Serenity and Wonder
Serenity creates wonder or wonder creates serenity?
I remember sitting in the dining room of my house in an early afternoon, sipping my tea. It is the nap time in the village. Everybody was taking nap, even the neighbors’ dogs stopped barking. I could hear clearly the sound of the tea cup hitting the glass countertop of the table after each sip. That was when I looked at the sunlight beam coming down the lightwell and its radiance all over the space. It illuminated the objects in the house, but I wasn’t seeing the objects, I was observing that wonderful light. It seemed it carried a message, although it was completely silent.
There are more moments of wonder like this that one can observe in the everyday life. One can find it in home or a quiet street corner, but also even in a busy area, as long as one is serene in thoughts and reflections, or observations. There are times that I sit down in a busy street of the Old Quarter, enjoying seeing people talking and doing what they do everyday. There are nothing spectacular happening in that vision frame of mine, and most of the time I can even predict the behavior of each person who is present in my view, but together that rhythm of the everyday life is strangely enjoyable.
For creators, it is the consistency of coming back to an idea or a subject that creates serenity, because the idea will punctuate the time of one mind. Each time it comes back with a new nuance that add to the previous layers of thought, sometimes it justifies the previous thoughts and replace with more complete ones. A concept can take or borrow a certain forms. Architects, for example, usually express their thoughts on space by mean of drawings, or modeling, either physical or in the computer. These tools help expressing the thoughts via an object, which is the physical extension of one’s thoughts. The objects are there so that one can observe one’s mind in a physical way. This observation, in turn, generates more depths for the concepts in practice and re-enter the mind again. It is this loop of information exchange that set the rhythm for an idea, and over time would constitute a kind of serenity in it. This is true as in the old Vietnamese saying “haste makes wastes.” Indeed, the “soul” should not be disturbed when the artist is at work. If it is, the condition where the artwork being composed is perplexed, thus makes the objectives less likely to be achieved. The saying implies that only a person with serenity in his or her soul can see things clearly, and be able to simplify entangled situations.
It is the rhythm of life that is magical. The everyday noise suddenly became the white noise that set the tone for serenity. Indeed, there are many layers that simultaneously happen in that everyday scene mentioned above. Sometimes I hear nothing but the mechanical sound of the scene: motorbikes roaring and honking, the sound of hand hammering from the ironsmiths down the streets, or the resounding sound of the steel bars dragging on the asphalt road by the construction workers. Some other times, I would pay a particular attention to the rising and falling motion of the wooden yoke on the shoulders of the hawkers passing by the streets. I’ve never stopped wondering how such a small feature of a women can carry such a load, which could intimidate even strong men, and sustain it throughout the day.
Artists have another rhythm – the rhythm of creation. For artists, art media helps convey their thoughts to the world, by mean of writing for a writer, an object for a sculptor, or a painting for the painter.Idea keeps coming even subconsciously. And that rhythm over time condense into a kind of unique serenity for each artist. That time is compressed with the density of thoughts. The artist works back and forth between the object of their thoughts and the evolution of these thoughts, which, in turn, would continue to project themselves as art forms. Thoughts can even be divided into single acts within a creation process. In designing a house, for example, an architect would start with a floor plans, but then he or she needs to compose it by means of elevation, three-dimensional models, or by dissecting it into sections, investigating the many details and conditions of space and material connections. Technological advancement have helped architects to deliver design faster, by integrating the different processes into “smarter” digital models, so that one don’t need to spend too much time going back and forth between recreating layers of information like the plans or sections and so on. Nowadays, with a digital model, whatever detail that one architect changes in the floor plans will simultaneously change in the building sections or elevations. There is no doubt about the efficiency of this methodology in saving time and efforts for the development of a project. This technique, however, can be disruptive for the creation process. It disrupts the rhythm of coming back and forth between the different geometrical planes, namely plans and elevations and so on, therefore also eliminate the planes of thought that associate with these elements. In a creation process, a floor plan does not need to be always correlated with an elevation, for each element has its own rigor. A floor plan can have thousands of different possible elevations that can be derived from it, and vice versa, which is already challenging for any computer program. But more importantly, breaking down the design process into elements like this help creating the rhythm needed for the artist, so that one can design a floor plan, generates an elevation, reflect on it as another generator, and re-apply it to the floor plan. The results might be several different floor plans and elevations that are not perfectly fitted into each other, but gives way to many possible compositions of space. It is the task of the architect to mediate between these different processes in order to come up with a singular form at the end. With this process, an architect have more times to reflect on different aspects of the design, therefore will have more choices that result in better design. It is true for artists of any other disciplines as well, regardless of the subjects and technologies involved, since these pauses between processes enables a serene background for renewed conceptions. That act of creation constantly exists thanks to the serenity that the artist creates, and also that repetition itself become a timeless serenity, which is intangible but at the same time solid as an object. In this case, the serenity itself becomes a wonder.
It is also the silence that serves as the background for rhythm, especially the rhythm of thoughts. Sometimes one need to mute a certain sound in the physical environment in order to create a silent background for one’s own thinking process. In my house and in that particular moment, the almost absolute silence may overlap with the serenity of the scene, but in many other cases there are sounds that don’t rhythm with the environment that resonates them. A too familiar pop song at high volume at the coffee shop in the morning, for example, is quite disturbing as I am writing this note. In order to continue to work, I need to create a layer of silence on top of that sound, and only by then I begin to come back to my thoughts. This layer of silence is the serenity that only human can create.
To appreciate silence we must set rhythm, and vice versa. For silence is also wonderfully suggestive, which gives more voices to a poetic ears than anything else. The wonderful propriety of silence is that it appears also in its opposite form: noise, or sound. Isn’t it a series of sound, when punctuated properly by silence, evoke something wonderful to human ears such as music? Silence can be argued as a form of serenity with regard to sound. An analogy of this silence is the serenity in visual art, where the void is as important as the figure, to sculpture, where the negative space gives the form its strength. Or the multitude of of shadows in a Japanese house, where the darkness praises the light, and through the darkness the light is cherished, to the point where they are identical, as in Taniguchi’s words in his book “In praise of shadow.” Darkness has its own rhythm, or degrees. A total black might be muted, but different shades of shadows gives darkness its integrity and serenity.
Architecture in general has this rhythmic composition of serenity, which invites not only the observers’ eyes but also footsteps. In the old time, for example, in the age of the Roman, the whole city was a wonderful landscape of forms and voids. In The Arcade, Walter Benjamin had contemplated in a kind of city that gives way for the flaneur to roam around. These flaneurs are not lazy, but rather walk with serenity. In the city of Tokyo, too, the Japanese anthropologist Hidenobu Jinnai presented a city that existed in the past. With an old map, he has projected a poetic city of the past onto the present. His footsteps represents a kind of serenity that is similar to that of Walter Benjamin’s flaneurs. To make that serenity even more special, the Japanese painters has combined those movements of everyday life into the simplicity of form on paper, so serene but at the same time extremely suggestive.
Even in the city of New York, where it’s hard to find true places to repose, here and there I can find places to read a book or write or doodle. I discovered by chance a cafe nearby, belonging to a yoga center. The atmosphere is different from a typical coffee shop, with dimmer light, aroma, and groups of people talking. This fact of people conversation is actually very important to create the serenity that I experienced. Without it I would feel the space empty but not serene. It is maybe about the proportion of the occupants of the space at a given time against the space itself, as a container. In this case, it is a volumetric composition.
Again, the difference between silence, or mute, and serenity needs to be clarify. It is not that any noise can compensate for it either. There is a reason why this particularly conversation and the level of sound of that group that tie the space together in a cozy way. Perhaps because their sentences rhymed in a way that is consistent as a topic, or perhaps their personality and voices just rhymed with each other. That rhythm helps composing a serenity that is fundamentally different from silence, since it gives an atmospheric calmness from within. It is stunning to think of serenity as atmosphere, and therefore, an object, in contrast with what surrounds it, which is silence. This serenity, therefore, is an “object” (so that it can radiates), but is at the same time the background against which one can observe wonders. That wonder could be an artwork in the room, a gesture in space, or one’s own thoughts. Sometimes one don’t need to gaze at anything, and can just sit down with an empty mind, and still feel wonders, given the serenity at hands. In this case, serenity becomes an object of wonder by itself, which also serves as the background for itself.
I’m wondering how many of such spaces exist in this city. How many serene corners do we have? Coming from a city where tea shops are omnipresent in the city, so that an ordinary person can stops anytime for even a few minutes, it is one of the hardest thing for me to walk in many neighborhoods of New York city. There are places with no coffee shops, or places with coffee shops miles from each other. In a typical suburbs, one can only go to a coffee shop by going to the center mall, where one would find not one, but many coffee shops at the same time, along with a myriad of other services. This is not a place to repose but to consume, people consume a temporary tranquility in a coffee shop in between other consumptions. In the overall landscape of the suburb, there are great deals of open space, that of the residential neighborhoods, and dense activities and services at the shopping centers. It seems to be the convenience and the tranquility at the same time, in which the “repose” areas occupy a lot of space, but in reality, this tranquility might become boredom, and the convenience exhaust of energy. The permeability of activities at a right proportion, I think, is the true measure for liveability of a city.
What does serenity means for the architecture profession? I think it means at least two things: the serenity of the mind of the architect, to not getting too excited and ambitious without a corresponded amount of time, and of letting go of his or her own practice in a certain area, or even better, to see the works with the eyes of the beholders, so that the serenity comes from the observation of his or her own creation. In the past, there are architects who made wonderful buildings such as Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright. They both made wonders and contribute substantially for the profession. But when given too much powers, and with the ideology that architecture could change society, they could have been made terrible mistakes. That is mostly true when these architects were trying to figure out the whole new city at once. There are obvious reasons for why it wasn’t a good idea: the scope of work goes way beyond a single mind of an architect, no matter how intelligent he is, therefore there is not enough time for a single person to figure out such an intimidate task. But the second reason is even more important, that is a city, if even as an object, take a much longer repose to “see” it. A piece of sculpture needs a void surrounding it in order to be seen, and also the time dedicated to see it. A building takes much more time than that. And therefore it is impossible to simulate the experience of a whole city’s population in a model or a set of drawings. Fortunately, the bold visions of the Radiant City of Le Corbusier remains only in paper. Le Corbusier himself is known as a revolutionary with bold visions for new architecture, and for that reason we might be able to understand better why he could proposes such a city, but odd designs can even come from architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, whose buildings manifests the organic architecture and the calmness of space, when he attempted to design a whole new city. The love for nature as seen in his “prairie house” turning into something similar to the American suburbs nowadays. His propose for “Broadacre city” looks beautifully in model and drawings, as it is with his glass art. But again, the disproportion of activities in space has proven the disadvantages of the project.
The creator, thus, needs a repose from his or her own work, to sit back and observe, refine and renew the wonder in it. Serenity, therefore, is the mediation between creative acts, and between media such as silence and sound, darkness and light and so on. It sets the rhythm for observation and creation. And by this mediation, an artist will soon find that it is the serenity that is actually in practice, and the artist becomes an observer. It is the moment where wonder and serenity is one and indistinguishable.
– Tuan Manh Nguyen