GREEN FORUM 2009GREEN FORUM 2009

EXCHANGE AND ADAPTATION
In our age of increased technological use, to be Green, we have to make extra efforts not only to save the planet, but also to maintain meaningful
connections with people and nature; even with machines. New technologies are increasingly minute, refined, and hard to adapt, yet ever more ubiquitous. Connections with others and our surroundings become superficial as electronic communication replaces the slower, physical processes of old: one of my favourite Noughties expressions is ‘keep it real’, which shows how far we have accepted that we are living artificially and communicating superficially. This instant gratification is proven to rot the brain due to excessive amounts of endorphins, explaining the increase in attention deficiency amongst younger people. People and environments are more quickly changed and questioned today, with our greater access to knowledge. But the more we question the fundamental benefits of our society and environment, the more we undermine deeply held beliefs which underpin our internal life. There are, however, looser, more playful connections available to us, if we can see beyond our 21st century fears and reconnect with some simple joys of life and design.

RISK AND PLAY
We think we take more risks through games, gadgets, website philosophies and chat rooms: risk our identities through role-playing avatars and adopting the latest opinions. This allows us partially to enact extravagant – I would say, extreme – desires, but are they really risky, let alone fulfilling? Risk-taking is a human condition, part of play and evolution; it is especially important now. Without risk, design in our age of global doom becomes simply a matter of kilojoules and pounds per square metre. The issue of sustainability should not be narrowed to mere energy-saving and function. Delight, vital to architecture and our lives, is so crucial that designers have to risk seriousness for it – not only virtually, but on the ground. More risk-taking, receptivity and delight will bring us back into contact with nature and the here-and-now. From our technological vantage point we can appreciate the natural world with a playful, childlike mind, since we know we have some control over its mechanics. Also vice versa: we can see communications technology as the effective and flashy species it is, but be wary of it, like a big dog. We need architecture that is riskier, and occasionally more challenging.

RECEPTIVITY AND PROCESS
The delights of others and our environment are many when our attitudes to them are receptive. Designers and architects have open ways of working and can often accept a problem positively, as an opportunity for conversion with materials, forms and delightful tweaks into original and appropriate designs. Chance discoveries can be efficient, and often work effectively beyond the initial brief, adding value, as good design should. This requires risk and play, which brings a less academic quality to the process of creativity. If the client, student, builder or ourself is not enhanced by our work, it becomes inadequate and soul-destroying. Here function gives way to a livelier design objective and debate; an enjoyable, life-enhancing process and product that should help us design our way out of global predicaments. Our approach to and recognition of life is the issue, not simply saving it out of duty. We need architecture with more gaps that allow unforeseen life to grow.

DELIGHT AND VALUE
Going with the flow is Zen-like: it allows the hand, as much as the brain and eye, to do the thinking. Gestalt, holism, happenstance – whatever you call it, the main driver of the process is delight. Delight is the driver, product and prism through which it can happen. I use the word ‘value’ carefully, as many question its economic attributes and cynical application, but what would happen if delight were the currency of architecture, including the product, its functions and efficiency? The test of a building would lie in its experience: the building of it, running a contract and inhabiting the space would then all be connected. The Bible talks of building the Temple silently, which sounds ridiculous, since a building site is often more like a war zone, but suggests a benign and appreciative modus operandi for each participant involved. We need architecture that is seen as a continuum.

INDIVIDUALLY GREEN
Alongside environmental proposals for green architecture, we need to reappraise how each of us individually appreciates and enjoys our surroundings, ourselves and others. If we are saving the life of the Earth, let’s make or have more of it! This is not for governments or scientists to dictate, but requires single-mindedness from individuals. We need to look at the way we live; to have more confidence in designing our lives and relationships with nature and others, and be guided from within. This is a battle not for votes, but for hearts and minds, which cannot be won by information alone. Individuals, not governments, change hearts and minds. We need architecture where strangers can meet and talk together more freely.

INDEPENDENT ACTION
We need to evolve a new model of ‘engaged citizenship’, in which we realise that the way we live affects everyone around us, and develop new ways to take up our responsibility – which I believe means the ability to respond appropriately. We need to take ‘participatory democracy’ to a new level, where we take responsibility for creating culture, including the environment. In return, we’ll get the feeling of a life fully lived, in which we are not victims of the system. We can see guerilla gardeners and self-builders making the first moves at this: another example is individuals creating and publishing film, music and text on Facebook, no longer simply buying what is marketed at them, but creating their own products through playful design. This open-ended creative process, peculiar to our relatively privileged times, may ultimately lead to the environment, as building suppliers respond to this market, and marketers recognise a new type of consumer. We need an architecture of new client-based building systems, which offers the individual customer the chance to be producer.

POLITICS AND LOOSENESS
Buildings once publicly expressed an institution’s or a patron’s power. But how will the consumer and independent producer choose to express themselves once the above building systems are available? Budget, site and fashion may form this architecture of diversity – or will it become yet another brand of Lego? Buckminster Fuller foresaw that factories and individuals would become symbiotically connected to make production and consumption most efficient; Gibson and Ballard presented a more dystopian view of ghetto enclaves for corporate and specialised groups. In both scenarios the natural world is irrelevant; all is functional, including the ecological groups. Hundertwasser became aware of a green energy mob mentality when he described ecology as becoming an issue of simple science, which to such an artist seemed anathema, but we now find acceptable. Somehow you can greet someone more generously when walking along a stream than in a conference hall. We need architecture that allows integrated groups to meet in hallways with fish-filled streams.

CYBERNETICS AND BLISSFUL IGNORANCE
Like most super-new technologies, the Internet and cybernetics stem from military inventions. This is fine with Velcro, but how do we interact with and appreciate the net, biotechnology and electromagnetic waves if we cannot see them, let alone adapt them? Perhaps we don’t bother; perhaps we can once again be in the Garden of Eden – as long as we ignore what’s going on. The only people who can really engage with the new technologies like electromagnetics, genetics and boson quarks to influence our global existence are a small elite of specialists. Maybe it’s a good thing we are left behind to frolic in the leaves,.as long as they keep the world going. But remember that cybernetics was invented by Norbert Weiner for military purposes, to control the minds of people and animals. This science can now function through the application of electromagnetic waves and monitored communications devices. Thus the prosthetics we see today used for basic physical function may soon become tools of some other function, especially if we can be rewarded for using such technologies. The play, risk and appreciation may be experienced by the participant or society consciously, but implemented for purposes they know nothing of;.we may soon be able to get on with our own leisure and prosthetic expressions whilst unknowingly performing tasks useful to larger, unseen systems. As long as we can ignore the elephant in the room, we need a functional leisure architecture that benefits us whilst also offering some input from wider unseen applications.

TECHNOLOGY AND THE INVISIBLE AGENT
In a media-driven culture, expression and oppression can be closely linked, no longer through propaganda but by hype and promotion. Therefore we need to be well centred to know what we really want to express or take on board. The desire to extend our faculties has become an addiction of the most material kind, and we are less selective of the data or gadgets we invest in. Expressing ourselves indirectly via technology is replacing deeper, direct human connections, and this ultimately controls the quality of our relationships. But something is occurring here beyond our control; technology is evolving like a species itself. Look at the mobile phone or satellite, the camera or observatory: all these are now used to observe the Earth and ourselves – maybe even themselves. Could Gaia be constructing a new self-reflexive mechanical species for the benefit of the planet? Is there a mechanical Darwinism afoot? Perhaps I’m paranoid to think that we are becoming the environment, both physical and cultural, for technology. It inhabits our world and we its. The Earth, God, group-consciousness or whatever, is driving humankind into a new space, and I, like Noah, want to take some good old-fashioned nature with me, and some friends and a few physical machines. IT has been emerging and expressing itself through man as maker for centuries. Today, however, when all the disparate components and tools become interactive and interdependent, even intergalactic, we find ourselves surrounded not only by hardware, but by an ecology of our desires. These manifested desires may encourage us to act in new ways that question the ethics we have taken for granted and depended on for social benefits for so long. We need an architecture that expresses and encourages moral imperatives and individual manifestations. while reminding us of past constructions and elemental life.

LIFE: LIVING AND SAVING
We are very inclined to imitate, to copy ideas, and what happens? The flame of creativity is lost and only the symbol, the picture, the word remains, without anything behind it. It is understanding that is important and creative, not just information stored in memory or given to us via the internet. We need to be able to comprehend immediately, in the moment. Most of us, particularly academics, are so burdened with information and the intellectual authority of others that our intuitions and lives suffer as we try to get on in the world. Information makes inner life very complex, as combative ideas increase while more abstract ones want resolution and harmony. So to connect with life’s river and see the natural world’s beauty we have to rise above the problems of environment, the shaping and fears of society, stop imitating others: to find our own way. Life is always volatile, never still. Yet today’s excessive functionality and information prevents us from having particular types of contact with life. A new world cannot be new if we have an idea about it; it will be born of what we have read of other people’s ideas. Life will guide me appropriately if I am free to feel what I want loosely. If I see a beautiful tree I may write a poem, make a painting or even a building describing not the tree, but what it has awakened in me. The awakening is connected to the tree that sparks my feeling, which is intuitive, not mechanical; it is in fact some sort of exchange between our internal workings and the world. If we can remain centred this allows all our mental workings to be balanced and we will thrive in life, not just survive the day. Overcoming fear requires the optimism of a snowdrop struggling to grow in Spring snows. We need an architecture that offers small but life-enhancing spaces for us to enact life’s rituals with ease and freedom from fear.

POLITICS OF OPTIMISM CONCLUSION
Cynicism stops joyful responses to life’s opportunities, and is the attitude most likely to conform to the desires of the powerful whose wealth is tied to planetary destruction. Fear and cynicism are encouraged by the grim coverage in the news. We are suffering from ‘solastalgia’ about the loss of the natural world and compassion for the suffering of millions. Yet we should not give in to the narrative lure of collapse. The cynical dynamic we see in media and political debate today stems from incorrect assumptions, including:

i) We are incapable of solving the earth’s problems.
ii) Bold solutions are ‘unrealistic’ because they involve unbearable costs.
iii) ‘Realism’ really means ‘in the best interest of those doing well today’..
iv) Small steps and half measures are the appropriate course of action.

Combined with the politics of fear, this is best thought of as a cynical ‘politics of impossibility’. Where no one believes things can change for a better future, despair is logical, nobody changes anything, and those benefiting from continuation of the problem are safe. If we want a better environment for ourselves, the Earth and our designs, we need to challenge cynicism. If we all introduced intelligent reasons for actions to show that a better future is possible, we could start to act out our principles. Consider, therefore, a politics of optimism, where the assumptions are:

i) Realism is defined as ‘within our capacity’ and ‘necessary’..
ii) We can create environments that solve the world’s problems.
iii) Improving the prospects of most people and their environments and the Earth incurs costs. But the returns are attractive: eco-stability, economic prosperity, international security and human well-being for now and the future.
iv) We publicly commit to appropriate actions and start defining win scenarios we want to create.

This optimism needn’t be naïve. We know people are fallible and self-interested. We can stress the importance of informed decision-making, demand rigour and note uncertainty. We can anticipate future setbacks and even total failures more easily if we acknowledge the struggle with optimism. If we do so, we shall liberate ourselves from the burden of despair this millennium has been given. And to do so, we as architects have to question some basics of how we relate to the design processes, nature and technologies that form the environment today; and not be ‘green’ with fear.

GREEN FORUM 2008

GREEN FORUM 2008

We are all trying to save the planet in the 21st Century but how do we do it without becoming too dull? This seems to be the question we should be asking today. Since Vitruvius first claimed that firmness, commodity and delight were key elements of architecture, many developments have been made in firmness and commodity through social and technical improvement.

However, now we are predominantly immersed in environments of data and media the element of delight seems predominantly image and text based. I think that in architecture this should be challenged: in a digital age we need more physical delight to balance our overwhelmingly mental lives.

The surface has become more important to architecture in the digital age than the interactive interface; the façade rather than the niche, the label rather than the feeling. In the last century, machines replaced the natural and pastoral delights of the land with modernism. Now, the delight of the keyboard and cell phone are replacing the delights of mechanical machines. Hi-tech is giving way to an architecture of low tech or invisible super technologies.

Let us not ignore the new technologies in our search for a green architecture. But find ways to use it to enhance our connection with the natural world. We have always delighted in the interfaces we have with our environments and the materials of our environments, in the control, function and commodity they offer. This has inspired architecture and the invention of use objects or tools. But, today this interface is less physical than ever before and often invisible. This technology is harder to express. I would say our architecture is therefore becoming less delightful. It seems our delight has become predominantly one of mental consumption. The reduced kinaesthetic and sensory experience of interacting with the environment, tools and materials of our environment is reducing our capacities to appreciate inhabiting physical space and architecture. This is why I wish to explore pastoral appreciation in a digital age, to look at how we can fully appreciate the physical, natural surroundings and interfaces architecture offers and how it can benefit our current crisis by reconnecting us in new ways with nature.

Natural environments have always been a source of inspiration for artists, architects and scientists. In the blank void of nature lie new ideas; the intellectual distance and gaps of the natural world offer creativity. Our intellects cannot stand the blank and chaotic nature, so we make sense out of it. But now we are running out of gaps to fill. We have always attempted to order and construct around us a sensible world. We are not used to the wilderness, we are social and need constructs. But now we may have too many constructs and may need to bring some green looseness back into our cities. Not just to save the planet, but ourselves as well.

In our search to fill the voids of understanding we now want to find the answer to everything. This diagram of E8 shows where quantum physics is now placing its ultimate questions of how the universe works. It shows an ecology of linkages. We are not satisfied with nature as it is but now our most advanced diagrams have a remarkably natural quality to them. Perhaps even in our most advanced intellects there lies a hard wired connection to the natural unknown worlds; to the romantic nature.

We go to great lengths to reconnect to the natural world and this reconnection takes many forms. Perhaps the strength of this physics diagram is its gaps. It seems it is the unknown, the unprogrammed, the gaps between the links and the mysterious that have driven us to learn and grow. The mysterious or the green wilderness can act like the obelisk in the 2001 film. It’s alienation forces us to react and keeps us lively and thinking. The mysterious, mystical and magical is the basis of cultural desires and as such become the basis of technological tools. I propose that if we become too engrossed in the rational and technological aspects of our environment we will neglect not only the earth itself but ignore what is driving us subconsciously. Our desire to reconnect with nature and enjoy mystery can be used to help save the planet and our humanity.

The search for the unknown and mysterious helps us to evolve. But what will happen when we think we have all the answers? What happens if our present ecological crisis precipitates simply energy, money and rationally biased environments to the exclusion of the sacred and wonderful. I suggest that there is a danger we might lose our mysteries and wonder as well as the planet. Our environments are becoming somewhat cybernetically rational: rational because all can be answered intellectually. Cybernetic, because we are more controlled and controlling. However, our mysteries, shared or individual, offer an evolution at many levels and a way forward for green architecture. A green architecture designed with mystery in mind can respect humanity and nature; and can nourish us at a deeper level.

Have we become so digital in our thinking that we find the fun and playful wonder of mystery naïve? Scientists have proven that fun and happiness are a key to health, intelligence, memory and business success. I propose an ‘ecology” of design thinking that is fun and free of the desire to be seen as simply right in a black and white binary sense- thinking. A green architecture that offers synergy feedback, mystery and the growth of systems in an architecture of opportunities.

Here buildings can evolve and grow and therefore last, using our new technologies and the natural elements. I believe that the combination of fun and living nature with complex technologies is a way forward in the face of fear and figures of environmental disaster. Saving the whales, rainforests and the planet itself should be more about appreciating and creating life, not simply saving energy and money. This is a near sacred experience and I feel that the financial calculations and energy-saving technologies so important to architecture today- neglect the fun of life, technology and essences of life and nature which should be added to our cities.

We can often find ways that nature can reflect our own imaginations and our own thinking, particularly in our relationships with animals. So as cities expand and become more densely populated with people and media messages, maybe the inclusion of wildlife from the surrounding countryside can offer us something? As opposed to destroying wildlife perhaps it can be incorporated beneficially into urban environments? We could find ways that allow animals ways to maintain their character and wildness whilst inhabiting cities with us. The distance between us and nature’s animals is shrinking so we better start learning to find ways to mutually benefit one another by our presence.

Bird baths. Bird nests. Cat, dog and fox runs. Ponds. Planted roofs and walls. Aquariums. Aviaries. Horse pastures. Cattle grazing. Chicken coops. Dovecotes. Stables. Kennels. Catteries. Rabbit hutches. Squirrel nests. Badger sets. Deer grazing.

Now we are more likely to be immersed, even infiltrated by data the challenge which faces us is environmental in a broader sense. We need to understand how we respond to data and create knowledge. If we re-establish how we relate to living and natural elements we save a very basic human experience of reality: the physical living experience of being on the natural planet, not predominantly in cyber space: but kinaesthetic. This is another way of thinking with the body and is not simply intellectual. Architecture can help us to think in this physical way.

Our interrelations with the natural world, each other and ideas can be re-established in ways that are now not only useful, but joyous too. The efficiency of tools and ideas as effective means for moulding the environment can now give way to the efficiency of play, not simply function or utility. Physical play helps us to learn and has been a key to human and child development throughout the ages. Happiness is proven to improve memory, communication, learning and relationships. Play is a way to learn and re-establish our relationships with the natural environment, data and other living species. Nature offers playful delight, not simply utility, it offers a way to reconnect with ourselves and the natural world. A green architecture should playfully integrate nature with its structures.

More joy and play can supplement the number crunching energy efficiency of the designs and audits we architects now make; forgetting the life and joy we are wanting to save. Ecologist and designer Hundertwasser has pointed out that our environments are being generated by predominantly economics and statistics; becoming less life fulfilling. Life affirming arts or shared human experiences seem to give way to statistical techniques. I hope today we can learn ways in which green issues can be extended beyond simply the pennies and kilojoules into the realms of imagination, energy surplus not saving, plants and animals, art, communities and play; not letting the current ecological crisis overcome our joyful experience of the sacred act of living.

Biologists suggest that our whole body has ‘neoro-peptides’ (intelligent cells) flowing through it; our intelligence and consciousness is not found simply in the brain. Anthropologists have suggested that ancient man’s brain and awareness grew as result of using hands to manipulate the surroundings. Consciousness and walking came about through interacting physically in the environment with our hands and arms. Our physical and mental evolution started as we physically interacted and evolved our surroundings. So a more playful physically engaging architecture influences our consciousness at a deep level, a green architecture should be playfully adaptive.

Lovelock suggests that our evolution is directly connected to the evolution of our surroundings and that we are part of creating an ecology of synergistic evolutions and adaptations. If we cannot adapt and play with our surroundings we cannot evolve. In order to adapt and play with our surroundings we need to appreciate them; and appreciation creates excellence.

As our ecological world seems to be precariously heading towards a catastrophe, or as Lovelock suggests is already in a catastrophic state, I propose that we should leap into a more balanced and idyllic paradigm which better integrates play with the natural, technological and our deeper selves. The first man moved rocks and so adapted his natural environment. With this playful adaption he therefore made technology, architecture and affected himself (in terms of boundaries, evolution, agriculture or shelter) whilst working with/or against the natural world. This was the first science and technology and it was natural and could be argued that it always is. Alternatively, it could equally be argued that the natural world has always been affected by man and is always artificial. The self, man-made stuff and the natural world have been strongly interconnected ever since this first moment. However, as we live in cities this connection is becoming abstracted and the distance between us has made the living world and pyshical play something of a distraction from our increasingly intellectual lives, lived in media and communication.

Interactions with our environments and each other once were defined by how we used materials taken from the earth. The uses of stone, bronze, agriculture and machinery have defined how we have interacted with ourselves, our man-made tools/ surroundings and the natural world. Compared to how we once engaged with language, the land or mechanical machines, how much do we really engage or adapt with the nano/information (not knowledge) around us? How malleable is information and culture today? How much more do we question information and didacts today? How much do we cherish and care for our information/tiny technology stuff as we once did our stories, songs, horse, garden, boat, house and car? How do we care for the physicality of ourselves and environments joyously when we would rather be in another space, a digital place.

Teilhard de Chardin posits that such a thing as a ‘noosphere’ exists and that this is an accumulation of human consciousness, which will bring about mass spiritual growth when it is infused with the Holy Spirit. I suggest that the realisations of the Digital Age, including those of image and surface and directly marketed objects and experiences will be seen as thinner than first imagined, once a critical mass of people have become media saturated. Then a new age of green architecture will be upon us.

Rupert Sheldrake talks of each species possessing a ‘morphic field’, a collective subconsious. This could be developed amongst various species in parallel to one another with certain subconscious benchmarks and overlaps which we could also be engaged in via architecture. In this way a communication between species and ourselves augmented by architectural interfaces could be more quickly developed. This could offer us new ways to appretiate physically the environment and each other; kinaesthetically and through the senses.

As we lose the ancient relationships of individually using the natural world for our material gains, and rely on others to farm, fish etc we still have a strong desire to maintain contact which nature and this desire causes a shift in our appreciation of nature. Levi-Strauss suggests we wish to “ maintain the coherent relationships conceived by men in a previous (natural) environment. So strong does this need for coherence appear to be that, to preserve the unvarying structure of relationships, people prefer to falsify the image of the environment rather than to acknowledge that the relationships with the actual environment have changed…”
This falsification is required to a greater extent in the urban world and may possibly be found in the myths of past times, good stories, cyberspace media and games; all are a form of secluded non-public space. As Fowles says, we need a place, a forest, in which the green man in us can hide, a place to play as a child with the complexities and paradoxes of childlike experience. With an information environment of data and fact this desire for the ‘woods’ is stronger and an artificiality or falsification of nature increases.

In an outdoor reading bench, I will start the design project by exploring how we can best live and work with nature, technology and each other in London: in a 21st century of increasingly stressed and less physical society. The moon, earth, air, fire, water, clouds, plants and animals are what one will connect with on this bench. These elements will be used to bring mental and physical grounding to our modern intellectual mind and experience of information. It will look at ways that spaces connect us with the complexities of living nature, each other and the luxuries of the elements, play and appreciation: to make more life, energy and conditions for individual growth than they consume. Sustainable should imply sustainable appreciation, keeping the joys of life going, sustaining our delight so that we can sustain the world, nature, our technologies and each other.

” Pastoral poetry makes poignant and real the dream it wishes to convey when the retreat is not a lasting but a passing experience, acting as a pause in the process of living, as a breathing spell from the fever and anguish of being. Then it fixes the pastoral moment, as an interval to be chosen at both the proper hour and the right point. The right point at which to stop and rest from a journey is a secluded spot, appealing to the traveller through the charm of its quiet and shade. Hence the topos of the ‘lovely place’ or ideal landscape…

It’s presence in an epic poem, in a romance or a tragicomedy foretells the unexpected apparition, which breaks the main action or pattern, suspending for a while the heroic, romantic or pathetic mood of the whole. Accordingly, the topos itself is but an idyllic prelude to an interlude, where the characters rest from their adventures or passions. Since the pause normally occurs in an obscure place, the intermezzo itself should be termed the ‘pastoral oasis’.”

Renato Poggioli 1957

Tags: delight, eco-fear and catastrophe, Gaia, gated communities, guerilla gardeners, mechanical evolution, mechanical linkage, play, risk