Tag: environment

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Architecture Art & Design Journal People

Somewhere Underground

Malcolm Wells
Malcolm Wells

There have been only a handful of people in my life whose words and examples made such an impression that my inner and outer life changed course in a way I could not have seen, let alone understood, until I was already well along the path in the new direction. I was, perhaps, very lucky to have been blessed with parents who were aware, different, and courageous enough to step out of the boundaries of their communities and go see the world, and so, ever since I can recall, new ideas, new people, a cavalcade of cultures, religions, senses of humor, languages, art, literature, even food, all swept through my life like a river, inviting me to take a breath and dive in. People with ideas flowered around me like a garden and learning was fun and sustaining. I was ripe for mentors.[1. Photo by Jay_Elliott]

This my parents prepared me for, enthusiastically, almost pushing me along. And certain people, people I read or met or heard from others speaking about, caught on like burrs and wouldn’t let go. People like Miss Patricia Burke, my high school English teacher, who nurtured a love of writing when my painfully shy personality held me back from releasing anything I wrote into public. Or Professor Don Taylor of the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program, who took me under his wing and encouraged me with my stories in spite of my lack of confidence. Or Professor Ken O’Connell of the U of O Art Department, who listened to my pleading with him to let me into his animation program and let me become his apprentice for the next two years. Or writers like Barry Lopez and Gretel Ehrlich and Edward Abbey whose books radically changed the way I saw the potential of weaving the exciting amalgamation of nature and science into a new kind of spiritual dialogue with the Earth, one both practical and meaningful. Or poet Mary Oliver who was the voice of nature itself, describing in spare, unpretentious vocabulary what we all feel and long for as living things. Or Tove Jansson, the author of the Moomintroll series of children’s books, whose magic continues to enthrall me 39 years later, something that few other writers have done.

And then there was Malcolm Wells, the “Father of Underground Architecture”. During my architectural studies I discovered his work while browsing, in the University of Oregon Architecture Department’s library, a copy of the magazine Progressive Architecture. A photograph of a building barely visible under a carpet of grasses and wildflowers caught my eye. His buildings lived underground, in the soil, like moles and Hobbits. After the inundation of all the sterile modern designs, the overly heavy and narcissistic classic 19th century fare that people traveled thousands of miles to see, and the complete shunning of Asian architectural design, with this new form of architecture, which attempted to erase its presence and bow to the exuberance of living things, I felt I had finally found my niche in architecture and could sally forth with a renewed sense of the appropriateness of this profession which, until then, seemed to me to do so much to scar the very world I revered so much.

I read everything I could find on Wells, searching the archives for articles on his designs, seeking anything he had written and said. I discovered an outspoken, but gentle-hearted man, whose love for the natural world outweighed his love for architecture and who spent his life trying to convince the world that the way we were going about building our homes and towns and cities was both destructive and deeply disrespectful of the planet we were sharing with other living things, if not downright stupid. His writing reminded me in a way of a good-natured nay-sayer who didn’t mind brushing the fur the wrong way at a dinner party, proposing preposterous ideas that most at the party would roll their eyes at, without properly stopping to consider just how wise and effectual the ideas were. Wells seemed to me an Edward Abbey of the architecture world, and when I first saw his photo I realized I wasn’t far wrong; he even looked like Abbey.

Out of my hundreds of books one of my greatest treasures is Wells’, “Gentle Architecture”, a book I have read dozens of times and still garner wisdom from. Not only does it propose new ways of building and inhabiting cities,… that thirty years later would probably still seem radical to most people today… it suggests a completely different way of looking at nature and what our buildings are supposed to mean to us and the land. He offers a way for us to regain our spirituality in the very act of building our settlements and dwellings, one that reveres all life and the very reason for our births into the world. Here is the list of goals he proposed should be the building blocks for creating places to live:

Malcom Wells Office
Malcolm Wells office

[2. Photo courtesy of MalcolmWells.com]

1) Creates pure air.
2) Creatures pure water.
3) Stores rainwater.
4) Produces its own food.
5) Creates rich soil.
6) Uses solar energy.
7) Stores solar energy.
8) Creates silence.
9) Consumes its own waste.
10) Maintains itself.
11) Matches nature’s pace.
12) Provides wildlife habitat.
13) Provides human habitat.
14) Moderates climate and weather.
15) …and is beautiful. [3. Quoted from “Gentle Architecture”, by Malcolm Wells, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1982, ISBN 0-07-069344-0]

When I moved to Boston to try to work as an architect I contacted him to talk about his design theories and ask if he might know of any leads. We corresponded, talking a few times on the phone and more often through handwritten letters. He apologized to me for not being able to hire me, but expressed a wish to follow my career. He encouraged me to get my architectural license, in spite of the objectionable methodology and philosophy it represented, telling me, “If you want to be taken seriously and make a difference it is important to go through the hurdles that the profession requires.” He asked me not to give up in spite of the obstacles. “It is worth it if you love the Earth,” he said.

That was 19 years ago. My life took a long curve out of the way. I initially returned to Japan to find work as a green architect, but with Japan’s bubble bursting just as I arrived, no firms were hiring non-Japanese architects. Needing to survive I eventually gave up and took work as an English teacher. With almost no exposure to the kind of architecture my heart was in my passion waned. I lost touch with Wells and with what was happening in the architectural world. But I never forgot his words and his warm encouragement.

Malcolm Wells Home
Malcolm Wells Home

Three days ago I learned that Wells had died last November, a day after my 49th birthday. The world seemed to drop away as I read the words, as if a huge chunk of my own history had suddenly sunken into the waves. It was one of those track switching moments in your life when everything seems to shunt forward and what you had attempted to hide away in the closets comes tumbling out, stark and naked. I fell back in my chair and wept, for the passing of a man who possessed one of those bright souls that had seen the wonder of the world, loved it with all his heart, and wanted nothing but to protect it, and for myself, for having let him down and for my own lack of courage. I realized how much he had meant to me and what a big influence he had had on my life and soul.[4. Photo courtesy of MalcolmWells.com]

But Wells was not a morbid man (his self-written obituary) and such moping would surely not have gone over well with him. Even though his ideas never caught on, he never gave up, perhaps because of his faith in the slow process of nature itself. If nothing else, he changed at least one person in the world. Think how difficult that is to do.

Please read more about him HERE.

Categories
Art of Living Journal Musings Self-Reflection

Adapting the Fire

Everyone’s comments have made me think a lot about my own attitude, and how my own attitude probably helps in shaping my misery. Though my love for nature is genuine, and I do need to find the kind of natural environment that brings me close to a sense of balance within myself and the surrounding environment, I also knew what kind of environment I was getting myself into when I moved here (though this place is exceptionally unfriendly and developing way too fast, with little thought given to the quality of the neighborhood. My last apartment may have been too small, but, even in the heart of Tokyo, it was quiet and the neighbors were so friendly that we had parties together and took care of each other’s children and pets). Aki’s comment particularly rang true with her insistence that it is how you choose to view a situation that in the end determines how that situation affects you and the people around you. Her example of Nelson Mandela was powerful. Here was a man who had been locked up and abused for years, and still he managed to get out of it with hope and grace and respectability. Instead of nurturing hate and revenge, he insisted upon fairness and understanding and thus managed to end a state of affairs that was intolerable for the black people of South Africa. And to relinquish power, too! What a generous and wise spirit!

I further read some thoughts by Robert Bateman, perhaps my favorite wildlife artist, in which he speaks of the need for people to learn, as he did in Europe, how to live within one’s circumstances. While I don’t intend to start another diatribe against America, I do think that the expansionist, pioneer attitude of Americans today is inappropriate in a world so overcrowded, and that it is this attitude, in great part, which has contributed to the intolerance that began the Iraq war.

I have to look at my own development, too, when I speak of “nature” and our relationship to it. Before I left Japan after high school, to attend university in Oregon, I loved Japan and Tokyo so much that I wanted to become Japanese. I saw no ugliness in the city and the crowds and jumbled development actually felt normal to me; it was the world I had grown up in. Upon arriving in Oregon everything felt odd and overgrown and frighteningly over-spacious. For more than a year I couldn’t get used to the empty streets and never bumping into people. The stretched out lawns in front of people’s houses, without walls, and the vast concrete wastelands of parking lots seemed a shocking exploitation of precious land. The gargantuan invisible wall of wilderness, where bears and cougars and men with guns roamed, was so alien and vast that for years I couldn’t wrap my mind around it and never dared venture too far into it without friends.

Living in Oregon for ten years, though, gradually eroded my conceptions of space and humanity. Concentrating on courses revolving around the environment and listening to passionate professors speak about the “loss” of this wilderness and the supplanting of old growth forests with human plantations, biased my ideas about what was a fair assessment of “nature”, and what an ideal human habitat might look like. The ideals were particularly American, home grown from a land of people used to great open spaces, abundant wealth, complacent in their expectations of land and standard of living. When I began studying architecture the mantras of relevance and respect for existing historical precedents meant thinking of buildings like an American, building with an American sense of size and personal comfort, ways of seeing the built world that were completely outside of my own experiences in Japan and Germany.

I returned to Japan carrying this new load of cultural baggage, my eyes newly attuned to a different wavelength of tolerance and expectation. Whereas Tokyo, before I left, had seemed beautiful in its details and the people finely accentuated for living within the environment that had shaped them, I now saw only seething crowds and a mess of unkempt buildings. And I hated it. Try as I might I couldn’t restore the old faith in things Japanese and join the people in delighting in the trivial trinkets that so plague the society today. Part of what I sought had been lost during the social shakedown of the Bubble Era and I was returning to a different world, but in large part it stemmed from my own changes. I had lost the Japan of my youth.

Perhaps this learning process comes in big steps that you take at certain junctions in your life. First was the pastoral wonder of the world in childhood, then the reinforcement of ideals to reach for in America, the plunging into reality in my post graduate period, an awakening to the enigma of arrival in my early middle years, and now, something new, a further step in awakening and change. It is an often painful struggle, like the writhing of a moth pupa when something dangerous touches it, but cleansing, too. Perhaps the step to be taken is not some harboring of resentment against the people around me, but to actively take part in transforming the world I inhabit, to embrace it and mark it with my own brand of charm and vision. Certainly sitting here fuming alone in front of the computer can’t spell an iota of influence upon the neighbors. But if I were to offer something to admire and like, something beautiful and open, with my heart ready to suffer the gauntlet, then perhaps my own spirit will emerge free. After all it is a pact with humanity that I seek, not nature. Nature is there of itself all the time; it is the vagaries of the human experiment that so troubles me.

Categories
Architecture Art & Design Journal

Squatting Lightly On the Earth

Maine Tree
Oak tree standing beside the Maine coast, U.S.A., 1987.

Maine Tree
Oak tree standing beside the Maine coast, U.S.A., 1987.

This is the twelfth installment of the bi-weekly topics at Ecotone: Writing About Place. This week’s topic is Protecting Place. Please have a look at other contributions to the topic, or join in the discussion yourself.

With Russia’s official declaration earlier today that it would not ratify the Kyoto Treaty, because the treaty would limit its economic growth, a confirmation of the blindness and madness of the human world seems to have taken root and the shoots of the consequences will hereby officially make its first, introductory cough. The leaders (and, by association, the populace) are not taking the health of the planet seriously. You really have to question the sanity of people who fail to make the connection between the air they breathe and their own survival. This is the only place we have and yet we go on drunk, oblivious to all warnings. Nothing short of a super-hurricaned, multiple tornadoed, giant tsunamied, mass flooded, collapsing mountains, global food deprived catastrophe will seem to carry the clout needed to ring the bell in people’s heads that we are not going to survive this assault on our world.

The knowledge to care for our home is there. We know what to do, if we would only wake up. People like Bush focus on utterly petty concerns like the conquering of Iraq, but completely ignore the evidence of one of the most climactically disastrous years in history. Mass flooding in the States. Unending rain in Japan. Record-breaking heat waves throughout Europe (more than 10,000 people died in France alone). Uncontrolled wild fires in Australia. A new, unprecedented and fearsome drought in northeastern Africa. Huge super typhoons and cyclones in Asia. Unexplained mass dying off of mackerel and sardines due to new oceanic fluctuations. The entire, enormous island of Madagascar on the verge of an environmental collapse. The first melting of the permafrost in Siberia since before the last Ice Age. The breakup of the Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf…

What are people waiting for? Why do we deny that a problem exists? It’s like we have gotten caught up in a drunken party and are ignoring a great blaze burning right in our home, ready to bring the whole house down.

I was working for an architecture firm in Boston back in 1989 and one day was sent to measure and evaluate a site for a new holiday resort. I drove alone to the area, passing through wooded hills and New England style farmland. The hill where the resort was proposed stood overlooking a small lake and the surrounding countryside, with barely a break in the trees. I sat and ate lunch, sitting on a log and gazing at the clouds rolling by overhead. Birds twittered and sang in the tranquility, quiet enough to hear bees buzzing and grasshoppers zithering in the grass. As I sat there, the feeling that this place was perfect just the way it was crept up on me. More and more the prospect of walking around the site with a measuring tape and taking notes about the attributes and problems of the site in terms of architectural needs seemed like a foolish and unnecessary exercise. I did the work as expected, but as I drove back to Boston I resolved then and there that I would not be one of those contributing to the further degradation of the world’s already beleaguered natural places.

It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with architecture. Done the right way, architecture can help create extraordinary and integral human artifacts upon the land that exist almost as an extension of the land itself. Most traditional farming communities around the world have developed vernacular designs that work closely with the habitat they exist in, often enhancing the human presence within the landscape. One of the most ecologically balanced, human-altered landscapes in the world is Tuscany, in Italy, where a medium was reached, by which the natural world and the human world could co-exist without destroying one another. Traditional Japanese settlements worked much the same way, often with a buffer zone, a “commons” (zoki-bayashi or sato-yama), where wild animals dwelled and human interference was minimal. Such communities often continued for centuries with little or no deleterious effect on the land. Tokyo itself, when it was still named Edo, was once the largest city in the world, with over a million residents, hardly producing any waste, its water clean, its coastal fish the pride of the country, and nearly everything was reused.

These examples show that humans can create settlements and use local resources wisely, without destroying the delicate balance.

Ecologically efficient rural communities continued mainly because the amounts of resources they consumed and needed for upkeep were small compared to the ability of the landscape to provide, and also because they had time to become familiar with unique local issues of climate, terrain, feeding capacity, and so forth. With time many of these communities came up with unique solutions to problems that only experience could help recognize. The northern New England landscape was once plowed under to plant crops, but the poor soil and rocky conditions eventually caused many homesteaders to give up and move back to the cities, later to be replaced by livestock oriented farming.

Once human settlements began to grow, however, and the demand outstripped the resources, all the problems associated with modern development took over. The problems are so huge today that just attempting to figure out where to start to tackle the issues can leave one reeling.

Architecture itself has fallen into the trap of glamour and riches, often leading the drive into bigger and bigger projects, with less and and less thought given to the consequences. And yet there are architects who have thought deeply about how we might address the issues of huge populations, destruction of natural habitat, overrunning of space, and over-consumption of resources. During the 60’s Christopher Alexander and a group of back-to-the-land thinkers at U.C. Berkeley developed the idea of “The Pattern Language”, a kind of encyclopedia or almanac of typological precedents used throughout human history for dealing with local conditions or architectural needs. The book of the same name, “The Pattern Language” lists and diagrams hundreds of patterns and ideas that a modern day architect or settlement builder can browse and use within a design context. The genius of this idea is that it takes into account local differences and allows an individual to tailor a project according to individual needs. It is almost the opposite of the standard modular cookie-cutter designs that dominate most large scale development.

Another project that has been developing steadily since the sixties is the Arcosanti project, an ecological town in the middle of the Arizona desert. The brainchild of Italian architect Paolo Soleri, the town is being built by volunteers who develop solutions to onsite problems as they move along. Almost 40 years in the making, the project aims to house an entire town of 5,000 people, while using a minimum of resources and attempting to become an extension of the landscape itself. The idea of using a ecological town stems out of the premise that, if contained in a limited space, the population will cause minimum damage to the surrounding land, while providing all the needs for its inhabitants. Whether or not this idea will succeed remains to be seen.

Malcolm Wells, an architect living in Massachusetts, and with whom I was in contact for a number of years while I was still an architect, is one of the most influential architects promoting “green architecture” (See his book “Gentle Architecture”). He believed that it was important to build human settlements and buildings that put the environment first, so much so that he advocated building designs that actually incorporated the landscape as part of their construction. He proposed cities with forested roofs and subterranean streets to get cars out of the way. He is most famous for his underground houses which, when approached, look like gardens dripping with flowers, grass, and trees.

Fufu Garden Walk
View of walkway to the dining room of the Hotel Fufu, designed by the Japanese architecture firm, Team Zoo. The area to the left, covered in grass and trees, actually covers an entire underground hall, complete with skylights and clerestories, vents and rafters. Above the Enzan Valley, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, 2002.

Shortly before I returned to Japan I had a conversation with Malcom Wells on the telephone. He had just finished apologizing for not being able to take me on as an apprentice, when I asked him what advice he could give me for getting started as an architect, especially in green design. He first replied that I should make sure to get a thorough background in all the essential fields of architecture, such as construction, drafting, structure, materials, typology, history, project management, drawing, and design. Then he said one last thing which has remained with me to this day, and which defines how I want to approach all the work that defines my commitment to the natural world:

He said (at least to this effect), “Forget the new sites and new developments. Forget trying to break new ground on pristine land. Instead, find the ugliest, most polluted, most badly damaged strip of earth you can and dedicate yourself to bringing it back to life. Find the beauty in it and revive it. Coax wild animals back to inhabit it. And when you’re done, be able to say that you helped the place to grow more healthy and beautiful than it was before it was destroyed.”

This is what the preservation of the world ought to be, I believe. We need to learn to be healers. If nothing else, we can start small, right here where we stand.