Our Natural Environment
Its place in the web of nature
Cherry blossoms
Upstream Color Original Soundtrack
Mountains are mountains
The office landscape
172. Garden Growing Wild
Problem
A garden which grows true to its own laws is not a wilderness, yet not entirely artificial either.
Solution
Grow grasses, mosses, bushes, flowers, and trees in a way which comes close to the way that they occur in nature: intermingled, without barriers between them, without bare earth, without formal flower beds, and with all the boundaries and edges made in rough stone and brick and wood which become a part of the natural growth.
Cyberspace as a global dump
If we think that cyberspace is a public space, then let's think of the oceans. They used to be as much of a world resource as anybody could think of but didn't belong to anybody. So everybody put their garbage into them. The potential of cyberspace as a global dump is quite substantial.
Freedomless freedom
The beauty of kasuri is received as a gift. As long as the laws of nature are upheld, the beauty of kasuri remains intact. This demonstrates the curious principle that the artisan is deprived of technical freedom but works in the freedom of nature.
In this sense, kasuri can be said to be created in a state of freedomless freedom.
Nothing that nature does not seek
Nature tells us the shape and pattern a material should assume, and nothing good can be achieved by ignoring its dictates. A good artisan seeks nothing that nature does not seek.
Deep Interlock
Forms which have a high degree of life tend to contain some type of interlock – a “hooking into” their surroundings – or an ambiguity between element and context, either case creating a zone belonging to both the form and to its surroundings, making it difficult to disentangle the two.
The interlock, or ambiguity, strengthens the centers on either side, which are intensified by the new center formed between the two.
The group of blind mullahs
In a natural landscape, each element is part of the greater whole, a sophisticated and intricate web of connections and energy flows. If we attempt to create landscapes using a strictly objective viewpoint, we will produce awkward and dysfunctional designs because all living systems are more than just a sum of their parts. Our culture has tried to define the landscape scientifically, by collecting extensive data about its parts.
These methods are much like the group of blind mullahs in the Sufi tale, who try to describe an elephant.
Ground displaced upward
Imagine that our rooftops were parkland, that the area of ground occupied by buildings was, in effect, simply displaced upward. Imagine that the city enacted legislation requiring that the equivalent of 100 percent of the surface area of New York were to be green. A 100 percent requirement would not simply oblige green roofs. It would also demand that compensatory greenery be added to make up for such ungreenable areas as roadways, runways, and other unplantable places. Perhaps the requirement would be satisfied with road narrowings, cantilevered gardens, or green floors in buildings (utilities on the order of the mechanical floors that occur in almost all tall buildings).
Nature, sentimentalized
Nature, sentimentalized and considered as the antithesis of cities, is apparently assumed to consist of grass, fresh air and little else, and this ludicrous disrespect results in the devastation of nature even formally and publicly preserved in the form of a pet.
Modularity
One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are “modular.” They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, identical houses, identical apartments in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can - and ought - to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth-century architecture.
Nature is never modular. Nature is full of almost similar units (waves, raindrops, blades of grass) - but though the units of one kind are all alike in their broad structure, no two are ever alike in detail.
The same broad features keep recurring over and over again. And yet, in their detailed appearance these broad features are never twice the same.
I went to the woods
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
The way of things
It is when one forces principles on the world that one interferes with its natural workings.
Ecological cycles
This house exists in the midst of a year-long cycle of natural phenomena. One might say that this cycle entails the periodic "rise and fall" of the ground surface. In winter it sinks below a snow cover that grows head-high or more; as spring approaches, this height gradually decreases until we can see the actual ground surface, not yet covered with undergrowth. With summer the vegetation grows higher and higher until the plaza seems once again to be lower than its surroundings. With the falling of the leaves, autumn restores our ability to penetrate these surroundings at eye level, at least until the snow begins to fall again... Through the four seasons, we experience the sensation of the ground rising and falling, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
I call this cycle of natural phenomena an ecological cycle.
The last of them all
And at that very moment, we heard a loud whack!
From outside in the fields came a sickening smack
of an axe on a tree. Then we heard the tree fall.
The very last Truffula Tree of them all.I speak for the trees!
The palette of nature
"What nature does with its colors is invariably—the palette of nature is twice as complicated, at least twice as sophisticated, as anything any artist can ever come up with. On a couple levels.
To start with, there are these amazing combinations of colors, filled with surprises and almost never wrong. I don't know how Nature ever conceived to put, say, those together. But, boy, are they right on the money!"
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more.Their own absence
After a seven days’ march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.
Suddenly the letter has a tail
I believe that the petal of a flower or a tiny worm on the path says far more, contains far more than all the books in the library. One cannot say very much with mere letters and words. Sometimes I’ll be writing a Greek letter, a theta or an omega, and tilt my pen just the slightest bit; suddenly the letter has a tail and becomes a fish; in a second it evokes all the streams and rivers of the world, all that is cool and humid, Homer’s sea and the waters on which Saint Peter wandered.
All the lives to be
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.
We have been given a standard
We have been given a standard to use. It is there, handy daily: things as they are, or Nature itself. This makes good sense, the only sense really—Nature should be our model.
Merely ornate
There is nothing merely ornate about nature: every branch, twig, or leaf counts.
When a building has this fire
And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety, created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself.
It is going to pass
The character of nature can’t arise without the presence and the consciousness of death.
When we make our own attempt to create nature in the world around us, and succeed, we cannot escape the fact that we are going to die. This quality, when it is reached, in human things, is always sad; it makes us sad; and we can even say that any place where a man tries to make the quality, and be like nature, cannot be true, unless we can feel the slight presence of this haunting sadness there, because we know at the same time we enjoy it, that it is going to pass.
As plain as day
The personal experience of most of us will testify to this persistence of an illusory image long after its inadequacy is conceptually realized. We stare into the jungle and see only the sunlight on the green leaves, but a warning noise tells us that an animal is hidden there. The observer then learns to interpret the scene by singling out "give-away" clues and by reweighting previous signals. The camouflaged animal may now be picked up by the reflection of its eyes. Finally by repeated experience the entire pattern of perception is changed, and the observer need no longer consciously search for give-aways, or add new data to an old framework. They have achieved an image which will operate successfully in the new situation, seeming natural and right. Quite suddenly the hidden animal appears among the leaves, "as plain as day."
Savage, hostile, and cruel
Some may find puzzling or distasteful the parallel I am drawing between the study of nature and the study of technology. After all, nature is good and good for you, whereas everyone knows that technology is ugly, evil, and dangerous.
A few centuries ago—say, on the American western frontier—a quite different view prevailed. Nature was seen as savage, hostile, cruel. Mountains and forests were barriers, not refuges. The lights of civilization were a comforting sight. We took our charter from the book of Genesis, which grants mankind dominion over the beasts, and felt it was both our entitlement and our duty to tame the wilderness, fell the trees, plow the land, and dam the rivers.
Nature undisturbed
My chief aim is simply to describe and explain the technological fabric of society, not to judge whether it is good or bad, beautiful or ugly. And yet I would not argue that technology is neutral or value-free. Quite the contrary: I suggest that the signs of human presence are the only elements of the landscape that have and moral or aesthetic significance at all. In nature undisturbed, a desert is not better or worse than a forest or a swamp; there is simply no scale on which to rank such things unless it is a human scale of utility or beauty. Only when people intervene in nature is there any question of right or wrong, better or worse.
Little sense of season
The real world of technology denies the existence and the reality of nature. For instance, there is little sense of season as one walks through a North American or western European supermarket.
Just as there is a little sense of season, there is little sense of climate. Everything possible is done to equalize the ambiance – to construct and environment that is warm in the winter, cool in the summer.
Mechanisms and organisms
"Kant described a mechanism as a functional unity, in which the parts exist for one another in the performance of a particular function.
An organism, on the other hand, is a functional and structural unity in which the parts exist for and by means of one another in the expression of a particular nature.
This means that the parts of an organism – leaves, roots, flowers, limbs, eyes, heart, brain – are not made independently and then assembled, as in a machine, but arise as a result of interactions within the developing organism."
— Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed His Spots
System A
System A is concerned with the well-being of the land, its integrity, the well-being of the people and plants and animals who inhabit the land. This has very much to do with the integral nature of plants, animals, and water resources, and with the tailoring of each part of every part to its immediate context, with the result that the larger wholes, also, become harmonious and integral in their nature.
Japanese Death Poems
A Book by Yoel HoffmanThe World of the Sea
A Book by Moquin Tandon & Martyn HartChilde Harold's Pilgrimage
A Poem by Lord ByronA Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams
A Book by Michael PollanBLDGBLOG
A Blog by Geoff ManaughIntroduction to Permaculture
A Book by Bill MollisonThe conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.
Thoreau 2.0
A Talk by Maciej Cegłowski- Walden
Phantom Regret by Jim
A Poem by Jim Carrey & The WeekndAnd if your broken heart's heavy when you step on the scale
You'll be lighter than air when they pull back the veil
Consider the flowers, they don't try to look right
They just open their petals and turn to the lightTendrils of Mess in our Brains
An Essay by Sarah PerryA ruin and a mess.
Watts observes that elements of the natural world – clouds, foam on water, the stars, human beings – are not messes, though the nature of their order remains inscrutable, and Watts doesn’t try to pin down its precise nature. Mess seems to be somehow a property perceptible only in the presence of human artifacts. Is this the result of some kind of aesthetic original sin on the part of humans, uncanny beings severed from the holiness of Nature? I hope not. “Humans are bad” is a boring answer.
The Beauty of the Overlooked
An Article by Maria PopovaMedusa from A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast by Philip Henry Gosse, 1853.
Philip Henry Gosse’s Stunning 19th-Century Illustrations of Coastal Creatures and Reflections on the Delicate Kinship of Life
“These objects are, it is true, among the humblest of creatures that are endowed with organic life… Here we catch the first kindling of that spark, which glows into so noble a flame in the Aristotles, the Newtons, and the Miltons of our heaven-gazing race.”
Crown
A Poem by Kay RyanToo much rain
loosens trees.
In the hills giant oaks
fall upon their knees.
You can touch parts
you have no right to—
places only birds
should fly to.tree.fm
A WebsiteTune Into Forests From Around The World. Escape, Relax & Preserve.
Shinrin-yoku
A DefinitionForest Therapy, also known as “Shinrin-yoku,” refers to the practice of spending time in forested areas for the purpose of enhancing health, wellness, and happiness. The practice follows the general principle that it is beneficial to spend time bathing in the atmosphere of the forest. The Japanese words translate into English as “Forest Bathing.”
British & Exotic Mineralogy
A Website by Nicholas RougeuxWalden
A Book by Henry David ThoreauLife-friendly design
An Article by Ralph AmmerI suggest that our industrial heritage has been an important preliminary stage. The next step is to carefully examine and implement design values that nurture our joy of life. Just like our “industrial design” illustrated our industrial values, a life-friendly design could express our biophilic values.
This optimistic design approach differs from naive nostalgia or fear of extinction. There is no way back to nature but only forward to nature.
The Timeless Way of Building
- Mind of no mind
- The quality without a name
- An objective matter
- Bitterness
- The most precious thing we ever have
Mind of no mind
To you, mind of no mind, in whom the timeless way was born.
The quality without a name
There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.
There are words we use to describe this quality:
alive
whole
comfortable
free
exact
egoless
eternalBut in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it.
An objective matter
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 divided ness, self-maintenance and self-destruction. In a world which is healthy, whole, alive, and self-maintaining, people themselves can be alive and self-creating. In a world which is unwholesome and self-destroying, people cannot be alive: they will inevitably themselves be self-destroying, and miserable.
Bitterness
The quality which has no name includes these simpler, sweeter qualities. But it is so ordinary as well, that it somehow reminds us of the passing of our own life.
It is a slightly bitter quality.
The most precious thing we ever have
In our lives, this quality without a name is the most precious thing we ever have.
And I am free to the extent I have this quality in me.
When our forces are resolved
When a person’s forces are resolved, it makes us feel at home, because we know, by some sixth sense, that there are not other unexpected forces lurking underground. He acts according to the nature of the situations he is in, without distorting them. There are no guiding images in his behavior, no hidden forces; he is simply free. And so, we feel relaxed and peaceful in his company.
Each of us knows from experience the feeling which this quality creates in us.
And for this reason, each one of us can also recognize this quality when it occurs in buildings.
Patterns of life
If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again.
Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, having a drink at a friend’s house, driving on the freeway, going to bed again. There are a few more.
There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen.
When I see how few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.
Fabric
And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town.
They are the atoms of our man-made universe
Further, each pattern in the space has a pattern of events associated with it. We realize then that it is just the patterns of events in space which are repeating, and nothing else. Nothing of any importance happens in a building or a town except what is defined within the patterns which repeat themselves.
Each building gets its character from just the patterns which keep on repeating there.
Each neighborhood is defined, too, in everything that matters, by the patterns which keep on repeating there.
Forces of conflict
A pattern which prevents us from resolving our conflicting forces leaves us almost perpetually in a state of tension.
For, if we live in a world where work is separated from family life, or where courtyards turn us away, or where windows are merely holes in the wall, we experience the stress of these inner and conflicting forces constantly. We can never come to rest. We are living then, in a world so made, so patterned, that we cannot, by any stratagem, defeat the tension, solve the problem, or resolve the conflict. In this kind of world the conflicts do not go away. They stay within us, nagging, tense…The build-up of stress, however minor, stays within us. We live in a state of heightened alertness, higher stress, more adrenaline, all the time.
The multiplicity of living patterns
The more living patterns there are in a thing—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has this self-maintaining fire, which is the quality without a name.
To fly past each other
In our own lives, we have the quality without a name when we are most intense, most happy, most wholehearted.
This comes about when we allow the forces we experience to run freely in us, to fly past each other, when we are able to allow our forces to escape the locked-in conflict which oppresses us.
But this freedom, this limpidity, occurs in us most easily when we are in a world whose patterns also let their forces loose. Just as we are free when our own forces run most freely within us, so the places we are in are also free when their own forces themselves run free, and are themselves resolved.
The quality without a name in us, our liveliness, our thirst for life, depends directly on the patterns in the world, and the extent to which they have this quality themselves.
Patterns which live, release this quality in us.
But they release this quality in us, essentially because they have it in themselves.When a building has this fire
And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety, created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself.
Modularity
One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are “modular.” They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, identical houses, identical apartments in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can - and ought - to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth-century architecture.
Nature is never modular. Nature is full of almost similar units (waves, raindrops, blades of grass) - but though the units of one kind are all alike in their broad structure, no two are ever alike in detail.
The same broad features keep recurring over and over again. And yet, in their detailed appearance these broad features are never twice the same.
It is going to pass
The character of nature can’t arise without the presence and the consciousness of death.
When we make our own attempt to create nature in the world around us, and succeed, we cannot escape the fact that we are going to die. This quality, when it is reached, in human things, is always sad; it makes us sad; and we can even say that any place where a man tries to make the quality, and be like nature, cannot be true, unless we can feel the slight presence of this haunting sadness there, because we know at the same time we enjoy it, that it is going to pass.
The gate
To reach the quality without a name we must build a living pattern language as a gate.
The patience of a craftsman
Here there is no mastery of unnameable creative processes, only the patience of a craftsman, chipping away slowly; the mastery of what is made does not lie in the depths of some impenetrable ego; it lies, instead, in the simple mastery of the steps in the process, and in the definition of these steps.
An infinite variety
The people can shape buildings for themselves, and have done it for centuries, by using languages which I call pattern languages. A pattern language gives each person who uses it, the power to create an infinite variety of new and unique buildings, just as his ordinary language gives him the power to create an infinite variety of sentences.
Each pattern is a rule
Each pattern is a rule which describes what you have to do to generate the entity which it defines. It is a three-part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution.
There is an imperative aspect to the pattern. The pattern solves a problem. It is not merely “a” pattern, which one might or might not use on a hillside. It is a desirable pattern; and for a person who wants to farm a hillside, and prevent it from erosion, he must create this pattern, in order to maintain a stable and healthy world. In this sense, the pattern not only tells him how to create the pattern of terracing, if he wants to; it also tells him that it is essential for him to do so, in certain particular contexts, and that he must create this pattern there.
It is in this sense that the system of patterns forms a language.
The network of connections
Each pattern depends both on the smaller patterns it contains, and on the larger patterns within which is is contained. Each pattern sits at the center of a network of connections which connect it to certain other patterns that help to complete it. It is the network of these connections between patterns which creates the language.
The grammar of the language
An ordinary language like English is a system which allows us to create an infinite variety of one-dimensional combinations of words, called sentences. A pattern language is a system which allows its users to create an infinite variety of those three-dimensional combinations of patterns which we call buildings, gardens, towns.
It tells us which arrangements of words are legitimate sentences, in a given situation, and which are not. And, furthermore, which arrangements of words make sense in any given situation, and which ones don’t. It narrows down the total possible arrangements of words which would make sense in any given situation.
Second, it actually gives us a system which allows us to produce these sentences which make sense. So, it not only defined the sentences which make sense in a given situation; it also gives us the apparatus we need to create these sentences. It is, in other words, a generative system, which allows us to generate sentences that are appropriate to any given situation.
Rules of thumb
Of course, these patterns do not come only from the work of architects or planners.
Architects are responsible for no more than perhaps 5 percent of all the buildings in the world. Most buildings, streets, shops, offices, rooms, kitchens, cafes, factories, gas stations, freeways, bridges… which give the world its form, come from an entirely different source.
They come from the work of thousands of different people. Each of them builds by following some rules of thumb. And all these rules of thumb - or patterns - are part of larger systems which are languages. Every person has a pattern language in his mind. This is true of any great creative artist, as of the humblest builder.
At the moment when a person is faced with an act of design, he does not have time to think about it from scratch. Even when a person seems to “go back to the basic problem,” he is still always combining patterns that are already in his mind.
It is only because a person has a pattern language in his mind, that he can be creative when he builds. The rules of English make you creative because they save you from having to bother with meaningless combinations of words. A pattern language does the same.
Ordinariness
We have a habit of thinking that the deepest insights, the most mystical, and spiritual insights, are somehow less ordinary than most things - that they are extraordinary.
In fact, the opposite is true: the most mystical, most religious, most wonderful – these are not less ordinary than most things – they are more ordinary than most things. And it is because they are so ordinary, indeed, that they strike to the core.
A genetic process
The mere use of pattern languages alone does not ensure that people can make places live.
The fact is, that the creation of a town, and the creation of the individual buildings in a town, is fundamentally a genetic process. So long as the people of society are separated from the language which is being used to shape their buildings, the buildings cannot be alive.
Discovering patterns
In order to discover patterns which are alive we must always start with observation.
Try to discover some property which is common to all the solutions which feel good, and missing from all the ones which don’t feel good.
Knowledge of the problem then helps shed light on the invariant which solves the problem.
Sometimes we find our way to this invariant by starting with a set of positive examples.
At other times, we may discover the invariant by starting from the negative examples, and resolving them.
Occasionally, we do not start from concrete observation at all, but build up the invariant by purely abstract argument.How things ought to be
It is hard to give up preconceptions of what things “ought to be,” and recognize things as they really are.
You must make the language first
It is the structure and content of the language which determine the design. The individual buildings which you make will live, or not, according to the depth and wholeness of the language which you use to make them with.
One you have it, this language is general. If it has the power to make a single building which lives, it can be used a thousand times, to make a thousand buildings live.
It must constantly be re-created
A language is a living language only when each person in society, or in the town, has his own version of this language.
To reach this deeper state, in which each person has a pattern language in his mind as an expression of his attitude to life, we cannot expect people just to copy patterns from a book. A living language must constantly be re-created in each person’s mind. As he modifies his language, and improves it, depends it, throughout his life - he does it, always, by creating, and improving rules which he invents.
Once people share a language in this way, the language will begin evolving of its own accord. The language will evolve, because it can evolve piecemeal, one pattern at a time. As people exchange ideas about the environment, and exchange patterns, the overall inventory of patterns in the pattern pool keeps changing.
Of course, this evolution will never end.
Repair
Within the larger language, it is impossible for any act not to help repair the larger whole. It is impossible for any act of building to remain an isolated act: it always becomes a portion of the flux of acts which is helping to maintain the whole.
Even the laying of a brick, to mend a wall, will not only be used to mend that wall, but will be used to help repair the seat, the terrace, or the fireplace which that wall helps to form.
The process of unfolding
The sequence of the patterns for a design - as generated by the language - is therefore the key to that design.
The process of unfolding goes step by step, one pattern at a time.
Chopped and disfigured
The details of a building cannot be made alive when they are made from modular parts
If the builder wants to build the room from modular four-foot panels, he must change the size of the rooms, and change their shape, to fit his panels.
In such a building system, it is impossible for a person to create a plan which reflects the larger subtleties of site or plan. Each plan will always be chopped and disfigured to make it fit the building details.
To make the building live, its patterns must be generated on the site, so that each one takes its own shape according to its context.
Until we leave the gate behind
And yet the timeless way is not complete, and will not fully generate the quality without a name, until we leave the gate behind.
Indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages. The language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves.
At this final stage, the patterns are no longer important: the patterns have taught you to be receptive to what is real. It is the gate which leads you to the state of mind, in which you live so close to your own heart that you no longer need a language.
This is the final lesson of the timeless way.