Design With Nature

In his eponymous 1969 tome, landscape architect Ian McHarg makes his now venerated case that to “design with nature” entails a keen understanding of the character of a given locale in concert with a deep sense of the extant natural system’s functionality and long term viability. That is, for human modification and occupation of the land to be truly “sustainable”, the design process must be guided by ecology with sensitivity to the particulars of a given place; this principle also drives the concept of “scale-linking” — that is, the impact of decisions from the scale of site-to building-to community-to bioregion, and ultimately, to the global. 

At the building scale…back in 1991, a revered graduate school professor posited that good architecture manifests an “intensification” of one’s experience of a given place, and that it must also be ameliorative in atoning for the taking of it to serve human purposes. Ever since, I have striven for this balance as the core of my ethos, that enhancement of the human experience — how spaces and landscapes make us feel — elevates our health and wellbeing. On one hand, we can readily leverage materials and systems in response to microclimatic conditions so as to keep our ecological footprint in check (in concert with the economics). On the other, the true challenge is designing for place, toward a sense of belonging and appropriateness. So, to borrow from Wendell Berry, we should ask questions that define proper boundaries, such as: “what is here?”, “what will nature permit us to do here?” and “what can nature help us to do here?” Environmental educator David Orr expands upon these ideas quite eloquently in this translation, that “ecological design is the careful meshing of human purposes with the larger patterns and flows of the natural world”. 

Ecological design is not the province of a particular style or discipline — it is a form of engagement and partnership with nature — kinship, if you will... Ecological design is simply the effective adaptation to and integration with nature’s processes. By explicitly taking ecology as the basis of design, we can vastly diminish the environmental impacts of everything we make and build. 

By definition, ecological design is rooted in the context of specific places; per Orr, it grows out of place the way the oak grows from an acorn. It responds to the particulars of place: the soils, flora, fauna, climate, topography, hydrology, and humans bringing it coherence. It seeks locally adapted solutions that can replace matter, energy, and waste with design intelligence. Such an approach matches biological diversity with cultural diversity rather than compromising both the way conventional solutions tend to do. To design with this kind of care, we need to rigorously assess a design’s set of environmental impacts; it begins with the richest possible understanding of the ecological context of a given design problem and develops solutions that are consistent with the cultural context — as designers, we must seek practical harmonies between nature and culture.