…As I see it, because of the flux in our cultural perspective, architects have the opportunity to both reclaim their role as creators of culture (and what this means in all of its fullness) to expand our role as leaders and teachers of a better way to live on Earth.

Primarily what designers do is provide physical context and reality to an ideology. We make tangible the ideas for inhabiting Earth. If we use our gifts and training to evolve into a better way of belonging to the Earth, we will make real this way of thinking into a living reality. In order to achieve this cultural transformation the way we approach, conceive and develop our environments must be radically different. We must begin to think of ourselves as not primarily in service to economic development and speculative commerce, not limited to a fixed set of conditions. It is from the perspective of this challenge that I have been thinking of the 4 concepts: poetic cosmos, ecological deep well being, dwelling in place, and ritual and myth.

These interrelated concepts have as much to do with living on Earth as they do design practice. They help us recognize the need to be responsive to the place we live in and the people, animals and plants who share these places with us, that remind us that we are more than the jobs we have, or the wealth that we may command, that our lives do not end at our own limits and our sense of being extends into a world that we may never understand in completely rational terms.

Lori Ryker
notes from AIA Arkansas Lecture 2008