Nature-Centered Design
Nature can live without humans , but humans cannot live without nature. Architecture can make this truth transparent and allow us to experience nature at a deep, transformative level. An important mission of green building and sustainable design is to bri
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Nature-Centered Design
Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
—E. O. Wilson
Nature can live without humans, but humans cannot live without nature. Architecture can make this truth transparent and allow us to experience nature at a deep, transformative level. An important mission of green building and sustainable design is to bring architecture and urban planning back into the flow and
S. Van der Ryn, Design for an Empathic World: Reconnecting People, Nature, and Self, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-505-2_3, © 2013 Sim Van der Ryn
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Design for an Empathic World
cycles of nature. We need to reconnect buildings to their roots in climate, land, and place for current and future generations. We need to design with the understanding of our genetic need to be connected to living natural environments (biophilia).1 Architects need to not only reduce the obscene, mindless consumption and waste in the name of design, but design regenerative, living systems. We can make buildings and communities whole through commonsense design that incorporates life-enhancing technologies that incorporate the basic elements of sun, water, healthy landscapes, and clean air wherever possible. How can design truly reflect the beauty, intimacy, complexity, and dynamic qualities of the living world? The terms sustainability and green describe technical fixes to what are basically unsustainable systems. They can slow the rate at which things get worse, but they can’t take us to a truly sustainable and healthy world. They can increase material and energetic efficiency, but they fail to radically restructure the predominantly suburban living pattern we’ve been building for seventy-five years—single-family-home suburbs linked by massive highways and energy grids and single-occupancy vehicles driving every day to offices, industrial malls, and central cities. Even if suburban
Nature-Centered Design
houses are green and cars are fuel efficient, it is like greening the Titanic by having deck chairs made of certified wood and hemp covers. The carbon footprint of the typical suburban commuter is two to four times greater than an urban household living in multi-family dwellings and using public transportation. I find the term regenerative useful because it suggests the selfhealing, self-organizing, and self-evolving properties of living systems, which can coevolve with design and designers grounded in natural systems logic, or “eco-logic.” For purposes of this chapter, I use the term ecological design. Let’s consider ecology and design. Let’s consider everything that humans design as “infrastructure.” That includes all buildings and services such as roads, communications, energy, sewer and water lines, and all technologies that alter the given world of nature such as genetic engineering, agriculture, industrial processes, wars, and resource extraction. What I call “ecostructure” is the design of the planet evolved over four billion years: the biosphere, its ecosystems, and all the cycles, flows, and
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