Do We Invent or Discover?

All “creatives” live in terror of not being creative. I am one of those creatives, an architect. For the last one hundred years, the century described as “Modernist,” architects were told that beauty is created via a defined “canon,” a theology of applied aesthetics. If you controlled any design’s architect-defined distillations of form, surface and space, you were creative. And, indeed, beauty was revealed in that human-defined canon — Maya Lin’s Vietnam Wall, Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal, le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel, and thousands more canon-compliant buildings impart the thrill we all have when we encounter beauty.

But what if beauty was always there, and we just happen to perceive it? What if the only perceivers of beauty, us humans, cannot create it, but reveal it? I help to make buildings, and that involves finding beauty in them, so the origin story of beauty has a personal meaning.

But the beauty that is found in the encounters that instantly thrill us is within every one of us. We are all “creatives” if creativity is simply seeing what is before us. To me the words of the Jewish existentialist Martin Buber, “All actual life is encounter,” crystalizes the reality of a world that we do not create, but discover.

The daunting truth for creatives is that discovery cannot be controlled by us. We humans all want to control our lives; we want to create. And we do. We build automobiles, televisions, artificial intelligence. But our genius is in the adaptation of what we encounter: what we were given by God. When we confront our inevitable inability to box with God, each of us becomes brother Fredo Corleone in The Godfather, declaring “I’m smart too!” My tribe, the creatives, are just the Fredo found in every human, hoping to justify ourselves by creation of what we think we can control.

But if we could create beauty, then every painting, poem, or beef stroganoff would induce the gush we feel when we encounter a baby, or a sunrise. No, we do not create the stroganoff — we combine the meat, sour crème, and just a little salt and cook it at the right temperature (none of which we invented). But we try.

Architects (including myself) try to conjure beauty. Some scientists devote themselves to determine a theory of literally everything. Not surprising in our humanity is the recent, explicit quest to define “A Theory of Everything” in which we, who are part of Everything, seek to define it, like architects writing our own canon — a theology that defines our own success. But I think that the Old Testament, composed of all of our canons, our “Law,” may be expanded to see a New Testament of, well, appropriately enough, God in us.

Some architects have come to know what we do not know. Rather than be the frustrated Fredo, unable to truly invent, some of us see the last century of aesthetic justification as a waste of neurons. Some creatives are seeing what Martin Buber realized at the dawn of the last century’s desperate faith in human invention, that humans do not invent beauty; we encounter it.

One of those was Christopher Alexander, perhaps the single most effective polymath architect of his generation. He died last year at the age of 85. Over six decades of relentless creation and research involving teaching, writing, building, inspiring technology, planning, pedagogy, and aesthetic theory, Alexander created a legacy whose breadth and complexity is difficult to apprehend. His writings have sold millions upon millions of copies. Those writings and theories cross-pollenated to the exploding world of computers, where his seminal book on architecture, A Pattern Language, generated a generation of computer programming theory.

His acolytes found me via an article I wrote and asked me to give a talk to their effort, “Building Beauty.” After five years I am on its Board of Directors, never having met Alexander, or explicitly used his extremely defined and articulate methods of discovering beauty. I am no practitioner of his exquisitely expressed methodology, but I do share his beliefs on the origin of creativity.

At the end of his professional life, Alexander wrote an article titled “The Long Path that Leads from the Making of our World to God.” For Alexander, the world is “the garden in which we live” and we its gardeners, tending to and expressing what we have already been given. Consequently,

the sacredness of the physical world — and the potential of the physical world for sacredness … is a powerful, surprising, and sure path to recognizing, and providing small steps towards understanding the existence of God, whatever God may be, as a necessary part of the reality of the universe.

For this world-class creative and thinker, creativity comes by listening to the God who made us rather than through conformity to “The Canon” that all architects were steeped in in the 20^th century. I think a lifetime devoted to understanding design and humanity made Alexander recognize what was in plain sight:

There are two approaches to the reality of God: one is faith, the other is reason. Faith works easily, when it is present, but it is luck, or one’s early history in family life, or a blinding insight of some kind that determines whether one has faith. Reason is much harder. One cannot easily approach the reality of God, by means of reason … In conventional philosophy, there is nothing which allows one to test the reality of God, or of visions inspired by God. But when a person is asked to compare two buildings, or two doorways, and to decide which one is closer to God, this question will be answered in the same way by different people, and with a remarkably high reliability.

Realizing the truth that Alexander expressed what I have seen in me, that “design” is “an action in which we give ourselves up, and lay what we have in our hearts, at the door of that fiery furnace within all things, which we may call God.” Alexander knew and I know that in the pinnacle of human entitlement, architecture, we are continually discovering the beauty that is a gift to us, rather than a transacted and earned result of our genius.

Even if we know that we did not make ourselves, why should humans accept that the aesthetic canons that we craft are just missions we invent to control what already exists? It is only in our encounters with reality that we know what has been given to us. Alexander spent fifty years in a fully secular world before he shared what he knew to be true.

In a personal letter the 16th century artist Michelangelo said, “The sculptor arrives at his end by taking away what is superfluous.” The paraphrase of this quote is often expressed as “I carved and carved until I set the angel free.” Since there was no mediator, no judge, no canon between Michelangelo and the block of marble that he carved, he simply encountered the beauty God gave him to see beneath the superfluous.

Truth, that “theory of everything” to which we aspire, is not earned or created, but disclosed to us completely out of our control. This pattern of revelation and response lies at the heart of Christianity. The Apostle Paul encountered a revelation of Jesus, to be given what he did not otherwise grasp. My presence in Building Beauty is a Pauline one — the outsider become a brother. Like Michelangelo, and me, and you.

Saul was blind and now Paul can see. None of us learn how to see, that sight is given to us. If I were to fashion for myself eyeglasses and then declare I have created sight, I would, to paraphrase Paul, know God and yet neither glorify him as God nor give thanks, becoming vain in my reasoning (Rom 1:21). Welcome to architects. Finding out that the beauty in life is already there, seen without our glasses, is far more difficult than wrapping myself in the swaddling clothes of the canon.

Though we architects and other “creatives” may glory in our own supposed genius, they are more discoverers than inventors. The beauty of this world cannot be made, only seen. Beauty is not created by us, but our joy in its experience can be the result of our seeing it in our creations.

The source of all truth, and the fount from whom all blessings flow has nothing to do with our canons. Creatives, like Christopher Alexander and Michelangelo — and you and me — are children of God, continually discovering what we have been given.