Lost In Place

Rebecca Solnit proposes that being lost is “a psychic state achievable through geography”. Humankind shares a desire to get lost, in order to escape, to find oneself, or to find a sense of belonging. Just as drudgery and devotion to place is embedded in our culture, longing for distance seems embedded in our nature. But being lost takes on a number of forms.

There is the desire to be lost for discovery. People hope to lose themselves in search of the new, of reinvention. They embrace the unknown. They shed one skin in order to don another. It’s the kind of being lost that children find in playing. It’s a kind of being lost that is vanishing with all that terrain labeled terra incognita.

I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.

-Rebecca Solnit

Solnit suggests that our modern places and landscapes are suffocating our ability to get lost for discovery. Media, fences, networks, and design, are cutting off and disembodying the unknown. And as architects, we’re at the forefront of the problem. It would seem that a world caught up in design and communication has created a new sense of being lost.

We now find ourselves so often lost in longing. With so many opportunities available to us, at such costs that we can never obtain them, we are always in search of more. It’s a similar form of losing oneself, but now instead of seeking the unknown, we seek those things we know as distant. When shiploads of city dwellers packed up and left in search of more, they headed for the prairies. The railroad and the government promised ample opportunity, cutting no costs in spreading the word. The prairies were founded in the spirit of getting lost.

In this way, place making and a sense of getting lost, are intertwined. But there are two ways of being lost that create entirely opposite senses of place. The first is to be lost as in never knowing truly where you are. You are physically lost in place, attempting to recreate where you came from. You are detached from the here and present, from the inherent qualities of the landscape. Your sense of place emerges out of where you came from, and what you expect.

Or you could be lost because you’re absolutely immersed. You are, in this way, lost to the outside world like a set of keys, but entirely present wherever you are. Solnit quotes Walter Benjamin as he states that being lost is “to be fully present”. It might have been the captives who found this sense of being lost, or the farmers who wholly dedicated themselves to a new land and new life.

The Prairie Landscape, as in the introductory chapter titles of both Solnit’s “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” and Raban’s “Bad Land: An American Romance”, presents an “Open Door” through which to get lost. But some exploration might discover that much of the place created in being lost, was in longing and detachment, rather than discovery and immersion.

The qualities of place come from two paths, those inherent and those inscribed. The prairies are built on a strenuous convergence between the two. We find the cultural qualities, the longings and preconceptions that followed the founders, inscribed on the landscape. And those qualities that are embedded in the landscape can be read on the people themselves. They are the qualities that pass from one culture to another, revealing the unavoidable truths of the place.