Growth is good when in accordance with nature’s own time-tested blueprint.

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By Nancy B. Solomon, AIA

Finding our place

“Why does a 400-year-old structure still work and feel right?” muses Boston-based architect Bill Reed, AIA, vice president of Natural Logic. “Not because of its style—timeless buildings exist in any style—but because it grew out of its place.” The master builder, who was local, had all the local data he needed—including climate, available materials, and labor, culture, and economy—to influence his architectural solution. “Local conditions allow a building to be part of its place,” sums up Reed.

Consider another scenario: “Until 1860, Paris fed its entire population with food that came from no farther than 40 miles away,” says Reed. It was a closed-loop system: Vegetables were eaten, and the resulting human waste became fertilizer. Once the city sewage system was constructed, however, the nutrients flowed out and the loop was broken.

In our rational Cartesian framework—in which everything can be logically mapped out in quadrants or dissected into discrete units—we have, for the most part, lost sight of such underlying flows, cycles, and connections. Even worse, we have become indifferent to them, believing our technological wizardry can outdo Mother Nature’s organic schemes. But our technological hubris has come home to roost.

 

Proposed Power Plant Brooklyn, N.Y. Artist Michael Singer of Wilmington, Vermont, and a team of designers, including Marcus Springer of Cannon Design in Boston, conceived of a community-friendly power plant for an industrial site along the East River in New York City (right). Waste heat from the utility plant will help to grow garden plants in greenhouses built along the exterior structure of the building (below). The public will be able to walk through a riverfront garden next to the power plant’s facade. Images © Photomontage by Stephen Solzhenitsyn (top); Namhoon Kim and Stephen Saude (bottom).

“We are a society that seeks to create manageable uniformity,” said landscape architect John Tillman Lyle, author of Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development (John Wiley & Sons, 1996) and a professor at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona until his death in 1998. In creating such regularity, however, we destabilize life-giving processes. America’s ubiquitous turf grass, for example, yearns to evolve into a meadow and then a forest. Yet we beat it into submission by mowing and dumping chemicals on it. In the process, we inhibit groundwater recharge; poison air, land, and water; and waste not only precious fossil fuels but also our own precious time.

To heal the Earth, and ourselves, says Reed, “we have to fundamentally change our relationship with natural systems, from energy and water flows to nutrient cycles.” Instead of fighting against Mother Nature, we need to work with her to help stabilize nature’s life-giving processes. It is just not up to the Earth to heal herself, because we, too, are part of the Earth.

This kind of design goes beyond sustainable; it is regenerative. It revitalizes the underlying systems—both cultural and natural—so that all can work efficiently and in concert to achieve and maintain a healthy environment. Regenerative design grows out of various ecological movements, including permaculture. The word, originally intended as a hybrid of permanent and agriculture, was coined in 1978 by Australian ecologist Bill Mollison and one of his students. Reed boils the discipline down to its essence: “Permaculture basically says that gravity happens. Water flows down and takes nutrients with it.” By acknowledging such forces and working with them, permaculture designers strive for systems that reap the greatest benefits with the least amount of effort and resources.

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