beginning
Food, shelter, and love are primary needs of man.
Without them we cannot exist.
It is in the active provision for these needs that we fulfil our natural functions, turning existence into life.
Whenever we have failed to satisfy these needs and have repressed these natural functions, misery and suffering, war and strife have been the inevitable results.
Chaos springs directly from our inability to see the world as a whole, and our refusal to accept change as an essential part of the process of living.
The outward forms of our society reflect this resistance to change; we invest church and state with divinity, and change becomes a heresy, a treason.
Our cities continue to sprawl over the earth, the harbours of dirt and disease; the village ha been left to die.
Growth and expansion are unco-ordinated.
We rape soil to provide food.
We build slums and suburbs to provide shelter.
Our need for love seeks fulfilment in pornography.
Chaos is everywhere.
All this we continue to accept.
We resign ourselves to the worst human evils and we remain apathetic to poverty and cruelty.
Chaos grows, and with it ignorance, disease and fear: fear of change, fear of responsability, fear of life.
We delegate our responsability to specialists who, safe behind the barriers of class, institution, profession, become isolated from each other, powerless to see anything but their minute piece of the puzzle which is our life.
Chaos is complete.
This is our world.
from Plan: Architectural Students Association Journal, no. 6, 1949
