Bonds of Attention
How does architecture connect us to the rhythms of the natural world and the life that it supports?
Buildings give us a place to control our environment, to modulate the temperature and humidity, the air flow, keep the rain and snow out, control the light, and to keep us secure. Most buildings built in the last 50 years, and our current economy in general, puts these tasks out of mind through sophisticated engineering and the expenditure of a massive amount of energy. The stated goal of that is to make all our lives easier. That goal isn’t an inherently bad thing, but besides the wider cost of that expenditure of energy, completely obscuring and automating those tasks severs our connection to the rhythms of nature which they interact with.
The epitome of this is an office building with a sea of desks and conference rooms without access to views, where the temperature is always 68 degrees, the airflow is constant but imperceptible, and the overhead lights are on 24/7. It appears in homes where the windows are always closed, the blinds always drawn, the thermostat set to that same 68 degrees, and time not spent watching a screen in the office is spent watching a screen in the living room. There are many studies on how those environments are detrimental to our personal health, but there are costs to them beyond the physical. Without that connection forged by attention it becomes easy to ignore, or forget, or never learn in the first place, that we are part of the wider ecosystem around us.
“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
To quote Aldo Leopold’s 1949 A Sand County Almanac, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” That is, of course, a statement meant to provoke his readers who do not own a farm. One does not have to own a farm, or chop wood for fuel, to retain that connection to an ecosystem. A building can make our lives easier without removing natural rhythms from our consciousness. In fact, by celebrating those rhythms it can make our lives markedly more enjoyable.
We use architecture, the shape of a space, a view, the way daylight falls on a material, how water flows across a surface, the sounds of rain falling on a metal roof, or how a window or door opens to a breeze, to draw our attention to those rhythms of life. Those things aren’t exclusive to Leopold’s family shack in the woods. All of those things can happen in buildings with a furnace or, ideally, with a solar powered heat-pump.
“I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.”
– Wendell Berry, “It All Turns on Affection”, 2012
Sunrise at the Flying Dollar Residence, photo by client.