BERKELEY PRIZE COMPETITION ESSAY PARTICIPANT Mr John L Boosinger COUNTRY United States UNIVERISTY University of Oregon DEPARTMENT Architecture and Allied Arts MAJOR Architecture (B.Arch) YEAR 5 ESSAY You are an architect. Believe this first, and know what it means. Then live by it. It is by this sentiment that I will make my beginning, and it is by this sentiment that I will make my end. When left by itself, as an answer, it is the only answer you will ever need. When asked as a question, as every great answer must be, it is the timeless question of the architect. How can we live by a knowledge that we do not have, or put our hopes in a belief we do not hold? From what great truth do these things arise, and to what great end are they destined? Who among us is an architect? There are those of us, good reader, who have chosen it as our career; and there are those of you who call yourselves bakers and bottle cap makers, who shape the world around you, and know when a place is right. It is our homes that we live in, and it is our cities that we build, and so we are all partakers of this ritual whose child is architecture. It cannot help but be social, and yet it is nothing if not deeply personal for those who put every ounce of their creative selves into a building SOURCES 1. Martin Locock, Meaningful architecture : social interpretations of buildings, (VT: Avebury, 1994) 2. Anthony D. King, ed., Buildings and society : essays on the social development of the built environment, (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) 3 Bruce Allsopp, Towards a humane architecture, (London: F. Muller, 1974) 4. Michael H. Mitias, ed., Architecture and civilization, (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999) 5. Stephen Willats, Between buildings and people, (London: Academy Editions, 1996) 6. Mark A. Hewitt, et. al., Culture and the social vision, (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1980) 7. Henry Sanoff, Community participation methods in design and planning, (New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 2000) 8. C. Richard Hatch, ed., The Scope of social architecture, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1984) 9. Charles Knevitt, Space on earth : architecture, people and buildings, (London: Thames Methuen, 1985) 10. Patrick Nuttgens, The landscape of ideas, (London: Faber, 1972)