What's the point?

The following is meant to shed some light on the origins of the company name, Freer Point. The name has meaning for myself both as a place and as a concept.

The Place

Freer Point is one name for a place on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, where I spent much of my early-adult life. It holds a special place in my consciousness. It is relevant to the mission of this company as it is where I first explored my capacity to design something and build it within a single, unified process; where I first experienced the closing of the gap between the (historically recently) dichotomized roles of the architect and the builder. I was trusted with a wide-berth within which to create structures for humans to use in daily life. This environment served as a sounding-board of architectural iteration and functional space-making within a limited budget. The project limits and constraints themselves served as the grounds for creative solutions.

Responding to these problems in an environment where experimentation is the status quo, at times gives rise to small failures; and in such moments where one's creative and rational faculties are challenged and sometimes humbled, one comes to understand that a little failure can be equal in value to a big success; that failure is the birthplace of its own overcoming, at least to the extent that one accepts the challenge.

The Concept

The point is the very beginning of, and the freest moment in, architecture, science and art. The point is freer than any other moment, because it is subject neither to the non-constraints of chaos nor the constraints of order, but exists at a no-man's-land, exactly on the border between chaos and order. It is the moment without momentum; non-directional, non-dimensional, yet pregnant with the potential for every direction and every dimension. The point, surrounded by chaos, is the pioneer and promise of order.

"I begin where all pictorial form begins: with the point that sets itself in motion. The point (as agent) moves off, and the line comes into being - the first dimension. If the line shifts to form a plane, we obtain a two-dimensional element. In the movement from plane to spaces, the clash of planes gives rise to body (three-dimensional). Summary of the kinetic energies which move the point into a line, the line into a plane, and the plane into a spatial dimension."

Paul Klee

The Thinking Eye:

The Notebooks of Paul Klee

p. 24

"The cosmogenetic moment is at hand. The establishment of a point in chaos...lends this point a concentric character of the primordial. The order thus created radiates from it in all directions." p. 4

First there was the point, and that point moved to become a line which moved to become a plane which moved to become a body which moved through time. In the case of architecture, the three-dimensional body is the building - both representationally and actually. The building is a three-dimensional body which also assumes existence in the fourth dimension of time. The building is derived from the point both physically and conceptually. And the point of a building can be thought of as this: to bear "the quality without a name," which is itself a kind of point.

The Quality Without a Name

Christopher Alexander, the architect/architectural theorist and writer of The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language, was concerned with articulating what makes some buildings alive, and others dead, some buildings timeless, and others superficial manifestations of a passing trend. And words could only take him so far.

In The Timeless Way, he undertakes an experimental effort to describe the 'quality without a name,' to name it. He cycles through a whole list of terms and meanings which dance around the central concept: alive, whole, comfortable, free, exact, egoless, eternal. And where he ends up is here:

"And yet, like all the other words, this word confuses more than it explains...And so you see, in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it." p. 9

He goes on to propose that the quality without a name can be best conceptualized as a point:

"Imagine the quality without a name as a point, and each of the words which we have tried as an ellipse. Each ellipse includes this point. But each ellipse also covers many other meanings, which are distant from this point.

"Since every word is always an ellipse like this--then every word will always be too broad, too vague, too large in scope to refer only and exactly to the quality which is the point. No word can ever catch the quality without a name because the quality is too particular, and words too broad. And yet it is the most important quality there is, in anyone, or anything." p. 39

-Christopher Alexander

The Timeless Way of Building