I acknowledge that the majority of my friends and acquaintances find this weird. I also know I’m not the only one who feels this and thinks this. But whenever I find myself in discussions with others about an assumed and seemingly common and pervasive desire to escape or retreat back to nature and the outdoors, I often feel obligated to reply by stating that my ideal conception of a retreat or escape is actually going further into the heart of a city. I find what is often described as “nature”- the woods, remote hikes, mountains, camping- to be stressful rather than therapeutic. What is therapeutic to me has always been experiencing and embracing a marriage of culture and environment.
I’ve been working my way through Christopher Alexander’s book The Timeless Way of Building. I’m loving it so far, described since it’s release as revolutionizing the way we think and theorize about archecture and city spaces, but it was a chapter dealing with the “nature” of building (or building’s) that shed new light on why it is I feel the way I do about this common desire to escape to nature,
It largely stems from his appeal to broadening our definition of nature. Rather than conceiving of it as non-human and non-human created physical properties, objects or spaces found in the world, or further spaces uncorrupted by and absent of human activity (as though we exist apart from or against nature), nature should be reapplied to mean, more appropriately, the true quality (or nature) of a thing. To speak of nature is to speak about what something is.
Along these same lines he makes a similar appeal when it comes to the concept of life itself. I remember reading a book by that same name (Life Itself) and coming to the realization that life has no accepted and agreed upon definition. In the world of academia and scholarship, and similarly in the workings of everyday society and common understanding, the application and use of the word life is inconsistent and largely held captive by its culturally positioned usages. We use it and redefine it when it serves a functional purpose, but we cannot locate a singular, governing application that tells us where the line between what is alive and what is not, what is less or more valuable, gets drawn, or whether there is even a line at all. All we have are social constructions.
Alexander, then, utilizes the freedom this space affords to recontextualize life in a broader and more unifying sense. Even if we distinguish between the life of a space or building and the life of a creature, both things share the same universal qualities. Life denotes something that exists in relationship to the world it occupies, something with the power to both be transformed by it and to transform these surroundings. As such, we can speak of buildings and spaces as being alive, of having a presence. We can also speak of them, in cases of buildings and spaces that stand detached from their environment or those which are non-expressive in their nature, as dead space devoid of life.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of this theory is the idea that buildings and spaces can have a life of their own. This obviously evokes the fact that buildings and spaces are acts of creation, and as such cannot bring about their own existence. And yet, as subsequent chapters point out, acts of creation are imitations of reality, meaning they are always reflective of the patterns that we find governing reality as a whole and which are inherent to the world we are creating within.
This does not mean, however, that the creations themselves are static and uniform. He speaks of such things as having a dynamism that ensures each thing, for what it shares in qualities, also has a unique representation. This is in fact something we know intuitively, and exists precisely because creators of buildings and spaces each have a necessarily limiting and thus differimg and diverse vantage point and set of knowledge of the world. We understand, intuitively so, when these buildings and spaces become stripped of that perspective and become products of an established and governing system detached from this creative process- for example, suburbia, or strict enforcement of rules regarding new developments of neighborhoods and condos (where every blueprint is the same). We also understand this to be true in what we normally mean by nature. Nature is an act of creation, but it is also, in and of itself, constantly creating. What emerges from these acts of creation is diversity. No blade of grass, no tree is the same. The fact is, if it was all the same we would cease to see it as life giving or alive. The world would be perceived as dead.
Coming back to my happy place- sitting in a coffee shop connected to the sidewalk and streetside of city blocks infused with a mix of buildings, trees, parks and structures, all coexisting in relationship. Train stations, seaports, cathedrals and coliseums, old cities and sky scrapers bridges, rooftop patios and old market squares, grand old cinemas and modern arenas, quiet shops and bookstores and busy outdoor markets. These are the spaces where I find myself rejuvenated. The best of these buildimgs are creative acts that open the door to reshaping its relationship to the space that surrounds it. Where lakesides meet living, or where shared roadways lead to shared destinations, where reclaimed history leads to remagined lands of the living.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disparaging the woods or dumping on the tranquility many find in the outdoors. It’s simply that I personally feel disconnected from the world in these spaces. I lose sight of where I fit within it, and it makes it harder to appreciate the patterns. I lose sight of that relationship and it’s transformative power. It creates this divide between where I feel like I am trespassing and where my own mode of living, as part of nature, is allowed to be and exist. It reduces humanity to the unwantedness and finds in nature some kind of unpolluted antidote. Which of course leaves me just as uncertain about the spaces I return to as well.
A small caveat here- I fully understand humanity’s role in neglecting and abusing it’s relationship to the world around it. This exists. I just don’t think the answer is established dichotomies. To me this actually makes the problem worse. Reimagining the relationship and building to feed this relationship is the solution. To find humanity in the world and a world with humanity in it helps to share my perspective of a world set in relationship to its different living parts
The Stories of my Life 