The Inner Studio - Riverside Architectural Press

PART THREE | INNER RESOURCES
We forget that the built world is also a symbolic world. The door,
the staircase, the act of opening and closing, the way a column is
upright, a pool of still water reflecting what is above–all of these
ordinary “built” conditions are also symbols potentially filled with
the latent energy of psychic transformation. The very substance of
architectural imagination is deeply related to our ability to imagine
the world symbolically. This symbolic potential suggests that there
is always a second project, a double, “a ghost, a spirit and shadow
world” embedded within all material, natural or built. It waits there
until it is called upon to speak to us through the dream.
Dreams confirm that the world of efficiency and convenience is
not enough for our modern psyche; we need a world of meaning.
We have an appetite for meaning. When a sign on the highway tells
us “100 miles to Dallas,” our intellect may be satisfied because we
can compute the time required to complete our journey, but there
are other parts of us that are ignored by this message. If we are
returning home and anticipating conflict, the sign will have a very
different meaning than it will if we are visiting a new grandchild.
At night we dream of places and settings that illuminate what we
need to consciously integrate and incorporate in order to move
toward our own wholeness. But because dreams present their point
of view from the unconscious, we often can’t make head or tail of
them. To understand the dream we need to enter the symbolic
world. We cannot interpret a dream or a symbol with our ego.
Symbols from the dream may stimulate years of research and scholarship,
and the meaning of the dream is rarely a simple matter. The
dream, with its narrative and symbols, belongs to a particular
context, the life of the dreamer.
There was a time when the appearance of things was more
predictable. We all recognize a 19th-century museum or city hall or
courthouse. There is no need for a large sign labeling the institution.
A century later and these same institutions are unpredictable
in their appearance. We can no longer agree upon what a courthouse
or school should look like. Yet when the built world falls
back on images that have exhausted their meaning, the entire society
experiences a loss. Today we have no choice but to ask questions
that go deeper into the designer in order to find out the
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