The mirror of the built environment

November 16, 2022

Our built environment, says a lot about our innermost, thoughts and feelings.

One of the subjects that has to be broached, tho' with the utmost delicacy in the face of climate change, and geopolitical instability, in order to secure the future we want, and not the mess we have, is to rethink our built environment for a new era. 

In Ancient Rome, before Cicero's time, there was a ritual stone over which water was ceremonially poured on some occasions. After Cicero's time, the same word for that stone had become the word for a stone that sat at the bottom of a deep well in the ground, that was used for storing the grain harvests, where its role was to mediate between the insides of the earth and out, even, between life and death. The same word, had completely become a different meaning, in the span of about one lifetime. 

We are staring down a short path to a completely different relationship to the built environment too. Climate and technological change will bring with a huge changes to what we make with our hands in our tools in this new modern age.

Art, also, has changed. Art has a fundamental and inseparable connection to architecture. A recent and very interesting notion has been floating around academia, especially in the writings of Slavoj Zizek, that the age of modernist art was really the linchpin, holding diametrically Leftist and Rightist politics in opposition to the other. The keystone of this discourse is that architecture can profoundly change our perceptions of both our inner and outer worlds. As the modernists used architecture to further political tension in a period of ideological warfare, we could nowadays use architecture to further establish consciousness about the natural world and climate change. Architecture, of course, has always been to some degree about mimicking the architecture of the natural world, but we could more consciously, through living buildings, and other eco-conscious art and architecture, inspire a new mental age of Climate and Nature-consciousness in the human condition. Some of this work is already starting, but, wouldn't it be wonderful, if, during our own lifetimes, we could see the change in the way we think, mirrored in the very environment we walk around in?