with
annotations from a 28 year perspective |
| I
lived and worked in Kansas City, from 1971 to the
mid-point of 1979. This is the longest period
that I have ever lived in one place. I
moved to Kansas City after a personal and professional
disaster that is described elsewhere and outlined
in Vol. 1, No. 2 of Renascence Reports. |
| In
1975, I gave my first Redesigning the Future Course
and this lead to the founding of the Renascence
Project the following
year. The Renascence Reports Started publication
in July of 1977 and continued, with some interruptions,
through July 1998. I believe there is one more
issue that was published in early 1979 but I have
lost
track of it. |
| The
Kansas City years were fruitful and lead to many
fundamental shifts in both my philosophy and how
I came to conduct my life. The Renascence Project was
not successful and finally ran out of steam about
a year after Gail and left Kansas City, however,
the nascent ideas that lead to it - and emerged from
it -
have continued to grow in my mind and work. They
are now, nearly 30 years later, beginning to find
expression in the real world. We were perhaps naive
in these
years
and lacking
the resources and experience to do what we dreamed
yet time has shown that the intention was
right on target. There were three intellectual products,
several design concepts and one major take-away that
came out of these years. The products were the Redesigning
the Future Course [link],
the design concepts included the Master Planning
Process [link],
megacity formulations [link] and
co-housing designs of various types [link].
All these were conceived to be parts in a design-build-use
[link] rapid
prototyping process [link] that
progressively built larger projects until large
scale human earth-based habitats [link] were
possible, as well as, space colonies [link].
The Renascence Project was conceived to do this.
Right idea, premature by a generation [link].
The major take-away from the Project was that humankind
needed a completely new kind of infrastructure
in order to successfully facilitate transformations
of
this type and scale. It is the building of this infrastructure
that Gail and I set out to do with MG Taylor Corporation. |
| This
is why I consider the Renascence years to be iteration1 of
the MG Taylor experience that followed them. In many
respects, we have gone full cycle in the 30 years
since Renascence was started. The course, now, ReBuilding
the Future, is being reconstituted [link],
many of the issues that the Project focused on are
now commonly
accepted
social causes and the specific projects are becoming
feasible. The scale and rate of change that the Project
forecasted has certainly taken place with a mixture
of good and bad results. MG Taylor has the METHOD that
was missing and necessary for integrating the diverse
forces that made up Renascence while still leaving
them free. The ad-hocracy we were trying to build
then is now understood as a ValueWeb[link] and,
while we are at the beginning stages of employing
this organizational
architecture, we know a great deal more about the
underlying theory and practice of networks which
makes it up. And, we have a shop [link] for
prototyping and limited production - something that
we tried
to do
but never accomplished in the Renascence years.
In retrospect, we are still prone to some of the
same habits that lead us to periodic organizational
confusion and economic stress. My annotations will
explore these along with the rest. iteration6 [link] is
our transformation to a true, full scale, functioning
ValueWeb architecture - an emerging understanding
but a goal
that goes back [link] long
before Renascence. |
| Renascence
Reports are here re-published, as having value
in themselves, and as a tie to many seminal early
experiences that not only lead to MG Taylor but remain
primary goals to this day. By exploring Worthy
Projects [link],
you can see this legacy. An extensively annotated
full screen
view
of
each page of the index connects
the past and present to the future we continue
to work to bring to reality. |
|
click
on each page for full screen view |
NOTE:
# 1 is misplaced
anyone
with a copy please
notify me
|
|
Page
4 & 5 - Centerfold:
aaaaa
|
Page
4 & 5 - Centerfold:
aaaaa
|
Page
4 & 5 - Centerfold:
aaaaa
|
Page
4 & 5 - Centerfold:
aaaaa
|
| The
first five issues of Renascence Reports cover
the basic idea of the Project and its
time of initial growth. The next five issues document
the ambitions of the Project and our struggle to
find the right match between resources, projects
and (new) organizational ability. Issue #10 highlights
an organization attempt (that ultimately did not
sustain) and the question of success or failure.
It also documents the circumstance of Renascence
starting to have influence outside of Kansas City. |
| Below
are some thoughts on the examined life, the role
of documenting the journey and the process of bringing
new ideas to reality in a society that is indifferent
and even hostile to many aspects of them. Following
this is a link
to the next five Newsletters. |
|
| Living
a self-aware reflective and active life
requires constant reevaluation - and recreation [link].
Many people have one years experience 50 time.
The better practice is to have 50 years experience
50 times. |
| Scanning these Newsletters, rereading them,
putting them on the web site and making annotations
is a way of connecting the past to now and to
the future yet to be. Julian Jaynes but forth
the model that consciousness as we experience
it emerged as a consequence of writing [link].
He believes that the act of making a thought
something external and tangible and
then experiencing this product as a reader provoked
awareness of mental processes, thus, consciousness
of self. Be this historically true or not, the
practice of documenting one’s life and actively
reviewing, appraising - and reusing-mixing -
this “old” material with the new, certainly is
an
essential
tool for living the “examined” life. |
| The most critical aspect of enterprise development
is the timing. Heilein said it this way: “when
it is time for railroads, people build railroads.”
The difficulty is in knowing the timing. We went
to the mood far sooner (less the 70 years after
the first successful manned flight) than was
expected and then dropped the ambition to develop
space for more than a generation. The timeline
presented in Vol. 1, No. 7 was aggressive but
not impossible. Humanity “voted” on another coarse.
Gail and I, ourselves, did the same thing in
starting MG Taylor Corporation which took us
away from these specific projects while we invented
a tool for support all projects of this kind.
We did not do this because there was no market,
in the late 70s, for the projects, we did it
because the Renascence experience informed us
that there were many process and organizational
capabilities missing from the humanity’s tool-kit. |
| One of the risks of being an entrepreneur in
the business or social realms - let alone in
both - is to keep moving on with the “successes”
and to abandoned the “failures.” Success or failure
cannot be understood in an immediate time frame.
the reasons for success or failure are many and
complex. The “lessons” extracted from the experience
have to be carefully thought through. Ideas and
there expressions in products and projects have
latency. It is critical to “go back” and to keep
bringing them into the present and future. Each
will come in its own proper season. |
| I choose Renascence for the name of
the Project because I wanted to stress the active
meaning of the concept: not rebirth but constant
re birthing. I did not know if the Project
would work - or not. I certainly did
not know that it would take 25 years after launching
MG Taylor before we would see the first evidence
of real success in our terms. None of this matters.
What matters is that the ideas that past the
test of time are not forgotten and they are constantly
reinvented until organization, idea and social
reality become requisite. |
|
|
GoTo part two of Renascense Reports |
|
|
GoTo:
Renascence Reports
Index - part two of two |
|
|
|
|
Renascence
Era Notebooks
1974 to1979 |
|
|
|
|
| Dome
Dwellings and Workplaces |
|
|
|
|
| Domicile
One - CoHousing Alternative |
|
|
|
|
| Kansas
City Strip and Master Plan Process |
|
|
|
|
| Matt
Taylor - Hand Written Notebooks Index |
|
|
|
|
| Planetary
Architecture - The Case |
|
|
|
|
| Steinmeyer
House - off the grid - first try |
|
|
Matt
Taylor
Elsewhere
July 19, 2005
|
SolutionBox
voice of this document:
INSIGHT • POLICY • PROGRAM
|
posted:
July 19, 2005
revised:
July 20, 2005
• 20050705.667621.mt • 20050720.879956.mt •
• 20050721.111100.mt •
(note:
this document is about 50% finished)
Copyright© Matt
Taylor 1977, 1978, 2005
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