Origins
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If we think of work as the raising of matter, as provision of food for the human spirit, then places of work need this sort of atmosphere. I think of the old carpenter's shops in the days before they became a screaming tension of dangerous machinery... not silent rooms, for there were too many interesting things in them, but places of magical reverence. |

Our ancestors knew well that the places we pass thorough affect our inner state of being.

Watercolor of train station in Eugene, Oregon by F. Peter Smith.
Roethke:
"I was living alone in a biggish house in Edmonds, Washington. I had been teaching the five beat line for weeks - I knew quite a bit about it, but write it myself? No; so I felt myself a fraud. Suddenly, in the early morning, the poem the "The Dance" started and finished itself in a very short time - say thirty minutes, maybe in the greater part of an hour it was all done. I felt, I knew, I had hit it ! I walked around, and I wept, and I knelt down - I always do after I've written what I know is a good piece. But at the same time I had, as God is my witness the actual sense of presence - as if "Yeats" himself were in that room. The experience was in a way terrifying. for it lasted at least half an hour. That house, I repeat, was charged was a psychic presence, the very walls seamed to shimmer. I wept for joy.... He, They, The Poets Dead - were with me."
"Space In the image of man is place
Space in the image of time is occasion." A.Loos
My office as a room is a silent office, even though we walk there. It is not oppressively empty when it is empty, but peacefully at rest. It is an office more like a church than a factory - and so it should be for I want the work that comes out of it to have something of the same sacredness.
Thinking no longer in terms of places as opportunities for the imposition of great ideas, but developing what is already there.
Art is what the mind can imagine but only the heart knows is true...
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Healing Silence...
the Architecture of Peace
the place of not yet, the space of becoming.
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St. Joseph's Abbey
167 North Spencer Rd.
Spencer, MA 01562-1233
(508)885-8750
Design as a Listening Process
Peaceful listening, listening as well as you hear.I try to make buildings which belong in the place they are, which are rooted in the earth, which give one the feeling that they always have been and always will be. Places which have this eternal feeling can convey stable, yet life-filled tranquility in a way that those bound to a transient moment of style never can.
DeTar
Toccata & Fugue in E., Widor