Rethinking Architectural Education

[I will try to re-post this with working links for footnotes.. a novelty for me. Any advice on how to do this?]

Right, here we are. As you will see, I footnote anecdotally, I have a lot to say and I say it convolutedly.. There is an essay to be written on the very notion that such an essay title “Rethinking Architectural Education” can meaningfully be set, setting it borders on the belief that any rethinking is good rethinking. My basic thesis is architectural education must be rethought in the light of our environmental situation, which will call into question all our present philosophical assumptions, and should end up with a community integrated model school, based on an idealised Rural Studio.

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Rethinking Architectural Education

“Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and, as long as the present anti-metaphysical temper persists, the disorder will grow worse. Education, far from ranking as [our] greatest resource, will then be an agent of destruction."[1]
E. F. Schumacher

To be moved to ‘Rethink Education’ is a question of value, and ultimately of morality. Any assessment of the value of education must chiefly be by its ends or effects, that is the resulting practitioners, and their buildings and lifestyles so formed by that education. To value these, and hence the education, this essay ventures the environmental, ecological and social impact of such practice as the most total and objective measure of success.

As such, this essay will suggest that imminent[2] environmental human catastrophes will judge[3] our profligate and uncritical schools of architecture whose self-interested courses have moulded superficial students pursuing ‘starchitect’ futures[4]; such schools, by whose dis-integrated establishment,[5] have served further to fracture the relational ecology of locality and industry[6] which hold intact a sustainable society. [7]

This is made emphatic given that the construction industry is substantially responsible for our misuse of energy and toxification of the environment.[8] Furthermore, the built environment is the stage on which consumer choices are played out; it is the nursery in which a nation’s aspirations are disseminated, and the chief point of reference for a society’s value judgements. The environmental problem is an architectural problem, change to which must start with architectural education.[9],[10] This essay will first consider the problems facing architecture as a practice, the roles that graduates of architectural education are taking, and the means by which they might address themselves to the problem, finally considering ways present education succeeds or fails to equip them for the task compared to possible alternatives.

The Egan Report on the problems and inefficiencies besetting the British construction industry, questions particularly the role designers play in adding value.[11] Its criticisms, while valid and pertinent, are predicated on no further imperative than of medium-short term economic gain,[12] being either indifferent to ecology, or presuming the capitalist hegemony to be one self-correcting and capable of addressing such a problem larger than its own internal wranglings and profits. Architecture finds itself caught as servant to these assumptions, complicit with its client and public in such indifference.

The beginning of a rethought architectural education will acknowledge such philosophy of the time and its own responsibility to moderate by demonstration of an alternative. The contemporary conception of architecture is affected by Schumacher’s ‘metaphysical disease’,[13] manifested, I will assert, in four key crises: of disembodiment or individualism; fragmentation of disciplines; the killing of history; and a preoccupation with spectacle. These in sum constitute a failure to submit to a wider biotic community[14]

The centrality of the individual within the architecture of Modernity has come at substantial cost to community and ecologies. Its illusion of the un-dependent self is maintained only by denial[15], aided by technology. Further, with the advent of hi-technology, the platonic dualism of body and mind, privileging the cerebral over the physical, has come home to roost. Individualism has ‘liberated’ citizens from their locale, has ‘disembodied’[16] them, collapsing a placed or narrative understanding of reality and undermining the loyalty an architect might otherwise have to society as a whole.

The fragmentation which Egan[17] and others[18] lament is broadly speaking a child of this Romantic Individualism.[19] It manifests the belief in a metanarrative of chaos; it is technological advance at the expense of community,[20] the self-interest which abstracts architecture from its purpose.

The third key principle informing the atmosphere of practice is a suspicion and contempt for history and its associated attempts at social engineering. With unprecedented clarity Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition[21] established the attitude of denial that was to define the relationship of planners and public to even recent folly, and it set them forever after to be wary, even fearful, of considering moral imperatives in architecture. Pointedly, Anthony Vidler finds a parallel between crises of confidence in the public realm and in education, having common roots in the disenchantment with post-war optimism[22]. These denials have the secondary, but not unintended, effect of dissociating design from consequence.

Fourthly, of significance, we live in an age of simulacra[23] and spectacle[24] which has emerged from the coinciding of a hyper-individualist value system and certain material conditions, notably abundant fossil fuel. This forum, where architects become but peddlers of shallow novelty, has been forged under the coercion of power-mongerers of the day[25], and through the confusion of truth,[26] and all along willed by a public who consider art a ‘game of distraction’.[27] And the victims of this addiction to novelty have been coherence of language, the value of tradition, and the well-being of the voiceless: ecology and the poor.

Into this context we introduce the role of ‘architect’ which the profession has carved for itself, a problematic intermediary role: simultaneously the impotent ‘sophist lapdog of commercial imperatives’[28] and antihero-artisan Howard Roark, “a man who does not exist for others” [29]

The continued egotistic and adversarial[30] self-definition of the architect practising an architecture ‘red in tooth and claw’[31] is alienating the profession at a time when every other report calls for collaboration and partnership across industries[32]. The profession is accused of protectionism[33], of using ‘introverted language’[34], and even of using ‘stylistic eclecticism as a joke at the client’s expense’[35]. These are traits which undermine the trust put in professionals, and hinder the potential for architects to effect positive change in building practice.

To achieve sustainable architecture there is a need for architects reconciled to the moral task to which they are commissioned. Only by this can we develop the trust of an ‘educated public’[36] and by this the requisite integration for sustainable building.

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“There is no lighthouse keeper. There is no lighthouse. There is no dry land. There are only people living on rafts made from their own imagination.”[37]
Dominic Crossan

We will consider now issues more acute to the university, tenets which undermine our task and which ill-equip graduates with the values, skills and knowledge for the task of practising sustainably in the face of the challenges outlined above.

The relative nature of truth,[38] the foremost issue, may have begun as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’[39] but is now to be considered as ‘the basis for a free society’[40] Not only is this often unspoken and bizarrely absolutist claim self-refuting but it requires a certain amnesia. Relativism’s damage is pervasive, making dialogue impossible,[41] cementing the premise that there can be ‘no clear good’[42] and ‘no core wisdom on which designers agree’[43] - exactly the quality of wisdom which Orr makes an ecological imperative[44], and ultimately it proliferates the lie of ‘amoral’ architecture which is a denial of the environmental consequences under which graduates will practise.

The second premise which is at odds with our task is the industrial and abstract nature of the university. Woods observes the defining influence of industry’s demands on the evolution of the architecture school[45], which Rowe extends commenting that ‘the university shaped itself to an industrial ideal—the knowledge factory.’ [46] This is a move to an abstraction[47], which it is argued powerfully by Berry, disintegrates community and accountability in our use of language and so undermines the integrity of an education[48]

If Berry’s leap from abstraction to language is wider than is justified here, some more immediate effects of so modelling the university may offer intermediate steps towards the principle. For example, Hauerwas argues that the university, by allying itself to the notion that knowledge begets earning power and marketing itself as a provider of such, enforces on itself a necessary ‘placelessness’[49] lest it suggest the earning potential is limited equally geographically. Or, from another direction, the university, via subsidies, is a tool of the state, a state which derives legitimation by ‘promising to save us from illness and death’ .[50] In this way risk-averse[51] short-termism[52] is conferred to the university as it is responsible to make good on these promises promptly, and so privileges science, particularly medicine, over the humanities.

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“I don't need sex - the school of architecture fucks me all the time”[53]
A 44,951 facebook member group

Further to these unsustainable tenets, various traditions curious to architecture schools are criticised in literature on the subject, chiefly these three: isolation of the school from community; the primacy of the individual versus collaboration; and irrelevant academicism of the curriculum.

The isolation spoken of is practical, geographic and conceptual. Schools typically operate at a distance from the public, industry and even the natural environment and so miss an opportunity to engage construction realities and issues of genuine human need.

The schools which are increasingly academic lose the realities of construction[54], aesthetics are disconnected from design realities[55], which results in a loss of attention to craft and making[56], further fracturing the industry. Spiller is a voice in favour of such ‘freedom’ of the academy[57], we must ask if such is possible only by architecture’s place as ‘capitalist service for hire’[58] and ‘handmaiden to the rich’,[59] and whether in the environmental future we will be able to justify such wanton luxury. It is their very isolation which insulates schools from such criticism, and the ignorance of genuine human needs which makes their education irrelevant. This loss of social concern was highlighted across the literature, profoundly by Dewar[60] and Lynch[61].

To create architecture with broad and deep sustainability the concern is more than charity. Education by its form and situation must challenge notions of entitlement held by students by confronting them with their human dependence[62] and common humanity with society’s poorest. Hauerwas points the contemporary university to Gregory of Nazianus’ work, ‘On Love for the Poor’ as a corrective to the politically motivated individualism of detached education. [63]

The second key complaint made of architectural education is its damaging lack of training in collaborative work born of the emphasis on the ‘primacy of the individual’[64]. The ‘tortured artist’[65] advocated in architecture school is modelled on the Romantics’ ‘Artist with a capital A’[66] and Kant’s autonomous individual - who becomes for Vidler an autonomous architect pursuing art for art’s sake, and running the risk of solipsism, detached from a foundation of any social or cultural vibrancy.[67]

Thirdly the academic hijacking of architecture school by faculty ‘more interested in words than buildings’[68] comes under fire from employers who complain graduates emerge with ‘too much theory and not enough reality’[69], considering ‘technical knowledge as secondary’[70] trained as ‘deconstructivist clones’[71]. The question of what an architect needs to know is not an easy one, nor will an answer be universal, but we can say that the problem has been exacerbated by dichotomising theoretical and practical knowledge. Alexander notes the embarrassment of students faced with parallel slides to concede goodness in vernacular architectures at variance from the postmodernism advocated in studio.[72] Cook notes the success of under-published architectural scenes, notably in Switzerland as a case in point against the glut of theory elsewhere.[73]


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“I tell my students, it’s got to be warm, dry and noble”[74]
Samuel Mockbee

There are successful alternatives for the content of architecture courses and for structures through which they are taught. This essay will conclude with some alternatives addressing the three key issues of individualism, the isolated department and the academicism, giving particular attention to Rural Studio and the successful ways it addresses the dilemma of the architect in postmodernity through an engagement with the real from the academy.

Arguing the counterintuitive virtue of collaboration as a means for nurturing appropriate individuality[75], Woods declares RIEA School, while it existed, was a demonstration of the potential of collaborative work.[76] Steel suggests more radical than mere group-work, we need to move away from an emphasis on ‘personal creativity’ … to ‘rigorous forms of collective understanding’,[77] ‘revers[ing] our present system of compartmentalisation of knowledge’[78] ‘to anticipate a wholly new kind of learning environment.’[79] The beginnings of such are described by Potts, in the ‘Portsmouth Model’, an experiment of vertical studio teaching, which saw autonomous studios combining a cross-section of students
from all five years, producing cross-fertilising fruitful relationships.[80] Most successful of all, Woods offers Rural Studio as a chief example of collaboration[81] …

Rural Studio is also cited frequently as a mode of addressing the isolation of the studio by blurring practice and education, to better socially inform and humanise student work. With no grander social goals than the dignity of the residents and on a meagre budget of $6000[82], projects such as Hay Bale House profitably engaged students in real-world social issues, and offers architectural practice a laboratory for ideas[83], and this encounter with the real is the heart of education. [84]

SCI-ARC’s ‘ever-renewable pedagogy’[85] and the AA’s ‘No tenure, no repetition, no hierarchy’[86], which succeed up to a point in making relevant their education, fall short of Rural Studio’s achievement in creating an environment for learning within a job, rather than simulating practice which strips the exchange of much of the subtlety, tacit knowledge and client feedback inherent in this practice more akin to apprenticeship.

To conclude, at a time when architecture is popularly conceived as an individualist’s, ahistorical spectacle, education has examples of alternatives to its academic isolation, if we are willing to learn humility from the unglamorous work displayed by Rural Studio.

[1] Schumacher, E. F. (1993 [1973], London:Vintage) Small is beautiful : a study of economics as if people mattered - p80
[2] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) - Synthesis Report
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf (retrieved 29th March 2009) - p46
[3] Hauerwas, Stanley (2007, Oxford, MA: Blackwell) The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God - p102
[4] Nicol, David and Pilling, Simon (eds) (2000, London: E&FN Spon) Changing Architectural Education: Towards a New Professionalism - p7
[5] Vesely, Dalibor (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p63
[6] Berry, Wendell (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000) Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition - p41-42
[7] ‘At the heart of the concern with environmentalism are the concepts of sustainability and place: architectural education needs to address these directly.’ Dewar, David (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p94
[8] Williamson, Terry. J. Radford, Anthony Bennetts, Helen (2003, London: Spon Press) Understanding Sustainable Architecture - p86-7
[9] ‘It is time to change the reality of architectural practice, and we should begin by changing architectural education.’ Woods, Lebbeus ‘Architecture School 301’ (2009)
http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/architecture-school-301/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[10] ‘Education is the profession’s lever over its own future’ - Milliner, Leonie (2000, London: E&FN Spon) Changing Architectural Education: Towards a New Professionalism - p227
[11] Egan, Sir John, (1998) Rethinking Construction: The Report of the Construction Task Force - p26
[12] Egan, Sir John, (1998) Rethinking Construction: The Report of the Construction Task Force (Citing of ‘profit’ as guiding incentive or measure of success) p4, p7, p10, p16
[13] ‘We are suffering from a metaphysical disease, and the cure must therefore be metaphysical’ Schumacher, EF (1993 [1973] London : Vintage) Small is beautiful : a study of economics as if people mattered - p80
[14] Orr, David (1992, E.F.Schumacher Society) Environmental Literacy: Education as if the Earth Mattered - http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/orr_92.html (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[15] Giussani, Luigi (2001, New York: Crossroad) The Risk of Education: Discovering out Ultimate Destiny - p69
[16] Taylor, Charles (2004, Durham: Duke University Press) Modern Social Imaginaries - p1
[17] Egan, Sir John, (1998) Rethinking Construction: The Report of the Construction Task Force - p8
[18] Hawley, Christine - p11 and Dalibor Vesely - p63-4 (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael)
[19] Vesely, Dalibor (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p63
[20] Berry, Wendell (1996, Washington, DC: Counterpoint) Another Turn of the Crank - p90
[21] ‘Modern Architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32pm (or thereabouts)’ Jencks, Charles (2002, Yale University Press) The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Postmodernism - p9
[22] Vidler, Anthony (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p15
[23] ‘Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation’ Baudrillard Jean (Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser) (1994 [1981] MI:The University of Michigan Press) Simulacra and Simulation - p12
[24] ‘In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.’ Debord, Guy (Trans. Ken Knabb) (2002 [1967] Paris) La Société du Spectacle
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle/ (retrieved 29 March 2009) - Thesis 1
[25] ‘abstraction and dehistorization conjoined to clear the way for a form of knowledge that could freely construct objects and their relationships’ Wolin, Sheldon (2001, Princeton, Princeton University Press) Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life - p21
[26] ‘In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.’ Debord, Guy (Trans. Ken Knabb) (2002 [1967] Paris) La Société du Spectacle
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle/ - Thesis 9
[27] Bacon, Francis (in an interview with Sylvester, David) Sunday Times Magazine (London, 14 July 1963) - p13
[28] Spiller, Neil (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p60
[29] Rand, Ayn (1943, New York: New American Library) The Fountainhead - p686
[30] Nicol, David and Pilling, Simon (eds) (2000, London: E&FN Spon) Changing Architectural Education: Towards a New Professionalism - p2
[31] Tennyson, Alfred Lord (1850) In Memoriam A. H. H. - Canto 56
[32] Egan, Sir John, (1998) Rethinking Construction: The Report of the Construction Task Force - p9
[33] Nicol, David and Pilling, Simon (eds) (2000, London: E&FN Spon) Changing Architectural Education: Towards a New Professionalism - p4
[34] Stansfield Smith Report (quoted in Nicol, David and Pilling, Simon (eds)) (2000, London: E&FN Spon) Changing Architectural Education: Towards a New Professionalism - p5
[35] Ostwald, Michael (1992) Architecture Bulletin, republished in Sydney Morning Herald, 28 April 1992 - p32 quoted in Windschuttle, Keith) (1996, San Francisco: Encounter Books) The Killing of History - p25
[36] Hauerwas, Stanley (2007, Oxford, MA: Blackwell) The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God - p89
[37] Crossan, Dominic The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (1975, Niles Argus) - p44
[38] ‘There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students' reaction: they will be uncomprehending.’ Bloom, Allan David (1988, London: Simon and Schuster) Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students - p25
[39] ‘Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.’ Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1979) Introduction:The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p xxiv-xxv
[40] ‘The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so [the students] see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society.’ Bloom, Allan (19xx) Closing of the American Mind - p25
[41] Giussani, Luigi, (New York: Crossroad, 2001) The Risk of Education: Discovering out Ultimate Destiny - p96
[42] Vidler, Anthony (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p14
[43] Wigley, Mark (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p17
[44] Orr, David (1992, E.F.Schumacher Society) Environmental Literacy: Education as if the Earth Mattered - http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/orr_92.html (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[45]Woods, Lebbeus (2009) Architecture School 202 http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/architecture-school-202/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[46] Rowe, Stan (NeWest Press, 2003 [1990]) Home Place: Essays on Ecology - quoted in Orr, David, (E. F. Schumacher Society: 1992) Environmental Literacy: Education as if the Earth Mattered - http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/orr_92.html (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[47] ‘Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found’ Berry, Wendell (New York: Pantheon Books 1992) Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community - p23
[48] ‘Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or ‘assessing’ what we now call ‘information’ - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.’ Berry, Wendell (2003, Durham: Duke University Press) ‘Thoughts in the Presence of Fear’ in Dissent from the Homeland - p41
[49] Hauerwas, Stanley (2007, Oxford, MA: Blackwell) The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God - p203
[50] Hauerwas, Stanley (2007, Oxford, MA: Blackwell) The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God - p199
[51] Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer Hursley, Timothy (2002 New York: Princeton Architectural Press) Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency - p13
[52] Orr, David, (E. F. Schumacher Society: 1992) Environmental Literacy: Education as if the Earth Mattered - http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/orr_92.html (retrieved 23rd March 2009)
[53] This breath-takingly cynical cri-de-coeur which titles a facebook group numbering a staggering 44,951members presents one transparent testament as much to the pervasive cynicism of this generation of students as much as it reflects failures specific to architectural education in creating architects of integrity - http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2211195089 (retrieved 23rd March 2009)
[54] ‘We begin to forget that there is a profound difference between imaginary and inhabited worlds, and that difficulty, labour, destruction and contingency are always involved in the act of building’ Lynch, Peter (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p55
[55] ‘[Mockbee and Ruth] lamented that architectural education had become more about academics and less about construction… The connection between esthetics and the realities underlying design was being lost’ Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer Hursley, Timothy (2002 New York: Princeton Architectural Press) Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency - p6
[56] ‘…detached from the reality of making, become contrived and bureaucratically driven where the processes of making, thinking and intellectualising have in some way been rendered a synthetic exercise. That, for me, is one of the main criticisms of present architectural education.’ Hawley, Christine (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p8
[57] ‘…the load of economic stringency can also weigh down the ideas stage of a project and impair its creative development. Further, student architects need to opportunity to ‘turn up all the dials’ on their creativity and vision to search for what is possible and not just for what is economically viable at any point in time.’ Spiller, Neil (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p61
[58] Ghirardo, Diane (1996, London: Thames and Hudson) Architecture After Modernism - p39
[59] Dewar, David (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p94
[60] Dewar, David (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p94
[61] Lynch, Peter (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p57
[62] Giussani, Luigi, (New York: Crossroad, 2001) The Risk of Education: Discovering out Ultimate Destiny - p69
[63] Hauerwas, Stanley (2007, Oxford, MA: Blackwell) The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God - p198
[64] Cuff, Dana (1992, MIT Press) Architecture: The Story of Practice - p45
[65] Stanton, Jean (quoted in Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer Hursley, Timothy) (2002 New York: Princeton Architectural Press) Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency - p3
[66] Brand, Hilary Chaplin, Adrienne (2007, Illinois: IVP) Art and Soul - p18
[67] Vidler, Anthony (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p21
[68] Cook, Peter (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p6
[69] Vidler, Anthony (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p13
[70] Cuff, Dana (1992, MIT Press) Architecture: The Story of a Practice - p44
[71] Windschuttle, Keith (1996, San Francisco: Encounter Books) The Killing of History - p8
[72] Alexander Christopher (2002, Berkeley) The Nature of Order (Book 1) The Phenomenon of Life - p74
[73] Cook, Peter - (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p8
[74] Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer Hursley, Timothy (2002, New York: Princeton Architectural Press) Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency - p0
[75] ‘I am convinced that a more embracive and ultimately more effective way to nurture individuality is the establishment of design studios that operate, paradoxically, on the basis of collaboration.’ - Woods, Lebbeus (2009) Architecture School 301 http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/architecture-school-301/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[76] Woods, Lebbeus (2009) Architecture School 301 http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/architecture-school-301/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[77] Steel, brett - (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p68
[78] Fuller, Bucminster (quoted by Steel, Brett) (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p69
[79] Steel, Brett - (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p71
[80] Potts, Wendy (2000, London: E&FN Spon) Changing Architectural Education: Towards a New Professionalism - p248
[81] - ‘The Rural Studio had (has?) the right spirit, but it was of an older type of collective work, in which individual work is subsumed in the common effort. I am speaking a ‘new’ kind of collective effort, where individual works remain legible.’ Woods, Lebbeus (2009) Architecture School 301 (Comments) - http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/architecture-school-301/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[82] Ghirardo, Diane (1996, London: Thames and Hudson) Architecture After Modernism - p39
[83] Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer Hursley, Timothy (2002, New York: Princeton Architectural Press) Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency - p12
[84] ‘To educate means to help the human soul enter into the totality of the real’ Giussani, Luigi (2001, New York: Crossroad) The Risk of Education: Discovering out Ultimate Destiny - p105
[85] Woods, Lebbeus (2009) Architecture School 301 - http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/architecture-school-301/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[86] Woods, Lebbeus (2009) Architecture School 301 - http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/architecture-school-301/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)

l'abri was

l'abri was
more than the sum of its parts
than choresome work in the yard
for some, a course in the art
of being formed by others who are
come here with nothing to prove
hoping somebody will move
their worldview to include
christ's work making everything new

the fruitful manifesto

The Fruitful Manifesto:
Architecture must be as a tree.
Architecture must blossom and it must bear fruit.
Architecture must put roots down in the soil beneath it.
Architecture must make space for birds to nest and bees to hive in.
Architecture's fruit must be given away as freely as it was born.
Architecture, when finished, need be cut down and reused and reused.

In an age when we buy identities in tertiary landscapes,
with language usurped by the marketeers,
with ornament excluded by the death of history,
with green space commodified by the developers,
Architecture must be as a tree.

(100words)

A draft of the manifesto to govern the next six months of my life.

how should we then wear?

"I wondered if you came across in your time at L'abri anyone exploring Christianity and fashion? ...fashion is art and what we wear functions as a work of art ... it relates back to your question about what place physical beauty has. Any further thoughts on that? The industry as a whole clearly has a lot of faults - but stripping that away do you think there is anything biblical there?" (Also see http://www.modelsforchrist.com/)

There weren't any explicitly in the fashion industry this term at L'Abri, there were photographers and related artists, and generally fashionable people.. Artisan Initiatives at St Mary’s tends to have a gaggle of fashion industry types and they link to MFC in their publication, I haven’t followed it before.

Slowly I am preparing for the blog my thoughts on Christians, Craft and Image, and trying to take in idolatry and the environment all in one, it is a convoluted piece. So for fashion, just as with architecture, we cannot say a piece of clothing is inherently wrong, God made us creative, we are fallen, everything is a mixed bag.

However, I do think some fashion is virtually irredeemable, though I feel that about some architectures, and it is possibly an unhealthy black and white approach. But some systems of deceit and illusion, of slavery and production, of shallowness and addiction, leave in their wake such a slew of victims and offer such fleeting happiness to the consumer as to demand that Christians demonstrate that a more joyful way of clothing oneself is possible, even if that means making them yourself, Gandhi did, Shane Claiborne does..

But calling things ‘bad’ is relatively easy compared with affirming the ‘good’, where in post-structuralist, hyper-environmentalist architecture school ‘beauty’ is considered unnecessary or arbitrary or even damaging. There is a borderline pharasaical legalism around ornament, tradition and story. It is spilt perfume all over again.

Doing and wearing fashion as an expression of something within a language that is both meaningful and redemptive is so hard in a context where we often do not share signifiers (a guy wears a rainbow t-shirt to denote peace in one community, which means something else in another language community), and where we do not have sufficient information, indeed there are vested (pun intended meh) interests by companies in keeping us from knowing the means of production (so ‘fairtrade’ ‘sweatshop-free’ ‘green’ become sloganised and make a mockery of our petty morals).

It is difficult, the fashionable Christians too quickly pull the, God-made-me-creative-to-express-who-I-am-Stop-with-your-Puritanism, the less fashionable Christians too quickly assume some bizarre moral high ground, based on flawed theology that is anti-the-physical-body.. This is the same conversation as Christians and food, Christians and architecture etc, and my stock response leans heavily on a return to locality, to community, and to traditional creativity, which requires that I for the sake of argument eschew many of the fruits of a hyper-specialised, technology-enabled modern life; this is a noble hope, but is not an adequate compromise and comes with its own list of theological short-comings…

The efficiency of a machine age has been used a trumph card justify all means of production, to supply all confected 'needs'. When that which formerly was a legible meaningful expression, or 'art' as you have called it, becomes a fashion 'industry,' clothes become consumer goods, their meaning becomes impoverished and there comes a disconnect between producer and consumer, the gifts of nature - cottons, leathers etc - and the joy of using them, the creator and the creature. Out of this we struggle to live in meaningful gratitude, which almost inevitably reduces the entire transaction to the sum of its vices. Vitally the role of christians should be affirming relevent art and craft at every level, shifting people's default state from consuming to creating. The fashion born out of vanity, insecurity and bare greed is easy to throw stones at, a braver move is to consider the process of production and the language of decoration and how we can integrate these in contemporary life, in redemptive and joyful ways. Catherine knitted a pair of socks for Anna in the last week of term, it was a deep joy just to watch, as were all the hats knitted, songs written and pictures painted, the socks just seemed more fiddly. This sort of physical work should be a spiritual discipline, this sort of personal expression constitutes the sort of truly Good Work that we would do without being paid, it is redeemed work. And so for the joy set before us... I have not yet seen a theology defending the 'art' of shopping, it is not inherently wrong, but it is opted for on the basis of expediency, consuming rather than creating is complicit in fracturing community and cheapening the value of work and people.

There is another area to be explored, that of festivity, of parades and carnivals as sabbath time and their associated attire, playful wear and colourful story, and ways in which this should trickle down to the every day, if we only did not consider ourselves too sophisticated to play like that in any but an ironic fashion.

Here I am again filling cyberspace with unfootnoted opinion, tenuously strung together argument, self-evident truths mixed polemically with spurious conjecture.. and no Bible.. The question we're asking is How Should We Then Wear? And I would point people chiefly to AF's lecture on "Intentional Community as a Subversion of Modernity" and CSL's essay on "Good Work".

Image: sxc.hu

rachel: creation and hospitality?

(I'm not dead, and I've not left this blog to become a forgotten piece of cyberspace clutter. Hopefully I can spend some time at Christmas collecting my notes from the last 6 months into succinctly bullet pointed thoughts on architecture, theology and intentional community.. In the mean time, Molly and Marie-Frances, linked in my little del.icio.us box are blogging out this term. I'm here til Dec 15, and would love the company of any of my single-digit subscribers. Below are few thoughts on hospitality after a little discussion here at the Manor. Love. P. x)

http://creationrevelation.blogspot.com/2008/10/question.html

So Rachel, I asked the question. I should by now, after a term and a half of L'Abri have worked out lunch tables, how to play them and how to pose questions.. How regularly I fail at this. A question with the C word in it needs very careful chairing to steer it away from a creation/evolution debate.. but it was not an unproductive conversation, although a little fraught, and some people left more confused than they arrived, but it did clarify for me a few thoughts, so I shall try to condense the fruits of conversation and those that ensued that afternoon springing from the question, if indeed i understand your question correctly..

Lunch was at E's and she supposed early on that you had lifted this question from Making Room, I hadn't realised there was a creational or environmental slant offered in the book, which she returned there was and that your question pertained to the parallel drawn in the book to God as host in nature. Did it? Needless to say, having my question thus defined for me, it ran away with itself dissecting the metaphor of God as host, the 'goodness' of creation, abuses of 'ownership' because of not understanding the both/and tension of being a part of nature and apart from nature. To a point where A had to interject to stop people using dominion and domination synonymically, so the lunch table's confusion emerged out of largely semantic issues of word definitions, and an attempt to then define hospitality left people at a loss, was the good Samaritan showing hospitality on the road? Is hospitality just loving people? It was all quite amiable, for better or worse, as the hospitality question is one i feel strongly about and I would sooner the conversation had ended in tears and people had fought for something than that we bumble through in a cautious and removed manner. Following lunch the de-briefs in the nooks and crannies of the manor were more clarifying.

I would venture two interpretations of the question as you have put it, firstly, and the one I see less to be gained in, there is the take on the question that looks at nature, 'fallen' though some suppose it to be, and extrapolate models for hospitality. This was presented by one at the table, drawing on Jonah and the vine that grows up to shade him. Further though tenuously, one can read in nature the way nests, colonies and shelters are constructed, how space is shared in an ecosystem and how symbiotic relationships between animals are enacted.

But hospitality is a more complex issue, a moral, relational, economic, even symbolic concept. The first take offers healthy provocation, particularly to consider ourselves as dependent creatures within a finite system, and to acknowledge the debt of knowledge as well as resources we owe and all that we still have to gain from a healthy relationship with nature and its systems. More clear to me are the profound tertiary impacts of our emphasis - or lack of - on making a home a home, on the environment. Simplistically one can cite negative impacts, where the demise of a culture of hospitality creates a demand and opportunity for brutally more resource-heavy and crushingly less-human means of accommodating visiting bodies in foreign cities, simplistically too we could posit roots of this in a fear of strangers, demand for luxury, and oil-driven expediency. Where once, or where ideally, there may have been an attitude and lifestyle among people that made possible travelling between foreign cities, finding there large families networked broadly and deeply in life-giving relationships to their neighbours and their soil, who were sufficiently engaged in a casual gift economy to make possible, even in their relative poverty, sleeping and eating provision to anyone who had need and this for the simple joy of new people and new stories at the dinner table, we now have exchanged the glory of this for an image of five star luxury on the company account, a lonely 50th floor hotel room, with sheets cleaned daily by an anonymous, faceless underclass, a private bubble kept at its perfect temperature, perfect placeless luxury. Do I make a point too romantically?

The counter argument given for this, even if we are willing to forgive its romanticism, is that an 'hospitality imperative' is a burden too heavy to bear, a duty typically performed by an exhausted working mother, making beds in the guest room after her 9 to 5, hoovering the hallway with one hand, feeding her children with the other, and all this to present and image and to tick a check box of the good christian household. I will concede that all the lunchtime sermons I preach, expounding the saving nature of hospitality are liable to lead to legalism if so understood, and thereby make also these lunching labrinis twice the sons of hell that I am.

So, I have tried briefly and tentatively to sketch 'hospitality' as the by-product of appropriate dwelling in the world.

- I picture in my mind of the green and blue marble of earth spread across with a vast web of relational links and clusters, at the junction of each tie is a home, our crabshells in which we eat, sleep and have our being, protected from the elements. I see the best domestic architecture not as the industry journal cover images, but as the unseen and anonymous framed worn paths and junctions, platforms for conversations, enriched gradually out of the commitment by a family to the story of a place across a span time longer than the life of a man and his return on venture capital.

- To achieve such houses, such homes, there is a need to fix in our worldview two states of being, 'visiting', and not-visiting, that is to say 'belonging'. And these as two distinct modes of being in a place, to avoid a disastrous middle way of non-belonging, consuming aliens, being both anywhere and nowhere, refugees fleeing each the city of your youth from home to uni, uni to first job, flat to suburbs. The state of 'belonging' contracts you to the ground where you meaningfully can honour your parents in front of those who have known them and be held to that geography by its beauty which becomes a part of you and whose land, weather, fauna are the foundation for your language, art, music, diet, identity. So the geography and architecture of the home are much less uprootable than modernism would have us hope.

- Heidegger said something to the effect of “Only once you have learnt to dwell should you build.” I quoted him more exactly somewhere.. What if you knew the secret of dwelling, of enduring all things in a place, of bringing life in dead places, of doing the next right thing for a place, of practising resurrection of a place, how then would we build there, how would we decorate, how would we conduct our households? I don’t know how much I project onto Heidegger and how much is in the text, but to dwell, to rest and work without angst, to be at peace, is practical as much as cerebral. To know that living in the second best postcode is ok, fearing nothing of fighting in the streets, being confident to let the stranger into your home, and sweating blood for love are all facets of the dwelling in confidence which is the only sufficient basis to begin to build. So on this basis not all houses have the same level of home-ness, home-ness it is a product of the amount of human emotional energy invested, for example the Manor House. If we believe we are here for the long haul, we should build like we believe that. And so too in our existing housing stock, in our rented flats and trailers, it should be a christian task of primary importance to redeem, to embellish, to restructure and make beautiful these spaces in God’s world because they are the primary places where one’s relationships are conducted, marriages consummated, meals eaten, games played, parties held, children raised, homework done, so too out of the relationships in these places it is here that personal meanings are formed and grounded, hopes expressed and dreams dreamt. All of these actions are ultimately exercises dominion over creation. Home is an extension of the self, the modifying device though which the raw materials of nature pass, the lens through which ideas pass, the expression of a view of the world and a hope for the world.

- So, the home is less, as corbusier is credited as saying, “A machine for living in” but rather “An organism for conducting dominion through” or even “An interdependent cell in the organism of a community for the redeeming of the world” .. And perhaps this is a useful image, that of an organism, the body of the church as it were, but crucially, making it physical, that each soul inhabits the shell of a home and by that gifted practically in bricks and mortar to form healthier cities, where the interaction between cells is hospitality, an exchange of love, conviviality, story and vision.. People truly 'live' only in relationship to other people. Homes are only truly alive in relationship to other homes? Households to households. Is it idolatrous to set up a practical-ly independent home? What is the joy of hospitality? What is the purpose of a christian home? What is the opposite of hospitality? Everybody has a home, if I can define it loosely enough, everybody has a patch of ground they lay their head, a bench they eat at, a manner of having dominion over space. And hospitality is the orientation of your life in respect to that dominion over space, outward or inward, do you share your box or not. The home is a tool for loving people, home is a gift, a grace of God, given and undeserved, making hospitality is a primary transaction of the gift economy, indeed an obligation if we truly are to receive it as a gift. Home is the point on the earth you invest your creative energy, draw on that specific land for food and for inspiration and leave your mark - architecturally, emotionally, ecologically.

- Hospitality is effecting the lordship of Christ over home making. Hospitality is the organising principle for a home that is the perfect third way, being neither a commune nor a nuclear family home. Hospitality is born out of an an attitude of enjoying the company of others, all others. Hospitality operates out of that nodal point in the web on the blue green marble, and its effectiveness, richness and beauty are increased and increased as the roots of the node go deeper into the soil beneath and as the supporting limbs of relationships to neighbouring nodes, the farmers, carpenters, local artists, babysitters, half-a-cup-of-flour-lenders and so on..

- One may stay in one place for the sake of the kids, for the sake of the elderly - those who most benefit from the security of regularity - and in order to move around as much as we do, we have needed to play down our commitments to these relations. But further, that which benefits them, is good for all, home is intergenerational, story is intergenerational, above all wisdom and understanding are intergenerational. We should exist intimately in intergenerational community. Home is crucially dependent for the sustaining and quality on being pursued by many generations together. Without the old we forget where we have come from, and expend incalculable energy reinventing the wheel, parenthood, cooking, and fashion each generation; without the young we forget our vulnerability, we loose our suppleness and humour, and we are at liberty to forget that we are fleetingly temporary tenants holding the plot for the next round.

The demise of hospitality can trace its roots to:
- The speed at which we are able to - and therefore do - live at. The jump from could to should live at is not self evident, and it is linked to faith in technology as saviour, and abandoned responsibilities to others, to relationships.. not making, earning, doing to give it away; not caring for the least last and lost.
- Likewise the culture of long working hours and commuting, motivated by misaligned notions of happiness, progress and then also workoholism and related addictions.
- Image based notion of the home, professionalisation of home-making to remote, economically motivated developers, short-term tenancy, a conception of housing as a disposable lifestyle accessory.
- Individualism, etc and all those systemic vices that most every L'Abri lecture defines itself by standing in opposition. Sigh..

So the gospel empowers us through a freedom from every fear that held us back, and motivates us by an obligation to a gift-economy transaction to practice hospitality, to orientate our lives and households around loving, feeding and sheltering anyone who has need, and this culture of hospitality is the primary spiritual discipline or lifestyle corrective to moderate our use, interaction with and redeeming of creation. Ho hum, I tailed away towards the end, let me know how these convoluted thoughts strike you...

Image: Rachel Bush's :-)

L'abri

May 26th to August 16th, 2008
Do write letters, postcards.. anything.
I promise to write back.

Phil Jackson
c/o L'Abri Fellowship,
The Manor House,
Greatham,
Liss, Hants
GU33 6HF.
United Kingdom

doughtnuts

http://bloggingjames.blogspot.com/2008/03/for-love-of-god.html

Jim Jams.. I would say, “Ah doughnuts.. you and I have too much time on our hands.” But we don't. When we stand before God, tonight perhaps, and he demands of us, how did you spend those precious hours I gifted to you, when you were in the heart of emerging student culture, in deep community, with people who don't truly know life or love on your doorstep, in your house.. How did you spend it. Bickering and bitching about doughnuts? Is this the plank in our eye. Are we simply not captivated by Christ.. !! - http://jasonclark.ws/2006/01/27/is_ranting_chri/

I'll blog this one out, inconclusively perhaps.. I am increasingly convicted of a need to curb my cynicism, and to post a lot more love joy and peace. pray. for. me.

“Handing out a doughnut with a casual “because God loves you” is profoundly ungodly.”
Steady on. On a scale of one to ungodly, this one surely is some way down the list..

"Have we taken the word love, interpreted it through the paradigm of our world experience and applied it to God?"

Yes we have a limited experience of love, yes we interpret, and by these interpretations we begin to understand God.. Perhaps if they were to assert, God is the doughnut giving God. Or that doughnuts were the substance and limit of the Love which is God, one might assume this.

"Have we thus not allowed God to interpret his own word?"
What does that mean? For the author to interpret his own word, is a hermeneutical loop. It is not so much the word we are concerned with, nor even the quotable verses describing love is patient etc, as we are concerned for the substance which it represents, which has been demonstrated in history objectively uniquely perfectly in Christ, in his LIFE and death and resurrection?

“If we truly want to share God’s love with people then we should tell them how God loves.”
This is the conservative sound bite, the emphasis on the preach, and I hold preaching in higher and higher esteem as I drift back into Piper. But lets not abstractise or intellectualise the love of God. Cor13v1 you can quote the whole bible at them, but if you have not love.. if there is not love, demonstrably active in you... How are we splitting doing love, from speaking of love. I'm baffled, I presume we are discussing Trent as the purveyors of this doughnut gospel, and within my experience of what passes for doctrine there, doughnuts are not preached as the limit and substance of God's love.

How does God love? God loves through creation, God loves through provision, God loves through Christ, God loves through people.. God loves us as children, cherished and precious, the apple of his eye, all of that. Christ's death is the clearest, most vivid, picture of God's love, the climax of a divinely orchestrated plan. This is the point that must be told of, BUT it is surely not the only way God loves?

Love is God's being, Love is done, Love is given, Love is received.. God is in Trinity that he might be Love, Lover and Loved. Christ became man, he did life on earth, he did love on earth he showed and taught us how do living. He died for our sin. That we too might do dying to ourselves and be raised in him. These are all things done, more than heard and assented to.
(Also note: people need to hear the specific story of Jesus, the 'gospel' message and by hearing that believe and by believing in him truly have life and a saving relationship with the father... this is not to the exclusion of that, I am defending people's right to give out doughnuts and tell people God loves them as a legitimate form of christian service in a hurting world)
..He *does* love

There is a God. He loves people. We love because he loved first. People don't know God loves them, or they deny it.. They need to know God loves them. To 'know'.. two great passages Eph 3v19 “and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” surpasses knowledge! what does that even mean? Then in Phil1v9 is “and it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment” Rob Bell drew out of this in his current series on Philippians, that the knowledge in play here is epignosis (?sp) which is not knowledge about, but knowledge gained from participation, knowledge through experience, from having lived it, not so much by having studied all the books on it.. That whole sermon Rob Bell pushes really really knowing that we might really tell and really do.
...the world needs to know love

We live in a visual culture, and there is a need for visual metaphors that speak of God's character but even further than that Art and Soul, (Brand and Chaplin 2001) and The Creative Gift (Rookmaaker 1981) I just finished reading both speak of the need for for art, images, art without justification, art simply to be beautiful, without agenda. In a culture that has forgotten what it means to share its stuff. This is prophetic performance art..

“love” as a word and concept..
Love.. this is a word relating to a concept and within this culture, that is post-christian, formerly 'christian' notions take on entirely other connotations. So words come in and out of meaning, sometimes they may need to be retired, sometimes refreshed. Language enables. In cross cultural mission, languages exist without words for grace, or sin, and so need to be invented.. id' appeal here to anyone who knows how this happens is done, as we need it in this culture. Jesus speaks in pictures in part for this reason. Perhaps this word needs to be re-worked into our vocabulary.. one which in a fatherless generation.. in so broken a generation needs to be started wherever we can. Love is patient, love is kind, love is ..there is a place for random acts of kindness, which begin to paint a picture for our generation of what the dying sacrificial love looks like (this may or may not apply to doughnuts).

I object to the notion that to give out doughnuts, and to give out doughnuts because god loves them is wrong. Wrong in and of itself? By virtue of the jammyness of the doughnuts and the jauntiness of the 'because god loves you'? No, I believe however that the conditions motivations and resources exercised in giving away doughnuts might be called into question. You might rightly say that doughnuts are not needs.. and would be probably right.

“People are going to love you for a doughnut, people are going to persecute you for telling them the gospel, the Bible assures us of that.”
As if we are to go out of our way to seek persecution..? Here I would question not so much the doughnuts and whether they speak of love, but the approach that lead to this rather than some more dangerous demonstration of love, more costly or sacrificial love.

(Although you could say that the people here giving out doughnut ARE being persecuted by your good, well-intentioned self..)

The sort of persecution I would expect would be from doughnut manufacturers, where, when the kingdom of heaven breaks in, and not just a couple of people are sharing their doughnuts, but everyone is making and sharing the doughnuts they have, at such a scale that it turns the economic systems, which make the doughnut manufacturers rich, upside down. Then you get persecution, then you challenge prevailing world assumptions.. This message is a gospel, this message is good news to the poor and the doughnutless.

Matthew 5:10-12 : "Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness...

- There is the problem with models of evangelism that they are a model. You can attack any model, simply for being a model, because a 'model' is not spirit led and compassion driven, its dry.. you. give. out. doughnuts. If a model becomes a rote.. a formula.. then legalism and cheap grace set in.
- There is also the notion of going without “a purse or bag or sandals” into evangelism, when Jesus send out the 72, and here there would be an element of trying to buy favour with people in order to evangelise.. but are these people trying to 'evangelise' or even mention Jesus, this purpose may fit better into the framework of community building, or simply loving your neighbour.. lunchbars on the other hand.. ;)
- The passage in Luke 10 then continues.. “and do not greet anyone on the road.” What does that mean?
- Also (Some time ago I had a link for this, via a Jason Clark post, but I've lost it..meh) It contended that giving doughnuts to shoppers was not giving to the needy and was infact proliferating a glutted culture of excess..

To be honest I don't know where I stand on the doughnuts issue.. Certainly IF talking about Jesus is actively discouraged, one would wonder what the enterprise was built upon.. We have to pick our battles, and these people love Jesus. I would say that I have a father that comes running down the drive to put a ring(-doughnut ;) ) on my finger, who loves me with a reckless, foolish love, not for anything I have done, not for anything I have earned. A doughnut is a picture of that, a glimpse of that undeserved gift of grace and my hope is that there will be doughnuts in heaven..