Building and Living as Part of the Natural World, Part 1

I'm going to begin posting articles i've written, each in a series of parts with images.  Here is the latest writing i've been working on, the first part......... comments welcome!

Building and Living as Part of the Natural World, Part 1

A few years ago, my wife, Beth, and I rafted through the Grand Canyon for eighteen days.  We were out of doors twenty four hours a day, in and out of the water, in the canyons formed over billions of years, sleeping under the stars.  When we left, we were bused to the back of a hotel and told to walk through a hallway up to the lobby to meet another bus.  As soon as i entered the hallway, I was completely disoriented, bouncing off walls, head dizzy.  

While in the canyons, my body and mind had drifted back into some ancient rhythm, or way of being in the world.  Every fiber within me was alive, alert, invigorated, breathing, and attuned to the sky and water and canyons. Returning to Cartesian space - abstract and geometric - jarred me out of my new primal existence.

This disconnect is unnecessary.  Architecture can be otherwise -  the spaces we live in can be attuned to the natural world.  As we painfully know, buildings in the US are, for the most part, life-less and soul-deadening. There is no resonance with anything from the world we come from.

More acutely, most buildings are full of toxic materials, often hermetically sealed with no relationship to the natural world.  Buildings are typically designed as discrete objects, with no regard for how the sun tracks across the sky, the wind courses through the windows, the flow of the land, the rhythms of the seasons.  

That's the intro.......i'll offer ways of creating vital space and form next week!



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