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t h o u g h t s a b o u t 's u s t a i n a b i l i t y'
especially relating to architecture and farming...
Winery:
1) a place to manufacture, taste and purchase wine
2) a cultural artifact, a sign...
I'm from West Virginia, and I grew up in the shelter of hills. At sunrise, light appears long before you can see the sun on the horizon. Likewise sunlight disappears long after the sun has dropped down below the hills on the opposite horizon. The hills create endless opportunities for nooks, crannies, alcoves, framed views, vistas in built environments which have been lovingly constructed stone by stone to enhance the beauty God has hidden in each and every place, only to be released by its cooperation with the men and women who design, build and repair, design, build and repair, the places that become beautiful over centuries of loving maintenance...as if these built works are gardens which need the daily attention of weeding, watering, watching... They almost seem a part of nature itself, IF you do not forget that nature includes men and women... |
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| The beauty of the Cinque Terre on the Ligurian Coast of Italy is perhaps the most beautiful example of our inspiration, (YOU CAN LEASE 20 HECTARES OF VINEYARDS IN THE CINQUE TERRE...CHECK THIS LINK TO LEARN HOW) and of our passion, as far as it encompasses why we lay stones at 11:30 pm by the light of our Ray-O-Vac sport headlamp. The fact that one of us is nearly insane (me!) could be one reason for this passion. The other reason could be my dismay at what passes for sustainable architecture, and at the screwball reasoning which produces, in my opinion, what seems to simply be a provocative and arresting pseudo architectural style, which more often burdens us with more intentional ugliness in our built environments
Chesterton said "Rome is not loved because she is beautiful: Rome is beautiful because she is loved." |
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I designed a 'green building renovation' at a nearby university which was a showcase for materials conservation and use which was a model of 'sustainability' then, in 1997. But one 'example' of an approach to sustainability was the use of technology to augment human responsibility...to perform 'perfectly' when human virtue required for the same disciplined act fails as it often does these days. The project contained sensors that detect the presence or absence of occupants and automatically turn on or off the lights. Is this sustainable?
In pursuit of a paycheck, we designers can continue to pave outerbelt farms with fenced compounds of vinyl siding and sheetrock to provide retiring baby boomers with condominium investments which will 'appreciate', while the Trumanesque nature of the so-called community created there shrinks to the act of watching people like us go in and come out of their garages in their cars off to wherever once or twice a day onto landscapes we have no relationship with, other than to view them as perfect pictures we never touch, smell, taste or hear. God forbid if you transgress the deed restrictions and erect lines to hang out your wash. God forbid if you plant a tomato patch, paint your shutters a color not one of the 5 'approved earth tones.' Is this kind of community sustainable? |
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Wendell Berry repeatedly asks, when our technological wizardry separates us from the historic mundane acts of maintenance and healing we perform to our places, 'What are our bodies for?' Will architecture that meets its prostelytizer's standards of sustainability be too ugly, too automatic, too sensually constricting, that the people who must do the work to care FOR it are instead repelled and appalled BY it, and are never able to overcome its negative power, the inner revulsion which resists spending valuable time and money on Ugliness - something that doesn't deserve the effort? How then do us ordinary folks develop the virtues required to trust our own instincts and do the work to our own places with the confidence and tenacity that draws forth beauty?
Who will care for ugliness? Who will actually *feel* an emotional wound seeing it shut itself up in blistering paint, rotting eaves, cobwebbed windows? Who will keep it from falling apart, from getting dirty and rusty, overgrown, rotted…if they are conditioned by the patterns their lives are molded to by it to only relate to it as a view? As scenery? As the content of a video screen? |
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Do you remember the shocking magazine images about the reality of the socialist paradise in Rumania when the Berlin Wall came down and the scales fell from some of our eyes? Look here. Time Magazine documented Innocent children sitting in a coal dust coated Hellscape of black soot everywhere, one teething on a rusty iron scrap, the other, older toddler with her hands in the headwaters of what must be the River Styx, of waste motor oil clarity and viscosity, against a background of an environmental nightmare. What blindness could endure this? What irruption of consciousness deadened the folks sensibilities and blinded them to admitting the obvious as they watched and dutifully aplauded the emperor's 'fine raiment' as he was carried by, stark naked, on his Royal Litter? |
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| It is the same one which worships the Technology as the God who will usher in heaven on earth. This is so compelling a faith, so wondrous and so luminous in its promise, that we true believers endure a thousand todays of ugliness, because of our certainty that there will come tomorrow a breakthrough which will repair the unintended consequences of the former breakthrough we unconditionally embraced. It is the same Gnostic faith which really believes real life is only the life of the mind, and that the body someday will become atrophied, useless, like vestigal organs, the appendix for example, which only exist to be ‘taken out’ some day. The only thing the Rumanian Hellscape needs is a population of natives, disembodied brains-in-vats, people whose bodies are reduced to the organ where REAL life is located, placed in a perfect disease and entropy free mechanical body of the kind we technobelieveres worship, a 6 million dollar man robot repository, an R2D2 possessing a human brain, rolling through its sooty heaven. |
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For us who have been 'passed by' by this version of 'progress' and the logical conclusion it leads to, we remain animated by the belief that the hands produce that of which the heart is full. Our places will be alive as much as we make them beautiful, so beautiful that it is unbearable not to care for them. Christopher Alexander writes that we ALL are architects of our own placees….we are all responsible and able to call forth beauty by and through our work, if we will only take seriously the child who asks us why our present works are so ugly… |
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Carl Jahnes
Mid July, 2004
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