I
“Now if this thing starts to fall, don’t worry about me. Just get out of the way, OK?”
Dad helps me stand up the 40-foot-long, 8x8 wooden beam. It is a sweltering southeast Idaho summer afternoon. I am 12 years old, almost in seventh grade, and we are inside an old cheese factory working to build the support structure for a climbing wall. Into his harness, Dad ties the rope dangling from the ceiling. He engages his ascenders—power drill swinging from his tool belt—and climbs into the air, securing the top of the beam against a third-story balcony.By my adolescence, he had taught me to plumb a house in beautifully-sweated copper pipe...
When a local gym went out of business, Dad found its disassembled walls sitting in a parking lot. So he bought the walls, leased a building and started hauling materials with me. Over the next nine months, we lived in that cheese factory, using only his vision as our blueprint.
Dad was never a carpenter, plumber, electrician, or otherwise employed in the building trades. He gained all of his technical knowledge growing up on a working dairy farm. By my adolescence, he had taught me to plumb a house in beautifully-sweated copper pipe; reseat a toilet; install and wire new lights, switches and outlets; frame, drywall and finish the interior of an entire house; lay perfect tile; build a staircase; repair masonry... You name it, I could do it.
II
Taking apart houses and putting them back together taught me about traditional materials, natural methods of construction and the optimal design of living spaces. Building practice is a living tradition; one that continuously evolves as new methods and materials are found and tried. It reflects thousands upon thousands of years of slow human study—not only of spatial relationships and proportions, but also of simple environmental, economic and cultural realities.
Building practice reflects thousands upon thousands of years of slow human study.
Around the same time that oil began to have an impact on our world, builders took up avant-garde modernism; a building style that forsook both form and function. The purpose of modernist structures deviated from functionality, as designers began championing the new role of the building as statement or art. While the first modernists bore an incredible understanding of traditional building methods and design, second and third generations of the movement broke with this knowledge to litter the landscape with buildings that did nothing (less than nothing; damage, even) for the aesthetics of a place. Their creations ignored functional inhabitability. Some architects even began to blatantly state that they designed buildings in order to confuse and frighten people.
With the amount of free labor that has been pumped into our system by advances in resource technology, it is shameful that we have failed to improve our built environment. We have even allowed our built environment to become toxic, scabbing over our landscape and destroying the naturally-balanced complexities between nature and culture that had reigned for thousands and thousands of years. It is a dichotomous conundrum that we can be so arrogant as to impose total dominion over the world with our brains and our hands, yet not apply that same power of insight to perceiving how directly we impact the world by the manner in which we live.
III
Fifty, fourty, thirty years ago, a few people started pushing back to regain a more traditional approach to the way we structured the spaces we inhabit in order to engender a better environment, economy and culture. Traditional living patterns arose out of balance and necessity. Communities—large and dense as cities and metropolises, or small and rural as hamlets and farmsteads—focus people and activities into efficient habits, and limit the scope of impact on the rest of the ecology. This is the original sustainability, the first “green” ideology, long before that word evoked anything other than photosynthesis.
Traditional living patterns
arose out of balance and necessity.
arose out of balance and necessity.
In the late 1960s, aging hippie and architect Paolo Soleri combined the words “architecture” and “ecology” to coin the term “Arcology.” Under this moniker, he designed unique ecological human habitats; enormous structures ready to house extremely high populations alongside stations to serve all of their needs. Only, we already had something that did that: Cities. While Soleri can be credited with launching the idea of ecological impact into design practice, it is my belief that he actually wound up working directly against that goal by moving away from the functional and beneficial natural complexities of cities.
Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk designed a few modernist buildings, then recognized the disconnect they were creating. Along with a small but growing group of compatriots, Duany and Plater-Zyberk researched the great buildings and places of human history. Measuring them, the couple discovered design aspects that allowed buildings to work well, and devoted themselves to bringing such concepts to America. Duany and Plater-Zyberk founded their own firm in Miami in 1980.
IV
This concept, of heirloom, has gained
important traction in my line of work:
the value of something that lasts,
serves its purpose and holds up well.
important traction in my line of work:
the value of something that lasts,
serves its purpose and holds up well.
Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s work spawned a movement called New Urbanism, thanks to which concepts like heirloom and “sprawl repair” now have considerable uptake.
Einstein said, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Which is very true, but also misleading in the case of the built environment. We do not need a new “ecologic” approaches that suggest we pattern our future development “along underground plumes of toxicity” as a way to accommodate and repair some of the damage we have already wrought, as the new Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Charles Waldheim suggests. Similarly, we will not preserve and protect our natural environment by patterning our settlements on a “metaphor for nature,” while in fact sprawling across it. By designers, architects and urban planners pursuing the naturally-derived complexity of human settlements through tradition and its evidence, we will automatically allow for the complimentary ecological complexities to survive and flourish.
A three-year Gallup study of 26 American cities, conducted in partnership with the Soul Of the Community Project, rediscovered this connection between quality of place and quality of life. Love and passion for one’s community came out as the top indicator for local economic strength. This love and passion is seen as based on social offerings, openness and beauty—far above perceptions about the economy and social services. Soul of the Community started with the question: “Great schools, affordable health care and safe streets all help create strong communities. But is there something deeper that draws people to a city – that makes them want to put down roots and build a life?” The answer is yes. That something deeper is tradition.
It is time we shift our primary focus from the myriad symptoms of the human condition that plague our world, to the underlying problem of how we build to live. Buckminster Fuller said, “When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” So too, I would argue, our world.