"Designing with Earth" is what I define as natural architecture. But perhaps even that needs definition. Natural architecture is design beyond the organic. When a building is designed or built in an organic form, it means that the shapes and angles and colours are in a shape that would be found in nature. What natural architecture is is when the building is organic but also is situated organically: a sort of camouflage or blend with its habitat. And that is exactly what everything natural in this world has, a habitat. So why can't our human-made objects have a habitat in which they fit.
When you see a building in perhaps a city, it usually is a block or a bulky mass. It is like of a toy block that had been forced into the sand of the sandbox by some hyper child. Now compare our bulky masses to the homes of other animals. A bird builds a nest in a tree out of what the tree has given her, making the nest almost invisible. A termite burrows in what the fallen wood has provided him, creating a massive condominium complex completely hidden. And what sets us aside from the bird and the termite is the ability to defy instinct and to deeply analyse and think about how to design: what wall goes where, how a certain window will permit light into a space, et cetera. We are able to go against nature in many amazing and fantastic ways but perhaps this rebellion has made us forget our place in nature.
As intelligent and nature defying humans, we have cut off our roots to the natural world. We claim that we are super-animal, distant and unrelated to any other living creature on this beautifully supplied planet. We remind ourselves of this daily. Humans have built great cities and gargantuan palaces and places of worship to remind ourselves that we are a super-species. Where is the line drawn, though, between natural and unnatural? Where is the tie between a glass box and a twig nest? How can homo sapiens design and build naturally without being primitive?
In all honesty, all these questions cannot be answered in this piece and I think that is obvious. These questions and views are all of course based on opinion (and very personal opinion). The only true way that these queries may be answered is through the action of designing, not the action of writing or speaking.
(This essay was composed by Timmie Zhovreboff. This is still a work in progress... I'm just posting this because I haven't posted anything for a while.)
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