RESPONSE: THE DESILO PRINCIPLES ON ARCHITECTURE PRACTICE AND EDUCATION
After uploading The Desilo Principles: Manifesto Version 1.0 to Zenodo, (link here) I shared the PDF with several friends and colleagues, inviting them to evaluate the relevance and approriateness of the principles within their respective fields of expertise.
Yesterday, I received a thoughtful review from my good friend, Ar. Lok Wooi Kuang, an architect and architectural educator whom I have known for many years. With his kind permission, I am pleased to share his reflections here.
His review illustrates how the Desilo Principles can be applied as an epistemological framework across different disciplines and contemporary issues. He also offers several constructive suggestions for strengthening and enriching the framework, particularly in relation to architectural practice and architectural education.
Thank you Ar Wooi Lok Kuang for such a constructive feedback.
The followings are his response, verbatim:
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Dear Dr. Zaky,
Thank you for sharing this thoughtful manifesto with me. It
arrives at a moment when many of us in architecture and the built environment
are grappling with precisely these questions—how do we restore wholeness to a
profession that has become increasingly fragmented, technical, and detached
from human meaning?
I read The Desilo Principles with genuine interest,
and I want to offer my reflections as both a friend and a fellow traveller in
the critique of reductionism. Let me respond to what I see as the salient
points, with some observations from the perspective of architectural practice
and education.
Salient Points That Resonate Deeply
1. The Rupture as a Foundational Diagnosis
Your opening statement—that we face "economic
prosperity alongside human deterioration"—captures something I encounter
daily. In architecture, we build more efficiently than ever, yet produce
environments that often diminish rather than ennoble human experience. The
dissonance you identify is tangible in every soulless tower block and every
masterplan that prioritises metrics over meaning. Your framing of this as a rupture
rather than a failure is important; it suggests something broken that can
be mended, not something that must be discarded.
2. The Mechanisms of Fragmentation
Your identification of reductionism, scientism, and
managerialism as compounding mechanisms is particularly acute. In architectural
education, we have progressively reduced design to technical problem-solving,
human experience to behavioural metrics, and beauty to a subjective preference
that cannot be taught. The managerial turn in our profession—where success is
measured in floor-area ratios, construction speed, and energy performance—has
systematically displaced the question: What does this place do for the human
spirit?
3. The Law of Meaningicide
This is, for me, the most powerful principle in the
document. The triad of fragmentation, severance, and reduction describes
precisely what happens when we take a site, a community, or a building
tradition and subject it to analytical methods that destroy its living
wholeness. We fragment the landscape into zones, sever the building from its
climatic and cultural context, and reduce architecture to a set of performance
criteria. Meaning is indeed "progressively diminished" through these
operations.
I would observe, however, that in architecture we also
encounter a specific form of severance that you do not explicitly name: the
separation of the maker from the made. When buildings are
designed in distant offices by specialists who never touch materials or inhabit
the places they design, a profound severance occurs that your framework helps
explain.
4. The Dethronement of Transcendence
In architectural history, the exclusion of transcendence
from our worldview has had devastating consequences. The great architectural
traditions—whether Gothic, Islamic, or Classical—understood buildings as
mediating between the human and the divine, the temporal and the eternal. We
have lost this. In its place, we have the autonomous ego of the architect as auteur,
the client as consumer, or the market as arbiter of value. Your diagnosis of
this metaphysical vacuum is essential, though I would add that some
contemporary architects, like Peter Zumthor or the late Christopher Alexander,
have attempted to recover a form of architectural transcendence without
explicit religious content—something that might be worth exploring in your
framework.
5. Capitalism as a Fragmenting Regime
You correctly identify how industrial capitalism reinforced
fragmentation because it facilitates measurement and optimisation. In
architecture, the same logic prevails: we standardise building components,
rationalise construction processes, and reduce design to a series of decisions
that can be evaluated for cost and speed. The result is the global
homogenisation of the built environment. One could argue that the most
significant architectural challenge of our time is not technological but economic—how
to create meaningful places within a system that rewards standardisation and
speed over beauty and belonging.
6. Measurement as a Means, Not an End
This principle speaks directly to my experience in
architectural practice and education. We are drowning in metrics—carbon
footprints, energy models, construction costs, space utilisation rates—while
neglecting the qualities that make places worth inhabiting. The transformation
of indicators into targets, as you describe, has distorted architectural
judgment. We design buildings that perform well on paper but fail in the lived
experience of their users. Your call to restore metrics to their proper place
as instruments of diagnosis rather than ends in themselves is timely and
urgent.
7. The Centrality of Worldview
This is where architecture can make a distinctive
contribution to your framework. A worldview is not merely an abstract
philosophical position but something that finds material expression in
the built environment. The medieval cathedral, the traditional Malay rumah, the
Japanese temple, the Greek agora—each embodies a coherent worldview in which
knowledge, meaning, value, and purpose are integrated. We have largely lost
this integrative capacity, and our buildings reflect that loss. Any framework
for defragmentation must attend to the material dimensions of worldview,
and architecture is uniquely positioned to contribute to this work.
Reflections from an Architectural Perspective
Let me offer some observations about how your principles
might be applied or extended in relation to architecture and the built
environment:
The Built Environment as a Site of Defragmentation
If fragmentation is a condition of the modern mind,
architecture is both a symptom and a potential site of recovery. Every
building, every street, every city is a materialisation of a way of
understanding reality. Your framework could be extended to consider how spatial
fragmentation—the separation of home from work, of nature from city, of
public from private—mirrors and reinforces the epistemic fragmentation you
describe. The recovery of wholeness must therefore include the recovery of place
as a living, integrated reality rather than a collection of functional
zones.
The Tacit Dimensions of Practice
You cite Michael Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension in
your suggested readings, and I would emphasise this in any architectural
application of your framework. Much of what matters in architecture—proportion,
materiality, light, atmosphere—cannot be fully captured in explicit knowledge.
It is learned through practice, through making, through embodied experience.
Desilo thinking must attend to these tacit dimensions and resist the temptation
to make everything explicit and measurable. In architecture, we know more than
we can say, and your framework must honour that.
The Education of the Whole Person
Your critique of modern education as fragmented and
specialised resonates with my experience in architectural schools. We have
created curricula that develop technical competence while neglecting ethical,
aesthetic, and spiritual formation. The result is graduates who can produce
sophisticated drawings but cannot articulate why a place matters. Your call for
the cultivation of insan kamil—the fully integrated human being—is, for
me, the most compelling vision for architectural education. We need not simply
train technicians but cultivate whole persons who can exercise wise
judgment about the places they create.
The Particularity of Events
Your principle of the particularity of events (suggested in
your comments on readings) is especially relevant to architecture. Every site,
every community, every building programme is unique and cannot be fully
captured by universal principles. Yet our profession increasingly relies on
standardised solutions, typologies, and best practices that ignore this
particularity. Desilo thinking, as I understand it, would insist on attending
to each situation in its specificity while remaining guided by integrative
principles. This is a difficult balance, but it is the heart of genuine
architectural judgment.
Points of Dialogue
I would also raise a few questions that might enrich the
ongoing development of your framework:
What is the Role of Beauty?
You discuss meaning, values, and purpose, but you do not
explicitly address beauty as an integrative principle. In architecture,
the recovery of beauty is essential to the recovery of wholeness. Could beauty
be understood as a manifestation of integrated reality—as the perception of
harmony, proportion, and fittingness that emerges when fragmentation is
overcome? I would be interested to see how you might incorporate this into your
framework.
How Do We Avoid New Forms of Dogmatism?
Your framework is pluralistic and open, which is
commendable. But in architecture, we have seen how attempts to recover
wholeness can become rigid, prescriptive, and dogmatic (Christopher Alexander's
later work, for example, sometimes takes this turn). Your commitment to working
propositions and open dialogue is essential to avoiding this. But I would ask:
How do you maintain the critical and open character of your framework while
still offering sufficient guidance for practice and education?
What are the Institutional Mechanisms of Change?
You diagnose the problem of fragmentation in institutions,
but you offer less guidance on how institutions might be transformed. In
architecture, the professional bodies, accreditation systems, and economic
structures that govern practice are deeply implicated in the fragmentation you
describe. What does institutional defragmentation look like in practice? How do
we begin?
Closing Thoughts
Your manifesto arrives at an important moment. The Rupture
is real, and its consequences are visible in every ugly suburb, every
alienating city centre, every building that diminishes rather than dignifies
human life. Your attempt to articulate an epistemological framework for
recovery is both timely and necessary.
I am particularly encouraged by your commitment to
transdisciplinary dialogue and your openness to multiple philosophical and
religious traditions. Architecture needs precisely this kind of integrative
thinking—not a single ideology but a framework within which different
traditions can encounter one another and contribute to the recovery of
wholeness.
I have no doubt that this document will generate debate.
That is its purpose. I hope it also generates action—in education, in practice,
and in the ways we think about what architecture can be.
I am happy to continue this conversation, and I would be
interested in exploring how the Desilo Principles might be applied in
architectural education and practice. Perhaps there is a collaboration to be
considered: a workshop, a publication, or even an architectural project that
embodies these principles.
With deep respect and admiration,
Lok Wooi
P.S. I recall our earlier conversations about
McGilchrist, and I see his influence in your work. The Master and His Emissary
offers a profound diagnosis of how the left hemisphere's analytical mode has
come to dominate the right hemisphere's integrative mode—a fragmentation that
your framework seeks to address. I commend you for extending his insights into
a practical epistemological framework.
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