October 2005 | Journeys
Design for Life
by Sim Van der Ryn
Where has beauty gone?
Since our emergence as a species, humans have been making places and spaces. We’ve been designing them for the last 30,000 years. All that practice has made us better at producing more material things and doing it faster and cheaper. Our advancements in science and technology have provided the knowledge and tools that have allowed us to shape the material world in utterly fantastic ways. But we have lost our ability to create places of beauty, comfort, and durability that fit both the natural world and our own human nature.
Architecture speaks volumes about the culture from which it springs. It is the physical manifestation of values, ideas, hopes, and dreams. Architecture is the human habitat, the environment of our own creation, the skin that separates us from the natural world. It is also a series of walls — physical and mental — that compartmentalize our perception of the world. It doesn’t have to be.
Sometime during the last century, architecture lost its soul. While the larger-than-life skyscrapers and the coldly postmodern structures of our time do inspire a detached sense of awe and wonder, very few truly move us. Beauty and spirit were integral to the works of earlier cultures and times. Today in Bali they still say: “We have no art; we just do everything well.”
When was the last time you were moved to tears by a building, or did not want to leave a place because it touched you at such a deep level? When was the last time you shivered, ecstatic, in a man-made place that tugged at something deep inside?
Our buildings, suburbs, and most of our cities are cold, lifeless, and uninspiring. To “inspire” is to breathe life into. How can we design environments that inspire and nourish our souls, bringing architecture into deeper connection with our innermost self? How can we reconnect buildings and cities to the cycles and flows of the natural world that are the basis for all life on Earth?
The creation of buildings and the systems that support them — energy, water, waste, roads — is the largest industry in the US and the industrialized world. This industry is the largest user of energy, materials, and open land, and it is the largest polluter of air, water, and soil. We are still designing and building as though resources are unlimited.
Anyone who is not completely unaware or in denial knows that humans are rapidly changing our planet and our environment in dangerous ways. Our free ride on the back of nature is over. Human history is at a critical turning point. Our human capacities for abstract symbolic thinking and testing, the making of ideas and plans as well as material objects and tools, and the ability to turn design ideas into realities have taken us into unprecedented new worlds and realities. Until recent times, the natural world and its processes were uncontrollable and forced cultures to adapt in order to survive. Now, technology has become the uncontrollable force affecting planetary life-support systems such as climate, atmosphere, biologic diversity, oxygen production, carbon sequestration, water purification, and soil creation. Technology is rapidly changing the nature of what it means to be human.
Today no place, no ecology on Earth — no matter how remote — is untouched by the consequences of human activities.
Most of what we do has unintended and unpredictable chemical, physical, and biological outcomes. More by accident than by design, human civilization controls the conditions of life over the entire biosphere. Fifty years ago, biologist Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring alerted the world to the law of unintended consequences by connecting the loss of birds to the widespread use of the biocide DDT. The story has become depressingly familiar as, each day additional evidence connects environmental damage to human activities. No one knows how the story will turn out.
Architecture and urban design can become integrated into the web of life, its cycles and flows. Louis Sullivan, the great nineteenth-century architect, decreed: “Form follows function.” I suggest: “Form follows flow.”
Buildings are not static objects; they are organisms. Cities are not mechanical assemblies; they are ecosystems. Through ecological design, our buildings and cities can become more fully integrated with nature. Like organisms, they can produce their own energy and reduce pollution by consuming and recycling their own wastes.
Nature can live without humans, but humans cannot live without nature. Architecture can make this truth transparent and allow us to experience it at a deep, transforming level. The mission of green building and sustainable design is to bring architecture and urban planning back to the flows and cycles of nature. We need to reconnect buildings to their roots in climate, land, place, and our human genetic need to be connected to living natural environments. Let’s take the pulse of our architecture and lower its metabolism by reducing the obscene, mindless consumption and waste in the name of design. Let’s make buildings whole through commonsense design that incorporates life-enhancing technologies.
Our common work is to shift our dominant worldview from the mechanical clockwork universe of the machine to the intricate, interconnected web-like order that underlies the living world. What does this shift mean for architecture and design? How can design truly reflect the beauty, intricacy, complexity, and dynamic qualities of the living world?
David Brower, the most inspiring environmentalist of our time, challenged modern civilization to “make the ecological U-turn” or face global disaster….Our global crisis is also a design crisis as civilization shifts from design processes and products formed in the image of the machine to design based on the forms and processes of the intricately ordered web of life.
As Gandhi said, “We must be the change we want to see.” This is the essence of actively living with hope.
Sym Van der Ryn, a plenary speaker this month at the Bioneer’s Conference, has been a national leader in sustainable design for over 35 years. The author of nine books, he served as State Architect under former Gov. Jerry Brown. Excerpted from the author’s Design for Life (Gibbs Smith, 2005).
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