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07 December 2007
Fri, 07 Dec 2007 16:05:31 GMTGentle Architecture
Malcolm Wells
The best-known architects of the day create stunning forms and impressive details, but there is little substance behind them. It’s not that the architects don’t know better. They do. We all do, by now. Modern architecture is empty because we still lack the courage to face its consequences. 5
Life without the courage to face consequences is cowardice, and life teems with it today. 6
Wells asks where the act of paving over 100 acres of prime wilderness should be put amidst this list:
- Terrorism
- Hostage Taking
- Skyjacking
- Kidnapping
- Assault with a deadly weapon
- etc, etc
I do know that we’re wrecking this country with out failure to face the consequences of our acts. 7
Pretending that there are no consequences rages through modern society. We are encouraged from all sides not to look beyond immediate gratification. And nowhere, it seems, is this attitude more common or more heavily cloaked in hypocrisy than it is in architecture. […] But we someitmes forget that each line we draw can actually destroy life. 8
“abstraction is what dehumanizes us” Robert Finch, 10
Take away all governments and armies, take away all businesses and industries, take away all communications; take away cars, houses, cities, hospitals, schools, and libraries; take away electricity, clothes, medicine, and police; take away everything, in fact, but the green plants, and most of us would survive. But take away the plants and we would all die. That’s how important they are. 19
That’s why our cities and suburbs have failed. We’ve created so much convenience and ease we’ve turned ourselves into an artificial people, with artificial values, who live precariously far from the roots of life. If you don’t believe it, just listen to what most people are talking about. Look at what most of us are buying at the supermarket. 20
“the only treasure we’ll ever have is this incredible ball beneath our feet.” 33
It isn’t possible for us to clean up skies and rivers once they get dirty. They can do that only by themselves. Our job is to manage wastes and conserve resources. It doesn’t involve skies and rivers at all. Once we do our part we’ll find that the skies and the waters have somehow miraculously cleaned themselves. That’s when we’ll know we’ve been doing something right. 57
Every creature except man builds unobtrusive or hidden buildings. Every creature except man has solar energy as its sole energy source. Every creature except man recycles all its wastes, not just some of them. […] Imagine having to burn electric lights in the daytime! Imagine having to air-condition! Imagine having to heat a building artificially! Imagine dropping human wastes into drinking water! 58
But is that all we want, just to get by? Isn’t that exactly the kind of standard that’s caused so much of today’s mess? We’ve produced a whole civilization based on mediocrity, on throwaway automobiles, on honky-tonk highway business, and on nonrenewable resources. If someone doesn’t stop us, we’ll go right on producing it. 60
As a species we have an almost criminal record of land destruction on this planet, and I feel at times as if the best solution to the environmental mess would be some kind of catastrophe great enough to eliminate all human life. But in my saner moments I know there is catastrophe enough already.
The 26 acres of buildings and blacktop that make up that shopping center pour 600,000 gallons into the pipe every time an inch of rain falls. 67
[Our cities] drink diluted sewage and throw away their rainwater. 68
We look with admiration at the soaring glass walls and never smell all the sewage, never feel all the hear losses, never see all the paper being consumed behind those sheer facades. Our capacity for self-delusion seems unbounded, and the crises always catch us unawares. 87
Emphasis mine.
A paving moratorium doesn’t sound like a bad idea… 90
It’s hard to imagine a future society that might treat land as shabbily as we treat it. We’ve got to change in order to survive, not by setting aside areas to be spared from our shortsightedness, but by making all land destruction a crime. 95
We feel obliged to fill time. If there is nothing at hand to fill it with, then we manufacture filler. (Just look how we spend our days.) Menwhile, the most beautiful world we’ll ever know slides deeper into trouble. Four billion of us, simply by living here, are greasing its skids — four billion of us, all serving ourselves first. Statistically there seems to be no hope at all. No government, no religion, certainly no new architecture, is going to set things right. Even a sudden switch to the most enlightened, the gentlest, of architectures would make only a small dent in the overall problem.
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