spatial dynamics

In one of the blogs I follow, Sophia Leadership, Heather Plett talks about the dynamics between space and people and how the quality of a space defines the quality of interactions that take place there. So true, I have been always overly conscious of the space I am in since I got out of high school and out of the confinements of living in a small, concrete flat with overprotective parents. I remember feeling like spreading my wings to fly into the big wild world, with such excitement! I was hungry for space to find myself and get to know the world.

We are sensual and spiritual creatures that thrive and expand beyond our own confinements when we encounter beauty. Beauty, in whichever form, is our gateway to the timeless and most sacred of creation. Eckhart Tolle talks about this in his book “A New Earth”: 

“Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature. The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition. Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves.”

I believe one very potent way of killing human spirit is depriving it of beauty and creativity.  I know this from public buildings in my country: schools, hospitals, public offices, all concrete boxes, nothing playful or creative, hard angles, edges and corners, everything revealed with harsh fluorescent light and nothing left to the eye of the imagination. The irony is that all of this is associated with modernity and progress. I see it as a symptom of our soul’s deprivation of nature, sacred and beauty. Hollow spaces where we get even more detached from our inner realms, creativity, learning, healing and all those natural processes that are inherently part of our nature. By only focusing on functionality, which is another symptom of unbalanced masculine energy in our world, we have created places of no warmth, no soul, no character; we might as well hang signs on the wall that read “Please do not get emotional and creative here. Do not think out of the box. Do not feel comfortable. Do not share openly what you think or feel. Sorry, have I already said that you are not supposed to feel here?”

Look at our workplaces which more and more people are willing to avoid and go elsewhere to think, create, work.

Or rather, would you prefer a space like this one to work?

This is Hub Amsterdam, a great example of new generation of co-working spaces where people are working on socially innovative projects. It’s obvious how this kind of space effects people’s thinking, creating and dialoging capacity. Too much order and control suffocates us, in our organizations, in our lives. Some healthy level of chaos, as it is in life, is necessary in our living, learning, working spaces as well…

and now look at these two school buildings:

The image on the left is a typical school building somewhere in Turkey and the one on the right is a Waldorf school elsewhere. Isn’t it obvious, by looking at this image, what kind of people each space would produce?

All I am trying to say is that actually it’s not so complicated. Spaces define us and we define spaces. It’s a bit of a chicken-egg story. If we see this simple truth, we can choose to create spaces  of beauty that would support creativity, dialogue, inspiration and meaningful actions.