standing, casting no shadow when it's high noon.

MITCHELL: Sure, sure, yeah. And that makes me think of Stonehenge, right? I mean, that was somewhat of a, I mean, it's obviously a ruin, but it identified the solstices and performed, but that's fascinating, that you thought of it that way.

Okay, I'm going to round it out Thomas, and ask you top three sacred sites that you have visited and why? If you can.

THOMAS: You got another hour? Well, that's a lot. I mean, one of my more recent books is looking at the architecture of six major world religions, and so my inspiring places are spread globally. I've had a long-standing fascination with the medieval church, and a favorite of La Madeleine in Vézelay because of its quite remarkable sculptural program and the narrative and communicative capacity of places like the medieval, you know, Abbey Church in this case or Cathedral.

Also, modernist works, some of Louis Kahn's work, such as the Kimbell Museum, which is really revolutionary at the time, in quite simple ways, in that it was a museum that you could be in a gallery and you'd still, you'd see sun slanting in from the cycloid vault from outside and would realize that, "Yes, I'm here, but this is part of a much larger world."

To Zen Buddhist temples, I already mentioned the temples in Japan that I studied at one point in their gardens. I'm going to call it View Gardens. And they were actually recognized, first of all, they were built by Zen masters, designed and “built” by Zen masters. And they reflected their level of enlightenment, the kind of martial part of Japanese Zen Buddhism. But they also performed is what in Rinzai Zen gets described as built koans. A koan is a paradoxical statement designed to put the adepts mind in such turmoil that the only escape is transcendence, right? And these are built forms to do that. And then much less known, I have a real interest in revealing and writing about places that people don't know so much about is the incredible tradition of Buddhist monasteries in Korea, very little in English.

And I wrote about one called Tongdosa. It's one of the three jewels, Buddhist term, appropriated for monasteries of Sangwonsa, dedicated to the Sangha, the practitioners. Haeinsa dedicated to the Dharma or teachings, and Tongdosa dedicated to the Buddha, the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. And it's a remarkable sequence of spaces that integrates so many disparate aspects of Indigenous, Buddhist culture, levels of understanding, what get called lay and elite codes, right? For the learned monks studying in the college there, there is encoding that gave them what they needed for the peasant woman coming to pray at the medicine Buddha's shrine. There's gifts for her too. And the great works, the late works of Sinan, the great Ottoman architect, architect of three sultans, his one of his last works, the Selimiye, built for the sultan Selim in Edirne, a remarkably mature and also syncretic work that incorporates layer geometries that are literally astounding.

And the you know Hindu pilgrimage sites, such as the holy mountain in the holy city of Pushkar, and the Journey up to the shrine of Saraswati, the consort of Brahma, very unusual places. There's very few temples actually dedicated to Brahma, usually they're Shavaitar or dedicated to Vishnu. In all of these places, to me, have been very instructive, both in the way you could say history theory, right? Methods and means to understand the significance and power of the built environment, and in terms of design theory, they are veritable pattern books of skillful means to design remarkable memorable places that can co-join us to others or to other beings or environments of which that we seek in going there.

MITCHELL: That's amazing. My big question is how do we get those types of structures back into our contemporary world? How does that happen? I don't know the answer to that, but it seems like we're just kind of left lacking at this moment for the, you know, the bigger buildings of our cities and societies, but…

THOMAS: Yeah, it's, it's, I'm not sure if it's at this point, and this may be reflect my particular interest. I'm not, not sure if a singular building or project is, is what we're called to do now. I think it's an imagining, a reimagining of human habitation and settlement. It's places that will do what architecture has typically done, but for different impetuses now, which is to gather, to co-join, to support, and so forth, right? And that's why I say different now, because in the past, particularly religious architecture, the goals weren't always, you know, ones that we would say, "Yeah, let's do that again," right?

There's a lot of territoriality in the built environment, and particularly in religious structures. We have different needs now, but the wonderful thing about the built environment is very generous and adaptable. And so, for me, reimagining our built environments in larger ways in terms of you know, a more sustainable world is very important and it can be very practical. It's something that I've been writing about. I think it really begins with the professional ethics that we adopt and which I think helps us to recognize when opportunities arise.

MITCHELL: When you finish your writing, or I'd love to read more about that, but I mean, that's a really, I think, a really nice approach to something that I hadn't really thought of is that these environments that we're creating right now, maybe we don't need to look to the past, or maybe we, you know, aren't using those as kind of whole precedents. We're imagining a new way that has not been, you know, built yet a new way of living, a new way of kind of communicating of meeting together. I think that's eye opening for me and seems a little bit more loose and friendly.

THOMAS: And productive.

MITCHELL: And productive.

THOMAS: I didn't make it up right there's a tradition hermeneutics writes about this that we understand the past through the lens of the present. So, the past is not this frozen thing that's either irrelevant or we should recreate. But we interpret it by understanding that we can only see it from where we are right now.

MITCHELL: Well, you opened my eyes, Thomas. Thank you so much. Is there anything you'd like to add to the conversation that we in that we didn’t touch on?

THOMAS: Just that I really appreciate your questions, and I think they come from your heart and from your own seeking and that I wish you well along your journey and hope that you know you find others, or we find opportunities to walk together.

MITCHELL: Absolutely. Well, yeah, thank you so much Thomas. And yeah, great speaking with you.

THOMAS: Thanks so much.