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In this issue...

Sacred Spaces

Editorial

Reflections on the Completion of the World Administrative Center on Mount Carmel Geoffry W. Marks

Wholeness as a Worldview Beauty and the Unity of Space and Matter Tom Kubala

Matters of Opinion

A Review of Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time by Monireh Kazemzadeh

A Review of The Life and Death of Planet Earth by Robert H. Stockman

Spiritual Space and Place: Looking at Our Built and Physical Environments [Page ii]Religion Society Polity ⚫ Arts WORLD ORDER 2003 VOLUME 34, NUMBER 3

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE, AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN THEIR SEARCH TO UNDERSTAND THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY.

EDITORIAL BOARD

Betty J. Fisher Arash Abizadeh Monireh Kazemzadeh Diane Lotfi Kevin A. Morrison Robert H. Stockman Jim Stokes

CONSULTANT IN POETRY

Herbert Woodward Martin

INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS

World Order is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 536 Sheridan Road, Wilmette, IL 60091-1811. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher or of the Editorial Board.

Peer review: Submissions to the journal will be subject to external blind peer review if they fall outside the expertise of the editorial board or upon request by the author..

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Poems should be single spaced with clearly marked stanza breaks.

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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright 2003 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States; all rights reserved. World Order is protected through trademark registration in the U.S. Patent Office. Printed in the U.S.A. ISSN 0043-8804.

ART CREDITS

Cover design by Richard Doering, cover photograph of model of the House of Worship to be built near Santiago, Chile, courtesy Bahá’í World News Service: p. 2, courtesy Vladimir Shilov; pp. 8, 12, 14-17, 19, 20, Mount Carmel Projects photographs, courtesy Ruhi Vargha; pp. 28, 30-37, photographs and illustrations, Tom Kubala; p. 40, Steve Garrigues; p. 48, Hans J. Knospe. [Page 1]

CONTENTS

Sacred Spaces Editorial

Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

Reflections on the Completion of the World Administrative Center on Mount Carmel by Geoffry W. Marks

Sonnet to the Seat of Study a poem by Rhett Diessner

Wholeness as a Worldview: Beauty and the Unity of Space and Matter by Tom Kubala

The Opening a poem by Bret Breneman

Matters of Opinion-A Review of Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time by Monireh Kazemzadeh

Matters of Opinion-A Review of The Life and Death of Planet Earth by Robert H. Stockman [Page 2]The Bahá’í House of Worship, Wilmette, Illinois, U.S.A. [Page 3]

Sacred Spaces

May 2003 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the completion of the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois. Planning for the temple began in 1903, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá dedicated the cornerstone in 1912. In 1920, delegates to the national Bahá’í convention reviewed some fifteen proposals for the temple, ultimately choosing an innovative design by the French-Canadian architect Louis Bourgeois. Construction on the nine-sided, domed building began the following year. The House of Worship was opened to the public at a dedication ceremony in 1953.

Like its sister temples in Uganda (dedicated in 1961), Germany (1964), Australia (1971), Panama (1972), Western Samoa (1984), and India (1986)—as well as the temple soon to be constructed near Santiago, Chile—the Wilmette House of Worship is not reserved for Bahá’ís alone. It is a public space where all people may pray, contemplate and meditate, and read the scriptures of the world's religions. Although each house of worship is unique, all share a sense of place and purpose supported by both the interior and exterior architecture, as well as by the surrounding gardens. Every Bahá’í temple has nine sides, symbolizing openness, and a soaring domed auditorium that encourages communion with God. Bahá’í temples are not merely beautiful structures; they are designed to inspire the virtue of reverence in their visitors. For "by observing reverence, both physical and spiritual," according to the Bahá’í scriptures, "one's heart is moved with great tenderness."

While temples and other holy places are clearly invested with special significance and inspire humanity to contemplate the divine and the holy, we may forget that all the spaces that exist around us, those occurring in nature and those that we create ourselves, affect our senses, our thoughts, and, ultimately, our spirits. The spaces that we create reflect our tastes and aspirations; how we choose to organize our surroundings is, in essence, a reflection of ourselves. We should not, therefore, neglect or ignore the space around us but should direct our energies toward preserving the natural environment and making the created environment one that, like holy places, uplifts and aids us in our endeavors. In the words of Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, "We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions."" [Page 4]

Letters from and to the Editor

Spiritual space and place is a topic that challenges us to look at our built and physical environments with new eyes and new understandings, for many such environments reflect only economic, commercial, or other material values. But increasing numbers of people are beginning to voice their wish that buildings and urban and rural spaces also accommodate other values (respect for the environment, freedom from noise, opportunities for encounters with natural beauty, social integration, spiritual and religious beliefs, and so on). These voices reflect a nascent, but growing, inquiry as to what our built and physical environments should be, and, more important, what they can be. The quest for a new vision of what spiritual space and place can give to all of humanity echoes yearnings increasingly being expressed in variety of forums.

Our two essayists in this issue come from different parts of the world and have chosen very different approaches to the general topic of space and place. One lives in South Africa, the other in Wisconsin, in the United States. One reflects on the Bahá’í holy places on Mount Carmel in Israel; the other ponders homes in the Midwest. Both turned to the Bahá’í scriptures and to works by Christopher Alexander to gain a deeper understanding of the elements that contribute to making a beautiful building or physical space, regardless of function. Unhappy with the Cartesian mechanistic view of the world that drives much of "modern" architecture and planning, Alexander, an architect-builder-philosopher, set out to describe "the fundamental order present when beauty occurs: an order characterized by the wholeness it achieves and the spatial unity or coherence that is established."

Geoffry W. Marks, in his reflections on the completion of the terraced gardens leading to the Shrine of the Báb and the buildings comprising the World Administrative Center of the Bahá’í Faith, takes us beyond the structural and logistical challenges of making a garden bloom on the vineyard of the Lord. He focuses, rather, on what the Mount Carmel Projects mean to those looking for "the emergence of new systems governing the relationships of nations and peoples." Drawing on insights in the Bahá’í scriptures and in one of Alexander's books, he reaches into meanings that gardens and buildings hold for the individual's inner life and for the body politic of the world.

Architect Tom Kubala contrasts a Midwestern duplex constructed wholly within a mechanistic view of the world to a family home he and his architect [Page 5]

INTERCHANGE

son built based on Alexander's principles of wholeness, beauty, and unity. His analysis of the Cartesian elements of the duplex plopped into the midst of a National Register of Historic Places neighborhood is eye opening (one editor who was house hunting as she worked on the article found it virtually impossible to find a home that was not a blood-relative of the duplex).

The articles by Marks and Kubala can be read as pleas for and a demonstration of a new paradigm that makes beauty, harmony, unity, and wholeness a necessary part of the places that define our lives our homes, our neighborhoods ("home" does not stop at our front door), our work places, our places of worship.

Monireh Kazemzadeh's review of the film Rivers and Tides invites us to reflect on a different aspect of our environment: the ephemeral "sculptures" of Andy Goldsworthy that surprise, delight, puzzle, and then reintegrate themselves into the physical environment from which their pieces came. The questions Goldsworthy raises about solidity, time, and change are echoed in Robert H. Stockman's review of Peter D. Ward's and Donald Brownlee's The Life and Death of Planet Earth. The two essays and the two reviews raise questions that lead us to think more seriously about the physical and the built environments, the importance of understanding the principles that bind things together, and the practical and spiritual responsibilities we have toward contributing to the beauty, unity, and wholeness open to us.

An announcement, serendipitous to the preparation of this issue on spiritual space and place, was made by the Universal House of Justice: Siamak Hariri of Toronto, Canada, has been selected as architect of the Bahá’í House of Worship (Temple) to be built on the Pan-American Highway near Santiago, Chile. The announcement was accompanied by an architectural rendering of the Temple, which we have reproduced on our cover. In the 13 June 2003 press release from Haifa, Israel, about the project (from which we quote liberally), Hariri, who hopes to complete the Temple within the next three years, describes his design as having "nine gracefully torqued wings, which enfold the space of the Temple.' He goes on to say that ""These vast wings are made of two delicate skins of translucent, subtly gridded alabaster, one on the outside and the other on the inside." He continues:

Between these two layers of glowing, translucent stone, lies a curved steel [Page 6]

INTERCHANGE

structure (the source of the faintly discernible gridding) enclosed in glass, its primary structural members inter- twining with secondary support mem- bers, not unlike the structural veining discernible within a leaf.

Light moving through and between each of the wings becomes light as structure, lines of radiance moving and arcing gently about The Greatest Name (calligraphy of Bahá’u’lláh’s name at the center of the dome).

The wings of the Temple, identical in form, are organically shaped and twisted slightly to produce a nest-like structure, a soft, undulating dome positioned around a raised base.

The inner form of the Temple, ac- cording to Harari, will be "defined by a finely articulated tracery of wood, which offers a delicately ornamental inner sur- face, rich in texture, warm by nature, acoustically practical and responsive to the cultural givens of the area."

During the day, he says, the soft undulating alabaster and glass skin forms the outer expression. "At night, the image reverses itself, the entire volume then becoming a warmed totalized glow, with the inner form of the building visible through the glass.""

The Temple, notable for its absence of straight lines, will rise amidst an extensive radiating garden comprising nine reflecting lily pools and nine prayer gardens.

Prominent Toronto-based architecture critic, Gary Michael Dault, said the Temple is a "hovering cloud, an archi- tectural mist."" It "acknowledges blos- som, fruit, vegetable and the human heart-but rests somewhere between such readings, gathering them up and transforming them into an architectural scheme that is, simultaneously, both engagingly familiar and brilliantly origi- nal.""

In 2001 the Universal House of Jus- tice announced that the "Mother Temple of South America" would be built in Chile. Submissions for a design were called for in September 2002. Hariri was selected from the final four teams chosen from the 185 submissions.

The new House of Worship in Chile, a place for communing with God in silence and reverence, will join its seven sister Temples in the United States, Germany, Australia, Panama, Western Samoa, and India. In the future each Temple will be the central feature in a complex designed to provide social, humanitarian, educational, and scientific pursuits. Funding for the construction will be provided by voluntary donations from the Bahá’ís of Chile and from local and national Bahá’í communities around the world.

PROVIDING MOMENTUM FOR THE ADOPTION OF THE ICC STATUTE

It was with appreciation that I read the 2002-03 issue of World Order [Vol. 34, No. 2] devoted to the International Criminal Court. While the idea and drafts of Statutes for the ICC had been in existence for decades, it was the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda that provided the moral outrage and political will for the nations of the world to finally act to approve first the Tribunals for those coun- tries, and then, in 1998, the ICC Statutes. In the months before the approval by the UN Security Council for a Commission to Investigate War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia (the predecessor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia), there was a confluence of crisis, grass-roots advocacy, and political will that came together to force the creation of the Tribu- nal when other hideous genocides of equal and worse brutality in prior years had earlier failed to do so.

After having investigated the status of Bosnian women and children refugees on behalf of the [Page 7]

INTERCHANGE

Office of Public Information of the UN in July 1992, this writer was assisted by the Office of External Affairs of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States to contact several staff persons on Capitol Hill involved in creating policy on the Balkans for the first Bush administration. From those contacts, Kenneth Blackwell, at that time U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and I collaborated to bring senior staff from the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Secretary of State's office, and a few congressional staffers and State Department offices on South Eastern Europe to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Together with these government agencies, we brought together specialists in the fields of the psychological effects of trauma, the national leaders of several major human-rights organizations, international law and policy experts to focus on three issues: (1) how to provide physical and psychological support to women and children refugees, (2) how to design legal protections for women and children while being sensitive to their unique psychological needs, and (3) how to institute collective-security measures to stop the genocide and provide a framework to prevent further genocides. We understood that one of the main implications of our recommendations to provide legal protections for women was the need to create an International War Crimes Tribunal. The basic framework we worked out in a white paper became the basis for what has become the standard on humane and ethical evidence collection in situations of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

It was the attention human-rights organizations had paid to protecting women who had been systematically raped as a tactic of war that became the chief moral rallying point for these early efforts to create a war-crimes tribunal. This rationale not only received little opposition from government sources, but it became the decisive issue that convinced them of the need for the tribunal. No doubt, years of prior advocacy especially on domestic abuse had created an accepted language, a legal infrastructure, and advocacy expertise to bring to bear on this international issue.

The same white paper called for the convening of the leaders of the world to recast the instruments of collective security in order to prevent genocide and to hold renegade nations and leaders accountable for acts of violence. Sadly, this long overdue but inevitable convocation has yet to occur.

JOHN WOODALL, M.D. Director, Resilient Responses to Social Crisis Interfaculty Working Group of the Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative Harvard University 42 Church St. Cambridge, MA 02138 [Page 8]The Shrine of the Báb with terraces and gardens leading up to it. [Page 9]

Reflections on the Completion of the World Administrative Center on Mount Carmel

In May 2001, amid Palestinian suicide bombs and Israeli air strikes, the Bahá’í community celebrated the completion of a unique construction project that exemplifies humanity's aspirations for unity and peace. The contrast could not have been more stark. Paying little heed to the bitter spiral of violence rocking the Holy Land, some three thousand Bahá’ís from 180 countries went to Haifa for five tranquil days to commemorate the fulfillment of an undertaking that had its origins in Bahá’u’lláh’s visit to Mount Carmel some 110 years ago when He called for the remains of the Báb, His martyred Herald, to be interred befittingly on its slopes and for the World Center of His Faith to be raised nearby.

While the celebrations received considerable attention in the media and were viewed via satellite and webcast by Bahá’ís around the world, coverage was overshadowed by the daily diet of death, disaster, and political intrigue that dominates the news. Yet for those tracking the emergence of new systems governing the relationships of nations and peoples, the completion of the Mount Carmel Projects—the name by which the nineteen terraced gardens embellishing the Shrine of the Báb and two large administrative buildings have been collectively known—is worth noting. For the project offers vivid proof of the regenerative force at work in the world and fresh testimony to the power of faith to triumph over the forces of

Copyright 2003 by Geoffry W. Marks.

1. The Bahá’í International Community reported that among the news organizations covering the event were the Associated Press, Agence France Presse, the BBC, the CBC, China TV, CNN, the DPA German News Agency, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Le Monde, the New York Times, Reuters, and UPI ("On Mount Carmel, newly completed garden terraces are officially opened," One Country, 13.1 [Apr.- June 2001] and at <http://onecountry.org/e131/e13101as Terraces_opening.htm>.)

GEOFFRY W. MARKS works in the Department of Communication and Development at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where he manages the University's relationships with major foundations. He has lived in Cape Town with his wife and daughter since 1989. From 1992 through 1998 he worked for an adult basic-education and training nongovernmental organization in Cape Town. Marks' publications include a number of essays and The Dynamic Force of Example (1975), Call to Remembrance: Connecting the Heart to Bahá’u’lláh (1992), and the annotated compilation Messages from The Universal House of Justice, 1963-1986: The Third Epoch of the Formative Age (1996). [Page 10]darkness. What, then, are some of the meanings that these terraces, gardens, and buildings hold for both the inner life of the individual and the body politic of the world?

The Renewal of a Sacred Site

Mount Carmel's religious associations go back thousands of years. In the days of Moses it was known to the Egyptians as "the Holy Cape." Elijah lived in its caves and triumphed over the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:40). Chronicles (2 Chron. 26:10) refers to "the vine dressers" in Carmel, while Isaiah (35:1-2) extols "the excellency of Carmel and Sharon" as a symbol of the spiritual well-being of Israel. Indeed, the name Carmel in Hebrew and Arabic means "the Vineyard of God." The Carmelite monastic order, founded in 1150, claims that monks have lived on Mount Carmel as a single community since the days of Elijah.²

Carmel's association with the Bahá’í Faith began in 1868 when Bahá’u’lláh spent a few hours in Haifa while en route by ship from Gallipoli to the prison-city of Acre. In that same year a small colony of German Templars—who came to witness the return of Christ—was established at the foot of Mount Carmel. Paintings and photographs of the area suggest that the mountain was covered with brush and show no remnants of the vineyards and gardens that once graced its slopes, thus calling to mind Amos's prophecy that "the top of Carmel shall wither" (Amos 1:2).

For Bahá’ís, Carmel's significance stems from Bahá’u’lláh's visit to the mountain in 1891. While spending the summer months in Haifa, Bahá’u’lláh visited the cave of Elijah and, in the vicinity of the Stella Maris Monastery, revealed the Tablet of Carmel in which He designates the mountain as the site of the World Center of His Faith.

‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ CONCEIVED THE GENERAL FEATURES OF THE SUPERSTRUCTURE THAT WOULD ADORN THE SHRINE AND ENVISIONED A SERIES OF TERRACES RUNNING FROM THE FOOT O OF MOUNT CARMEL TO ITS CREST,

"Rejoice," Bahá’u’lláh bids Mount Carmel, "for God hath in this Day established upon thee His throne, hath made thee the dawning-place of His signs and the dayspring of the evidences of His Revelation."3

On another occasion Bahá’u’lláh directed ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, His eldest son, to build a mausoleum in which to inter the remains of the Báb and designated the spot on which it was to be built. Seven years after Bahá’u’lláh's passing in 1892, ‘Abdu’l- Bahá began to construct an imposing mausoleum made of native stone in which He laid the Báb's remains to rest in 1909. Later He conceived the general features

2. David S. Ruhe, "Mount Carmel," unpublished article for the Bahá’í Encyclopedia Project, 1992, Bahá’í Encyclopedia Project files, Evanston, IL, used by permission of the Bahá’í Encyclopedia Project. For the meaning of the word Carmel, see Ugo Giachery, Shoghi Effendi: Recollections (Oxford: George Ronald, 1973) 209; Eunice Braun and Hugh E. Chance, Crown of Beauty: The Bahá’í Faith and the Holy Land (Oxford: George Ronald, 1982) 71; Javidukht Khadem, Zikrullah Khadem: The Itinerant Hand of the Cause of God, With Love (Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1990) 279.

3. Bahá’u’lláh, Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, comp. Research Department of the Universal House of Justice, trans. Habib Taherzadeh et al., 1st pocket-size ed. (Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1988, 1998 printing) 4. [Page 11]

REFLECTIONS ON MOUNT CARMEL

of the superstructure that would adorn the Shrine and envisioned a series of terraces running from the foot of Mount Carmel to its crest. He also foresaw a day when world leaders would walk up the mountain as pilgrims to pay their respects at the Shrine.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s vision for the beautification of Mount Carmel, faithfully executed after His passing in 1921 by His grandson, Shoghi Effendi (Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith from 1921 to 1957) and later by the Universal House of Justice (the supreme governing body of the Bahá’í world community, established in 1963) harmonizes with what seems to be an archetype for sacred sites evident in holy places throughout the world.

In his book A Pattern Language, the architect Christopher Alexander relates that a fundamental characteristic common to holy places of all cultures is being hard to reach and having "layers of access, waiting, levels of approach, a gradual unpeeling, gradual revelation, passage through a series of gates":

There are many examples: the Inner City of Peking; the fact that anyone who has [sic] audience with the Pope must wait in each of seven waiting rooms; the Aztec sacrifices took place on stepped pyramids, each step closer to the sacrifice; the Ise shrine, the most famous shrine in Japan, is a nest of precincts, each one inside the other. Even in an ordinary Christian church, you pass first through the churchyard, then through the nave; then, on special occasions, beyond the altar rail into the chancel and only the priest himself is able to go into the tabernacle. The holy bread is sheltered by five layers of even more difficult approach.

This layering, or nesting of precincts, seems to correspond to a fundamental aspect of human psychology. We believe that every community, regardless of its particular faith, regardless of whether it even has a faith in any organized sense, needs some place where this feeling of slow, progressive access through gates to a holy center may be experienced. When such a place exists in a community, even if it is not associated with any particular religion, we believe that the feeling of holiness, in some form or other, will gradually come to life there among the people who share in the experience."

Alexander maintains that the best way to preserve a holy site is to intensify its meaning by introducing "a progression of areas through which people pass as they approach the site":

A garden which can be reached only by passing through a series of outer gardens keeps its secrecy. A temple which can be reached only by passing through

4. Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York: Oxford UP, 1977) 333. [Page 12]

GEOFFRY W. MARKS

The nineteen terraced gardens leading to the Shrine of the Báb prepare visitors for approaching the sacred spot and, visually, frame the Shrine in concentric circles.

The Shrine of the Báb, with terraces leading to the bottom of Mount Carmel, introduces the sacred into the modern life of the port city of Haifa, Israel.

a sequence of approach courts is able to be a special thing in a man's heart. The magnificence of a mountain peak is increased by the difficulty of reaching the upper valleys from which it can be seen; the beauty of a woman is intensified by the slowness of her unveiling; the great beauty of a river bank―its rushes, water rats, small fish, wild flowers-are violated by a too direct approach; even the ecology cannot stand up to the too direct approach-the thing will simply be devoured.

We must therefore build around a sacred site a series of spaces which gradually intensify and converge on the site. The site itself becomes a kind of inner sanctum, at the core. And if the site is very large-a mountain-the same approach can be taken with special places from which it can be seen-an inner sanctum, reached past many levels, which is not the mountain, but a garden, say, from which the mountain can be seen in special beauty.

The nineteen terraces and gardens that extend above and below the Shrine of the Báb exemplify Alexander's analysis of the characteristics of holy places. The effect is twofold. For the pilgrim the terraces and gardens are precincts through which one passes as one draws near the Shrine and thus serve to prepare the soul to approach the sacred spot, the holy of holies. On a visual level, when seen from afar, whether from above or below, they frame the Shine in a series of concentric circles.

5. Alexander, Pattern Language 133. [Page 13]

REFLECTIONS ON MOUNT CARMEL

Faribourz Sabha, the architect of the terraces, explains that the intent was to enhance the beauty of the Shrine and to draw attention to it. He compares the terraces and gardens to the setting a beautiful ring affords a precious jewel: it draws attention to the jewel and enhances its beauty. "The Terraces provide both a physical and a spiritual setting for the Shrine," he notes. "Everything directs your eyes towards the Shrine.""6

The Shrine of the Báb and the terraces and gardens adorning it reintroduce the sacred into modern life. The site's holy associations, both ancient and modern, are fittingly reflected in a design that features the age-old pattern of multi-layered precincts set within the modern, bustling city of Haifa. Thus they serve as a metaphor for the Bahá’í principle of progressive revelation, for they connote the renewal of the prophetic impulse in a form that affirms the divinity of all religions but is relevant to the needs of the new age. They also assure us that the ancient, prophetic promise of peace is the crowning possibility of our time.

Beauty as a Symbol of Transformation

The word most closely associated with the buildings, terraces, and gardens on Mount Carmel is beauty. The Bahá’í writings portray beauty as an attribute of God. Its usage suggests an intimate approach to the inner reality of the Divine Essence opened to humankind through the bounty of God's love for His highest and noblest creation:

O SON OF MAN! Veiled in My immemorial being and in the ancient eternity of My essence, I knew My love for thee; therefore I created thee, have engraved on thee Mine image and revealed to thee My beauty.

O MAN OF TWO VISIONS! Close one eye and open the other. Close one to the world and all that is therein, and open the other to the hallowed beauty of the Beloved.'

Beauty is also used in collective reference to the Manifestations of God, those peerless "Revealers of the beauty of the All-Glorious," and is intimately associated with Bahá’u’lláh through His most commonly used titles: The Blessed Beauty, the Ancient Beauty, the Most Great Beauty.³

For Bahá’ís, creating beauty in the physical world is not only a means of achieving pleasure and enjoyment but of expressing love and adoration for God. Thus, from the earliest years of his ministry, Shoghi Effendi strove to beautify the gardens surrounding the Shrine of the Báb and the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh at Bahjí, both as a fitting tribute to their stations as the twin Manifestations of God for this age, and

6. Fariburz Sahba, quoted in "On Mount Carmel," One Country, 13.1 (Apr.-June 2001). and at <http://onecountry.org/e131/e13101as Terraces_opening.htm>.) 7. Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words, trans. Shoghi Effendi (Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1939, 1994 printing) AHW3, PHW12. 8. Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-lqán: The Book of Certitude, trans. Shoghi Effendi, 1st pocket-size ed. (Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1993, 1998 printing) 13; see also 17, 45, 167. [Page 14]as a means of inducing an attitude of reverence and awe in pilgrims as they approach their Shrines, where they come as close as they can in this world to "attainment unto the divine Presence." Implicit, then, in the beauty of the gardens and terraces is the understanding that worship is the highest urging of the soul, the pivot around which our lives revolve.

But the terraces, gardens, and buildings on Mount Carmel have another function beyond summoning the soul to worship. In a commentary on the "profound significance" of the Mount Carmel projects, the Universal House of Justice explains: "The beauty and magnificence of the Gardens and Terraces. . . are symbolic of the nature of the transformation which is destined to occur both within the hearts of the world's peoples and in the physical environment of the planet."10

A detail from one of the nineteen gardens and terraces that invite contemplation, worship, and admiration.

Peter J. Khan, a member of the Universal House of Justice, has suggested that the gardens and terraces are not only to be admired but also contemplated. He observes that they call us to reassess the role of beauty in our lives, particularly in terms of how we beautify our inner beings with manners, speech, and deeds and the way in which we conduct our relationships with others. They also invite us to reflect on the need for balance between the material and the spiritual and teach us that symmetry, balance, and proportion are essential aspects of life.11

On the societal level, the gardens and terraces stand for the harmonious reconciliation of form and function, industry and environment, and they tell us that such reconciliation may be made in ways that fulfill the requirements of beauty and serve humanity's transcendental yearnings. They tell us that answers to the problems of the world lie in spiritual, not material, realms.

Underscoring the important role the buildings, gardens, and terraces play as a symbol of the transformation the world must undergo, the Universal House of Justice warns the Bahá’ís that they "should never, for even one moment, lose sight of the fact that the crisis now engulfing every part of the planet is essentially spiritual." The Mount Carmel Projects, the House of Justice explains, "represent

9. Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-lqán 170; see also Bahá’u’lláh, Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh 50. 10. The Universal House of Justice, letter to National Spiritual Assemblies, 4 Jan. 1994, 92, 9. 11. Peter J. Khan, address on the significance of the terraces and buildings on Mount Carmel, Bahá’í World Center, Haifa, Israel, July 2000, used by permission in Khan, e-mail to author, 25 Feb. 2001. [Page 15]much more than the erection of buildings to meet the expanding needs of the Bahá’í World Center." They are "central to the work of the Faith in eradicating the causes of the appalling suffering now afflicting humanity." They "stand as the visible seat of mighty institutions whose purpose is no other than the spiritualization of humanity and the preservation of justice and unity throughout the world."12

The importance of giving precedence to spiritual and moral principle in our search for solutions to human problems is reflected in the way the buildings of the Bahá’í World Administrative Center frame the resting places of the daughter, son, and wife of Bahá’u’lláh and the gardens that surround them, rather than being focal points in themselves. Their architect, Hossein Amanat, explains: "The idea is that the buildings are pavilions adorning this garden. They should not impose on it.""13

In fulfilling his brief, Amanat was faced with the unusual challenge of creating a design that achieved two objectives that seemed mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the buildings had to be functional offices in which the work of the Bahá’í World Center would be carried out for centuries to come. On the other, they had to be ornamental in character and preserve the preeminence of the monument gardens and not dominate them. He solved this challenge by opting to sink below ground about two-thirds of the buildings for the Center for the Study of the Text, the International Teaching Center, and the Seat of the Universal House of Justice, tucking them into the side of the mountain."

The Seat of the Universal House of Justice (left) and the Center for the Study of the Texts, classical in style, are tucked into the side of Mount Carmel and integrated into the gardens at the Bahá’í World Center.

12. The Universal House of Justice, letter to National Spiritual Assemblies, 4 Jan. 1994,, 13, 2, 9. 13. Hossein Amanat, quoted in "Reshaping 'God's holy mountain' to create a vision of peace and beauty for all humanity," One Country, 12.2 (July-Sept. 2000): 14 and at <http://onecountry.org/e122/e12208as MtCarmel Projects.htm>. 14. The Center for the Study of the Text was completed in 1999; the International Teaching Center in 2000; and the Seat of the Universal House of Justice in 1983. [Page 16]The International Teaching Center, like its sister institutions, is classical in style and integrated into the gardens on Mount Carmel.

Amanat also notes that the classical style of the buildings is meant to elicit a spiritual response:

in our modern life, we are rushing everywhere. And there is no time for looking at the details of a classic building. But the classic style is meant for a society that is more relaxed, that is taking time to meditate and pray. Modern buildings evolved after the industrial revolution, which is when the material life took over from the spiritual. But we Bahá’ís think beauty is an important factor in design, because beauty is so important to the human soul. 15

Thus the buildings of the World Administrative Center are a vivid metaphor for the effort we as individuals need to make to ensure that the spiritual side of life regulates the material.

A Declaration of Confidence in the Future

Another dimension to the significance of the World Administrative Center and gardens on Mount Carmel is its statement about the Bahá’í view of the future. In an age of accelerated change, when all things have their sell-by date; when relationships, like appliances, are disposable; and when public facilities become obsolete after a few decades, the Bahá’í community has constructed a World Center intended to last for centuries.

15. Amanat, quoted in "Reshaping 'God's holy mountain,"" One Country, 12.2 (July-Sept. 2000): 14 and at <http://onecountry.org/e122/e12208as_MtCarmel Projects.htm>. [Page 17]When commissioning the construction of its seat in 1975, the Universal House of Justice called for a building “conceived in a style of enduring beauty and majesty, and faced with stone that will weather the centuries. . . .”¹⁶ The same standard was applied to the more recently completed buildings housing the Center for the Study of the Text and the International Teaching Center, thereby bringing into being a World Center “capable of meeting the challenges of coming centuries and of the tremendous growth of the Bahá’í community” predicted by Shoghi Effendi.¹⁷ Amanat explains that the buildings were designed to last at least five hundred years: “Every detail, when implemented, was done with a great amount of research as to what kinds of materials we should use, what technology we should use, so that these buildings will last as long as possible.”¹⁸

A detail from the stairs connecting one terraced garden to another showcases the integration of beauty and utility, spirit and form.

The Bahá’í World Center is thus a tangible expression of the Bahá’í community’s confidence in the future. This confidence is rooted in the conviction that humanity is steadily, though painfully, marching toward a divinely ordained destiny. “God’s purpose,” Shoghi Effendi affirms,

is none other than to usher in, in ways He alone can bring about, and the full significance of which He alone can fathom, the Great, the Golden Age of a long-divided, a long-afflicted humanity. Its present state, indeed even its immediate future, is dark, distressingly dark. Its distant future, however, is radiant, gloriously radiant—so radiant that no eye can visualize it.¹⁹

The realization of such a vision calls for acts that lead to the creation of a united global civilization—acts rooted in an unshakable faith in the power of the divine will to transform the world. Such a vision requires a design that evokes the spirit

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16. The Universal House of Justice, letter to Bahá’ís, 5 June 1975, in Messages from the Universal House of Justice 1963–1986: The Fourth Epoch of the Formative Age, comp. Geoffry W. Marks (Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1996) 164.4: 317.

17. The Universal House of Justice, letter to Bahá’ís, 31 August 1987, in [The Universal House of Justice], A Wider Horizon: Selected Messages of the Universal House of Justice, 1983–1992 (Riviera Beach, FL: Palabra, 1992) 53.

18. Amanat, quoted in “On Mount Carmel,” One Country, 13.1 (Apr.-June 2001) and at <http://onecountry.org/e131/e13101as_Terraces_opening.htm>.)

19. Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day Is Come, 1st pocket-sized ed. (Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1996) ¶286: 190. [Page 18]of faith in addition to meeting utilitarian needs. For this reason, Khan suggests, the terraces, gardens, and buildings on Mount Carmel embody a unification of spirit and form, of beauty and utility, of worship and work, signaling that a glorious future awaits us if we can but rise to higher levels of integration that harmonize more effectively the spiritual and material aspects of our nature. They also beckon us, he adds, to have confidence in our own future and invite us to make long-term plans for our self-development and service.20

A Resolution of the Paradox of Our Time

Today hope is in short supply. One can hardly deny that the twentieth century witnessed a litany of horrors: recurring episodes of genocide; wars-global, regional, and civil-that have caused the deaths of millions, impoverished generations, and unleashed an ever-rising tide of refugees, many of whom move from place to place for years in a desperate search for safety; unprecedented ecological disasters that threaten the sustainability of life on the planet. On a personal level, evil deeds shamelessly perpetrated by corrupt leaders and common folk alike stun the senses and numb the mind.

But the dark picture obscures another reality: the emergence of new and broader alliances, whether humanitarian, commercial, or political, coinciding with scientific and technological innovations that both signify and give impetus to the world's gradual but steady drift toward unity. The coexistence of two contrasting but parallel processes of destruction and construction mirrors the throes of adolescence, when new forces, difficult to understand and control, trigger intense, unpredictable, and at times disturbing behavior as the child moves haltingly toward maturity.

In a statement read at the ceremony marking the inauguration of the terraces, the Universal House of Justice offered the Shrine of the Báb as a symbol of hope and renewal. Suggesting that the "unspeakable tragedy" of the Báb’s execution in 1850 in northwestern Persia by a firing squad of 750 soldiers, after which His "mangled body" was "thrown on the side of a moat outside the city, abandoned to what His cold-blooded persecutors thought would be a dishonourable fate," heralded both the trials that would afflict humanity and their promising outcome, the Universal House of Justice drew a parallel between the Báb’s plight and the turbulent transition through which the world is passing:

The sufferings sustained by the Báb so as to arouse humanity to the responsibilities of its coming age of maturity were themselves indications of the intensity of the struggle necessary for the world's people to pass through the age of humanity's collective adolescence. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is a source of hope. The turmoil and crises of our time underlie a momentous transition in human affairs. Simultaneous processes of disintegration and integration have clearly been accelerating throughout the planet since the Báb appeared in Persia. That our Earth has contracted into a neighbourhood, no one can seriously deny. The world is being made new. Death pangs are yielding to birth pangs. The pain

20. Khan, address on the significance of the terraces and buildings on Mount Carmel, used by permission in Khan, e-mail to author, 25 Feb. 2001. [Page 19]shall pass when members of the human race act upon the common recognition of their essential oneness. There is a light at the end of this tunnel of change beckoning humanity to the goal destined for it according to the testimonies recorded in all the Holy Books.

The Shrine of the Báb stands as a symbol of the efficacy of that age-old promise, a sign of its urgency. It is, as well, a monument to the triumph of love over hate. The gardens which surround that structure, in their rich variety of colours and plants, are a reminder that the human race can live harmoniously in all its diversity. The light that shines from the central edifice is as a beacon of hope to the countless multitudes who yearn for a life that satisfies the soul as well as the body.

This inextinguishable hope stems from words such as these from the Pen of Bahá’u’lláh: “This is the Day in which God’s most excellent favours have been poured out upon men, the Day in which His most mighty grace has been infused into all created things.” May all who strive, often against great odds, to uphold principles of justice and concord be encouraged by these assurances.²¹

The Shrine of the Báb, surrounded by gardens symbolizing harmony in diversity, is a symbol of hope and renewal beckoning humanity to the goal destined for it in all the Holy Books.

The Coming of Age of a World Community

Even though the combined forces of Persia’s government and clergy were expended in a prolonged campaign to extinguish the Faith of the Báb and later the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh—a campaign that continues to the present day—the advent of the new Day of God could not be deterred. The light kindled by the Báb burst into flame after Bahá’u’lláh assumed His prophetic office. Later, during the ministries of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi, it gradually began to incarnate itself in institutions and communities dedicated to bringing into being what the Universal House of Justice termed “the promised world civilization that would signify the coming of age of the entire human race.”²²

The emergence of the Shrine of the Báb in a splendor so stunning that Ma’ariv, ‎Israeli’s Israel’s‎ second largest newspaper, termed it “‘the eighth wonder of the world’”

---

21. The Universal House Of Justice, On the Occasion of the Official Opening of the Terraces of The Shrine of the Báb, 22 May, 2001, Haifa, Israel, Bahá’í World News Service. See also One Country 13.1 (Apr.-June 2001). <http://www.onecountry.org/e131/e13102as_Statement_of_UHJ.htm>.

22. The Universal House Of Justice, On the Occasion, 22 May, 2001, Haifa, Israel, Bahá’í World News Service. [Page 20]reflects an achievement of much significance for the Bahá’í community.23 On one level it constitutes the culmination of a 110-year effort to construct the Bahá’í World Center on Mount Carmel. On another it represents the attainment of a new level of maturity by a community poised to play a fuller role in constructing a just and prosperous global society. It is a maturity fortified by the knowledge that its unity is secure and that it can accomplish large-scale undertakings under the leadership of its administrative institutions.

But, further, the completion of the Mount Carmel Projects is a declaration of intent: The Bahá’ís have set themselves the task of raising up a world community the culture of which is based on spiritual values, and they are determined to fulfill that task with undeviating adherence to the laws and principles of their Faith. Those who dismiss them as starry-eyed idealists or as lacking sufficient strength to effect change are challenged to think again. For the World Administrative Center, terraces, and gardens that now adorn Mount Carmel stand as visible proof of the steady and systematic manner in which the teachings of the Bahá’í Faith are being established in the world, of the patient and disciplined manner in which Bahá’ís pursue their objectives, and of the magnificence and beauty of the results they can achieve.

23. "Reshaping 'God's holy mountain," One Country 12.2 (July-Sept. 2000): 10 and at <http://onecountry.org/e122/e12208as_MtCarmel Projects.htm>. [Page 21]

Sonnet to the Seat of Study

Knowledge is twenty and seven letters. All that the Prophets have revealed are two letters thereof. No man thus far hath known more than these two letters. But when the Qd’im shall arise, He will cause the remaining twenty and five letters to be made manifest. -Imam Sadiq

My dreams of two-score and four real- so real-this carnate marble season. The hallowed center, housing the Seal of Truth, guiding the fruits of reason. Evoking saints of scholarship many: Aḥmad, Kázim, Dárábí, Abu’l-Faḍl, Nabíl-i-Akbar, Mazandarání, Townshend too. Their ghosts of ‘irfan, of ‘agl haunt these rooms of study, contemplating those seven and twenty letters of the new Book-their seeking truth ne’er sating- in this hermeneutic dance most lovely. O philosophers of the Text most pure, what truths will you uncover to endure?

Copyright 2003 by Rhett Diessner -RHETT DIESSNER

RHETT DIESSNER is a professor of psychology and education at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. He has published and coauthored a number of books and many articles. [Page 22]

Wholeness as a Worldview: Beauty and the Unity of Space and Matter

TOM KUBALA

Confusion about the meaning and importance of beauty is long-standing and pandemic. On the one hand, we all seem to recognize beautiful times and places that deeply affect our understanding of ourselves as human beings. On the other hand, we parrot the well-worn phrase "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and continually underfund arts education in favor of math and science. It seems that our current worldview, generally based on the scientific method, has failed to account for what we all palpably feel when in the presence of a powerfully beautiful artifact or place. Far from being an abstract issue, the marginalizing of beauty as subjective and, therefore, unquantifiable has fueled a dramatic reconfiguration of our surroundings over the last seventy-five years. This confusion has become manifestly visible in our architecture, our municipal organization, and our regional planning. To experience the end result of our fundamental confusion over beauty, simply take a drive from the historical edge of nearly any city in the world toward the connection to a major highway. The intervening space is filled with what we have planned and built over the last seventy-five years. It is difficult to imagine a more painful assault on the senses and spirit.

Yet, there is an alternative to the scientific worldview: a view of the world based on wholeness, where beauty is the structural result of the relative unity or coherence of space. In the Bahá’í writings the idea of unity, the idea that one Creator is responsible for one humankind, is fundamental to a new worldview. A corollary to this greater unity is the concept that both scientific and spiritual investigation ultimately describe the same reality—a unity of truth, so to speak. A worldview

Copyright 2003 by Tom Kubala. This essay is based on the keynote address presented at the colloquy on Cities, Suburbs, and Countryside: Connecting the Spirit to the Environment, 26-28 October 2000, sponsored by the Institute for Bahá’í Studies and World Order, Evanston, Illinois.

TOM KUBALA co-founder of Kubala Washatko Architects in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, is Principal-in-Charge of Design. He oversees projects from first schematics through final drawings and has directed many of the firm's award-winning projects and research endeavors. His completed projects exhibit a sensitivity to and understanding of function, scale, construction methodology, and materials. Kubala is also a watercolor painter. [Page 23]

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that discounts or leaves out elements of our experience and understanding is incomplete or confused. Throughout the Bahá’í writings one finds references to interrelations between the elements and aspects of our world. For example, the Bahá’í scriptures establish a connection between spiritual well-being, facets of unity (symmetry, harmony, perfection), and beauty:

It is natural for the heart and spirit to take pleasure and enjoyment in all things that show forth symmetry, harmony, and perfection. For instance: a beautiful house, a well designed garden, a symmetrical line, a graceful motion, a well written book, a pleasing garment-in fact, all things that have in themselves grace or beauty are pleasing to the heart and spirit....

Although the connection between beauty and spiritual well-being seems clear, and most people would agree with the general concept, yet designing beauty that is "pleasing to the heart and spirit" is far from being a priority, as can be seen in an inspection of "progress" in virtually any city.

The Cartesian Worldview

Laypersons and professionals in the building fields all operate from some kind of worldview whether they are aware of it or not. It can be argued that the building industry is deeply influenced by a worldview dominated by Cartesian thought and process where function reigns supreme and ornament is arbitrary and frivolous. Descartes’ method of understanding the world was based first on isolating a portion or fragment of the world, formulating a mechanical model of that portion, and then applying known forces to the model until it approximated the real thing. This method, consistently applied since 1640, has produced startling advancements in our collective knowledge of the workings of the world. But something has also been lost. At some point we began to confuse our mental model of the world with the real thing. In explaining a metaphor, John S. Hatcher, a Bahá’í philosopher and writer, describes this confusion. For example, in the metaphor "her smile lit up the room," it is normally understood that a person’s smile is not literally a light source. Yet, somehow, we often confuse the Cartesian model with reality. The universe, to those who subscribe to the Cartesian worldview, has become a machine assembled of independent parts related to one another by forces.

Descartes’ worldview has effectively marginalized the kinds of work in which architects, landscape architects, urban planners and designers, and virtually all artists

1. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in "Music," The Compilation of Compilations: Prepared by the Universal House of Justice 1963-1990, vol. 1 (Maryborough, Victoria, Australia: Bahá’í Publications Australia, 1991) No. 1422: 78. 2. See John S. Hatcher, The Purpose of Physical Reality: The Kingdom of Names (Wilmette, IL.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1987)78-83. [Page 24]find themselves engaged. In a world given value by the extent to which phenomena can be measured, the so-called subjective aspects of artistic endeavor and the qualities associated with them are essentially not measurable and are, therefore, nonexistent or, at best, decided upon arbitrarily.

The Worldview of Wholeness, Unity, and Beauty

David Bohm, a twentieth-century physicist, and B. J. Hiley, a long-time colleague of Bohm's at the University of London, pointed out the limitation of the Cartesian view of the world when they observed that "Classical physics provided a mirror that reflected only the objective structure of the human being who was the observer. There is no room in this scheme for his mental process which is thus regarded as separate or as a mere 'epiphenomenon' of the objective process." Christopher Alexander, an architect-builder-philosopher, puts the situation in terms more familiar to those in the building professions:

We are constantly trying to make decisions about what is better and what is worse in an evolving building. If the only statements considered potentially true or false are mechanistic statements of fact, and if all statements of harmony, beauty, what is better or worse, what has more life or less life, are always considered matters of opinion which can only be referred to private and arbitrary canons of judgment then, in principle, rational discussion about buildings should be impossible.

To engage in "rational discussion," the first critical step is to understand the extent to which mechanistic thought influences both our personal and professional lives. It is then necessary to conceive of a universe that transcends mechanistic measurement and provides a reasonably satisfying explanation of beauty. New insights in the works of Bohm and Hiley and of Alexander offer stimulating alternatives to traditional ways of seeing order in the world, providing specific details that fill out the larger vision of unity outlined in the Bahá’í scriptures.

Until his death in 1992, Bohm was one of the foremost scientific thinkers and distinguished physicists of his generation. He felt strongly that the view of conventional quantum mechanics did not provide a coherent overall view of nature, a feature he determined to be "an essential ingredient of any physical theory." About his scientific and philosophical work, he stated that "my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete, but which is in an unending

3. David Bohm and B. J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe (London: Routledge, 1993) 389. 4. Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Book One: The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Oxford UP, 2001) 17. 5. B. J. Hiley, preface, Bohm and Hiley, Undivided Universe xi. [Page 25]

WHOLENESS AS A WORLDVIEW

process of movement and unfoldment." He was concerned with the basic inadequacy of the current worldview when he observed that

the widespread and pervasive distinctions between people (race, nation, family, profession, etc., etc.), which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good, and indeed, even for survival, have one of the key factors of their origin in a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected, and "broken up" into yet smaller constituent parts.

He went on to say that

science itself is demanding a new, nonfragmentary world view, in the sense that the present approach of analysis of the world into independently existent parts does not work very well in modern physics. It is shown that both in relativity theory and quantum theory, notions implying the undivided wholeness of the universe would provide a much more orderly way of considering the general nature of reality.

Referring, however, to the two theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, Bohm noted that

Each theory is committed to its own notions of essentially static and fragmentary modes of existence (relativity to that of separate events, connectable by signals, and quantum mechanics to a well defined quantum state). One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails is unbroken wholeness."

Bohm's worldview describes the primary aspect of the universe as movement, not constituent elements. He provides an analogy to help in understanding this new way of seeing. Consider a stream flowing past a bridge, producing vortices and standing wave forms. Bohm suggests that what we normally call an element or particle or thing is actually like one of the vortices in the stream. It is identifiable, we give it a name, we can tell where it is, but it is hardly independent, divided, or separate. Like any vortex in a stream, a thing is utterly dependent on the conditions of the whole, is a result of its movement, and will eventually dissolve back into it.

Unlike Bohm's approach, Christopher Alexander's approach to a nontraditional worldview originated in his being thoroughly confused by his architectural education. Like many other architects, Alexander wanted to design beautiful buildings. What makes Alexander more interesting than most architects, however, is the seriousness with which he has pursued the idea of beauty, the order that makes something beautiful, and the requirements to produce it. First trained as a scientist, Alexander was later drawn to architecture through experiencing a deep emotional connection to particular buildings and places, gardens, and paintings. But

6. David Bohm, intro., Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980) ix, xi, xv. [Page 26]

TOM KUBALA

his experience in studying at the Cambridge School of Architecture was a rude awakening to a discipline that had little abiding interest in beauty, raising further questions in his mind about the state of architecture in general. This, in turn, led to questions of a general nature concerning order. Alexander comments, "Very few people realize, I think, how much the present confusion which exists in the field of architecture is wound up with our conception of the universe."

In his recently published book The Nature of Order, Alexander, using the building arts as a launching pad, has attempted to describe the fundamental order present when beauty occurs: an order characterized by the wholeness it achieves and the spatial unity or coherence that is established. His conclusions are strikingly similar to those of Bohm. Alexander presents a view of life that is broader in scope than the one currently accepted by science. To Alexander, life is intrinsic to how space and matter are organized. The more space and matter become coherent, the more they exhibit life. The life quality appears, with relative degrees of intensity, in both animate and inanimate "things." It is not exclusive to naturally occurring systems but also appears in artifacts made by humans. He observes that

It is not hard to see that such a conception-if we could get it-would make it easier to design buildings, towns and regions. If the conception of life is completely general, we shall then be able to extend it from the purely natural (such as conservation of a beautiful stand of trees), to the cooperation between nature and man-made forms (roads, streets, gardens, fields), and then also to buildings themselves. In such a mental world it will become easy to make sense of architecture-because we can then simply proceed with the general idea that all our work has to do with the creation of life and that the task, in any particular project, is to make the building come to life as much as possible.

In a way that parallels Bohm's view of the universe, Alexander rejects the idea that the universe is assembled from independent constituent parts or basic elements. He proposes that what we normally call "parts" are really organized areas of space and matter that unfold from a more general ground called wholeness. He calls these coherent regions "centers." Our world, he says, can be seen as a complex field of centers with each region having relatively high or low levels of coherence or unity.

If life is intrinsic to the relative coherence in space and matter, it is essential to understand what helps space to organize. Alexander has conducted experiments over a twenty-five-year period to identify the structural characteristics present in things

7. Christopher Alexander, Nature of Order, Book One 7. 8. Alexander, Nature of Order, Book One 31-32. [Page 27]

WHOLENESS AS A WORLDVIEW

and places that exhibit a high degree of life or wholeness. From the experiments he has identified fifteen Fundamental Properties that describe how space and matter hold themselves together. Although it is not possible to describe the Fundamental Properties in detail, simply naming them provides an overall feeling of them and how they might begin to form accurate descriptions of spatial coherence.

1. LEVELS OF SCALE 2. STRONG CENTERS 3. BOUNDARIES 4. ALTERNATING REPETITION 5. POSITIVE SPACE 6. GOOD SHAPE 7. LOCAL SYMMETRIES 8. DEEP INTERLOCK AND AMBIGUITY 9. CONTRAST 10. GRADIENTS 11. ROUGHNESS 12. ECHOES 13. THE VOID 14. SIMPLICITY AND INNER CALM 15. NOT SEPARATENESS

Alexander has described the Fundamental Properties as the basic ways in which “centers” help to organize larger centers and, in turn, are helped by smaller ones. The stability of any center is thereby dependent on the support of other centers in an overlapping, recursive, and cooperative structure.

For example, consider the property LEVELS OF SCALE. Objects with a high degree of wholeness are composed of centers that vary broadly in size. A concrete example of this is concrete itself, where strength depends on stone aggregate that is well graded, preventing interstitial spaces from being too large and thus being filled with relatively weak cement. Besides having a range of sizes, the centers cannot have large jumps in size between them. A particular center is best served when the adjoining center is either half or twice its size. Jumps greater than 3:1 generally dissipate a center’s capacity to help another.

Alexander makes it clear that the fifteen properties are “not merely visual features that appear in works of art.” If we are to use the theory of wholeness—and the concept of life—as the basis of all architecture, it would be nice to know that this wholeness, together with the properties that bring centers to life, is a necessary feature of material reality.

The question remains, however: How does one determine, definitively, the relative intensity of the field of centers? Alexander, like Bohm, considers human consciousness as much a part of an undivided wholeness as any other center—just a center much more complex, richly structured, and subtle. He has devised an empirical method to measure wholeness using consciousness as a touchstone. He does this

9. Alexander, Nature of Order, Book One 244. [Page 28]FIG. 1. COMPARING AN AMERICAN DIME TO A NICKEL AND TO A QUARTER An American dime is generally chosen over an American nickel (and also over an American quarter) as the object one would prefer to become before death.

by comparing two objects to determine which one has more coherence and exhibits more life: a nickel and a dime (see Fig. 1).

About the two coins, one may ask, "Which object do you like best?" This question often produces an answer that does not help at all. One may hear comments such as, "I really like nickels. My grandfather used to give them to all of the grandchildren," or "I have hated dimes ever since I choked on one when I was four years old," or "I prefer nickels because they are larger." Such answers are opinions or preferences based on idiosyncratic experience or cultural conditions. However, one may also ask a question that Alexander has formulated to dig past human differences and into our vast similarities: "Which of the two objects seems like a better picture of all of you, the whole of you: a picture that shows you as you are, with all your hopes, fears, weaknesses, glory, and absurdity, and which-as far as possible- includes everything you could ever hope to be; in short, which comes closer to being a true picture of your self."¹⁰ In experiments where this question is asked, more than 80 percent of the respondents choose one of the objects over the other, regardless of culture or personality. More people say that the dime has more life than the nickel. People also choose the dime over a quarter, dispelling the notion that the dime was picked over the nickel because of its higher monetary value. A different form of the question is "Which one of the two objects would you prefer to become by the day of your death?" Such questions focus attention on the actual life-giving nature of a thing, avoiding certain pitfalls typical of our daily working experience―opinions, images, and idiosyncratic preferences.

The detailed reasons for why the mirror-of-the-self test works are many, but part of its success relies on the degree of development or enlightenment of the observer. What is required is the ability to stop listening to distractions and to see the objects

10. Alexander, Nature of Order, Book One 317. [Page 29]to be judged directly, without filters. For example, one would be distracted from the task at hand by asking such questions as "Which coin would my professor pick," "Will my friends think I am naive if I pick the dime," "How will my choice be seen by my peers," "Am I making the proper, sophisticated choice befitting my education," "Will my parents be proud of my choice." The pressure to avoid making a genuine, heartfelt choice, which these ego-oriented questions produce, is very powerful, as is that of our image-ridden culture. This, explains Alexander, may be why those places, buildings, and objects that exhibit extremely high degrees of wholeness have been produced, nearly exclusively, through the mystical branches of the world's great religions, where the lack of ego is valued above all.

Once we have trained and developed the ability to discern degrees of wholeness in things, it is important to determine an order-producing process consistent with the idea of wholeness, where the universe is not perceived as divided. Alexander has postulated that living structures emerge in nature from a process of unfolding wholeness: "According to this principle, the transformations which occur in the system take whatever wholeness exists at any given instant, and continue it and intensify it while broadly maintaining its global structure."" To work properly, the process needs to maintain a kind of smoothness, avoiding large discontinuous jumps from one state to another.

Alexander goes on to offer the process of structure-preserving transformation as a way in which we might produce high degrees of wholeness in the things we make. In a step-by-step process, where each decision in an ordered sequence is qualified by the mirror-of-the-self test, we build upon the existing wholeness to create a building, a garden, a table, or a painting. Each step is a question: "What is the simplest thing I can do to the given situation that will produce the most amount of life?" A process that creates the startling beauty, awe, and inspiration in the natural world becomes available to any artist in shaping a built environment endowed with the capacity to produce deep feeling in all people.

As an architect, I have found Alexander's thoughts compelling for many reasons. But as a Bahá’í who accepts the oneness of creation and the unity of the Creator, the idea that beauty is the direct outcome of an architecture based on the unity of space and matter is completely captivating.

Analyzing two homes, "A" and "B," built during the same year in the same town illustrates how divergent worldviews impact the architecture that springs from them. One home was influenced by Cartesian thought, the other, by Bohm's and Alexander's views of wholeness, unity, and beauty.

The Cartesian Worldview and Home "A"

Home "A" is a new duplex built on an in-fill lot in an established neighborhood that is on the National Register of Historic Places. The Cartesian/Mechanistic worldview, which provides the basis for much of the contemporary development- construction industry, underlay the approach to the duplex.

11. Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Book 2: The Process of Creating Life (New York: Oxford UP, 1996) Ch. 11:30. [Page 30]TOM KUBALA Duplex Front Facade Street

FIG. 2. HOME "A" A duplex based on a Cartesian/Mechanistic worldview

FIG. 3. STREET FACADE OF HOME "A" Designed for curb-appeal marketability, the garage dominates the south-facing portion of the duplex, depriving living units access to the sun.

INTENT

Home "A" was conceived as an investment opportunity (see Fig. 2). The land was seen as property, owned and controlled by the current title holder. Financially, the property became an economic entity isolated, by its underlying Cartesian view of the world, from the functional, visual, and emotional qualities of the neighborhood. The house was seen as adding value to the owner's land. Like many homes built as investments, it was not designed for the people who built it; it was designed to appeal to as large a group of future buyers as possible. A part of a speculative building project, it is a generic, saleable product. The design of Home "A" faithfully meets all building and zoning code requirements. But it could have been built on any number of lots anywhere in the region, and most likely has any number of duplicates.

BIG IDEA

Home "A" was placed on the site so that the "front" of the building faced the street, as are many homes in new subdivisions. This is a builder convention stemming from curb-appeal marketability. In the case of Home "A," the convention deprives the prime living space in each unit access to quality solar orientation. Garages dominate the south-facing portion of the duplex (see Fig. 3).

STREET

The primary entrance to the duplex was given over to the street and the automobile since most residents and their guests would arrive at the home in a car, not as pedestrians. Thus the street's sole purpose was seen as a vehicular traffic conduit, isolated from the visual and social fabric of the neighborhood. The quality of the connection to the street was measured by how efficiently, conveniently, and cost- [Page 31]

WHOLENESS AS A WORLDVIEW

Grass Grass o

Duplex Driveway Street. Trees Street Grass Sidewalk ° Street Trees

FIG. 4. HOME "A" FROM THE SIDEWALK The street, when imagined only as a way for cars to get to the house, becomes a vacant and un- friendly space.

FIG. 5. HOME "A" AND THE SIDEWALK When the sidewalk is conceived merely as a path on the ground, its potential as a contributing feature of a rich neighborhood experience is greatly reduced.

effectively the connection was made-an approach that has been prevalent in subdivisions built during the last twenty-five years (see Fig. 4). In fact, most people who live in similar subdivisions enter their homes through the garage, using a digital keypad to open the overhead door. No attention is paid to the wholeness of the neighborhood. In terms of Alexander's First Fundamental Property LEVELS OF SCALE, the sizes of the centers present in Home "A" are either very large (street, driveway surface, garage doors, house facade) or quite small (blades of grass, six-inch siding, asphalt shingles, and light fixtures). Centers with sizes in between these two extremes are virtually nonexistent, causing the unity of the spatial fabric to fragment.

SIDEWALK

Any pedestrian-scaled qualities of the duplex were added primarily for curb appeal. Because the space between the street and the duplex is dominated by driveway and lawn, the public walking experience along the sidewalk is not supported spatially or experientially (see Fig. 5). According to Alexander's Fifth Fundamental Property POSITIVE SPACE, each center in a whole place is shaped three-dimensionally by other centers both larger and smaller than the center under discussion. In Home "A," however, the sidewalk, which should be a room-like space, is merely a concrete slab on the ground. This tends to produce a kind of spatial hemorrhaging, further shredding the unity of the whole.

FRONT YARD

From the point of view of the Cartesian, mechanistic cosmology, the duplex was conceived of as an object on the lot. Hence the space between the house and the sidewalk was not conceived as anything palpable, such as a room; is devoid of small- scale elements; and is occupied by a vehicle or two most of the time. It provides [Page 32]

HOME "A" AND THE FRONT YARD

Because the space between the duplex and the sidewalk was not conceived of as anything beyond a parking place, the "front yard" provides little space for family activities. The duplex is a Cartesian model of fragmentation.

little support for family activities. To be fair to the neighborhood, the older homes in the area support the life of the street to a much greater extent than the duplex, but most of them do not work very hard at bringing life to the front yard. House "A," thus, represents perfectly the conventional Cartesian model of fragmentation and, conversely, exhibits few of Alexander's Fundamental Properties of wholeness (see Fig. 6). In following standard practices, it failed utterly to fulfill a larger need for beauty and wholeness. Indeed, soon after the duplex was completed, the negative reaction of the neighbors was so intense that it provoked a change in the local zoning ordinance, requiring future homes on in-fill lots to be reviewed by the Planning Commission before construction would be permitted. However, within the canon of the mechanistic paradigm, the deliberations of the Commission about design issues for new homes will no doubt come down to an argument between divergent opinions rather than a consideration of properties of spatial coherence, ending with the worn-out phrase "beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

The Wholeness Worldview and Home "B"

At the same time that Home "A" was being constructed, our family constructed Home "B," which is within a short walk of our architectural studio and next door to our previous home of twenty years. In designing and building Home "B" ourselves, my son Alex and I hoped to test Alexander's theory of space and matter, which our Studio has been studying for fifteen years. As far as was reasonably possible, we created our home using wholeness as a worldview (see Fig. 7).

INTENT

We conceived Home "B" as an ancestral home that would be handed down in our family for generations to come. The deeply satisfying human qualities of the neighborhood were the reasons we chose to build there. Each aspect of the home [Page 33]

WHOLENESS AS A WORLDVIEW

FIG. 7. HOME "B" is based on a worldview of wholeness where beauty is revealed through the coherence of spatial unity.

FIG. 8. THE HEART OF HOME "B" faces the sun and a private terrace and a garden beyond the terrace.

and garden was specifically developed to support our family in the most meaningful way possible and to complement the unific qualities of the neighborhood. In other words, the needs of our family and the wholeness of the neighborhood and its spatial integrity were the constant and unswerving focus of our endeavor. The concern for future resale value did not enter into any of our design or construction decisions.

BIG IDEA

The largest center in our neighborhood happens to be the sun. To ensure a con- nection between the heart of our home and this center, the widest facade with the most windows faces south and overlooks a private terrace in the backyard. The sun- filled south terrace and garden beyond were intended to be the primary center of the home (see Fig. 8). To give the garden POSITIVE SPACE (Alexander's fifth Fun- damental Property) and to connect it to the living room, a two-story garage and guest room was placed at the northern edge of the lot. A stone wall was built to hold the garden's western edge. Smaller outdoor places at various LEVELS OF SCALE (Alexander's first Fundamental Property) were located along the north and south edges of the garden (terrace, deck, sitting steps, screen porch), helping to thicken its BOUNDARIES (the third Fundamental Property) and establish strong connections to living space within the house and above the garage (see Fig. 9).

STREET

After the sun, which dictated the placement of the heart of Home "B," the next largest center in the neighborhood is the street. The strength of the street as a POSITIVE SPACE depends on the strength of the homes, sidewalk spaces, and land- scaping along its edges. The closer the homes are to the roadway, the more the street feels like a room with GOOD SHAPE (the sixth Fundamental Property), a definite place.

Within a worldview based on wholeness, the undivided nature of the environment [Page 34]Garage South-Facing Outdoors Terrace Heart of the Home Street Stone Wall

FIG. 9. HOME "B" Positive Space links the home, terrace, gardens, and garage and guest room.

FIG. 10. HOME "B" AND THE STREET The street is conceived as an outdoor room shaped by the trees and homes along its edges.

is of central concern. The field-like, cooperative nature of space and matter virtually requests the help of each act of construction to bolster its unity and harmonize the whole.

My son and I moved Home "B" as close to the street as possible to keep the cross-section ratio of the street's width to its height no flatter than 2:1 (see Fig. 10). The contribution of Home "B" to the life of the street was to create an environment on the sidewalk that supported human activity (see Fig. 11).

SIDEWALK

The space between the front yard and the street is the center closest in size to the street. It is where walking neighbors and strangers alike come closest to the house without being invited in. Home "B" supported this center by creating smaller centers along the sidewalk edge. A low stone wall, set back twenty inches from the sidewalk, framed an intense zone of small-scaled plants and flowers. The stone wall would be supported by a low hedge behind it. This BOUNDARY (Alexander's third Fundamental Property) between front yard and sidewalk is thick enough to allow passers-by to feel comfortable lingering without feeling as if they are intruding on our privacy, yet permeable enough not to feel unwelcom-

Street as an Outdoor Room- Shaped by Houses and Trees

FIG. 11. THE STREET AS A ROOM The street, the second largest center to be considered in designing Home "B," dictated that it be considered a room connecting the house to the neighborhood. [Page 35]FIG. 12. Future Hedge, 3' High- Fountain Sidewalk as Room Low Plantings with Sma Scale Leaves and Flowers Street Street Trees HOME "B" AND ITS FRONT YARD AND SIDEWALK The space between the house and the sidewalk is a center that connects the house to the street and simultaneously creates a protective boundary against the street.

ing and separate from the front yard. Opposite the front door and just off the sidewalk, we placed a small fountain, the side walls of which are at a convenient sitting height. The fountain participates in both the life of the sidewalk and the life of the entrance yard, cementing the two through DEEP INTERLOCK AND AMBI- GUITY, the eighth Fundamental Property (see Fig. 12).

The weakest aspect of the sidewalk is its rather thin boundary along the street edge-a three-feet wide strip of grass. The high level of truck and car traffic along this road requires more separation between the street and the sidewalk to ensure the safety and security of pedestrians, especially children. Years ago, when the street was narrower, the space between the sidewalk and the curb was larger and afforded more protection. However, the City owns the thin strip of land, and it is not possible to remedy the situation.

ENTRANCE YARD

Looking at the world as an unbroken field of centers in which space and matter are considered equals in the making of the environment, we considered the space between the house and the sidewalk as a center that could, at the same time, connect the house to the street and create a protective boundary against the street. The yard was given its overall GOOD SHAPE (the sixth Fundamental Property) by the house, the street trees, and the two large flanking pine trees. Rather than a conventional walkway connecting sidewalk to front door, we made a room-like center within the larger yard, formed with the help of the fountain and future flowering shrubs. The room was marked with a change in ground texture and shaped acoustically with the sound of the water in the fountain (see Fig. 13). Even in its primitive form, our teenage children and their friends use the space to hang out. Welcomes and farewells are enlivened by this center.

A strong LOCAL SYMMETRY (the ninth Fundamental Property), created by the front door, sidelights, and windows on the second floor reinforces the entrance yard. The [Page 36]TOM KUBALA Bench Bench -Future Canopy Stone Paving Room-Like Center Tall Flowers: Tall Cedar Sidewalk Transitional Center Grass Street

FIG. 13. HOME "B" AND ITS ENTRANCE-YARD PATIO A fountain reinforces, layers, and elaborates the sense of transition from street to home.

fountain became a part of this local symmetry while also acting as a barrier to straight-line access to the door from the sidewalk, forcing the visitor to make a change in direction, increasing the sense of transition from street to home (see Fig. 14). A future canopy over the front door will complete the POSITIVE SPACE (the fifth Fundamental Property) needed to give the entrance yard the strength of a true outdoor room.

Conclusion

It seems evident that modern uneasiness with the state of the built environment is as deeply seated as it is pervasive. There have been numerous design responses to this uneasiness, including the Congress for a New Urbanism, Sustainable Community Design, and Neo-Traditional Town Planning, to name just a few. As well organized as these efforts have been

FIG. 14. HOME "B," AN ELEMENT IN COOPERATION WITH A WHOLE NEIGHBORHOOD As Home "B" was built, each design and construction decision was considered in light of its contribution to the wholeness of the place and the surrounding neighborhood.

to date, none has dealt directly with wholeness, unity, and beauty as tangible constructs that can be implemented consciously. Until the value and meaning of wholeness, unity, and beauty are included, in an essential way, in the constellation of related thoughts, beliefs, and mental constructs that make up our worldview, our progress toward a coherent, living, and whole environment will remain painfully slow and ineffective.

The Bahá’í scriptures, with their call for freeing ourselves "from idle fancy and imitation," discerning the "oneness" in the world about us, and looking "into all [Page 37]

WHOLENESS AS A WORLDVIEW

things with a searching eye," offer such a worldview. The promise before us is a new paradigm, where the work of artists and architects can no longer be marginalized or deemed arbitrary by a fictitious gulf separating intellect from spirit. This worldview sees the unity of things as a fundamental verity and the artist as an equal to the scientist in the work of discovering the structure of our universe. Beauty will no longer be a captive to the eye of the beholder but will unfold as our knowledge of wholeness deepens.

As we struggle to plant the work of building in the rich soil of a new paradigm, it behooves us to explore the promising works of David Bohm and Christopher Alexander-works that offer a language of wholeness that we all may begin to speak in our collaborative efforts to build an environment that more faithfully reflects the emerging knowledge of the universe.

12. Bahá’u’lláh, Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, comp. Research Department of the Universal House of Justice, trans. Habib Taherzadeh et al., Ist pocket-sized ed. (Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1988, 1989 printing) 157. [Page 38]

The Opening

(Haifa, May 22-23, 2001)

1.

Elijah's cave, place of yearning, womb for highest human hopes and purest dreams, scarlet with sacrifice in dusky gloom- harbinger and herald- thrummed with the chantings of the King of Glory where He stood, appointing, where He watered with His tears the new Eden.

Terraced now, tiered with fountain-courtyards, happy with birds in its rising meadows, with mongoose and deer in floral dapplings- quintessence of Creation, full and exquisite with the Father's care, Who, with a gesture, arcs the Vineyard for His servant Son to tend.

From stony dark, from hatred's cruel cold, from anguished agony of many thousands who gladly poured their blood for the present hour, from evil's depths, we reach this height and see these solemn lights ascending to a golden dome and past it to the summit of God's glory. [Page 39]

THE OPENING

Children of the Father come Around His House to celebrate. Their costumes honor where they're from. The flute takes flight, the rolling drum Proclaims the fullness of the date. Children of the Father come. A mighty choir begins to hum, God's Morning to commemorate. Their costumes honor where they're from. Counted, one can't know their sum: Unseen millions throng the gate. Children of the Father come. Many to their love succumb, Grateful for their lofty fate. Their costumes honor where they're from. Each country is a string to strum. Each lowly offering is great. Children of the Father come. Their costumes honor where they're from.

-BRET BRENEMAN

Copyright 2003 by Bret Breneman

BRET BRENEMAN is an historic interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and an adjunct professor at Thomas Nelson Community College. He is finishing a manuscript of poems based on photographs at the Bahá’í World Center.

[Page 41]

Reviews of Books, Films, and Exhibits

FILM REVIEW BY MONIREH KAZEMZADEH RIVERS AND TIDES: ANDY GOLDSWORTHY WORKING WITH TIME DIRECTED, PHOTOGRAPHED, AND EDITED BY THOMAS RIEDELSHEIMER (GERMANY, 2000; RELEASED IN THE UNITED STATES, 2002; 90 MINUTES; IN ENGLISH)

Audiences in the United States can now see a spectacular film: Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time. Although the film was produced in 2000, it was only released in the United States in the summer of 2002. In Rivers and Tides German director, cinematographer, and editor Thomas Riedelsheimer records—with great artistry and an almost uncanny sense of the aesthetic—several creations by Andy Goldsworthy, an artist who works predominantly out of doors. Unlike many other well-known installation artists who import (and often impose) foreign objects onto a natural setting, Goldsworthy uses odds and ends found in nature—stones, flowers, branches, even icicles—to create simple works of breathtaking beauty in their own environment. His creations include what may be called sculptures—certainly they are three dimensional. But to describe the works in any detail is to lose the suspense cleverly created by Riedelsheimer. Part of the fun of the film is trying to figure out what Goldsworthy is doing with those twigs or leaves, or whatever other objects he may have in hand, and then enjoying a sense of surprise and wonder at the final products.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Goldsworthy’s work (hinted at by the title of the film) is that most of his works are intentionally ephemeral—laborious creations that last for a fleeting moment before being swept away by a tide, or a rushing stream, or a breath of wind. Goldsworthy welcomes these “transformations,” and audiences can see why: His works are beautiful as static [Page 42]creations, but they assume wondrous dimensions as they change and rejoin the nature from which they sprang. The film is narrated by Goldsworthy himself, offering answers to an unseen (and unheard) interlocutor. He is eloquent about what inspires him and why he works as he does (he creates his works as offerings to nature as much as for anyone or anything else). His uninterrupted responses form a verbal stream of consciousness that echoes the perpetual sounds of moving water, the rivers and tides with which he works.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PLANET EARTH: HOW THE NEW SCIENCE OF ASTROBIOLOGY CHARTS THE ULTIMATE FATE OF OUR WORLD

BOOK REVIEW BY ROBERT H. STOCKMAN PETER D. WARD AND DONALD BROWNLEE (NEW YORK: HENRY HOLT, 2002, 240 PAGES)

If one writes, or reads, biographies to understand the lessons a life can offer, what are the lessons taught by a biography of the planet Earth? Peter D. Ward, professor of geological sciences and zoology, and Donald Brownlee, professor of astronomy (both at the University of Washington) teamed up to explore that question. The book they have written—The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World—reviews the 4.5 billion years of the Earth's "life" already passed and projects forward to the next 7.5 billion years that remain.

Copyright 2003 by Robert H. Stockman.

Astronomical observations and geological studies in the last decade have made a detailed story possible for the first time.

The first three of the book's thirteen chapters discuss new advances in astrobiology—a field that examines the implications of research in geology, astronomy, and biochemistry in order to understand the conditions that make life possible throughout the universe. The next six chapters lay out six stages in the future life of the Earth: (1) the return of the ice age during the next few million years; (2) the reassembling, in 250 million years, of a supercontinent out of the current continents of the Earth and the implications of such a superconti-

ROBERT H. STOCKMAN received his Master's degree in planetary geology from Brown University in 1977 and his M.T.S. and Th.D. degrees in the history of religion in the United States from Harvard Divinity School in 1982 and 1990, respectively. He has published three books about American Bahá’í history and is director of the Wilmette Institute and the Institute for Bahá’í Studies, both in Wilmette, Illinois. [Page 43]

MATTERS OF OPINION

nent for life on the land and in the oceans; (3) the loss of higher plant life as the Earth's atmosphere runs out of carbon dioxide in about 500 million years; (4) the end of animal life, also in about 500 million years, when surface temperatures become too high for animals to exist; (5) the loss of the Earth's oceans in about 1 billion years when the surface temperature rises so high that the oceans evaporate into space; and (6) the melting of the Earth when the sun swells into a red giant star as it goes through its death throes in 7 or 8 billion years.

The last four chapters of The Life and Death of Planet Earth consider other topics related to life on Earth and other worlds: the danger of an asteroid collision (an asteroid ten kilometers [six miles] across hit the Earth 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs); whether humanity can leave any long-term trace in the universe; the implications of our understanding of the evolution of the Earth on our chances of finding sentient (intelligent) life elsewhere in the universe; and whether humanity can survive by leaving the Earth.

The Life and Death of Planet Earth conveys to the reader an amazement and appreciation for the complex processes that make our home a cradle for life and sentience and a sobering reminder that those processes cannot endure forever; indeed, they may already be breaking down. Many factors work together to make possible an oxygen-rich world covered with liquid water. Had the Earth been several times larger, its atmosphere might have retained so much solar heat (through the so-called greenhouse effect) that it would have experienced roasting temperatures. Had it been several times smaller, the water and air would have escaped into space. Had the moon not been present, there would have been no tides, greatly reducing the size of the zone washed by the ocean's waves where life could move from sea to land. Furthermore, the moon's orbital momentum helps to stabilize the Earth's axis, reducing extreme changes in the Earth's tilt and thus moderating its climate.

Two factors, Ward and Brownlee explain, determine the surface temperature of a planet: the intensity of sunlight falling on it and the heat held in by greenhouse gases (principally carbon dioxide). The sun's heat output was 30 percent less when it first began to shine, and the physics of nuclear fusion dictate that the sun's energy output will increase two-and-a-half times before it begins to die. Quoting Robert Frost's poem "some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice," the authors argue that, while we have ice in our short-term future, fire is the Earth's ultimate fate.

Yet ice has not dominated our past. In two brief periods (geologically speaking) 2.3 billion and 700 million years ago, the planet appears to have frozen over completely (all the way to the equator). Three billion years ago, the early Earth's thick blanket of carbon dioxide held in the sun's feeble rays, raising the mean surface temperature of the Earth to as much as 70 degrees centigrade (158 degrees Fahrenheit), a temperature so high it may have slowed the evolution of life. At least the Earth avoided the fate of Venus, which, in its early life, was probably endowed with oceans and an atmosphere similar to Earth's. But, with twice as much sunlight (because of its greater proximity to the sun), Venus evolved in a very different direction. Its oceans boiled and escaped into space and its carbon dioxide led to a [Page 44]greenhouse effect that today keeps its surface temperature at 450 degrees centigrade (800 degrees Fahrenheit). Mars, in contrast, with half as much sunlight as Earth and a much thinner atmosphere, may have barely thawed in its early days and today is in deep freeze.

The quantity of carbon dioxide gas in the Earth's atmosphere was the primary reason the mean surface temperature of the Earth steadily declined throughout its first 4 billion years. The weathering of rocks at the Earth's surface involves chemical processes that convert carbon dioxide into carbonate minerals, thereby removing the gas from the atmosphere. But not all of the carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere; another geological process was at work to return it to the air. The Earth's surface is divided into plates, each of which is a sort of giant conveyor belt that rides on the Earth's mantle, a hot layer of rock with the consistency of taffy. The plate travels from a mid-ocean ridge toward an oceanic trench where it plunges into the mantle—the technical term for the plunge is subducting—melting and releasing the plate's water and carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere as gases escaping from erupting volcanoes. Thus much of the carbonate rock ultimately is recycled and restored to the atmosphere, with the exception of the carbonates that slowly accumulate on the continents, which are made of lower-density rocks that are too buoyant to subduct.

Some 3.6 billion years ago, single-celled bacteria began to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, thus cooling the Earth. About 530 million years ago, the atmospheric oxygen reached a critical mass that allowed the evolution of larger, multicellular organisms equipped with nervous systems. The subsequent explosion of life filled the oceans with advanced forms and created complex ecosystems. A little over 100 million years later, plants invaded the land as well, their roots stabilizing the surface, slowing the weathering of rocks and the creation of carbonates, and creating complex soils. Since that period the biological and geological processes have worked together to keep the Earth's mean surface temperature between 5 and 25 degrees Centigrade (41 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit; currently it is 15 degrees Centigrade or 59 degrees Fahrenheit). The relatively stable climate has allowed tremendous diversification of life and the eventual evolution of a sentient species: humanity.

Unfortunately for the sentient beings, however, it is no longer possible to maintain a temperate climate by matching the steady increase of solar output with a steady decrease in carbon dioxide because the latter has now fallen to such a low level that plants are having difficulty obtaining it from the air. Thus, over the next few hundred million years, the Earth will see a slow but steady increase in its mean surface temperature.

Ward and Brownlee note that humanity has made the problem of global warming potentially worse through burning coal and petroleum. The atmosphere now has 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide, industrialization having pushed the level upward from about 270 parts per million. If the carbon dioxide level continues to rise, it will raise the Earth's mean temperature significantly, melting glaciers and raising the sea level. Such a rise will wreak havoc with the world's economies and ecosystems. However, the authors argue that over the next few thousand years, global warming may [Page 45]

MATTERS OF OPINION

actually prove to be beneficial, given that, over the last 2.5 million years, the Earth has been in an ice age most of the time. Our current interglacial stage will last only a few thousand more years; greenhouse gases may postpone the inevitable return of the ice. Ward and Brownlee draw a vivid portrait of the impact of a new ice age, with glaciers half a kilometer (sixteen hundred feet) high crushing New York, Chicago, Seattle, and London, and arctic winds blowing off the ice, converting much of the United States and Europe into a frozen desert. The land gained from the lowering of the sea level by 130 meters (400 feet) would not equal that lost to the glaciers. Starvation, warfare, and possibly the destruction of civilization would result, with the remaining human beings confined to the tropical zone.

The era of glaciation that the Earth has been experiencing for the last 2.5 million years, however, is likely to last only a few million years (2 to 10 million more, Ward and Brownlee speculate). The drifting of the continents will change the climatic pattern and move large land areas away from the poles. Life will then have about 250 million more years of pleasant, temperate conditions before the movement of the continents will bring about their collision, assembling a single, giant continent.

A supercontinent, with mountainous edges, vast central deserts, and an extreme climate, has existed at least twice in the past. While the creation of such a land mass would permit highways joining former North America to former Europe Ward and Brownlee say that most likely the Atlantic, currently widening, will close the highways would have to cross a chain of formidable volcanoes running along the former eastern coast of North America and then a high mountain range forced up by the collision of Europe and Africa with the Americas.

Eventually the supercontinent will break up again. The smaller continents, surrounded by oceans, will have fewer deserts and more rainfall (because the rain comes from the evaporation of seawater) and milder climates (because the sea takes longer to heat up and cool down than the land and thus moderates the climate of the land near it). But by then, perhaps half a billion years from now, the steady decline in carbon dioxide from the weathering of rocks-which over hundreds of millions of years will overwhelm any carbon dioxide humanity adds to the atmosphere--will bring about the steady decline of the biosphere. Plants unable to tolerate carbon dioxide levels of 10 parts per million or lower will become extinct. Eventually carbon dioxide will all but disappear from the atmosphere, and only algae and bacteria will be able to survive. Animals that can eat algae and bacteria will persist, but the loss of plants will cause a steady decline in the level of oxygen in the atmosphere until only insects and simple organisms will remain.

The ecosystem will also face a steady increase in solar intensity and the heating of the Earth. Once the surface temperature exceeds 45 degrees Centigrade, organisms with mitochondria in their cells the factories that generate most of the cell's energy-will become extinct, as mitochondria cannot function at high temperatures. At that point the earth will lose insects, sponges, fungi, and other multicellular organisms as well. The era of the animals, which began 570 million years ago, will end about 500 million years from now. As Ward [Page 46]and Brownlee note, the evolution of life will essentially reverse, and the earth will return to the biological simplicity of its early eons, dominated by single-celled algae and bacteria that lack a cell nucleus and mitochondria because nothing else will be able to tolerate the heat and the lack of carbon dioxide and oxygen.

But even the biosphere resulting from reverse evolution will not be stable, for the sun will grow still hotter. A billion or so years from now the surface of the Earth will reach about 70 degrees Centigrade (158 degrees Fahrenheit), a critical temperature at which water vapor will begin to rise much higher into the atmosphere than at present and escape from the planet much more rapidly. The oceans are currently losing a meter of water per billion years to outer space. A billion years hence the rising surface temperatures will accelerate the process enormously, and the entire hydrosphere will be gone in a few hundred million years. The plains on the ocean bottoms will become great salt flats, and all of the Earth's surface, an enormous desert. Bacterial life will survive around volcanic hot springs and other sources. The water escaping from the Earth's interior through volcanoes will no longer be replaced by the wet sea floor's being subducted into the Earth's mantle, causing a drying out of the crust and mantle and a stiffening of the now dry and more brittle crustal rocks. The changes will probably stop subduction entirely in 1 or 2 billion years.

The 6 billion years that follow—the remaining half of the Earth's life—will see steady increases in surface temperature as the sun continues to heat up, eventually sterilizing the earth entirely. The last billion years will see the sun's energy output rise from two-and-a-half times its current level to several thousand times, heating the outer layers of the sun and expanding them, creating a type of star known as a red giant. Mercury and then Venus will be swallowed by the expanding sun, and the Earth may share the same fate. Calculations indicate the edge of the sun will just about reach the Earth's orbit. The outflow of gas escaping from the sun will slow the moon's rotation around the Earth and cause it to spiral in and collide with its molten primary. Finally, a series of explosions will blow off about half the sun's mass, and the rest will collapse to form a tiny white dwarf star, in which all fusion has ceased. If a part of the Earth survives the red giant phase, it will cool to a dead, black cinder.

The Earth will suffer its death in an unimaginably distant future, far after every human being alive on it today will be dead, probably far after the human species has achieved its purpose (about which the authors do not speculate) and become extinct. Yet the Earth's ultimate fate, as postulated by Ward and Brownlee, provides much to ponder. They note that new geological and astrobiological research indicates that the age of the period of animal life on the Earth—which scientists used to assume would last 8 billion years, until the death of the sun—will actually be closer to 1 billion years. A consequence of this research is that far fewer worlds in the universe will have enough time to evolve intelligent life. One can easily imagine that sentient species will evolve on planets already in rapid decline from global warming and will have their potential cut short by the deteriorating conditions. Indeed, entire species and the billions of individuals making them up could be [Page 47]rendered extinct fairly rapidly by their dying central star, raising issues of theodicy (the justice and mercy of God) far graver than, say, the holocaust of World War II.

Ward and Brownlee, throughout The Life and Death of Planet Earth, stress the uniqueness of the conditions that permit life and sentience and thus convey a sense of the preciousness of this world. Bahá’u’lláh notes that “every man of discernment, while walking upon the earth, feeleth indeed abashed, inasmuch as he is fully aware that the thing which is the source of his prosperity, his wealth, his might, his exaltation, his advancement and power is, as ordained by God, the very earth which is trodden beneath the feet of all men.”¹ A book such as The Life and Death of Planet Earth helps remind the reader of the importance of preserving the rare combination of conditions that makes life and “prosperity” possible. It impresses on us the importance of careful study of the problem of greenhouse gases, for their increase has grave implications for the Earth’s climate and biosphere.

In a sense, Bahá’u’lláh recognizes the uniqueness of the Earth when He says: “Great is thy blessedness, O earth, for thou hast been made the foot-stool of thy God, and been chosen as the seat of His mighty throne.”² The statement need not imply that the Earth is the center of God’s creation. Rather, it could simply reflect the Earth’s importance as the cradle of humanity and, therefore, a site of revelation. A book such as The Life and Death of Planet Earth is not a place where one would expect to find the Earth portrayed as having a special spiritual station. Yet one of the implied arguments throughout the book is the Earth’s uniqueness a scientific parallel to the theological argument.

Bahá’u’lláh also notes that “every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute.”³ While science virtually guarantees that life exists elsewhere in the universe—the universe is far too big for it to be absent—it also offers proof of the Earth’s rarity and specialness. In that light, perhaps the passage about the ubiquity and abundance of life in the universe should be understood to be hyperbolic and nonliteral (underlining the existence of life somewhere else in the universe), spiritual (referring to spiritual, but not physical beings) or future-oriented (there may be no life on Venus or Mercury today, but perhaps biologists will develop life forms able to survive there in the future). Certainly it reinforces the notion that physical life exists elsewhere in the universe. It offers hope that, when the Earth’s potential is exhausted, another world will take shape around a new star of the right size and composition, the planet will cool to the requisite temperatures, and a new cradle for life will form. The story of Earth will be repeated again in a new form in a universe that knows no end.

1. Bahá’u’lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, trans. Shoghi Effendi, 1st pocket-size ed. (Wilmette, IL, USA: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1988, 1999 printing) 44. 2. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, trans. Shoghi Effendi, Ist pocket-size ed. (Wilmette, IL, USA: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1976, 1999 printing) 30. 3. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings 163.

[Page 49]

A Special Issue on Travel

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: December 2003 SUBMISSION DEADLINE: June 2004 For publication in late 2004

In our modern world, growing numbers of people assume that it is their right (and increasingly their practice) to travel as they wish, sometimes over vast distances, and for any number of personal reasons. Travel has unarguably brought the world closer together. Travel contributes to greater understandings of cultures, histories, and peoples and has helped to shape an emerging sense of world citizenship. The term travel, like the term tourism, suggests freedom of movement and the desirable mixture of cultures and peoples.

But it wasn't always so. In earlier ages most people had no personal right to move from place to place. For most, travel meant short, sanctioned, carefully circumscribed journeys. The privileged few might, of course, travel greater distances, and do so for more diverse purposes than could the great masses of people. However, travel in those earlier times often had overtly symbolic social, religious, or governmental content. Travel almost always was, in part, an expression and exercise of power and social control, part of the exercise of governance. Today, mobility is one of the defining characteristics of our age.

Manuscript Submission Information

Submissions (articles, reviews, photo-essays, creative writing, poems, and the like) to this issue might wish to take up some of the following questions:

• Sacred travel in a secular modern world: How do the Bahá’í writings or those of other religious traditions speak of travel and mobility? How is pioneering or religious missionary work related to sacred writings on travel?
• Tourism and Ecology and Culture: Can one speak today of unspoiled beauty and authentic cultures if one only encounters it/them through travel and tourism? How has travel blurred cultural distinctions? What are the ecological implications of travel? How has travel contributed to either economic equality or increased poverty? What can travel writing teach us about new cultures and peoples? Do National Parks preserve nature or accommodate tourists?
• Meta, virtual, and imaginative travel: How do new technologies make it possible to travel without physically going anywhere? How has literature and, more recently, film already made such "travels" possible?
• Travel and suffering: How is travel linked to the exercise of power in the case of exiles, refugees, or those who have been banished? How might Bahá’u’lláh’s banishment and exile be related to conceptions of travel and place in the Bahá’í writings? How does immigration change ideas of nationality and identity? How has travel contributed to the recent explosion in exilic and diasporic novels and film? How does war change the way the terms travel and home are understood?

For a copy of the World Order style sheet for preparing a manuscript (and other tips), send an e-mail to <worldorder@usbnc.org>, or write the address below.

Submissions to the journal will be subject to external blind peer review if they fall outside the expertise of the editorial board or upon request by the author.

Manuscripts (in Word or WordPerfect) should be sent to World Order, Dr. Betty J. Fisher, Managing Editor, 4516 Randolph Road, Apt. 99, Charlotte, NC, 28211-2933, USA or <worldorder@usbnc.org>.

World Order has been published quarterly since 1966 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

Religion Society Polity Arts WORLD ORDER [Page 50]

Forthcoming...

Global Cinema

with articles on...

Iranian films and Western audiences Indigenous cinema Film festivals in Hong Kong and Hawaii Conversations with Bahá’í filmmakers

and...

Explorations by a number of authors on aspects of globalization and internationalism, including Deborah Thomas’ review of Charles Carnegie’s Postnationalism Prefigured

Jim Stokes on Shakespeare as a touchstone in modern London theater

Julio Savi reflecting on Alessandro Bausani, an Italian scholar of Islam

Kim Meilicke Douglas interviews Susan Atefat-Peckham, the 2000 National Poetry Series award winner