Vision Statement
The Overview Effect is the experience of the sublime that comes from grasping our physical, cosmic situation from Space. Depending on the account, it is a mix of terror, awe, beauty, respect, and religiousity. Humans like to place themselves in relation to the cosmos. It's a humbling relationship. The first photograph of the whole Earth (1967) is said to have helped precipitate the environmental movement of the 1970s. People who spend their time studying Space are acutely aware of the disquieting truth that among the exciting discoveries of mountains and volcanoes, canyons and dunes, rivers and oceans, atmospheres and storms, glaciers and caves, and a 24-hr day on other planets, the whole Earth remains the only place that could pass as a complete home.
Humans have sometimes concluded that the universe seemed fine-tuned for them, but the universe turned out in many ways and all, except one, kill us. Our Earthliness is logically, chemically, and even spiritually inescapable.
It is sometimes said that the human brain is more complex than the universe it sits in. Perhaps the Earth is more vast than the universe it sits in. Its depth goes infinitely inward, through the web of webs of information, energy, and material that made a molten rock accreted from cosmic dust into a pulsing life system sending envoys to its neighbors. Earth is the source - both a cradle and a mother. We humans were grown by our planet, quite literally. Our connection to Earth's biological signals, to its energy flows and its seasonal epicycles not only literally made us in the deep past, it makes us feel whole in lived experience.
We all feel something happening. It's a crescendo of intensification, complexification and abstraction threatening our wholeness and humanness. The destabilization of planetary systems and "boundaries" and the proliferation of digital systems and "realities" synergize into a wicked crisis that creates a compensatory and intensifying hunger for the embodied, spatial, tactile, and beautiful. These have become the buzzwords of digital life because the real thing is receding. There is a growing imperative to discover, again and anew, ours whole humanity through sensory contact with the living landscapes of our physical world and to take these phenomena with us wherever we venture.
Like astronauts, most members of industrialized societies spend nearly all of their lives indoors, our relationship to nature mediated by architecture, that most archaic meta-system. Buildings are technologies placed in our raw planetary environments to determine what we let in, what we keep out, and what we frame for interaction. From conception to completion, countless decisions affect how architecture affects us and how it changes the environment. It can be deliberate and visionary about the future it models. No future is there when the world is flattened to accommodate something preconceived. A future is there when our contributions are modeled on reciprocity, the principle of “a give for every take” that created our awesome world.
On our world, our species is singular in its ambition and awareness. In our universe, our world is singular in its capacity to nourish us. To continue on in both directions, outward and inward, we need a multitude of tangible models of action. We need different systems.
Different Systems is the architectural practice of a creative, nature-awed child turned pioneer in Space Architecture. I consider architecture to be an all-in-one epistemology, ontology, and craft that gives form to physical relations between you, me, and the world. It is way of first modelling, then making, the world you wish to live in today and, before long, leave behind for creatures who mostly don't exist yet. Creatures we are and from creatures we come. We’ll go where creatures will go. Inward to the ecosystem, outwards to the solar system.
The Overview Effect is the experience of the sublime that comes from grasping our physical, cosmic situation from Space. Depending on the account, it is a mix of terror, awe, beauty, respect, and religiousity. Humans like to place themselves in relation to the cosmos. It's a humbling relationship. The first photograph of the whole Earth (1967) is said to have helped precipitate the environmental movement of the 1970s. People who spend their time studying Space are acutely aware of the disquieting truth that among the exciting discoveries of mountains and volcanoes, canyons and dunes, rivers and oceans, atmospheres and storms, glaciers and caves, and a 24-hr day on other planets, the whole Earth remains the only place that could pass as a complete home.
Humans have sometimes concluded that the universe seemed fine-tuned for them, but the universe turned out in many ways and all, except one, kill us. Our Earthliness is logically, chemically, and even spiritually inescapable.
It is sometimes said that the human brain is more complex than the universe it sits in. Perhaps the Earth is more vast than the universe it sits in. Its depth goes infinitely inward, through the web of webs of information, energy, and material that made a molten rock accreted from cosmic dust into a pulsing life system sending envoys to its neighbors. Earth is the source - both a cradle and a mother. We humans were grown by our planet, quite literally. Our connection to Earth's biological signals, to its energy flows and its seasonal epicycles not only literally made us in the deep past, it makes us feel whole in lived experience.
We all feel something happening. It's a crescendo of intensification, complexification and abstraction threatening our wholeness and humanness. The destabilization of planetary systems and "boundaries" and the proliferation of digital systems and "realities" synergize into a wicked crisis that creates a compensatory and intensifying hunger for the embodied, spatial, tactile, and beautiful. These have become the buzzwords of digital life because the real thing is receding. There is a growing imperative to discover, again and anew, ours whole humanity through sensory contact with the living landscapes of our physical world and to take these phenomena with us wherever we venture.
Like astronauts, most members of industrialized societies spend nearly all of their lives indoors, our relationship to nature mediated by architecture, that most archaic meta-system. Buildings are technologies placed in our raw planetary environments to determine what we let in, what we keep out, and what we frame for interaction. From conception to completion, countless decisions affect how architecture affects us and how it changes the environment. It can be deliberate and visionary about the future it models. No future is there when the world is flattened to accommodate something preconceived. A future is there when our contributions are modeled on reciprocity, the principle of “a give for every take” that created our awesome world.
On our world, our species is singular in its ambition and awareness. In our universe, our world is singular in its capacity to nourish us. To continue on in both directions, outward and inward, we need a multitude of tangible models of action. We need different systems.
Different Systems is the architectural practice of a creative, nature-awed child turned pioneer in Space Architecture. I consider architecture to be an all-in-one epistemology, ontology, and craft that gives form to physical relations between you, me, and the world. It is way of first modelling, then making, the world you wish to live in today and, before long, leave behind for creatures who mostly don't exist yet. Creatures we are and from creatures we come. We’ll go where creatures will go. Inward to the ecosystem, outwards to the solar system.
Jeffrey Montes
Seattle, WA
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