The Inner Studio - Riverside Architectural Press

PART THREE | INNER RESOURCES
patriarchal beliefs. The other great masculine artifact of our
modern cities is infrastructure. These enormous constructions are
seldom thought of as “designed,” yet in their self-absorbed rationality
they express the masculine, as do many performance-based
workspaces such as offices, fast-food restaurants, and laboratories.
Environments that show no regard for nurturing life, or that ignore
basic human longings are evidence of overloaded masculine traits
and are common throughout contemporary suburban and urban
developments. Factories and malls that imperiously impose themselves
on the agricultural land surrounding most cities represent the
one-sided patriarchal values that grip modern planning debates.
While they are usually the product of municipal or regional
planning design studies, these environments signify a major victory
of infrastructure and organization, characteristics necessary when
going into battle, but less significant if the goal is to ennoble a
human-centered life. The habitual overvaluation of one quality,
usually the masculine, translates into abstract and counterintuitive
spaces that have become the norm in North America. The resulting
alienation and a lack of “place” are symptoms of the one-sided
thinking that continues to dominate most urban design. Tools and
their modern equivalents, which we see in the latest technological
devices, belong to this category and speak to the penetrating role
of the intellect that accompanies many of these inventions.
Feminine: Mother Nature
All those artifacts and places that are hollow, offer refuge, and can
be filled through inhabitation or use symbolize the feminine built
world. Churches are considered feminine because they contain the
spirit of the Father. The unconscious is considered feminine
because it is the source of all things or, as Jung liked to say, “the
womb of the arts”–it is infinite and from it, consciousness emerges.
Artifacts as diverse as ships, walled cities, public spaces, niches,
gardens, and homes belong to a category of objects and places that
have associations with the feminine. While men may be thought of
as “king of the castle,” they are usually only in charge of fixing the
house, while all the decisions that relate to the inside the house
have traditionally been the domain of the feminine. Places that
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