Brugge Blog

It was just a year ago that the family cabin started to change. In 30 years, it has had lots of tweaks to its inside, but they’ve been relatively small. Not fancy, but a place that has the well-worn comfort of familiarity.

Now the clan has grown in size, and when we all want to be together up there, any group activities have to happen outside; great if it’s sunny, not so great if it’s rainy or buggy. Being a place that has so many memories attached to it, the question of how to change it was tricky, and took a lot of thought. My folks spent a lot of time thinking about it, probably more than I know, and bounced the ideas off of the rest of us. A bigger porch? Maybe a wraparound? Deck? Extra bedrooms? Sounds good in theory, and on a sketch, but nobody could really answer the tougher question: what is it going to feel like?

What developed was work that went about and evolved without a lot of hard plans, with adjustments and reflection all along the way. I wasn’t there, but from the stories my Dad tells about how they worked with the builders, it sounded just like what the architect Christopher Alexander described in The Timeless Way of Building. And the results have us in a kind of awe.

A building or a town will be alive to the extent that it is governed by the timeless way.

There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been.

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.

The word which we most often use to talk about the quality without a name is the word “alive.”

It has above all to do with the elements. And it happens when our inner forces are resolved. Of course, in practice we often don’t know just what our inner forces are. Yet still there are those special secret moments in our lives, when we smile unexpectedly–when all our forces are resolved. We cannot be aware of these most precious moments when they are actually happening. Yet each off us knows from experience the feeling which this quality creates in us. And for this reason, each one of us can also recognize this quality when it occurs in buildings.

The first time we drove up to see it, it was dusk, and the new porch was lit from inside. I thought we were arriving at a chalet. And even though the place looked completely different, it felt like the new pieces fit right where they belonged. Over the weekend, life flowed throw the whole place, with each piece being just what it should: the original cabin still felt like where you should cook and sleep, while the new porch was simply where you went to sit and relax, and the new deck was just the place to hang out.

It is certainly a different place than it was before, yet it isn’t new in the sense that you have to get used to it. It just fits. And it wasn’t just luck that it turned out this way. My folks let this quality without a name emerge, trusting that their strong sense of the life force of that place was a vision they could follow, whether they thought of it consciously or not. It certainly wasn’t easy, but I don’t think they could have done it any other way. The cabin has a hold on all of us.

Places which have this quality, invite this quality to come to life in us. And when we have this quality in us, we tend to make it come to life in towns and buildings which we help to build. It is a self-supporting, self-maintaining, generating quality. It is the quality of life. And we must seek it, for our own sakes, in our own surroundings, simply in order that we can ourselves become alive.

To make a building egoless, like this, the builder must let go of all his willful images, and start with a void. You are able to do this only when you no longer fear that nothing will happen, and you can therefore afford to let go of your images.