January 21, 2021

Yielding

(Intervening)

“The world is perfect as it is; including my desire to change it.”

Ram Dass

Passive House is an innovative, voluntary standard for energy efficiency in architectural building and construction that is gaining in popularity since its inception in Germany and Sweden in the 1980s. What makes it cutting-edge is that its guiding principles are organized around passivity rather than activity. Passive house standards are all about optimizing thermal insulation and minimizing heat loss rather than actively involved in heating, circulation and recovery. Passive house principles have been documented to result in ultraslow energy buildings representing a 90% reduction of energy demand compared with required for a standard new construction. Passive house principles turn dualistic architectural practices on their head by yielding to the elements; solar heat, wind and topography. Ultra-low energy passive house buildings are less energy intensive to produce and more sustainable to maintain than zero energy buildings which rest on principles of techno centric optimization. <Coupling - Decoupling>

Originally developed around 1988 by Professor Bo Adamson of Lund University, Sweden, and Wolfgang Feist of the Institute for Housing and the Environment, Germany. Residences that embodied the passive house principles were first built in Darmstadt, Germany in 1990. The Passivhaus Institut was founded in 1996 to promote and operationalize the standards. “The heat losses of the building are reduced so much that it hardly needs any heating at all. Passive heat sources like the sun, human occupants, household appliances and the heat from the extract air cover a large part of the heating demand. The remaining heat can be provided by the supply air if the maximum heating load is less than 10W per square metre of living space. If such supply-air heating suffices as the only heat source, we call the building a Passive House.” Univ. Prof. Dr Wolfgang Feist Head of Energy Efficient Construction/ Building Physics at the University of Innsbruck, Austria and Director of the Passive House Institute, Darmstadt, Germany.

Architects and designers regardless of methodology are always in a dance with passive and active designing interventions. Insensitive and dualistic active modes of architecture and urban planning have regrettably inscribed xenophobic and exploitative intentions as bricks and mortar instantiations of the built world. The shift from modernity to postmodernity has resulted in dramatic changes in professional architectural practice, among them a recognition of the intrinsic value of the architect’s capacity to move from logical/analytical to sensing/yielding modes in designing. <Dancing - Wrestling>

Modern architecture epitomizes dualistic thinking in a rationalizing and universalizing impulse to order, optimize and control. In the interim, we have learned that trying to figure things out is a way of trying to control things. Contemporary architectural practice acknowledges the need for both mind and gut knowing at appropriate times. Knowing and being in control can actually inhibit creativity. If improvisation is a metaphor for surrender into the flow of the present moment, then yielding may be a useful metaphor for an orientation to process that values passivity as much as activity, and intuition as much as reason. <Improvising - Planning>

Within and beyond the world of architecture and urban planning, it takes great strength to yield in cultural contexts that value decisive action, measurable results, and masculine displays of efficacy. Our Modern selves celebrate leaders who question, analyze and optimize. Our Postmodern selves celebrate those who challenge the status quo, who speak truth to power, who transgress the boundaries of convention. These active, pushing “hyper masculine” (Bonder) stances are superordinate values of our cultural times. What if, as creators we could dance with our power? What if we saw our inherent yang and yin creative aspects as dynamic polarities always in a mutable state of flux? From this more fluid spectrum of designing modes architects and designers would have a range of choices about when and why to show up in more masculine - and socially acceptable - ways, and when to show up in more feminine ways that may be marginalized and nascent in professional design practice. <Accepting - Denying>

Our concepts of leadership and management are undergoing a significant transformation from practices of control and management to practices of cooperating and allowing. Understanding the fine line between driving and steering, we cultivate, we create the conditions for thriving, and we amplify the good. For example, when we, as a collective use the Theory U process to go “to the bottom of the U” - the causal space of surrendering attachment to outcomes and allowing the emergence of what is brought forth by means of collective intention - we dare to engage the creative process not from the I self but from the We self. MIT Professor Otto Scharmer explores and extends his Theory U methodology - itself a product of iterative action research in the We-space - through his newest iteration - U-Lab: Transforming Business, Society, and Self, a global MOOC that serves a platform for incubating, collective visioning and prototyping and stewarding of what arises to be brought forth as the “emerging future” U-Lab is a global scale action research experiment in the cutting-edge collaborative art of surrender to the present moment. The lab platform hosts some 28,000 participants from 191 countries in alive unprecedented collaboration organized into 350 local hubs. In yielding into what is coming into emergence and what is breaking down we collectively practice what Scharmer calls being together in a new way through the exercise of “open mind; open heart; open will.” <Entrusting - Allowing>

A senior lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, Scharmer is co-founder of the Presencing Institute. Following the successes of Theory U, his best-selling book, and Presence, collaboratively co-authored with Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers, his newest book, Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-system to Eco-system Economies, co-authored with Katrin Kaufer, focuses on the interrelationships between transformations of business, society, and self. In order to to prototype new ways of measuring social progress and thriving, Scharmer co-founded the Global Well-being and Gross National Happiness Lab with support from GIZ Global Leadership Academy and the Gross National Happiness Centre in Bhutan. <Dancing - Wrestling>

Yielding is a practice of surrender and receptivity cultivated over a lifetime of learning and relearning the art of letting go and letting be.  Amazing synergies can happen when we surrender into the mysterious workings of the systems we inhabit and participate with. In sharing this distinction between yielding and intervening I hope to discriminate the ways that both yielding and intervening can be appropriate responses to the particularities of the present moment. I hope to give you tools to recognize them when they arise in the midst of your designing activities.

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