I believe God made me for a purpose.
But He also made me fast.
And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”
— Eric Liddell, Chariots of Fire
Chariots of Fire (1981), directed by Hugh Hudson, tells the story of two British runners competing in the 1924 Paris Olympics: Eric Liddell, a devout Scottish missionary, and Harold Abrahams, a Jewish Cambridge student determined to overcome class and religious prejudice. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. I was eleven when I first saw it, and forty-four years later, I can still hear Liddell’s voice in my ear, the Scottish brogue lingering on the word pleasure.
Only now do I understand, through Albena Yaneva’s writings on architecture and actor-network theory developped by Bruno Latour, that what Liddell embodied could be described as a kind of pragmatism in motion. For Liddell, running is relational and communicative, a way of being in dialogue with the divine. He participates in a dynamic network where meaning arises through interaction among human and nonhuman actors: body, beach, wind, and God. His pleasure is the feeling of connection within that network.
Harold Abrahams, in contrast, perhaps embodies a structuralist mode of thought and communication. He runs within and against the social architecture of Britain, its class hierarchies, anti-Semitism, and academic elitism. His approach is analytical and disciplined; his running is a tool in pursuit of other interests. Unfortunately, in his opposition, he remains bound by the very structures he seeks to transcend. The film presents two philosophical ways of being: Abrahams’ structural design of self and Liddell’s relational communication of spirit.
In 1992, after working as wardrobe supervisor for the National Theater of the Deaf’s Northern Ireland tour, I was suddenly laid off. At twenty-two, I took a hydrofoil from Belfast to Scotland to see the houses and furniture of starchitect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. There was no internet, no Uber, no GPS, just paper maps, bus timetables, and strangers’ directions. I had to figure it out. But that was fun.
When I first studied Mackintosh at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, his work existed as images on slides, flattened light projected on a lecture-hall wall, filtered through Dr. David Brownlee’s very certain affected Harvard accent. His voice made architecture sound grand but somehow distant, polished, elite, not meant for everyone. I learned how Mackintosh fit into the architectural canon: his position within a linear, evolutionary story of architecture. That framework was important to Brownlee; it gave architecture coherence and lineage, placing each building within a rational progression of styles and ideas. But it also reflected a structuralist way of seeing, a system built on sequence, influence, and hierarchy, where meaning is derived from position within the whole. And you can talk about it endlessly without ever physically being there.
When I finally arrived in Scotland, I stepped outside that structure and into a network. When I entered The Hill House, after a long bus ride and a walk on a wet and chilly November day, something in me shifted. The light, the landscape, the wallpaper, the elongated proportions of the furniture. In that moment, like Liddell, I felt God’s (Goddess’s) pleasure. Standing in Mackintosh and Macdonald’s space, I was in awe. I was so excited to be alive.
The building, too, was alive. We were in conversation, me, a Black Jewish girl from Philadelphia, and this famous Scottish house were communicating. I was no longer looking at a work of art on a slide. I wasn’t even thinking about Mackintosh; I was participating in its unfolding. The lines and proportions I had memorized for Brownlee’s exam now faded: I was now more interested in the way a window framed a cloud, the height of a chair back, the mud on my feet, the silence of being one of only a few people there. I became part of the system. I wondered what processes were involved in making this structure - clearing the site, bringing in the materials, who built the house and tended the land? Did they like each other? Who actually lived in the house - what were their stories? And now who now was taking care of it? How did the get here? Did they ride the same bus I just rode? What were their lives like? How did they feel about their jobs?
It was the difference between the canon’s structural order and Yaneva’s Latourian network, between knowing about something and being in relation to the processing of making and sustaining it. What filled my heart was not the authority of understanding but the humility of connection. Maybe tomorrow the next architecture student would be here processing the experience in their own unique way.
