Appreciate the past and use new building technology
Some of the most beautiful structures ever created by man were indigenous shelters and early places of worship that predate the profession of architecture. These vernacular buildings used local materials to provide necessary shelter and were highly responsive to local climatic conditions. Some really simple buildings have an elegance that stems from being locally sourced. Their method was trial and error, sometimes a matter of religious expression of the people. There’s a lesson in that for us today, when many new buildings are “cookie cutter” replicas. The technology of today, though, is a good thing. We believe the path forward for architecture should be to appreciate the past and use new building technology. The challenge is how to do both well.
The old ways
If you look at shelters or places of worship built long ago by indigenous people, you’ll notice several things. Homes are often very simple, they are built with an economy of materials and labor, and their purpose was simply to shelter. Places of worship may be grander, but both types of structures tend to be built with materials found within walking distance. A book by Amos Rapoport, “House Form and Culture,” surveys many examples. Heating and cooling the space tended to be of paramount importance. Whether in the American Southwest, Nepal, or Africa, the outcome tends to be simple, elegant, beautiful buildings that respond to their climate.
Think about Mesa Verde, in southwest Colorado. Here are 9,000-year-old dwellings built into the side of a cliff, the smoke shadows still on the ceiling. Apartments in effect; dozens of families occupied these rooms, living out their lives here, depending on materials that were all close at hand.
Today, most new construction consists of suburban complexes by developers and contractors. The design quality is not very good; the approach gobbles up acres and acres of farmland and wetlands for people to have a quarter acre lot on a house on a cul-de-sac. This is wasteful, environmentally degrading, and poor planning.
The new ways
Over the last 500 years we have grown to have a lot more people, often in crowded conditions; we have transportation networks that can bring materials from anywhere; heating and cooling systems that can create comfort from Fairbanks, Alaska to Dubai. The harshest environment can be managed by building systems. It’s led to an architecture free-for-all where we can build anything anywhere. Elevators and steel have allowed unprecedented heights. We’ve lost the sense of place. You can build a building in Tokyo that looks like one in Riyadh that looks like one in LA.
We’ve ignored the unique qualities of places and developed an international style with a small “i.” We can hardly distinguish one place from another any longer, and this is exacerbated by branding to make retail chain stores identical everywhere. We’ve lost that sense of local culture and response to climate that made those indigenous buildings so wonderful. We need to bring that back.
Finding the best of both
However, we are not advocating for building the way people did 200 years ago. A lot of enhancements and new technologies are very good things and should be part of any approach. Consider the evolution of building codes to protect the public welfare and energy codes to reduce fossil fuel use. We need to follow these codes, and we like using new materials and systems because they can increase comfort with relatively less energy consumption.
Our solution involves studying, analyzing, and understanding local historical styles and using the available building technologies to create new works that still provide a unique sense of place. If you study and analyze the historic buildings and the local climate and you respond to that, then a building in southeast Pennsylvania will look and feel very different from one in Arizona or Washington State, or Florida.
We believe appreciation for the past and use of new building technology both have a place in architecture. Both together are valid responses to place and climate. That’s what we are all about in this practice. We also embrace the available technology to use maintenance-free materials and highly efficient mechanical systems for a better quality of life than may have been the experience in the past. Best of all, using local materials and responding to specific climatic situations fit into the larger context of the local fabric of a community.