The opportunity exponential.

02 Feb, 2025

In the best of architecture as the best of everything is generosity, and in the most measure of that generosity an opportunity exponential and unbound, not an opportunity for a small few alone to gain benefit, but instead one for all to gain as they'll give and to give as they'll gain. In this ideal is the gift the gain and the gain the gift, wherein nothing can ever be truly lost, wherein such reciprocity is an oil spinning virtuous cycle.

That opportunity result of truest generosity carries no precondition, no limit to action but no obligation to act either. It is an opportunity not extinguished in the taking but sustained in it, and in the very best and truest multiplied in it. Thus is it the colloquial exponential, each of the best opportunity taken capable of generating further opportunities and so on up an ever climbing benevolent line.

Generosity is mere counterform to opportunity, one gift to the other’s gain and neither without the other. Both are too counterform to agency: the opportunity result of generosity cannot be taken in the absence of some agent, as cannot that generosity be given.

Such generosity as attends that best of both the profession and the phenomenon of architecture, that being generosity in its most measure, would attend all aspects of it if allowed, and thus in all aspects would there be found the opportunity exponential. In the process of the design of it, and that of its regulation, construction and occupation, would be constant opportunity to be afforded and availed of.

This all being of a general opportunity arising from a general generosity, from all and to all, it would seem as easily done as conceived of, product simply of the general adoption of a certain and simple shared attitude, arising from a general recognition of a self interest as the group interest, and of group interest as universal interest. It would seem easily done if one discounts all prior evidence and knowledge of human nature and behaviour, and even the most optimistic will admit that any definitive proof of some relatedly innate motivation universal in all people and simply awaiting activation is always just up and around the corner, proof otherwise seeming always available and much more piles up as these 2020s roll on. The manias that take have seemed rarely constructive.

Still we all know that any well-directed greed, any the truest self-interest, would demand the most measure of a general generosity, from all to all, because everyone knows, even if dimly, even if they'd prefer it otherwise, that the most and best benefit will only ever be available to each when it's available to all.

It's an unfortunate and ageless truth though that those with the most measure of effective power lack the imagination or scruple to see it that way, instead imagining or pretending that their own benefit can only ever arise from another’s loss, their theft and hoard of the common wealth compelling others to act in the same way. Some even in aggregate gain will still only ever see the loss.

Given the foregoing then, with its implication that ideal conditions for the ideal processes leading to our ideal outcomes are always awaited and never forthcoming, it would seem we'd ever need to seed in fallow soil. Yet green shoots are never long to take again on even the most pounded and ground-down ground, and within the seed, hard-shelled and inert apart from its opportunity, lies a most potent generative force awakened when joined with it. Any cubed inch of space is the same, worlds within awaiting activation.

A generous architecture is as the seed too when joined with its opportunity, and as the seed becomes not just the seed but the seed and the seed’s interpretation and use of the entire environment with which it joins, so too the architecture with its environment, all animal, vegetal and mineral elements and actors.

The type of the seed itself has been shaped by its environment in evolutionary time and process, with the instance of it, the activated seed, shaped by and finding its shape in that environment within its own lifetime's timescale.

Though anthropic intercession has had hand in the shape of the seeds that we’d sow through our selective breeding, thus the plant eventuate, such intercession is at the very tailend of a process. The form of the type as arisen, arising as it does from this process, is always thus appropriate to its opportunity and its opportunity appropriate to it.

Our contemporary built environment on the other hand, nominally for us and by us and the us in question an animal also subject to those same general evolutionary processes, is shaped by us this animal within environmental processes shaped by us too.

Those types of processes that govern natural evolutionary development are thus in the case of our constructed environments mediated by human agents, so generally subject in the present age to criteria and parameters of success concerned with the short term financial reward of a small number, rather than to either dumb and impersonal natural selection or to an enlightened and deeply personal concern for the common wealth and well-being.

The seed is of course only analogy, the writer no more expert in it and its evolution than anyone. It's enough here to say that the type of our seed-analogue architecture will have within it too a potent opportunity realisable when exists agent to take it, that opportunity a function both of its organisation and the means of its activation.

For the taking of this opportunity then are two necessary conditions. The first is that there be opportunity innate in the type, the second is that there be some external instantiating force - that there be that which would make it activable, and that which would activate it. The means of activation is in action, and in that action agency, the ability of someone or thing to act.

The ideal here is the direct seizure of opportunity by an occupant, unmediated and unmitigated, but without impediment to the opportunity of another, and with generosity in the taking too.

Prevailing modes of ownership and regulation become thus somewhat of an ideological anathema, representing as they usually do a barrier to either existence or seizure of an opportunity, yet they do also represent the present reality.

If one considers current prevailing modes of development one might struggle to find any measure of generosity or opportunity. One might rather find the opposite, a built environment composed of basic recurring types whittled down to a bare regulatory minimum, meanness in place of generosity, opportunity very deliberately excluded, for in opportunity, and in particular our ideal opportunity, without precondition, limit or obligation, is to the usual profile of a developer and regulator unconscionable risk, that of the unknown.

Therein is the opportunity though, in the unknown, for the opportunity is for individual action, and our generosity to that end, the facilitation and encouragement of individual action, free, unlimited, unpredictable, imaginative and generous action, and unknowable until known.

What one will find in our ideal, when it is, is what one will find with the contemporary real above, as it is, type whittled down to a minimum. Thus should we find that there’s a limiting minimum and an enabling minimum, and a mean minimum and a generous one.

We may too find that there's little enough between these two minima to begin with, but what there is between them will soon grow to be absolutely everything.