Earth & Space are different systems that form a single connected frontier.
To advance planetary flourishing, we need the know-how to bring humans closer to both.
Vision
The cosmos humbles us.
The first photograph of the whole Earth, taken in 1967, helped start the environmental movement. Astrobiologists and astronomers are environmentalists. Exciting discoveries on other planets—of mountains and volcanoes, canyons and dunes, rivers and oceans, atmospheres and storms, glaciers and caves, and a 24-hour day—belie the reality that the only place that could pass as a complete home is a whole Earth. Sometimes the universe seems fine-tuned for us, but it produced many environments, and all except one diminish us. Our earthliness is logically, chemically, and spiritually inescapable.
It is 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, material, and meaning that made a molten rock accreted from cosmic dust into a pulsing life-system sending envoys to its neighboring worlds. Earth is the source— both the Cosmist cradle and a Gaian mother. We humans were grown by our planet, literally. Our connection to Earth's biological signals, to its energy flows and its epicycles not only made us; it keeps us that way.
We all feel something happening. It's a crescendo of complexification and abstraction threatening our wholeness and humanness. The destabilization of planetary systems and the proliferation of digital systems have synergized 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, our humanity through sensory contact with the living landscapes of our physical world and to hold these phenomena close to us wherever we venture.
Astronaut-like, most members of industrialized societies spend nearly all of their lives indoors, our relationship to nature mediated by this archaic technology called architecture. 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.
The first photograph of the whole Earth, taken in 1967, helped start the environmental movement. Astrobiologists and astronomers are environmentalists. Exciting discoveries on other planets—of mountains and volcanoes, canyons and dunes, rivers and oceans, atmospheres and storms, glaciers and caves, and a 24-hour day—belie the reality that the only place that could pass as a complete home is a whole Earth. Sometimes the universe seems fine-tuned for us, but it produced many environments, and all except one diminish us. Our earthliness is logically, chemically, and spiritually inescapable.
It is 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, material, and meaning that made a molten rock accreted from cosmic dust into a pulsing life-system sending envoys to its neighboring worlds. Earth is the source— both the Cosmist cradle and a Gaian mother. We humans were grown by our planet, literally. Our connection to Earth's biological signals, to its energy flows and its epicycles not only made us; it keeps us that way.
We all feel something happening. It's a crescendo of complexification and abstraction threatening our wholeness and humanness. The destabilization of planetary systems and the proliferation of digital systems have synergized 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, our humanity through sensory contact with the living landscapes of our physical world and to hold these phenomena close to us wherever we venture.
Astronaut-like, most members of industrialized societies spend nearly all of their lives indoors, our relationship to nature mediated by this archaic technology called architecture. 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 ability to nourish us. To continue on in either direction, outward or inward, requires humility, bold inventiveness, and a reverence for the outer vastness of Space and the inner vastness of Earth.
Architecture can be an all-in-one epistemology, ontology, and craft that gives form to physical relations between you and the world. It is a way of modelling and making the world we 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.
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