Connection - Introduction
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Statement Concepts inspirations connection introduction sundial windmill waterwheel a planted tree footbridges dragon the path conclusion vocabulary Precedents Site Programme Scratch Pad |
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Auguries
of Innocence
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour William Blake (1757 – 1827) As distances across
the planet are reduced by faster travel and comprehensive communication
systems, it is ironic that we are becoming more and more distant from our
surroundings and ourselves. We are caught in a web of magnetic fields
that absorbs so much of our time - internet, e-mail, telephones, pagers,
radios, and televisions. Our interior spaces are climate controlled
to defy the changing seasons and in a city like Montréal, we are
even able to avoid the weather by going underground. What has all
of this technological living done to the human experience of nature, our
connectedness to it, and our subsequent concern for ecological sustainability?
Phenomenology, as he [Edmund Husserl] articulated it in the early 1900s, would turn toward ‘the things themselves,’ toward the world as it is experienced in its felt immediacy. Unlike the mathematics-based sciences, phenomenology would seek not to explain the world, but to describe as closely as possible the way the world makes itself evident to awareness, the way things first arise in our direct, sensorial experience. By thus returning to the taken-for-granted realm of subjective experience, not to explain it but simply to pay attention to its rhythms and textures, not to capture or control it but simply to become familiar with its diverse modes of appearance -- and ultimately to give voice to its enigmatic and ever-shifting patterns -- phenomenology would articulate the ground of the other sciences. (Abram, pg. 35) In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram uses phenomenology to define how we can reconnect ourselves to the natural world. He explores the history of Western culture from its oral traditions in Greece, to the written word, the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and our current age - what I refer to as the information revolution. He explores the power of language to shape our experience of the world relating his understanding of Edmund Husserl's theory of phenomenology. It was Husserl's genius to
realise that the assumption of objectivity had led to an almost total eclipse
of the life-world in the modern era, to a nearly complete forgetting of
this living dimension in which all of our endeavours are rooted.
In their striving to attain a finished blueprint of the world, the sciences
had become frightfully estranged from our direct human experience.
Their many specialised and technical discourses had lost any obvious relevance
to the sensuous world of our ordinary engagements. The consequent
impoverishment of language, the loss of common discourse tuned to the qualitative
nuances of living experience, was leading, Husserl felt, to a clear crisis
in European civilisation. Oblivious to the quality-laden life-world
upon which they themselves depended for their own meaning and existence,
the Western sciences, and the technologies that accompany them, were beginning
to blindly overrun the experiential world -- even, in their errancy, threatening
to obliterate the world-of-life entirely.
George Orwell’s novel,
Nineteen
Eighty-Four, written in 1948, dramatises Husserl’s and Abram’s assertions
of the power of language, Newspeak, to control not only how we view our
present, but also how we view our past and our relationship to the world.
Aldous Huxley describes the satisfying effects of ‘soma’ and ‘sex-hormone
chewing-gum’ in Brave New World to distract an engineered society.
Both of these novels illustrate aspects of our contemporary society that
we are currently living. We are losing, or are in danger of losing,
our ability to recognise and experience natural events and learn from the
immense wisdom that they contain. Urban environments already take
us out of the mythical ‘forest’; additionally, with artificial light, we
are now able to obliterate the existence of stars in the night sky.
With respect to the weather, I once heard someone comment that we only
‘know’ how cold it is by first consulting the weather report rather than
stepping outside for a moment to assess it for ourselves. We need
to relearn how to trust our own senses and observations about the world
around us.
We have been taught that there is no objective difference between good buildings and bad, good towns and bad. The fact is that the difference between a good building and a bad building, between a good town and a bad town, is an objective matter. It is the difference between health and sickness, wholeness and dividedness, self-maintenance and self-destruction. In a world which is healthy, whole, and alive, and self-maintaining, people themselves can be alive and self-creating. In a world which is unwhole and self-destroying, people cannot be alive: they will inevitably themselves be self-destroying, and miserable. But it is easy to understand why people believe so firmly that there is no single, solid basis for the difference between good building and bad. It happens because the single central quality which makes the difference cannot be named. (Alexander, pg. 25) Alexander describes
the ‘quality without a name’ with the following words: alive, whole,
comfortable, free, exact, egoless, and eternal. He is attempting
to access a universal concept of building and town planning - one that
can be learnt through observation of nature and human nature. Abram,
argues to keep us in contact with nature for similar reasons. There
is so much to learn from the natural world around us and we too must also
recognise that we are of that same natural world.
Places which have this quality [being alive], invite this quality to come to life in us. And when we have this quality in us, we tend to make it come to life in towns and buildings which we help to build. It is a self-supporting, self-maintaining, generating quality. It is the quality of life. And we must seek it, for our own sakes, in our surroundings, simply in order that we can ourselves become alive. (Alexander, pgs. 53-54) Living places and connectedness
support, and are supported by, sustainable design. The joy of living
encourages us to continue living and it is this approach to sustainability
that has the best chance of helping people to feel and understand why environmental
sensitivity is so vital to our lives. We may be told that broccoli
is good for us; however, when broccoli is deliciously prepared and beautifully
presented, we are then given the whole-hearted desire to eat and enjoy
it.
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