Spirit and Place

Christopher Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136365249
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Built environment surrounds us for 90% of our lives but only now are we realising its influence on the environment, our health, and how we think, feel and behave both individually and socially. Spirit & Place shows how to work towards a sustainable environment through socially inclusive processes of placemaking, and how to create places that are nourishing psychologically and physically, to soul and spirit as well as body. This book's unique arguments identify important, but often unrecognised, principles and illustrate their applicability in a wide range of situations, price-ranges and climates. It shows how to reconcile the apparently incompatible demands of environmental, economic and social sustainability; how to moderate climate to make places of delight, and realign social pressures so places both support society and maximise economic viability. Thought provoking and easy to understand, Christopher Day uses everyday examples to relate his theories to practice and our experience.

PART ONE …

Issues for the twenty-first century

A vision without a task is a dream,
a task without a vision is drudgery,
but a task with a vision can change the world

Black Elk (Black Elk Speaks)

… He who enjoys what [nature] gives without
returning, is, indeed, a robber.

Bhagavad Geetã III 12

CHAPTER ONE …

Beneath the surface of today

Our world, our time, our opportunities

Environment affects us. It affects both social and personal health; body soul and spirit. For 90% of our lives, environment means built environment. Buildings, spaces between them, journeys amongst and through them – these are the frame for daily life. Different frames make different lives, influence how we think, feel, behave – how we are.

It's not only us that buildings affect. Though covering but a tiny fraction of the earth's surface they account for roughly half of all pollution, half of all energy¹ (and travel between them adds another quarter), half of all mining, quarrying and earth despoliation.

The facts certainly make sober reading: bad news about what we do to nature. Worse news however, about what we do to the human condition. For what we do to our environment, ultimately we do to ourselves. In James Lovelock's words ‘Nature is not the least fragile. People are fairly tough … But civilization is very fragile.’² Civilization is about relationships: person to person, people to nature, present to past and future.

Our buildings damage nature. Each house produces, on average, 1 ton of climate-changing CO2 each year. Building materials comprise some 70 000 chemical products, every one with a pollution history; the more synthetic, the longer the history. This is needless! Traditional buildings did no such damage. Nor need ours. Nor need we stop at not damaging; we can start to heal places and create healing places thereby.

Evolution is self-editing, mistakes don't survive long. We can't live in old ways today, but from the lessons embedded in old places, buildings, cities and landscapes, much can be learned. We, today, have a conscious understanding and environmental responsibilities as never before. Old or new, buildings affect our lives, affect our planet. Old or new, these are the buildings we live in – so are something we can do something about. But what? How? How can we do it ourselves, not have to wait for others not to do anything?

How can we understand the complex implications of what, at first sight, seem simple decisions? How can we see clearly through the multifarious complexity of often conflicting information, and strategize our actions simply?

Easy as it is to view human action as inevitably destructive of nature, we ourselves are inescapably a part of nature; and nature – its elements, levels, processes and cycles a part of us. How can this be aligned with the forces, processes and elemental principals of nature? How can we work with different levels of situations: the emotional, continuum-based, underlying essence as well as the practical and rational? How can we heal our environment – and in the process, heal ourselves?

A new way for our time

The challenges of today

We live in challenging times. Veiled by an air of normality, both the planetary life-support systems and the bonds holding society together are under threat. We all know we can't survive another century continuing to live as we have. Scientists have told us often, but we only know this in our thinking; rarely do we experience it. After all, we live in cleaner surroundings than the industrial cities of the last century. That the world is more damaged is outside normal daily experience. Action and result are separated in time and space.

Today's problems are multiple and multifaceted, but the mainstream approach is to look for ‘fixes’: technological, methodological and fiscal.³ Fixes assume scientists, economists and politicians can solve all problems with technology, cost-benefit appraisals and taxes and subsidies. Some are bizarre, like dumping steel scrap in the oceans to stimulate carbon-dioxide-anchoring deep-water bacteria (a steel manufacturer's proposal!), many are myopic, but most sound, if uni-dimensional. Fixes, however, avoid a fundamental issue, for by abdicating our responsibilities to ‘specialists’ we disempower and disconnect ourselves.

These problems share an underlying common theme; our alignment to nature – the relationship between her formative processes and ourselves. This is a spiritual, not a technical problem. At its root lies disconnection.

Displacement is an underlying issue of our time. Social, cultural, economic and ecological displacement. Just as chimneys and winds displace pollution, goods, finance, food, clothing and building materials come from all over the world. Even our social life is free from place: community, colleagues, society, interest-group and friends each have different geographical boundaries, some global.

Community is more or less constrained by a 15minute journey radius, whereas friends may be continent wide, and interest-group and colleagues electronically linked around the planet, making ‘society’ an equivocal concept. How different from even 50 years ago. There are also temporal disconnections. It takes some 17 years for today's pollution to reach the stratosphere. Many larger building projects take around 10 years from inception to occupation and another 30 before trees reach the size on architects’ drawings. So, for a more sustainable lifestyle three decades hence means action today, if not yesterday.

Communications technology has likewise expanded consciousness horizons beyond the limits of experience. The scale of environmental problems, let alone disasters, seems so dauntingly immense, wholly beyond any individual abilities. What can we do about them? They're problems for somebody else to deal with – ‘not me but the landlord; architect; planners; government; European Union; international consensus’ ... and so on ... Unfortunately, governments (also planners, architects, and landlords) have a poor record of doing much about the environment, so the odds are nothing will happen unless I do it.

Disempowered I may feel, but the world's future is also my future. How can I take part in shaping it? Even only in small ways. It is, however, the small bits of our surroundings that we touch, bump into, smell. Unlike grand schemes where scale magnifies unseen problems, small ones tend to work. However unprestigious, they can have a disproportionately large effect. And, being accessibly scaled, are easy to start.

Most of us can only influence small-scale things – but this is no limitation. One deed inspires another. The awakened and inspired will is a great force. A liquid ready to suddenly congeal is ‘supersaturated’. Add one more gram and ... Who in 1988 could have imagined the cold war not lasting at least another 50 years? But many small actions were suddenly enough to reshape the world overnight.

The environmental crisis of our time is multidimensional. Material resources are running out; the living systems of nature under assault; social life under strain; and stress commonplace. Issues of matter, life, soul and spirit. The sciences isolate specialism from specialism while identity problems plague the arts. These aren't isolated issues but manifestations of a single crisis.⁴ Actions directed at single issues invariably spawn more problems than they solve. Without holistic awareness, environmental controls easily cause unemployment; and energy conservation, building sickness. Remember Stalin stopped unemployment, Hitler inflation and Pol Pot urbanism! The problems of our time are but symptoms, linked at underlying levels. Only by working with underlying structural forces can we bring the disparate and apparently contradictory into harmony and wholeness.

Forces, like climate, continuous place-biography, cultural evolution, archetypal soul-needs, underlying values, give form, integrity and meaning to our environment, both ‘natural’ and built. Framing our daily lives, spatial and consciousness parameters and social interactions, this colours outlook, values and expectations, powerfully influencing how we feel and behave, shaping whom we become.⁵ The Irish ceildh developed from fiddle music round the farmhouse table. How many ceildhs are born in modern bungalows?

So much are surroundings part of the background we barely notice their influence, hence the more powerful their effects on health, both personal and social. Crime and illness are obvious, but environment also has a healing potential. This is nothing new; sacred architecture is age old. Feng-Shui, Vedic, Islamic ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Publication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Author’s note
• Foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales
• Foreword by Susan Roaf
• In the beginning
• PART ONE: ISSUES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
• PART TWO: PEOPLE, PLACE AND PROCESS
• PART 3: BUILDING TO HEAL
• A new beginning
• Bibliography
• List of photographs
• Index