Rebuilding Our World

Reimagining the Design Process

The elementary forms: triangle, circle, square

Priests of Modern Culture

The Evolution of Design

The New Bauhaus

The Bauhaus had a revolutionary agenda: to create a new aesthetic appropriate for a modern industrial society. The school would use technology to improve our quality of life.

What Will We Build?

A matrix of human experience: the tangible to the intangible, the concrete to the abstract, the physical to the metaphysical

I was raised by parents who were part of the Jesus movement in Vancouver, Canada. That upbringing continues to influence me to this day. But my ideas about faith, hope and love are very different from what I inherited. I have been grappling with the meaning of these terms through my own lived experience. I have not arrived at the destination of certainty. Instead, I have been on a journey to discover ever more questions that ignite my wonder in truth, beauty and goodness, which I can only comprehend in juxtaposition with their opposites.

In design, white space is one of the most important means of guiding the attention of the observer to that which is most important. It is the shapes of the spaces surrounding the letters that help us to comprehend their meaning. The structure and the rhythm of the negative and positive shapes form the foundation of our understanding.

We work with symbol systems to communicate in the abstract about the concrete. What we discover in the process is that the concrete is merely an abstraction of a much deeper reality that transcends the physical and connects each one of us to a process that leads all the way back to the origins of time, space and matter. In the beginning was the word, the logos. The idea not only transcends reality, but is the creative force that brings something out of nothing.

As a designer, I learn from past experience to extrapolate possibilities into the future. The adjacent possible is what we call our present reality, at the intersection of past experimentation and future technologies. We shape our tools to shape ourselves.

From this basic understanding comes the core questions of human experience: who are we and who do we want to be?

Building

Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain.

Love never fails.

“Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.

Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool.
What kind of house will you build for me?

says the Lord.

Or where will my resting place be?
Has not my hand made all these things?

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

Deconstruction

Rebuilding

Our design challenge is the human experience.

They replied, “Let us start rebuilding.”

So they began this good work.

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Designer, educator, social architect, founder, Builders Collective. We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together. https://bldrs.co

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Stephen Bau

Designer, educator, social architect, founder, Builders Collective. We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together. https://bldrs.co