The Inner Studio - Riverside Architectural Press

INTRODUCTION
design and legislate for their survival. According to the World
Watch Institute, by the end of this decade, for the first time, the
majority of the earth’s citizens will live in cities. This should give
us pause.
Where we once lived in a symbiotic or harmonious relationship
to our natural environment, today we live in a thoroughly built
world in which we are rapidly losing the opportunity to gain the
deeper self-knowledge that comes from observing the arising and
passing away of natural things. Not only were we once part of
nature, all the happenings of our inner world were considered
“natural.” How can self-knowledge be extracted from the designed
environment unless the designers themselves can consciously
experience their own inner worlds and use these to promote selfknowledge?
The purpose of psychology is to guide us through human problems
and to help us make sense of our lives. Where we once
prospered by studying the migration of animals, we now find
ourselves struggling to know how we feel about ourselves and
others. Clearly we live in a world that is both physical and psychological
and we can no longer afford to leave out the complex,
paradoxical, and often troublesome role of feelings that occur
during the design process. Society has distinguished itself by
its willingness to integrate new technologies–The Inner Studio
proposes using the self-knowledge and creativity that reside in our
modern understanding of the psyche.
Architects will often explain their work by saying that it has been
“designed from within.” This usually means that we are designing
from some rational appreciation of a building’s organization. I want
to suggest a less intentional explanation, that there is a moment in
the creative process that rests on a different kind of know-how, on
the relationship we have to the inner world of our psyches. The
role of inner know-how, the world of instinct, imagination, and
intuition, the world of subtlety and felt sense, is not only a complementary
counterweight to our technical training and practical
skills, it also represents a part of ourselves that needs to be
respected and developed and included in the built world.
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