Beautifying the Illusory Boundaries

When one considers what architecture really is, at its very core, as both an art and an entity, it is little more than a boundary, and an illusory one at that. We fabricate these arbitrary notions such as "inside" and "outside," "my house" and "your house," "public" and "private," and so forth, and then we create some boundaries to tell the difference between the two.

Is there such a thing as "inside" and "outside"? Can the two exist before we starting throwing up some walls? Clearly not. The inside does not exist until the walls are built. So what is "out"-side if there is no inside? Aren't the two mutually inclusive of each other? Does not one's existence depend on the other's existence? Certainly the same can be said for public-private, my house-your house. We simply fabricate these interrelations that depend on one another. We create the opposites via our own constructions. We literally construct the delineation of these opposites.

Architecture clearly depends on constructing the division between "inside" and "outside", two things that never existed until we built them. What is amazing about architecture is, in all its simplicity as the creator of divisions, it is merely beautifying those boundaries. All the history books, all the theory books, all the technical, philosophical, and whatnot books on architecture are little more than how to deal with this boundary. The whole essence of architectural theory is how to work with these boundaries (illusory boundaries, because the opposites didn't exist until we fabricated the walls that divide them, and don't exist without those walls), whether it be: dressing the wall up this way, or stylize that hole in the wall (call it a "window" if you will) in this manner, or don't design the door in the wall that way, et cetera.

The same can be said for anything we fabricate, and religion is not exception. There is this arbitrary division between what is human and what is divine, and we imagine there being a division between the two. All the religions of the world are little more than how the walls between the divine and the secular are to be dressed up. The Christians certainly dressed up their illusory boundaries between the divine and the human than the Hindus did, or the Mayan to the Chaldean, the Inuits to the Taoists.

The concept of culture can be viewed in much the same light: how such-and-such a culture dressed up their boundaries between what is acceptable and unacceptable, which is different from a completely different culture.

And certainly the same can be said for the arbitrary division between science and religion. Science has a certain way of dressing up the division between truth and falsehood, and religion has another. Both are in search of truth, whatever that truth may be and for whatever reason (what is "truth" without it having a wall thrown up between it and falsehood?), though their means of finding truth are different (i.e. how they dress up the boundaries).

This is getting tedious. But the point of it is: what is this or that without the boundaries we, human beings - with our "rational" and "intelligent" minds - have created to divide things that didn't seem all that bothered being mingled together in the chaos of pre-creation? Whatever this or that is, the entire fabric of our reality is merely a product of our making. And because different cultures made things differently, the only difference between Muslims and Christians, Americans and Chinese, Moses and Barack Obama is how these illusory edges have been stylized.

Suddenly, all our differences seem really superficial, and that's because they are.