Although I enjoyed the opportunity for a holiday break, I confess to having spent some time in my office in an effort to catch up and do some planning. The windows of the office look out on what will eventually be a magnificent New School building, one that will come to represent the visual center of our school.
If you have ever seen a large building in construction, you will understand that my attention was regularly drawn to the extraordinary events across 5th Avenue. What seems like hundreds of men move about the site and enormous machines, especially the cranes, move material from the ground to a region of current focus. Concrete in large buckets flies up to a place where wooden molds have already been built; steel rebar suddenly takes off from the ground almost effortlessly, eventually to be nestled into a new home of concrete.
But how does all this happen! The workmen - and they are all men - are not ants, blindly following instinct to ensure the success of the species. They are trained and supervised; they belong to unions; a firm designed the building according to the University's specifications; the land was acquired; permits from the City were issued; wood, steel, wire, concrete, nails, and eventually HVAC machines were acquired from across the globe and paid for through bank borrowing, eventually to be repaid by gifts to the University and tuition payments.
Unpacking all the financing, trading, social organization, aesthetic insight, needs and capacities turns on how it is managed, financed, the economics of world trade, social need, the role of place in education, disagreements along the way, labor organization, manufacturing techniques, wood harvesting, and on and on. In what sense, then, can we say we understand this building from first principles? Indeed, no one person understands all but we will likely choose some feature of importance - how a choice is made opens a new set of issues - and make sense of it: architecture, finance, management, higher education, commodities, forestry, manufacturing, city government, accountability, etc, etc, etc. But when the ribbon is finally cut and the New School president makes a speech acknowledging that this new building will enhance education and research, each of us will have an opinion about it's look, its expense, how it will be used and how it will change the way The New School operates.
Having made such observations about the ways in which we understand a building to come into existence, what can we say about the social structures - management, urban policy, international affairs, economics, higher education – that undergird it. In what sense do we understand those fields? Are the explanations we give for our claims fundamentally different? Are the vocabularies in which we speak even understood across fields?
Despite all the questions we can ask, miraculously the building is getting taller each day because all the parts are coming together, although they could have meshed differently to produce something more pleasing and useful, or less so. Without building at least two structures, we'll never know.
Must we struggle so, without a firm place to stand? Are explanations always tentative, albeit some better than others? After all, some constructions fall down, break, are acknowledged to be ugly, don't quite meet the needs for which they've been built. We're influenced by the explanations that were adequate for our predecessors but not quite good enough now. Stuck as we are in a place and time that we think may be better than that of the past, we make judgments without all the facts and live with the consequences. But I'm still looking forward to walking into our new building, whether I like it or not, and toasting its significance and the sense in which it will change our sense of ourselves.