Modern aesthetics are obsessively standardized, globalist, and morally defunct. Postmodernism is a problematic, but understandable response. In theoretical circles, postmodern thinkers rejected the iconic, crudely accessible, unfulfilling visual signifiers of the architecture of capital. Their constructs reverted to the opposite extreme, charting an architecture of self-conscious complexity that drew from a pre-Capitalist visual language.

Globalism’s emptiness, embodied by the near cultureless image of slick concrete and glass banking towers with marble and mahogany interiors, a sort of gilded depravity, cannot meet the iconographic needs of contemporary society. Nor can postmodernism’s false populism and abandonment of legibility in favor of labyrinthine and self-defeating academic reference, clearly affirm the dignity and agency of the individual.  Rather, contemporary visual languages must dispel myth and transparently acknowledge their ideologies of form and space, and be built upon and serve the lived experience of the individual. In short, artists and designers must strike a responsible balance between the sense of wonder and the sense of consciousness.

The visual languages of spiritualism stabilized global cultures throughout time. Drawing from a substantive ideological base, religion, they expressed a sense of wonder with an earnest, albeit often co-opted and abused, pursuit of meaning in life. The waning of religious iconography in a secularizing world may mistakenly lead people to believe that contemporary life has lost a core, rather than simply losing sight of what made religion a core in the first place: its power to situate the individual within something emergent and greater than themselves. This is because medium so often becomes message. Religion — the image bank — has been conflated with the underlying human impulse that generates it, for one’s own character and the world constructed around them to mean something or nothing at all. This is because the only verifiably universal takeaway from a signifier is the body of cultural touchstones it references: in this case, ideologies of faith.

Deleuze meditates on the transmutation of meaning through the process of learning, which can be bridged to the ability to see and to sense space using the body:

“Learning to swim or learning a foreign language means composing the singular points of one’s own body or one’s own language with those of another shape or element, which tears us apart but also propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheard-of world of problems. To what are we dedicated if not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our language?”

Public space is a unique medium for communication in that it disseminates a static system of signifiers— remotely through images and models or in situ through habitation of constructed environments— to an indeterminate, albeit often targeted, demographic over time. Like acquiring a skill, constructing meaning through aesthetics in a positive-nihilist global culture involves translating the empirically observed world of material reality and individual experience into prescribed discourses governing meaning and truth. Done poorly, this is a process of abstraction that silences the voice of the individual. Done well, it builds a holding environment for individual expression such that people can adopt a common language and respond to one another. Herein, perhaps, lies the lost meaning of contemporary life: we have always constructed ideologies about what the world is, and as long as we have built, we have projected these ideologies through sensory and volumetric iconographic languages. We build what we believe in.

The glaring state of affairs, however, as has been the case throughout modern history, is that we fall short of building what we believe in. Global systems discourage us from building in ways that affirm the core of people’s sense of their own humanity, relentlessly diverting society’s effort and resources away from the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment toward powering the global economic system, toward production as means and end. This begs the question, if the endless accumulation of capital is an empty pursuit, what exactly characterizes one that is “full”? Can a global system of infinitely many diverse minds, environments, narratives of humanity and place, and ideological systems find a new sufficient core to drive itself; or is bland, imperialist, culturally nonspecific corporatism our inevitable fate?

Phenomenology may provide a solution to this conundrum. If a sense of beauty is the vehicle for projecting meaning that, through phenomenological experience, is of utility to the individual, then perhaps an explicitly defined sense of beauty can in and of itself be a morally legitimate spiritual guide for society. Beauty is experienced when an entity affirms our dignity and agency, sometimes by making us think or feel something unexpected, and sometimes by simply supporting our quotidian lives.

Sadly, phenomenological experiences of space have been increasingly watered down to a set of motifs that deliver a didactic message in an unintentionally offputting way. The globalization of these signifiers into useful constructional elements for disseminating a wide swath of themes is characteristic of globalists’ propensity to cleanse architectural strategies promoting a radical ideological statement, deploy them in as many contexts as possible, and pretend that they, the globalists, have the power to simply change what signifiers mean. Architecture mirrors, responds to, and prescribes societal organization simultaneously. When global systems insufficiently navigate territories of ideology, either by imposing rigid narratives or by emptily juxtaposing elements to benefit from positive externalities, they create architecture that challenges rather than affirms the agency of the individual, and creates a denigrating rather than dignifying environment within which people are made to live.

The inhabitant constructs architectural ideology in real time. Architecture that supports this fact, a middle course between rigid prescriptivism and the altogether rejection of meaning and intrinsic value, permits constructional signifiers to leave room for the speaker to make free associations that allow them the choice to actively or passively engage however they want. By embodying agency in physical space and experiencing wonder in a rich, sensory environment, the inhabitant participates in the creation of spatial language that effectively resists the twin entropic urges to extract or obfuscate— a spiritualism for a secular world.