Our identity as architects is still very much tied to a specific relationship with Nature left to us by Romanticism. This places architecture and other human constructs strictly outside of a “wild” Nature that is pure, vibrant and untamed. The reality of climate change should enlighten us to the fact that such a separation has been problematic, since no piece of Nature is immune from human influence. Unfortunately, one reaction has been to develop nostalgic eco-narratives that attempt to retrieve a loss that never was and to which architects remains outsiders viewing in from their technology bubbles. To retrieve some ground for the architectural imagination we need to understand our role as part of this evolving relationship with Nature, coexisting as interdependent entities (both physical and conceptual), with which we can imagine productive and healthy infrastructures for a collective ecology. This paper addresses the formulation of an ecocentric identity through three installation projects.
In the West, we are indebted to the Romantic Movement in the arts, from literature to garden design, for teaching generations to appreciate the landscape. However, in conjunction with this appreciation, an exclusionary image of ecology was concretized by the Romantic’s adulation of wilderness in its many forms. In concert with the Enlightment’s mandate to exercise control over the natural world that this image intended to debunk, it helped establish the nature/culture duality that defined Modernity. In Practice, this duality still defines our self perception along with our perception of ecology although it may no longer do so in theory. In the formulation of architectures’ relationship to Nature, there are two veins of Romanticism to consider, the Pastoral and the Sublime. The bucolic Pastoral, engages people with the environment through constructed landscapes. Assembled from multiple sources these Arcadian representations in painting, text, and
scenery actually composed the harmonious environment that the same arts claimed to emulate.This circular reference turns Nature into a product of our minds. Consequently, it lacks its own identity making the Romantic image promote the Kantian anthropocentrism that strips away the agency of non-human objects. Bolstered by this world view, the constructed picturesque vision of a peripherally occupiable landscape gave license to reconstruct entire ecosystems and create the “right” image in the English Landscape Garden. In contrast, intending to evoke awe, sublime landscape paintings like those of Thomas Cole, portray wild landscapes as untamable, even dangerous, and certainly beyond human control. These constructs can only be admired from afar, for the power of the wild would be diminished by man’s transgression. These images have defined how we interface with our context: we cordon off that which we hope to maintain as natural (Image 01).