Three Cultural Ecologies

David Leatherbarrow, Richard Wesley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317094746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Three Cultural Ecologies reverses common conceptions of modern architecture. It reveals how selected works of two modern architects, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, embraced environmental and cultural conditions as reciprocal and complementary. A basic premise of this book's arguments is that cultural patterns cannot be adequately conceptualized in the terms that typically define ecology today. Instead, studies based on the natural sciences must be complemented by descriptions and interpretations of historical narratives, cultural norms, and individual expressions. Previously unpublished images and new interpretations will allow readers to rediscover works they thought they knew; Villa Savoye, Taliesin, La Tourette, and Ocatilla; as well as projects that are less well known: by Wright, the House on the Mesa and the City Residential Plan, and by Le Corbusier, the Immeuble-villas and Ilôt Insalubre projects. More broadly, this study of cultural ecology at three scales – domestic, monastic, and urban – reconsiders the history of modern architecture. The conditions brought about by societal and technological modernization and confronted by modern architecture have not disappeared in our time, but have intensified, making the task of imagining how some measure of equilibrium between culture and ecology might be achieved even more pressing.

1
Speaking of cultural ecology

Architecture as cultural ecology: what might this phrase mean?

It may seem strange to pose this question today, when the words culture and ecology are used so widely and seem so obvious in architecture and other fields. But the answer is far from clear, especially when the two are joined to form a single term.

If it was possible a few decades ago to dismiss the warnings of an impending environmental crisis as alarmist, if faith in evermore effective, technological fixes once allowed architects to believe there would be no need to change the way they practiced design, the situation has changed today; routine methods and indifference have become entirely unacceptable, to clients in many cases and to the public almost always. Persuasive accounts of the ecological crisis and recommendations for alternative design practices come from all quarters: from public policy and governmental regulations, to environmental science, award-winning designs, education reform, and professional licensing requirements.

No less common and insistent are the calls for change from outside architecture. Among the many, perhaps the following lines from Félix Guattari’s widely read Three Ecologies can be taken as a representative example:

The Earth is undergoing a period of intense techno-scientific transformation. If no remedy is found, the ecological disequilibrium this has generated will ultimately threaten the continuation of life on the planet’s surface. Alongside these upheavals, human modes of life, both individual and collective, are progressively deteriorating.¹

The apocalyptic tone of this forecast has become standard fare, across the philosophical and ideological spectrum. The remedy Guattari seeks will no doubt depend upon the contributions of many, each of us is being called to act, according to whatever means we have at our disposal – material, intellectual, or professional. Today, pleas for ecological awareness and “green living” call for sustainable actions that minimize our use of natural resources and reduce or eliminate damage to the natural environment – water, land, and air.

A thinker who may be seen to argue an opposite politics, David Orr, offers exactly the same diagnosis of our predicament:

We can no longer assume that nature will be either bountiful or stable or that the earth will remain hospitable to civilization as we know it … three crises [the food crisis, the end of cheap energy, and natural systems at their breaking point] constitute the first planetary crisis, one that will either spur humans to a much higher state or cause our demise… . We have a decade or two in which we must make unprecedented changes in the way we relate to each other and to nature.²

Orr does not say in this passage that architecture will play a significant role in the “unprecedented changes” required for the continuance of life as we know it, but this inference is suggested by his allusion to the Earth as an environment made “hospitable” to human civilization. But the problem is not for Orr essentially political. Making hospitable settings is architecture’s basic task. The same role for architecture is implied in Guattari’s allusion to “human modes of life, both individual and collective.” Yet surely it would be presumptuous to attribute to architecture a salvational role, on the assumption that better design could bring an end to the environmental crisis. Much of modernist urbanism also assumed this premise. At both scales, inaction is not an option either. Resignation is no better than over-reaching. Nor can we continue to rely on the concepts, techniques, and images that have historically contributed to this state of affairs.

A basic purpose of this book, and of our opening question about the possibilities for a cultural understanding of ecology, is to explain the ways that architecture can respond to what is today commonly called the environmental crisis, precedents for which can be found in 20th century examples, many of which are rarely considered in ecological discussions today.

We realize that modern architecture in the first half of 20th century will seem to many readers an unlikely place to find answers for current environmental questions, for the buildings and ideas of that period are often said to have contributed in a significant measure to our current predicament. Mounting evidence of such a “contribution” should not, however, cause us to include among those charged all who practiced before the awakening of environmental awareness, particularly not the suspects thought to be culpable only because their works are so very well known. Perhaps we have rushed to judgment rather too quickly and see the modern tradition too uniformly. Our aim in this book is to look again at projects and writings we thought we knew perfectly well, in an attempt to learn still more from them. Especially relevant for us are projects, ideas, images, and elements developed in the first period of the modern movement, its “heroic” phase – generally speaking, between the two World Wars.³ The works of two architects in particular, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, will be closely studied in the chapters that follow, not because their works were so influential – which of course they were – but because they indicate more clearly than others how modern architecture has been practiced as a form of cultural ecology, admittedly avant la lettre, as we shall explain.

Reconsidering a categorical division

As long as conventional understandings of culture and ecology are accepted uncritically, our study will seem unpromising. We imagine our approach will appear less doubtful when we point out that the boundaries between these fields are no longer settled in other disciplines. Border crossings have become the norm in contemporary anthropology, for example:

[I]t is becoming increasingly difficult continue to believe that nature is a completely separate domain from social life, hypostatized according to circumstances under the species of a nourishing mother, of a spiteful stepmother, or of a mysterious beauty to be unveiled; a domain that humans attempt to understand and control and whose whims they occasionally suffer, but which constitutes a field of autonomous regularities, within which values, conventions, and ideologies have no place. This fantasy is now vanishing: where does nature stop and culture begin in regard to global warming, in the thinning of the ozone layer, in the production of specialized cells from stem cells? Clearly the question no longer makes any sense.⁴

Is this true in architecture as well? Is the fantasy of a categorical distinction between social concerns and environmental conditions also now vanishing in the design of buildings, landscapes, and urban areas? The answer to the question depends on the way recent environmentalism is viewed. Some will maintain that architects came to this realization decades ago, in the 1960s, when the “environmental movement” first emerged in architecture and its proponents called for reforms in both design and theory. For that position to be maintained, however, contributions from figures both in and outside architecture would have to be allowed. To describe this book’s thesis concerning cultural ecology more fully, let us briefly review some of the key texts and ideas in this history.

Environmentalism

Most narratives of architecture’s environmental movement maintain that the ecological problem or crisis we face today has been in discussion for a number of decades, maybe as long as a half century, at least since the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was not, of course, a book written for architects in particular, although many read it. Hers was not the only wakeup call: other writers, scientists, and poets also sounded the alarm – figures like John Muir, Paul Sears, Aldo Leopold, and Wendell Berry.⁵ In fact, concern for environmental destruction was becoming widespread in the post-war years.

In 1955, for example, a symposium at Princeton University gathered an unusually large number of proto-environmentalists to celebrate the accomplishments of the American conservationist George Perkins Marsh by taking account of all that mankind had done to (negatively) change the Earth – deforestation, soil erosion, species relocation, pollution of the waters and sky, the rearrangement of plant communities, and of particular relevance to architecture, all of the consequences of ever-expanding urbanization. Marsh’s explanation of the American “dust bowl” was taken as a pioneering example of this sort of study and explanation. The massive publication that resulted from the conference had an indicative title: Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.⁶

Still, Rachel Carson’s account of “the grim specter [that] has crept upon us almost unnoticed,” seems to have quickened the awareness of environmentalists more effectively than any other.⁷ Of the “two roads” modern civilization could take, her choice was clear: all that would (or should) be acceptable in future were “biological solutions, based on an understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong.”⁸ Her scope could hardly have been wider. The sea she loved was the site of her initial concern, then “surface waters” and eventually the whole of “earth’s green mantle.” The threat, in the form of “elixirs of death” came from industrial chemicals (pesticides) especially, developed for agri-business and sold for great profit in the post-war years, thanks to the earlier contributions from the science that enabled chemical warfare. Insects and weeds had become the enemy, DDT and organic phosphates the armaments. The “co-lateral damage” of this undeclared and rather one-sided war, “side effects,” as she called them, concerned Carson greatly; industrialized agriculture was threatening the very world it was supposed to nourish.

Design with nature

The territory that concerned Carson – widely regional, by implication global – was far beyond the sphere of action in which architects operate. An early and exceptionally ardent champion of the ecological approach to design, Ian McHarg, was likewise concerned with comprehensive frameworks for project making, but his recommendations for action were to have bearing on territories that were smaller in scale, which is to say regions and specific localities or landscapes and settlements within them. Like Carson, he perceived a crisis and recommended radical changes in both thinking and practice. His categorical indictment of “anthropomorphic man [who] seeks not unity with nature but conquest” is no less challenging today than it was in 1969, when Design with Nature first appeared.⁹ Although he described his now-classic book as an “ecological manual for the good steward who aspires to art,” it is much more than that, for his sense of unity or “co-tenancy of the phenomenal world” ascribes to works of art the same origin as natural phenomena. Such a statement, verging on the monism and tight-fisted positivism of the 19th century, implied both a philosophical anthropology and theory of art.

The idea of line of descent for works of art from nature is, of course, only a conceptual premise, but it was one that allowed McHarg the development and use of an elaborate method of description and analysis, utilized in “case studies” that would, if pursued widely for decades, result in an inventory of all of the sectors in a given region that would be congenial to settlement and occupation, having distinguished them from areas that would not. Such a “mapping” would serve the purposes of regional planning and policy making. Yet, still another premise was required for these studies: that “physical, biological, and social phenomena [could] be represented as values.”¹⁰ He didn’t define this last term, but given what he wrote elsewhere in the book, it would seem incorrect to assume they included cultural or historical matters, especially if understood anthropocentrically. Closer to his understanding and aim is the use of the term in mathematics: the value of an unknown in an equation, for example. The values, once determined, could be ranked, basically, from high to low. Lastly, when observed, valued, and ranked, natural and social phenomena could be set out as a range of “guidelines” for project development – something like ecological zoning on a regional scale. Although he referred to the several factors of his surveys as “parameters,” digital techniques were obviously unavailable in the 1960s.¹¹ McHarg’s parameters were not “para- metric” in the contemporary sense of the term, he simply assembled and variously superimposed hand-drawn maps made on transparent sheets of paper or film.¹² The descriptions that resulted authorized development and excluded any impositions that expressed other “values,” let’s say aesthetic or cultural values that could not be extrapolated from the aspects of the natural world that had been represented “scientifically.”

Despite the clarity and rigor of McHarg’s analytical procedure, his text was rather silent about the steps that were to follow analysis, those of project mak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Speaking of cultural ecology
• 2 Pre-modern home economics
• 3 Rustica and urbana
• 4 Up on the roof
• 5 Pre-modern cloisters and precincts
• 6 Alone-together naturally
• 7 Into the desert
• 8 Answering disequilibrium
• Bibliography
• Index