Earthbeats

All I’ve known to cure myself is this— Blue and green hues pulse together while I’m lying lonely on top of pine needles. Rows and rows of trees with peeling, orangey skin align, and the symmetry feels safe. It’s nearly sundown, and the whirring noises are far away in the city. All I can hear is clarity and crickets.

Colorado is my home now.

The tree bark is my creative chair. My brown leather journal lies in my lap, but I don’t know where to start, or which questions to ask that I haven’t written down yet.

The wind touches my skin, and breath branches into all parts of my body in bold colors.

Most of my thoughts reflect the relationship we have to the earth. I’ve realized how feeble my body has always been at such a young age, filled with air and always wanting something looming overhead. The mountains move me further from feeling like I need answers. The mountains speak in an unlearned language that I love.

I close my eyes and slide farther down onto the ground.

Land cradles my body, comforting me like the child I crave to stay. Returning to the roots of existence and feeling the weight of the human body on top of damp soil is my personal soul’s responsibility. There is no other way for me to eliminate the illusion of separation between us or make sense of the circumstances in my life.

A colony of black specks marches along toward the wooden stump on my right-hand side, in a line, while I wonder how many I’ve stepped on getting to where I am now.

What is there that hasn’t been named yet?

I still have my pen in between my pointer finger and thumb, twitching. The lines in my journal, still empty.

Billowing cotton-candy clouds remain from the sunset, pummeling the sky matching my chest with an odd curvature in my heart—bottomless gratitude for a grand experience of the sky’s last dance before darkness.

I walk back down the mountain.

There’s something new nodding its head and healed within myself.

I look back up to the landscape and wonder—what is the reason for the mountain range and clouds coming together as one moving thing that contracts and expands in time with my breath? Whose heartbeat am I hearing? △

Nature Is Architecture without Enclosure

From my upcoming book "Under the Influence of Architecture"...

So much of architecture is about replacing what exits. We remove buildings or parts of them, we scrape off land. We like new.

Then we get immensely attached to the buildings that have weathered throughout centuries. Think, Venice or historic buildings like Monticello or Westminster Cathedral. And we want to preserve them, not change a thing.

This is the discussion design enters into when we begin the critical examination of a project’s circumstances: What actually exists? Although the direction that is uncovered in the partí—the basic concept of an architectural design—holds both the physical and ephemeral, it is innumerate. Design, therefore, is a process of uncovering and illuminating the exact constructs necessary to meet the partí. And this is where the eye of the beholders produces the endless solutions to any given design problem. (Put another way, this is also where all hell breaks loose, for who is to say when a partí has been met?)

If architecture begins at the beginning of everything, and it is guided forth by secrets that cannot be told within the mind alone but are revealed by light, then it would seem that in order to uncover and illuminate the exact constructs necessary, design would have to continuously trace back to origin, to tapping the feeling that instantaneously shoots into the infinite.

There is an image on the farewell cover of Alpine Modern’s print magazine. It is an image that fades from a near-white mountain backdrop to a dark silhouette of a lone person in profile standing on a mossy green capped rock. I stare at that cover often because it describes everything architecture is, without a shred of enclosure. △

"I stare at that cover often because it describes everything architecture is, without a shred of enclosure."

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When not practicing architecture or creating singular built environments at her research-based firm Studio Points in Boulder, Colorado, ml Robles explores the source of architecture in her writings. She is currently writing her book "Under the Influence of Architecture."