A year ago I was helping a friend of mine to prepare the posts and beams for a timber frame home. I was contemplating beauty. It is one of my interests to work with wood. The awesome smell of fresh wood, the soft material that can be shaped with our tools. Most of all it is the character of wood that fascinates me. The grown structure with branch knots, cracks from drying, and all the amazing lines and patterns of decades of growth.
Yet in the shop of my friend we were not working for my own home but for a customer of my friend. Demanding customers today want every piece to be perfect. No holes from fallen out branches, no cracks from drying, no visible splits or edges from working the wood. So we turn the beams to show only their best sides. We glue back together what has come apart. We grind all irregularities away until every beam looks and appears the same.
Yet in the shop of my friend we were not working for my own home but for a customer of my friend. Demanding customers today want every piece to be perfect. No holes from fallen out branches, no cracks from drying, no visible splits or edges from working the wood. So we turn the beams to show only their best sides. We glue back together what has come apart. We grind all irregularities away until every beam looks and appears the same.
I thought about beauty in the forest and in nature. I thought about the beautiful faces of everyday people. Then I realized the sterile and masked world of models, cold modern architecture, and our glossy and shiny magazines. The world is being bend to perfection. A world with no marks, no stories, no scars, becomes an empty world of illusions. Uniform masks like mass-produced Wal-Mart articles. Architecture aimed for functionality with no spirit and no natural beauty.
Then I remembered the 560 year old house my uncle in Germany lives in. An old timber frame building, where every piece of wood is a handmade symbol of craft mans ship, with the pride of tradesman from over 500 years ago. Every room is different. Every room has its own spirit, and its own energy. In times with limited amounts of timber and very hard work to harvest timer, nothing was wasted. Every piece was used. All natural and man-made irregularities are visible and compound to a beauty that can be felt when you enter each room.
The same principle applies to people too. There are the beautiful, but hollow models in unnatural postures. Shaped by make up artists, and in the end still photo shopped to perfection. Part of our uniformed society with the illusion of body shapes, that are architecture and not created or evolved.
Then I remembered the 560 year old house my uncle in Germany lives in. An old timber frame building, where every piece of wood is a handmade symbol of craft mans ship, with the pride of tradesman from over 500 years ago. Every room is different. Every room has its own spirit, and its own energy. In times with limited amounts of timber and very hard work to harvest timer, nothing was wasted. Every piece was used. All natural and man-made irregularities are visible and compound to a beauty that can be felt when you enter each room.
The same principle applies to people too. There are the beautiful, but hollow models in unnatural postures. Shaped by make up artists, and in the end still photo shopped to perfection. Part of our uniformed society with the illusion of body shapes, that are architecture and not created or evolved.
On the other end of the spectrum there are those people that are content with who they are and how they look. They are grateful for their health and their looks. Those people even age gracefully and gain more character then wrinkles. The unique difference is that those people can not only bee seen, but be felt - even by a blind person, as soon as they enter the room. Did you ever meet someone, a non-complainer, a healthy and fit person that radiates contentment and gratitude? As soon as their energy field reaches you, you feel uplifted. Negative thought subsides and the positive energy elevates the conversation to the good things in life. Abundance of possibilities replaces scarcity and fearful thoughts. Radiant health ends the talk about all our little aches and pains. Beauty has much more to do with radiation than with body shapes and measures. That applies to people as much as for nature or for architecture.
We wish you good luck in finding some real beauty today.
We wish you good luck in finding some real beauty today.