Since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, our office has been discussing how we can make architecture more human and at one with nature. We need to ask ourselves, what legacy do we want to leave behind on humankind's urban culture?
The human rights record within China seems to rise and fall over time, but it's very clear that in the run up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics and since then, there's been a greater intolerance of dissent and the human rights record of China has been going in the wrong direction.
Maybe I wanted to have kids because you want to leave behind lessons, leave behind everything that matters to you. That's how you touch the world. But I have to reconsider what it's like to leave a legacy.
Are we, finally, speaking of nature or culture when we speak of a rose (nature), that has been bred (culture) so that its blossoms (nature) make men imagine (culture) the sex of women (nature)? It may be this sort of confusion that we need more of.
There are certain things that are fundamental to human fulfillment. The essence of these needs is captured in the phrase 'to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy.' The need to leave a legacy is our spiritual need to have a sense of meaning, purpose, personal congruence, and contribution.
The Olympics brought a lot of development to Beijing, but I don't see that there have been any changes to human rights as a result of the Olympics.
When we die our entire legacy is simply the added together strengths of all the connections we make with others. This is the ghost of ourselves we leave behind. This is showing up.
We need to be willing to risk embarrassment, ask silly questions, surround ourselves with people who don't know what we're talking about. We need to leave behind the safety of our expertise.
The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
I've thought about it a lot: How do I want to leave my legacy? And what do I want to leave behind when I'm done with the sport and with USA Volleyball.
There is no need to invent an ego that is separate from the divine if our basic human nature is trusted. If we trust ourselves, we know how to avoid interfering with nature and how to live in harmony. When we know God as an unseen, loving, and accepting power at the heart of everything, allowing us to make our own choices, then God is a trusted part of our nature.
Squash has the credentials to become an olympic event and our goal is to see the sport in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. We are working towards this and will keep trying even if our bid is not successful.
Our life is our prayer. It is our gift to the universe, and the memories we leave behind when we someday exit this world will be our legacy to our loved ones. The best thing we can do for ourselves and everyone around us is to find our joy and share it!
Architecture arises out of our need to shelter the human animal in a spatial environment and to enclose the social animal in a group space. In this sense architecture serves our institutions and expresses the values of our culture.
We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place. We stay there even though we go away and there are things in us we can find again only by going back there. We travel to ourselves when we go to a place. We have covered a stretch of our life no matter how brief it may have been but by traveling to ourselves we must confront our own loneliness. And isn’t it so that everything we do is done out of fear of our loneliness? Isn’t that why we renounce all the things we will regret at the end of our life?
I would remind people on the planet that this is the only one we have, and we need to take care of it. I would want people to truly consider what we do and how we treat the earth, the ecosystems, and animals we share it with, and think about the legacy we want to leave behind.
You know, in our culture today, our Western, reductionist, Roman, linear, fragmented... culture, we don't ask how to make a pig happy. We ask how to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper, and that's not a noble goal.