Inpetration - Incarnation

Their faces come back to me in my falling asleep and in my waking.  Their eyes are looking into mine, mine into theirs.  We are smiling.  Even as we are looking into each others’ eyes, our peripheral vision is taking in the changes that the faces have undergone in these intervening (good Lord!) 20 years since they were my students.  We had come together in one of the really grand places in Detroit, old diamonds in the new rough.  They had done this kind of thing before, planning a big, dressy party in places we forget about, places that deserve not only to be remembered, but to be enjoyed.  Twenty years ago on this same Belle Isle, the 985 acre island park in the Detroit River, the Marusich Brothers coordinated the annual Beaux Arts Ball, renting generators and

spotlights that brought out the nighttime glory of the old Casino here, not a place for gambling ,but dancing and relaxation.  They purchased bolts of spring-colored fabric and draped the building, celebrating spring in the custom of Paris’ Ecole de Beaux Arts.  This weekend, it was the Detroit Yacht Club in which we met, to initiate the development efforts toward the Volterra International Residential College, a dream that bespeaks the education that these bright young people received at University of Detroit, now UDM. 

What brought Kathy and I to the event was not, I confess, the prospect of seeing these faces.  The thought had not even occurred to me.  We came simply to be in the same room with Bruno Leon, FAIA, the founder of the School of Architecture, the man who had served as their Dean.  I had come to know Bruno and these his students in the middle of the Arab Oil Embargo in the late 1980s, when the recession that it caused slowed architectural work to a standstill, when our students had to struggle to find work.  My job was to help them, in the middle of this record unemployment, to find paid experience in this field they had taken to be their calling.  Bruno didn’t coddle them or pity them.  He called them instead to their highest nobility, to the humanization of the very mess that we found ourselves in.  He called them to find in that recession not a reason to abandon their dreams, but to develop within themselves the courage that the challenges required, to build their mental and spiritual strength by the uphill climb that the circumstance required.   

Perhaps that is why their faces come so clearly and insistently and powerfully into my mind’s sight now, two days later.  There in another beautiful building on that same worn island, these same courageous dreamers talked deep into the night not about the challenges of this recession or this tough job market for architects, but about this great dream of turning a storage building in Tuscany into a year-round school, making it possible for every current and future student to experience what they had in Volterra.  It was more than Etruscan architecture and Roman ruins.  It was the same thing that had stopped Bruno Leon mid sentence as tears held back his words.  It was the humanity of the society there, the fabric of life that showed them that good architecture is not trendy or titillating, but what I would call the inpetration of the human spirit, that spirit taking form in stone, in structure.  A good built space takes the shape of the good of the culture that inhabits it.

And it is just so that these faces are so beautiful, so haunting because they are the incarnation of the spirits of their inhabitants, these courageous, tenacious, striving young people who found themselves in Bruno’s school - spirit made flesh.  There is a final love story here, a further harmonic.  The symbol of the School of Architecture is the chambered nautilus, the symbol of life not only ancient but incessant in its striving, not for survival, but for extropy, the term coined by Tom Bell (T.O. Morrow) and defined by Max More in January 1988 as "the extent of a living or organizational system's intelligence, functional order, vitality, energy, life, experience, and capacity and drive for improvement and growth.”  And here in these faces of a generation of Bruno’s students is validation of that symbol.  As they had entered and exited the building that they shared with him, they had walked under his guiding motto: “Beauty is the Flower of Humanization.”  And here they are, faces beautiful because they flower, because they come to this jewel in the Detroit River to incarnate that motto, to follow in the words in the closing stanza of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem The Chambered Nautilus: 

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea! 

Please click on the link below.  See the "dome more vast" that Wladek Fuchs, AIA and his people are building in Volterra.  Help if you can. http://www.volterra-detroit.org/