Animistic Architecture

I recently attended the 30th annual conference of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (SAC), a subsection of the American Anthropological Association, held this year at UC Berkeley’s Faculty Club.

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This is a lovely old building very appropriate for such a gathering of psychonauts; one of those made by master architects from the last century with one foot in the Dreaming.

In its rafters are dragons…

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Tim Lavalli presenting beneath the dragon posts

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…and even the door catches on the floor seem sentient.

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Here a view of those door catches in context.  Would you have noticed their faces?

(Look along the line where the two wood grains meet. They’re right in the middle, where the doors will come together.)

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A lot of speeches and discussions have taken place in this place. (For a description of one of them, see my post Molecular Dancing with Water.) If everything in these lovingly-crafted buildings, even the seemingly-inanimate bits, is looking back, does that mean they’re also listening? And if so, how much knowledge must they have amassed in their years here at this center of learning?!  I would not want to have to argue with them, that’s for sure.

Delights like these little faces in the architecture are everywhere; the world is just waiting to open its petals before your imagination.

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