The grounds for caring architectural practice: how aspiring life's purpose as wellbeing is architectural value

Abstract

A comprehensive orientation to science and technology, as thought ‘answers’ for problems and design is not essentially caring nor humane and has inherent destructiveness to the planet’s life. This paper proposes that architecture is original to dwelling and it is 'caring' as questioning life’s purpose. Its role is to provide care as environments that support wellbeing. The built environment that provides wellbeing is caring. Wellbeing is defined as cascading out of life’s purpose. Life’s purpose is finding out what that is. Spiritual practice engages this. Spirituality in the form of rajayoga and its antecedents brings a 'more original' 'alternate cognitive knowledge' that inform discriminating architectural value from the profession’s hegemony of technological problems and design. The Verknüpfung or ‘mutual claiming of one another’ of architecture and spirituality is described in outline according to my dissertation to show how architectural value may be generated in a space of discriminating means (technology) from ends in dwelling (architecture). The conclusion is that the technicist value proxy is replaced by re-allocating the discriminative capacity of consciousness to provide practice of architectural value. Caring architectural practice that serves wellbeing is based in Mind rather than body. This is illustrated with five vectors of research questioning how matters of dwelling presence aspiration at loci to provide caring architecture for realizing such practice.