Craft Monastery
Salona Quarry
Salona, Clinton County, PA
Caulen Heil
The Pennsylvania State University Department of Architecture
ARCH 491 Design Research Studio Half Commodity & Half Something Else
Professor Eduardo Mediero
Fall 2020 (Virtual Instruction)
Overview
This prompt dealt with communal living as an alternative to standard housing today. I was tasked with creating not only a community but also an ideology, philosophy, & societal structure which would inform the architecture.
This community is a confederation of craftspeople who worship through creating. They engage in a monastic lifestyle. Their goal is to achieve self-actualization & transcendence. They view themselves, the objects they create, & nature as part of an extended family. There is no profit to be made in this community, rather a focus on worshipping, creating, & bonding. This is the ideal for our society, & architecture as a reflection of it, to move towards: mutualist, spiritual, & ecologically oriented.
Site
The site is a quarry in the area of Lock Haven, marked in red on the map. It is part of a series of quarries along the West Susquehanna owned by Hanson Aggregates, a multinational corporation that deals in a variety of commodities from construction materials to tobacco. This site provides the opportunity to heal the environmental damage that has been done. It provides means of constructing from local materials, mainly stone and timber. The location of more quarries down river provides for expansion of more communities.
Narrative
This community directly challenges & seeks to improve upon the series of cyclical issues perpetuated by our socio-economic system. They go as follows:
•Mass Production
o We derive meaning through material consumption.
o Mass production is necessary to meet that demand.
o This limits us from achieving self-actualization & transcendence.
•We have no connection with nature
o We identify with our jobs & things.
o Consumerism is the root of this severance.
o We are blinded by consumption & do not care about the damage we a causing ourselves & our planet.
•This system is unsustainable
o Because we need to mass produce things & have no connection with nature we are running an ecological deficit.
o We are consuming & extracting more than the earth can produce.
•Animist societies have a deep connection with nature & have no need for mass production. They did not have these problems.
What is Animism? The head of the American Indian Studies Program at Cal State University Enrique Salmon describes it as a “Kincentric Ecology”
He says:
“Indigenous people view both themselves & nature as part of an extended ecological family that shares ancestry & origins. It is an awareness that life in any environment is viable only when humans view the life surrounding them as kin. The kin, or relatives, include all the natural elements of an ecosystem. Indigenous people are affected by &, in turn, affect the life around them”
Go-shintai is a concept found within one of the largest animist religions in the current world, Shinto. Go-Shintai are objects worshipped at shrines as repositories in which spirits reside. These objects exemplify quality, durability, & spirit. These crafted objects are part of the ecological kinship in a ritualistic manner. This is where craft comes in: it is an alternative mode of production that is sustainable Craft focuses on quality & durability rather than quantity & disposability.
