A NARROW HISTORY OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE:
Our deepest histories include our relationships to places through our dwellings.
Our first dwellings were, most likely, ready-mades. Spaces found in natural environments that were somehow advantageous for survival. Overhangs, depressions, coves, caves, earthen shapes, morphological intimates.
Pre-historic buildings were made from hyper-local ephemera. Materials like foliage, branches, skins, textiles. They were handmade, woven bits of the immediate environment.
The Ancients made use of stone. This began as a collective earth-forming exercise. Geological fragments were uncovered, excavated, and refined into new geometries then placed with careful intention. Whole cities were built this way. We began making our own morphologies. Stereotomic villages. Entire territories were constructed, terraced, and niched for dwelling.
The Classics made building in stone into a volumetric, atmospheric art form. Rather than niches, the stones shaped expansive atmospheres. Buildings were the results of excavation, ingenuity, and spiritual aspiration. Earth’s materials extracted, articulated, and compiled to shape the loose light of a divine spirit.
The Moderns made use of the technological outputs of industrial production. The complex materiality of the natural world was split, divided, categorized, and reformulated into more efficient, component forms for shaping the built environment. Concrete, steel, glass, adhesives, and pre-formed sheets became the tools with which a more democratic, egalitarian allocation of personal space was sought.
We of the Anthropocene have the miracles of polymers, membranes, composites, foams, HVAC systems, and computation to help create our dwelling places. The result is most often an intentionally hermetic separation from the natural world. We program our thermostats from our phones inside of our bonus rooms. We filter our fresh air to eliminate the traces of the atmosphere outside. We make more perfectly encapsulated volumes for an optimized, personal weather.
Reading this history, it is easy to see a story of growing separation between us and our immediate environments. What began as a search for physical safety within our environments has ended in our self-actualized alienation from those environments.
Yet, one may feel that this kinship to the immediate landscape persists. We know it more deeply than can be shaken in a few generations. And reconnecting ourselves with our immediate environments is within our capabilities. It is, in fact, very simple. We can turn our built environments back toward the landscapes in which they reside by engaging directly with the materials and culture of the places in which we live. Recognizing this really is a sort of re-cognizing, its an act of remembering.
As Tim Ingold writes, “The landscape tells - or rather is - a story. It enfolds the lives and times of predecessors who, over the generations, have moved around in it and played their part in its formation. To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perpetually with the environment that is itself pregnant with the past.”