To succeed now, we have to continually refresh our stocks of knowledge by participating in relevant flows of new knowledge. But there are two challenges. First, knowledge doesn’t flow very easily, especially if it is tacit rather than explicit knowledge.

To keep it simple, think of tacit knowledge as the “know how” rather than the “know what.” Imagine trying to perform brain surgery after having read all the books you can find on the subject. The books are the explicit knowledge telling you what to do but knowing how to perform this kind of surgery critically depends on an extended apprenticeship process in which tacit knowledge gets communicated through observation and then by participating on the periphery of these operations. Accessing this kind of knowledge typically requires long-term trust-based relationships. And, in times of rapid change, tacit knowledge becomes increasingly valuable: because it’s the newest knowledge, it’s the most helpful in dealing with the latest changes in a fast-moving business landscape.

Here’s the second challenge. We can’t participate effectively in flows of knowledge–at least not for long–without contributing knowledge of our own. This occurs because participants in these knowledge flows don’t want free riding “takers”; they want to develop relationships with people and institutions that can contribute knowledge of their own. This is a huge hurdle for most executives who were trained to guard their knowledge carefully. Yet if they remain “takers” they will find themselves rapidly marginalized. Knowledge flows tend to concentrate among participants who are sharing with, and learning from, each other.

The upshot of this is that you’re on much more solid ground if you want to quote or otherwise reference a work for the purposes of rubbishing it than if you are doing so to celebrate it. This is one of the most perverse elements of copyright law: the reality that loving something doesn’t confer any right to make it a part of your creative life.

The damage here is twofold: first, this privileges creativity that knocks things down over things that build things up. The privilege is real: in the 21st century, we all rely on many intermediaries for the publication of our works, whether it’s YouTube, a university web server, or a traditional publisher or film company. When faced with legal threats arising from our work, these entities know that they’ve got a much stronger case if the work in question is critical than if it is celebratory. In the digital era, our creations have a much better chance of surviving the internet’s normal background radiation of legal threats if you leave the adulation out and focus on the criticism. This is a selective force in the internet’s media ecology: if you want to start a company that lets users remix TV shows, you’ll find it easier to raise capital if the focus is on taking the piss rather than glorifying the programmes.

Critique of Spiritual Narcisssism and the existing interpretations of religious pluralism

A few marginal voices notwithstanding, the search for a common core, universal essence, or single metaphysical world behind the multiplicity of religious experiences and cosmologies can be regarded as over. Whether guided by the exclusivist intuitionism of traditionalism or the fideism of theological agendas, the outcome—and too often the intended goal—of such universalist projects was unambiguous: the privileging of one particular spiritual or religious system over all others. In addition to universalism, the other attempts to explain religious divergences have typically taken one of the three following routes: exclusivism (“my religion is the only true one, the rest are false”), inclusivism (“my religion is the most accurate or complete, the rest are lower or partial”), and ecumenical pluralism (“there may be real differences between our religions, but all lead ultimately to the same end”).

The many problems of religious exclusivism are well known. It easily fosters religious intolerance, fundamentalist tendencies, and prevents a reciprocal and symmetrical encounter with the other where divergent spiritual viewpoints may be regarded as enriching options or genuine alternatives. In the wake of the scope of contemporary theodiversity, the defense of the absolute cognitive superiority of one single tradition over all others is more dubious than ever. Inclusivist and ecumenically pluralist approaches suffer from similar difficulties in that they tend to conceal claims for the supremacy of one or another religious tradition, ultimately collapsing into the dogmatism of exclusivist stances. Consider, for example, the Dalai Lama’s defense of the need of a plurality of religions. While celebrating the existence of different religions to accommodate the diversity of human dispositions, he contends that final spiritual liberation can only be achieved through the emptiness practices of his own school of Tibetan Buddhism, implicitly situating all other spiritual choices as lower. In a way, the various ways we have approached religious diversity—exclusivism, inclusivism, and ecumenical pluralism—can be situated along a continuum ranging from more gross to more subtle forms of “spiritual narcissism,” which elevate one’s favored tradition or spiritual choice as superior. The bottom line is that, explicitly or implicitly, religious traditions have persistently looked down upon one another, each believing that their truth is more complete or final, and that their path is the only or most effective one to achieve full salvation or enlightenment. Let us now look at several types of religious pluralism that have been proposed in response to this disconcerting situation.

Insufficiency of Earlier Varieties of Religious Pluralism

Religious pluralism comes in many guises and fashions. Before suggesting a participatory remedy to our spiritual narcissism in dealing with religious difference, I critically review here four major types of religious pluralism: ecumenical, soteriological, postmodern, and metaphysical.

As we have seen, ecumenical pluralism admits genuine differences among religious beliefs and practices, but maintains that they all ultimately lead to the same end. The problem with this apparently tolerant stance is that, whenever its proponents describe such religious goal, they invariably do it in terms that favor one or another specific tradition (e.g., union with God, nondual liberation, and so forth). This is why ecumenical pluralism not only degenerates into exclusivist or inclusivist stances, but also trivializes the encounter with “the other”— after all, what’s the point of engaging in interfaith exchanges if we already know that we are all heading toward the same goal? The contradictions of pluralistic approaches that postulate an equivalent end-point for all traditions have been pointed out by students of religion for decades. A genuine religious pluralism, it is today widely accepted, needs to acknowledge the existence of alternative religious aims, and putting all religions on a single scale will not do it.

In response to these concerns, a number of scholars have proposed a soteriological pluralism that envisions a multiplicity of irreducible “salvations” associated with the various religious traditions. Due to their diverse ultimate visions of reality and personhood, religious traditions stress the cultivation of particular human potentials or competences (e.g., access to visionary worlds, mind/body integration, expansion of consciousness, transcendence of the body, and so forth), which naturally leads to distinct human transformations and states of freedom. A variant of this approach is the postulation of a limited number of independent but equiprimordial religious goals and conceptually possible ultimate realities, for example, theism (in its various forms), monistic nondualism (à la Advaita Vedanta), and process nondualism (such as Yogacara Buddhism’s). The soteriological approach to religious difference, however, remains agnostic about the ontological status of spiritual realities, being therefore pluralistic only at a phenomenological level (i.e., admitting different human spiritual fulfillments), but not at an ontological or metaphysical one (i.e., at the level of spiritual realities).

The combination of pluralism and metaphysical agnosticism is also a chief feature of the postmodern solution to the problem of conflicting truth claims in religion. The translation of religious realities into cultural-linguistic fabrications allows postmodern scholars to explain interreligious differences as the predictable upshot of the world’s various religious beliefs, practices, vocabularies, or language games. Postmodern pluralism denies or brackets the ontological status of the referents of religious language, which are usually seen as meaningless, obscure, or parasitic upon the despotic dogmatism of traditional religious metaphysics. Further, even if such spiritual realities were to exist, our human cognitive apparatus would only allow us to know our culturally and linguistically mediated experience of them. Postmodern pluralism recognizes a genuine plurality of religious goals, but at the cost of either stripping religious claims of any extra-linguistic veridicality or denying that we can know such truths even if they exist.

A notable exception to this trend is the metaphysical or deep pluralism advocated by some process theologians. Relying on Alfred North Whitehead’s distinction between “God’s unchanging Being” and “God’s changing Becoming,” this proposal defends the existence of two ontological or metaphysical religious ultimates to which the various traditions are geared: God, which corresponds to the Biblical Yaveh, the Buddhist Sambhogakaya, and Advaita Vedanta’s Saguna Brahman; and Creativity, which corresponds to Meister Eckhart’s Godhead, the Buddhist emptiness and Dharmakaya, and Advaita Vedanta’s Nirguna Brahman. A third possible ultimate, the cosmos itself, is at times added in connection to Taoism and indigenous spiritualities that venerate the sacredness of the natural world. In addition to operating within a theistic framework adverse to many traditions, however, deep pluralism not only establishes highly dubious equivalencies among religious goals (e.g., Buddhist emptiness and Advaita’s Nirguna Brahman), but also forces the rich diversity of religious ultimates into the arguably Procrustean molds of God’s “unchanging Being” and “changing Becoming.”

The co-creation hypothesis as solution to diversity

“Can we take the plurality of religions seriously today without reducing them to either cultural-linguistic by-products or incomplete facets of a single spiritual truth or universe? I believe that we can and in the anthology I recently co-edited with Jacob H. Sherman, The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies (SUNY Press, 2008), we are calling this third way possible the “participatory turn” in the study of religion and spirituality.

Briefly, the participatory turn argues for an understanding of the sacred that approaches religious phenomena, experiences, and insights as cocreated events. Such events can engage the entire range of human faculties (e.g., rational, imaginal, somatic, aesthetic, contemplative, and so forth) with the creative unfolding of reality or the mystery in the enactment—or “bringing forth”—of ontologically rich religious worlds. Put somewhat differently, we suggest that religious and spiritual phenomena are “participatory” in the sense that they can emerge from the interaction of all human attributes and a creative spiritual power or dynamism of life. More specifically, we propose that religious worlds and phenomena, such as the Kabbalistic four realms, the various Buddhist cosmologies, or Teresa’s seven mansions, come into existence out of a process of participatory cocreation between human multidimensional cognition and the generative force of life and/or the spirit.

But, how far are we willing to go in affirming the cocreative role of the human in spiritual matters? To be sure, most scholars may be today ready to allow that particular spiritual states (e.g., the Buddhist jhanas, Teresa’s mansions, or the various yogi samadhis), spiritual visions (e.g., Ezekiel’s Divine Chariot, Hildegard’s visionary experience of the Trinity, or Black Elk’s Great Vision), and spiritual landscapes or cosmologies (e.g., the Buddha lands, the Heavenly Halls of Merkavah mysticism, or the diverse astral domains posited by Western esoteric schools) are largely or entirely constructed. Nevertheless, I suspect that many religious scholars and practitioners may feel more reticent in the case of spiritual entities (such as the Tibetan daikinis, the Christian angels, or the various Gods and Goddesses of the Hindu pantheon) and, in particular, in the case of ultimate principles and personae (such as the Biblical Yaveh, the Buddhist sunyata, or the Hindu Brahman). Would not accepting their cocreated nature undermine not only the claims of most traditions, but also the very ontological autonomy and integrity of the mystery itself? Response: Given the rich variety of incompatible spiritual ultimates and the contradictions involved in any conciliatory strategy, I submit that it is only by promoting the cocreative role of human cognition to the very heart and summit of each spiritual universe that we can preserve the ultimate unity of the mystery—otherwise we would be facing the arguably equally unsatisfactory alternative of having to either reduce spiritual universes to fabrications of the human imagination or posit an indefinite number of isolated spiritual universes. By conceiving spiritual universes and ultimates as the outcome of a process of participatory cocreation between human multidimensional cognition and an undetermined spiritual power, however, we rescue the ultimate unity of the mystery while simultaneously affirming its ontological richness and overcoming the reductionisms of cultural-linguistic, psychological, and biologically naturalistic explanations of religion.

What I am proposing here, then, is that different spiritual ultimates can be cocreated through intentional or spontaneous participation in a dynamic and undetermined mystery, spiritual power, and/or generative force of life or reality. This participatory perspective does not contend that there are two, three, or any limited quantity of pregiven spiritual ultimates, but rather that the radical openness, interrelatedness, and creativity of the mystery and/or the cosmos allows for the participatory cocreation of an indefinite number of self-disclosures of reality and corresponding religious worlds. These worlds are not statically closed but fundamentally dynamic and open to the continued transformation resulting (at least in part) from the creative impact of human visionary imagination and religious endeavors.

In the context of the dilemmas posed by religious pluralism, one of the advantages of a participatory account of religious knowing is that it frees religious thinking from the presupposition of a single, predetermined ultimate reality that binds it to reductionistic, exclusivist, or dogmatic formulations. Once we do away with this assumption, on the one hand, and recognize the ontologically creative role of spiritual cognition, on the other, the multiplicity of religious truth claims stops being a source of metaphysical agnosticism and becomes entirely natural, perhaps even essential. If we choose to see the various spiritual ultimates not as competing to match a pregiven spiritual referent but as creative transformations of an undetermined mystery, then the conflict over claims of alternative religious truths vanishes like a mirage. Rather than being a source of conflict or a cause for considerate tolerance, the diversity of spiritual truths and cosmologies becomes a reason for wonder and celebration—wonder inspired by the inexhaustible creative power of the mystery and celebration of our participatory role in such creativity, as well as of the emerging possibilities for mutual enrichment that arise out of the encounter of traditions. In short, a participatory approach to religion seek to enact with body, mind, heart, and consciousness a creative spirituality that lets a thousand spiritual flowers bloom.

Although this may at first sound like a rather “anything goes” approach to religious claims, I hold to the contrary that recognizing a diversity of cocreated religious worlds in fact asks us to be more perspicuous in discerning their differences and merits. Because such worlds are not simply given but involve us as agents and cocreators, we are not off the ethical hook where religion is concerned but instead inevitably make cosmo-political and moral choices in all our religious actions.

How can we evaluate religions in the context of co-creation?

This does not mean that we cannot discriminate between more evocative, skillful, or sophisticated artifacts.

Whereas the participatory turn renders meaningless the postulation of qualitative distinctions among traditions according to a priori doctrines or a prearranged hierarchy of spiritual insights, these comparative grounds can be sought in a variety of practical fruits (existential, cognitive, emotional, interpersonal), perhaps anchored around two basic orientations: the egocentrism test (i.e., to what extent does a spiritual tradition, path, or practice free its practitioners from gross and subtle forms of narcissism and self-centeredness?) and the dissociation test (i.e., to what extent does a spiritual tradition, path, or practice foster the integrated blossoming of all dimensions of the person?). As I see it, this approach invites a more nuanced, contextual, and complex evaluation of religious claims based on the recognition that traditions, like human beings, are likely to be both “higher” and “lower” in relation to one another, but in different regards (e.g., fostering contemplative competences, ecological awareness, mind/body integration, and so forth). It is important then not to understand the ideal of a reciprocal and symmetrical encounter among traditions in terms of a trivializing or relativistic egalitarianism. By contrast, a truly symmetrical encounter can only take place when traditions open themselves to teach and be taught, fertilize and be fertilized, transform and be transformed.

Two important qualifications need to be made about these suggested guidelines. The first relates to the fact that some spiritual paths and liberations may be more adequate for different psychological and cultural dispositions (as well as for the same individual at distinct developmental junctures), but this does not make them universally superior or inferior. The well-known four yogas of Hinduism (reflection, devotion, action, and experimentation) come quickly to mind in this regard, as do other spiritual typologies that can be found in other traditions. The second qualification refers to the complex difficulties inherent in any proposal of cross-cultural criteria for religious truth. It should be obvious, for example, that my emphasis on the overcoming of narcissism and self-centeredness, although arguably central to most spiritual traditions, may not be shared by all. Even more poignantly, it is likely that most religious traditions would not rank too highly in terms of the dissociation test; for example, gross or subtle forms of repression, control, or strict regulation of the human body and its vital/sexual energies (versus the promotion of their autonomous maturation, integration, and participation in spiritual knowing) are rather the norm in most past and present contemplative endeavors.

The need for embodied spirituality

The embodied and integrative impetus of the participatory turn is foundational for the development of a participatory critical theory of religion. From a participatory standpoint, the history of religions can be read, in part, as a story of the joys and sorrows of human dissociation. From ascetically enacted mystical ecstasies to world-denying monistic realizations, and from heart-expanding sexual sublimation to the moral struggles (and failures) of ancient and modern mystics and spiritual teachers, human spirituality has been characterized by an overriding impulse toward a liberation of consciousness that has too often taken place at the cost of the underdevelopment, subordination, or control of essential human attributes such as the body or sexuality. Even contemporary religious leaders and teachers across traditions tend to display an uneven development that arguably reflects this generalized spiritual bias; for example, high level cognitive and spiritual functioning combined with ethically conventional or even dysfunctional interpersonal, emotional, or sexual behavior.

Furthermore, it is likely that many past and present spiritual visions are to some extent the product of dissociated ways of knowing—ways that emerge predominantly from accessing certain forms of transcendent consciousness but in disconnection from more immanent spiritual sources. For example, spiritual visions that hold that body and world are ultimately illusory (or lower, or impure, or a hindrance to spiritual liberation) arguably derive from states of being in which the sense of self mainly or exclusively identifies with subtle energies of consciousness, getting uprooted from the body and immanent spiritual life. From this existential stance, it is understandable, and perhaps inevitable, that both body and world are seen as illusory or defective. In contrast, when our somatic and vital worlds are invited to participate in our spiritual lives, making our sense of identity permeable to not only transcendent awareness but also immanent spiritual energies, then body and world become spiritually significant realities that are recognized as crucial for human and cosmic spiritual fruition.

This account does not seek to excoriate past spiritualities, which may have been at times—though by no means always—perfectly legitimate and perhaps even necessary in their particular times and contexts, but merely to highlight the historical rarity of a fully embodied or integrative spirituality. At any rate, a participatory approach to spirituality and religion needs to be critical of oppressive, repressive, and dissociative religious beliefs, attitudes, practices, and institutional dynamics.

Conclusion:Spiritual Individuation in a Common Spiritual Family

Let me conclude this essay with some reflections on the future of world religion and spirituality.

Briefly, to embrace our participatory role in religious knowing may lead to a shift from searching for a global spirituality organized around a single ultimate vision to recognizing an already existent spiritual human family that branches out from the same creative root. Traditions may then be able to find their longed-for unity not so much in a single spiritual megasystem or global vision, but in their common roots—that is, in that deep bond constituted by the undetermined dimension of the mystery (or the generative power of life, if one prefers more naturalistic terms) in which all traditions participate in the cocreation of their spiritual insights and cosmologies.

Like members of a healthy family, religious people may then stop attempting to impose their particular beliefs on others and might instead become a supportive and enriching force for the “spiritual individuation” of other practitioners, both within and outside their traditions. This mutual empowerment of spiritual creativity may lead to the emergence of not only a rich variety of coherent spiritual perspectives that can potentially be equally aligned to the mystery, but also a human community formed by fully differentiated spiritual individuals. Situated at the creative nexus of immanent and transcendent spiritual energies, spiritually individuated persons might become unique embodiments of the mystery capable of cocreating novel spiritual understandings, practices, and even expanded states of freedom. If we accept this approach, it is plausible to conjecture that our religious future may bear witness to a greater than ever plurality of creative visionary and existential spiritual developments. This account would be consistent with a view of the mystery, the cosmos, and/or spirit as moving from a primordial state of undifferentiated unity towards one of infinite differentiation-in-communion.

The affirmation of our shared spiritual family may be accompanied by the search for a common—nonabsolutist and contextually sensitive—global ethics. It is important to stress that this global ethics cannot arise out of our highly ambiguous moral religious past but needs to be forged in the fire of contemporary interreligious dialogue and cooperative spiritual inquiry. In other words, it is likely that any future global ethics will not be grounded in our past spiritual history but in our critical reflection on such history in the context of our present-day moral intuitions (for example, about the pitfalls of religious dogmatism, fanaticism, narcissism, and dissociation). Besides its obvious relevance for regulating cross-cultural and interfaith conflicts, the adoption of a global ethics may be a crucial step in bringing about the mutual respect and openness among practitioners necessary for sustaining and invigorating both their common roots and their individual spiritual blossoming.

But there is not. There is, in fact, poverty. None of this is news. What is new is that a Canadian company wants to mine in Rosia Montana. But “mine” is perhaps not the right word. Rather, they want to destroy the mountain, and in destroying the mountain they must destroy the village. They want to replace the village with a lake of cyanide to reduce a ton of rock to a grain of gold. In only 17 years, it is their plan to reduce the mountain of gold to a heap of slag. This is not to say that the Canadians are being unfair; they are more than willing to pay the villagers. Some have accepted, others are resisting. And they promise to turn the slag into a garden.

Now, it is not my place to tell the villagers what they should do. It is neither my village nor my country, and these are decisions which only the people of Rosia Montana and the government of Romania can make. But whether the villagers decide to stay or go, the decision they make is a sign and symbol of something much wider, and part of something much greater. To be specific, it is part of a great joke about capitalism. But it is a joke that no one seems to get. So here is the punchline: Rosia Montana is a place of great natural wealth, BUT THERE IS NO INCOME (as one of the villagers in the film put it). Now, here is a place that has received every gift that a loving God could bestow on any piece of ground: mountains full of minerals, valleys full of farms, pastures full of animals, rivers full of fish. It is a place that could—and has—supported tens of thousands in peace and prosperity, but under capitalism, it cannot provide work for a thousand. An area that should be prosperous and happy becomes an area of forced idleness. There is wealth, real wealth, but there are no jobs, and people, young people especially—that is, the future—feel they must leave. And if they leave with a few Euros provided by the Canadians, who can blame them?

But still there is the joke. The joke is that while the villagers have real wealth, the Canadians have financial wealth, and under capitalism, the latter is more important than the former. The bits of paper with the € printed on them are heavier than gold; the sterile bankers notes more fecund than fertile fields. We may laugh at the joke; we may even laugh at the Romanians, but we are caught in the same joke. In this country, no less than in Romania, men who make naught but bits of paper (called “financial derivatives”) have brought a great country to its knees. These men contributed not so much as a grain of wheat to the commonwealth, but from our common wealth we have paid them 100′s of billions of dollars, and will pay them more still as a reward for their failures. At least the Canadians will pay something for their destruction of the village; we must pay for the rope they will use to hang us, and pay a monopoly price at that.

While networks on their own might be democratising, equalising, liberating – the hybrid forms are not, because they inject aspects of command at key points as substitutes for voluntary agency.

Very often, networking of capitalism involves a replacement of systematic agencies which are flexible or universalistic on the side of the institution, with arbitrary, commandist agencies making extreme demands on participants. By seeking to capture the WHOLE of networks, the distance between power and everyday life is reduced or eliminated. One thus ends up with an extremely intrusive and cruel, “personalised” form of power which attempts to draw on all aspects of the network by becoming identical with it. This is the type of hybrid I think is dominant today, definitive especially of Third Way and neoliberal politics; it is associated with one of Zuboff’s two types of high-tech in the workplace, and with “New Age policing” (CCTVs, ASBOs etc) and “welfare to work”/employability/flexibility (of the worker). In rendering the command apparatus (state/capital) identical with society and with life, in denying life any space of its own, this model is terrifyingly totalitarian. It is really an attempt to ward off the power of networks by decomposing, by substitutionism.

There is also a second type which lets networks do their own thing and seeks to filter a surplus from them. This is more sustainable, but at the moment seems to be facing huge resistance from the status quo.

In the medium term, the loss of power to networks is probably irreversible, and capital and the state will either go down fighting or create more-or-less stable intermediary forms which allow them to persist for a time. We are already seeing the beginnings of the latter, but the former is more predominant. The way I see the crisis deepening is that large areas will drift outside state and capitalist control, integrated marginally or not at all (this is already happening at sites such as Afghanistan, NWFP, the Andes, Somalia, etc., and in a local way in shanty-towns and autonomous centres).

I also expect the deterritorialised areas to spread, as a result of the concentration of resources in global cities, the ecological effects of extraction, the neoliberal closing of mediations which formerly integrated, and the growing stratum of people excluded either because of the small number of jobs available or the growing set of requirements for conformity. Eventually these marginal spaces will become sites of a proliferation of new forms of living, and a pole of attraction compared to the homogeneous, commandist, coercive core.

(This is slightly complicated by the issue of reactive networks – the closure of networks in otherwise non-hierarchical spaces by their coalescence around fixed identities and exclusions, as “small-world networks”. This tendency is strong today, partly because it is a major strategy of state and capitalist reintegration of escaping areas, partly because of effects of hierarchy-induced scarcity – and is the reason these areas have not gone further in becoming loci of affirmative energy and forces of attraction).

At the moment, the state (backed by capital) tries to bring these areas back in violently, but sooner or later, sectors of capital will realise they can profit by working with forces on the ground in the deterritorialised areas. Corporations which adapt to their loss of power at marginal points will become more like merchants, or service providers; I see the likes of PirateBay as forerunners in this regard.

I’ve been talking a lot in recent years about a system I’ve dubbed Utilihab, which is a generic name I’ve given to a series of building systems based on aluminum T-slot framing as used in industrial automation and which go by such names as Tomahouse/Tomatech, Jeriko House, iT House, Kit Haus, etc. I’ve personally worked with Tomahouse and Jeriko House.

You can see these here;

* www.tomahouse.com/

* jerikohouse.com/

* www.tkithouse.com/

The designs take their cues from classic Modernists but the structural system derives from Japanese/Polynesian pavilion architecture such as traditional Japanese homes and more recent derivatives like the modular resort cottage homes of Tony Gwilliam’s Bali-T houses, based on traditional Indonesian ironwood post&beam framing with a synthesis of Asian and Modernist-Minimalist design.

The concept of aluminum profile based modular housing may actually have its origins with profile based housing developed in the late 1940s by Jacque Fresco -who some may recall as the itinerant inventor and futurist founder of the Venus Project. This was very radical for the aluminum industry of the time, with extruders few and timid about pushing their equipment to the limits -something American extruders seem to have never gotten over to this day. Alas, he was also never a particularly smart businessman and came from an era long prior to the notion of open source…

The current forms of this building system tend to be based on 240mm-250mm square aluminum primary frame profiles with two or four T-slot channels per face and secondary and floor/ceiling grid framing of 120x240mm and 120mm square -usually based on newer and larger standardized profiles (60mm series) and sometime with custom profiles, though there’s no particular advantage to that over the standard industrial profiles except for profiles with integral thermal breaks. (used when designers want the framing to be visible externally as an architectural detail) Some companies still have compulsively old-fashioned thinking and so try to employ custom profiles as a gimmick to lock-in market share -which is sort of silly given that, currently, there is no established ‘market’ to divvy up! Trusses are also possible for much larger unit spans and particularly convenient using ready-made ‘web plates’ that slip and lock between a pair of profiles to link them into a truss beam. Buildings are composed of simple post&beam structures with a typical 4 meter square unit module supporting 1 meter floor/ceiling grids (actually, a meter plus interstitial frame thickness) and then finished in various forms of non-load-bearing pre-finished retrofit paneling, concealment strips, and planking. Light panels, usually about a meter wide, use pop-in or friction mount attachment while exterior walls use bolt or other mechanical attachment and have interstitial volume for insulation, where not using some for of SIP. Some fixtures are designed to attach to the framing slots in the same way accessory components are added to industrial automation structures and with the hollow channels within the framing sometimes serving extra duty as utilities conduits. Typical structures are one or two storeys high, but the systems have been rated for ten storey structures -usually with the addition of things like cross-brace tension cables and gusset plates.

Though some developers have patented special profiles and connector designs only they use, the T-slot framing technology itself is largely public domain. In fact, none of the manufacturers of T-slot parts for industrial automation seem to have any clear picture of it’s origins, which may go back to some time very early in the 20th century -most-likely the 1920s when things like ball socket space frames appeared, though T-slot attachment schemes with machine tools and optical benches go back well into the 19th century. Companies sort of sprang-up simultaneously around the globe and started making this for industrial automation use in the late 1970s, with all of them thinking/claiming they had invented it then suddenly finding everyone else’s prior art. It was almost like Sheldrake’s Morphic Field effect.

This ‘frame and panel’ system -along with similar space frame variants like Universal Node System/Min-A-Max- is one of a couple basic forms of small component plug-in architecture currently being developed; the other key one being ‘planar backplane’ systems as explored in Shigeru Ban’s Furniture House series. Here the structure of homes consist of largely independent floor and ceiling plane elements composed of a modular planar grid. These are then supported by strong modular furniture units serving triple-duty as load-bearing structural support, partitions, and active furnishing elements. These planar backplane elements become very similar in character to the motherboards of backplanes of computers, determining the attachment grid for the other components and integrating most infrastructure and climate control systems. This is a potentially more advanced system because of the potential to integrate a great deal of technology within the structural elements while being intuitively simple for the user, though more limited in overall structural shapes. Users can basically design on-the-fly by the simple arrangement of these modular furniture elements, keeping within simple limits of span, cantilever, and vertical load communication according to the planar grid. This set of structural rules is easily automated by having the backplane of the house made digitally active, a ‘structural integrity network’ basically live-modeling the house by identifying the parts plugged into it and graphically communicating to users where their changes approach safety limits and showing them when parts are broken, worn, or stressed. Frame and panel systems like Utilihab are likely to evolve toward or be superseded by planar backplane systems in the future, based on these advantages. However, that form of technology is much less developed and, to be fully demountable and freely adaptive (which Shigeru Ban’s designs aren’t as yet), requires much more sophisticated component interfacing and integral structural intelligence.

Though these technologies aren’t ready for immediate large projects like relief efforts (the companies I noted all are still stuck making prefab luxury homes -even though most have relief/low-cost housing aspirations of one kind or another), they’re ready for discrete housing and experimental use. (I plan to use these for my own home in the near future) Their chief functional limitation is roofing technology. We still haven’t devised a practical means of fully demountable small component modular roofing that’s freely extensible/variable in two directions. There’s a lot of room here for innovation and it’s accessible given that you can base these on the off-the-shelf components of the industrial automation industry. But it is pretty sophisticated and needs comprehensive fabrication facilities and engineering to push the envelope.

What’s really significant about these technologies is that, in order to develop them effectively, one has to employ a completely different industrial model than has been common to the Industrial Age. They need ‘industrial ecologies’ like that of the computer industry, where your products represent open ‘platforms’ based on p2p defined standards supported by ecologies of competitive product developers in a food chain of sub-component integration. This is the world-changing part. This is what made the computer industry different from all other previous forms of industrial development and is why this most complicated of all artifacts ever devised has enjoyed such an unprecedented pace of evolution, so very quickly transforming from rare 100 million dollar behemoths to small, ubiquitous, and cheap enough that some homeless people can afford them and simple enough that a child can assemble them from parts made around the world and it will work perfectly the first time it’s turned on.

There is much that can be done on the level of simpler and even lighter technology, though the application to permanent housing gets trickier the less physically robust structures are. From a nomadic architecture standpoint, it’s hard to improve on the accumulated experience embodied in traditional technologies of nomadic cultures. There’s a sort of singular refined perfection in the yurt, tipi, lavvu, bedouin tent, Romany caravan, etc. that only -and rarely- gets improved upon with new materials and fastener technology. (tension structure materials like ETFE and teflon impregnated fiberglass cloth like Sheerfill, new cable materials, and fasteners like Grip-Clips) However, traditional nomadic architecture evolved in a context of large open spaces and extremely light lifestyles of minimal personal possessions (though traditional Tuvan furniture -albeit designed to be portable- is, thanks to Chinese influence, often far from what might be called ‘light’) So these structures don’t integrate well into an urban environment. Proponents of the original Urban Nomad movement, such as Ken Isaacs, sought first to focus on the re-appropriation and adaptive reuse of found urban space -primarily indoors. This was the premise behind Isaacs’ ‘Living Structures’; the simple wood framed multi-function ‘furnitecture’ that produced the Box Beam and now Grid Beam building systems. Relying on another larger enclosure structure to provide the more basic environmental shelter, one can employ much more freely adaptive structures within them and use very simple modular component systems.

I recently proposed a p2p architecture experiment based on this called Vivarium whose premise was to repurpose a generic commercial/industrial urban space as a community-evolved recreation facility based on the notion recreational architecture -building structures as group play- using Grid Beam and Living Structures. One would simply repurpose a functionally generic space, like a warehouse, into a recreational space based on the participants’ individual and collective notions of fun, pleasure, and comfort as realized in structures they alternately individually or collectively build and combine, through negotiation, into the space. So in this context the Grid Beam system is being used like an adult Tinker Toy system with which to spontaneously build furnishings and structures. This seemed a fun and ‘low stakes’ setting in which to explore p2p community design concepts.

Many kinds of small light ‘furnitecture’ are possible and suited to this sort of sheltered generic space environment. The Japanese Capsule Hotel unit is a good model here that can be explored in many variations. I think it was Archigram that, in the 60s, experimented with ‘pod living’ based on the idea of using generic open dwelling space to host functional rooms in the form of enclosed appliance-like furniture unit pods that could be freely moved about. (an idea reinvented today with the rooms of Shigeru Ban’s Naked House, which I’ll link to shortly) Such pods are possible with many different materials, such as T-slot, light space frames, and rigid composite shell units and fabric covered structural foam that have the option to be used outdoors. I once considered the idea of making a slightly larger form of Japanese Capsule Hotel unit into a rigid composite shell microcabin, complete with solar power, communications, and other gear built-in, that could be pulled on bicycle wheels and provide a highly insulated durable alternative to tents at a lower cost than trailers. Though bulkier than tents when moved, fabric covered structural foam cabin pods would also be suited to this application. N55 explored a similar idea called Snail Shell System based on repurposing a rotomolded HDPE tank. Andrea Zittel explored this concept in the form of a stationary variant of the traditional ‘teardrop’ trailer called the Wagon Station.

Wanting to move beyond the limits of the found urban space, Isaacs also explored the microcabin/microhouse concept based on stressed skin plywood structures. An interesting aspect of this in the p2p context is that he devised the use of these with external multi-level frame structures based on modular pipe fittings like Kee Klamp that would externally support complexes of these microhouses up to several storeys high. The intention was to use these to host small constantly evolving villages. You can visualize these as open scaffold-like structures sprawling volumetrically which the microhouses could rest in, each module fitting within the unit cubic grid space. These would include decking, walkways, screens, and simple corrugated metal roofing in different areas, all of it freely demountable. Problem was that Isaacs never found a good way to waterproof his microhouse designs and the plywood of the time was pretty crude, giving these microhouses a short life span. This was similar to an early plug-in architecture concept based on large space frame structures that complexes of pod-like room modules would be suspended within. Sometimes proposed for megastructure architecture, one of the most interesting forms of this was based on webs of tension cables suspended between canyon walls into which whole cities might be retrofit as complexes of suspended pods and decks. More recently, this same concept re-emerged with the Shimizu Try 2004 megacity concept where such pods were taken to the scale of whole skyscrapers suspended within a space frame pyramid. Rather over-the-top, but you can easily imagine how this works at a more human scale.

This concept of adaptive structures sheltered by larger structures extends to more permanent -or should we say ‘continuous’- habitats based on purposely built ‘skybreaks’. The term ‘skybreak’ originates with students of Buckminster Fuller who proposed the concept as the ideal approach to the use of the geodesic dome for housing. Typical dome homes are based on using a dome in much the same way one uses the basic frame of a house, which is then partitioned into rooms. This has never worked particularly well with the dome shape. Fuller’s student’s realized that a more appropriate role for the dome was as a large area shelter against the extremes of the basic elements -a largely independent barrier or shield against the rain, wind, and greater temperature extremes. Thus one would shelter one’s whole ‘lot’ space with a dome that could be open on the perimeter in warm weather and inside which one would cultivate a garden environment and build light freely-changed structures to actually inhabit and provide the functions of different rooms. Essentially, it’s like using a greenhouse to shelter another lighter house. Decoupled from the function of weatherproofing, these light internal structures would use materials not normally practical and could get away with modular systems that were easy to owner-assemble but not yet sophisticated enough to be weatherproofed. The catch with the idea was that it wasn’t until close to Fuller’s own death that silicone sealed planar glazing systems and ETFE based ‘pillow panel’ systems were devised to make the transparent skybreak a practical concept. (Fuller’s earlier attempts with translucent plastic sometimes failed dramatically)

This isn’t actually that radical or new a concept. It originates with the pavilion architecture of Asia and Polynesia where traditional housing never used load-bearing walls but instead relied on clear-span post and beam structures that created functionally generic space made functional by mobile furnishings and light, sometimes free-standing, screens and partitions. This later inspired the Modernists, the concept made iconic by Philip Johnson’s New Canaan CT Glass House then reapplied in thousands of variations. I personally consider the pavilion the most practical form of housing in the contemporary cultural context, particularly for non-toxic home applications, though it doesn’t suit the conventional western suburban environment where you have no use of walled enclosures as in Asia (because western suburbs are about the public display of social status and affluence, not about living well…) and where you lack the space to articulate landscape for sake of privacy.

Today we have a huge variety of structural types -many prefab- that can be used to make skybreaks of most any scale or shape. Tension roofs and pneumatic structures in particular are promising for large scales, though there hasn’t been much experimentation with this. The potential of the concept well demonstrated, in small scale, by such things as Shigeru Ban’s Naked House where a translucent-walled clear span enclosure shelters a series of traditional Japanese rooms contained within boxes on casters that can be freely moved about. A similar concept I’ve often considered trying would use a translucent dome or hypoid/conic tension roof transported inside one of several 20′ containers on casters or short legs which would be used as simple rooms in a ‘compound’ home once the skybreak was deployed over them.

One of the most intriguing skybreak concepts I’ve come up with employs the strategy for large urban microgravity habitats on orbit. Called EvoHab, the concept derives from the Transhab -a pneumatic-hulled space station module once intended for the ISS but now the focus of the Bigelow space tourism projects. The Transhab employs a tough but flexible foam-filled skin as a pressure hull, supported by a rigid core truss around which functional elements are radially organized. Small scale, these things don’t seem very different from a typical NASA-style space station module, organized into circular decks. But I’ve anticipated this technology would produce progressively larger habitat structures, eventually trading the pre-made flexible hulls with composite hulls built on-orbit by combining a supporting frame with external shield panels and internal pressure hull panels sealed with plastic materials. In this way the same basic structure using this same core-truss radial organization would continue to grow in scale until you could enclose an entire small city within large spherical and cylindrical hull shapes. These hulls would be made ‘light transmitting’ by using externally mounted holographic membrane heliostats and internal light emitter panels linked by thin optical fibers or light pipes. These would eventually become image-corrected, making the hull virtually transparent from the inside. This vast spherical skybreak would then house an ‘urban tree habitat’ based on using the large core truss as primary attachment for radially mounted equipment and dwellings made from modular building systems. This deployable orbital housing would, in smaller forms, be akin to Japanese Capsule Hotel units but could evolve into large multi-chambered pods and clusters made primarily of semi-rigid structural foam, fabrics, and light alloy frames. The largest dwellings and work spaces could be based on stacked planes outfit by furnishings that attach between them -the same concept as the planar backplane plug-in architecture but here adapted to microgravity.