9 Tranquility
Tranquility: quiet, stillness, peace, joy, simplicity.
In principle, a room is the sanctification and illumination of a life. It is your life made manifest. The room itself, like a cradle or a gathering together of a life, is, in its essence, the place of a thousand joys and sorrows, the receptacle of your life and your children’s lives, the embodiment, in physical order, of what your spirit has been and has become.
That is, perhaps, the true purpose of a room. It is comfort, but true comfort, an inner spiritual comfort. When I describe it as spiritual it sounds ascetic, and too much connected with self-awareness. A good room is utterly comfortable. It is the real comfort, the comfort of the soul: but also the comfort of pillows, soft light, sounds just right for the ear, birds singing, a solitary vine running up the front door and bearing one, two, then three blossoms, the comfort of the paint outside on the building, the feeling of happiness I feel when I come home to the deep reddish rose of my own house, the cages with hamsters stuck all over the house, and the way my children squeal and play with those cages, the oil paints all over my studio, the voice of my dear wife singing, coming up from the rooms below. That is real comfort.
Too many people have lost all sense of this ordinary comfort.
The environment is almost meaningless if exterior comfort exists but interior comfort is not there. In a period of image consciousness, there are many places where developers or corporate clients are prepared to spend money outdoors (to impress people) — yet often not indoors where people live and work. I would like to suggest to you, therefore, in your work in buildings, to make every effort to allow the value of the indoor space — the rooms themselves, their tranquility, their geometry, their peacefulness — as much weight, as much money, and as much effort, as the outdoors.
Stand in the place. Ask yourself what you should put there — a certain stone on the mantel, a color on a piece of wall, the shape of an opening. For any one of these, you ask, does it generate greater tranquility in me? If it does, keep it. If it does not, reject it. Keep on doing that, for everything around you.
And then, get rid of everything else. Get rid of everything that does not create this sensation of tranquility in you.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/13 The Character of Rooms#