As part of my research in the history of architecture, built environment, and human nature of health (including survival), I came to the thought that instead of reinventing the wheel (residential housing practices, construction, strategies etc.) what if we took away housing all together, how would we build it?
I have asked a similar question to that specification before but I am now asking from a different approach. If we modeled our housing from animals, it would most likely be characteristic of the ingenious strategies of the animals in that region or using them as a direct resource (beginnings of farming and agricultural practices).
It should also be considered that although we build based on what we know, we also have preferences and different personal hierarchy of needs within our built environment for survival. We also manipulate and experiment with matter to improve different aspects of our lives (which eventually leads to the industrial revolution, consumerism, modern technology, etc.).
Thus, the thought is, if I can put aside the personal and unique qualities of humans and their form of expression through material means, what then is left for survival? Can Maslow's hierarchy of needs be redefined into the needs of life in the built environment (as a wholesome and sustainable ecosystem between man and nature)?
The question can also be thought of in the following thought. If we were to become "animals" again, how would we define our community, neighborhood, city, region, territory, etc. What are the connected systems between other communities? For example, a bird will flock with its own kind but may select various trees or a particular tree. Assuming that animals are simple in nature and have less understanding of individuality, what then is the common factor between said different trees or location of same tree? The nest formation is also unique to the bird. What then is similar between one bird family from another with in the same species or not. Do they face a particular direction? Orientate themselves from other neighbors rather than the sun? In order to live, birds also have a way to fight parasites and disease, or co-exist with other living things. They also need food, water, and a mate for offspring and survival. They also would pick healthy waters which feed healthy plants which then feeds their source of health resources.
However, one aspect which doesn't seem to be measurable is Maslow's selection of intimacy, rather than just physical but also love as an emotion as studied with children. Is there a "spiritual" and/or "emotional" similarity between living things in their set living circumstances for survival and/or life and existence.
Even in biblical understandings, self expression is a luxury rather than a necessity. The specific laws, commandments, and lifestyles are generally simplified into the basic laws that we understand as a human species to be the basic morals of being who we are. Riches, wealth, and happiness were blessed upon those who were righteous until they abused certain laws and it was taken away through famine, war, etc. The commandments given are to allow us to be spiritually and physically/temporally free, happy, and prosperous.
It is possibly that I am trying to reinvent an ancient wheel of living. A way of living harmonious and comparable to how nature needs another life form.
I am looking for resources, discussions, and answers of anything discussed or related.
The following link might give hints for thinking about the question posed here:
http://www3.canisius.edu/~grandem/animalshabitats/SOFTCHALKGOOD_print.html
We can talk about this during the intensive, but I have always marveled at the beaver and how they build their nests.
On asknature.org (https://asknature.org/strategy/habitat-mosaics-stop-fires/#.WG143fkrJPY), there is an article about how beaver's can affect forest fires. It would be fascinating to learn more specifically how it is done so it can be mimicked, such as in forest conservation practices, to protect homes. Thus creating a neighborhood/home that is protected, especially since disasters strike unexpectedly and the emotional, mental, and physical stress it brings to those living there.
Is round/circular versus square an interesting perspective?
Squareness dominates in current built urban environment from houses, to blocks of buildings to public squares. Although there are roundabouts, ring roads and roundish public worship structures (St. Peter/Vatican; "square" in English). Similarly in farming with block field and square farmstead. However, the hunter-gathers use round/conical shelters, small farmers live in round huts, round compounds, kraal livestock in circular enclosures and sometimes cultivate circular fields, even today. You can observe the gradual transition from round to square in African settlements today as round houses are refitted with square windows and rectangular doors. New square houses are build next to the old round houses sometimes with the same materials. Similarly, the pastoral nomads of the steppe live even today in round tents; the square caravan is an alternative for mobile pastoralists in warm deserts and the alpine heights, but not in the steppe. However, the iron age farmers in Europe here were squarish in their long houses and lay-out of "Celtic fields". On the other hands medieval farmers have grouped at round village greens. In Christian and Islamic religious building a trend from domes to squarish maybe be identified. In many medieval European castles the oldest building component is round, the latest square to rectangular.
So long.
The following link might give hints for thinking about the question posed here:
http://www3.canisius.edu/~grandem/animalshabitats/SOFTCHALKGOOD_print.html
Chloe,
As a builder and environmentalist I see much in what you are saying here. Maslow was a great idea person in his approach to human need verses want. It is not until the basic needs are met that a person can do any more than just try to survive. This is why in my opinion that we do not see more wild animals that are intelligent in the same way we see humans (sometimes) act.
If you are familiar with the Architect Malcolm Wells he did a great job of pointing out how we as humans should be more than just builders and consumers of land but rather live on and in the land. We sometimes destroy before we build. He was a master of pointing this out. We must learn to build to the land and under the land to preserve what it is that makes us worldly.
There is many advantages to this approach. I am also a scientist and as a research scientist I see many things that are just ignored in the sciences because of greed. We live in a world where the humans that have the most try to keep others from having as much as they have. This is why we have not advanced past killing each other over wars and religions. It is about greed.
As a society we must get past this or we will not survive.
You have posed a set of questions that could lead use to a better built environment and less need for Maslow's base of his hierarchy.
Please let me know what I can do to help. I am a green building consultant and a green building designer. My efforts have been pushed to the side as I moved to build better and safer and stronger to last forever not just until the next storm. Many of the greedy have seen this as a front to the profit of building and not just a better way to build in the future.
Good luck with this question I think the future of the world depends on people moving to take care of everyone not just the ones we think we love.
Dear colleague
Living things respond to their environment by adapting to it. Organisms react to different things in their environment, such as light. Other environmental factors include basic things such as heat, food, odors and sound. When these environmental factors affect or change an organism, they are called stimuli. As the organisms learn to adapt to the stimuli around them, they become better suited for living in the specific environment. For example, camels have long, thick eyelashes. The eyelashes work to protect their eyes from sand since they live in sandy environmental conditions.Living things also learn how to obtain energy from the environment, and this energy helps them to reproduce. The ability to reproduce is a characteristic of all living things in the world.
Regards
Convenience, ability, and opportunity are supplemented by intelligence and group dynamics.
I'm not fussy about Maslow's hierarchy of needs - I'm much happier with Max Neef's approach. Maslow admits that needs give way to habits, and that his conclusions come from anecdotal evidence from the top 1% of the population. Max Neef's approach is more open ended and addresses far more nuance that can come from Maslow.
That all being said, this is a great question. Exoplanetary thinkers are considering how to live on Mars, and they all come up with different expressions of that intent. They all start with their defining conditions (eg, how much stuff can you send at once, or what are the climatic conditions on Mars, or whatever), and then evolve their idea from there. Whatever is the first thing that is put down on the piece of paper becomes the holiest of grails. (Me, I think the ecosystem they construct has to be able to function in the absence of human intervention, but that's completely beside the point)
So, if one is to start with 'how do I live here?' how you define 'live' and 'here' will constrain your answer. If the need one is trying to meet is 'homeostasis', then one will end up with a different answer than if she starts with 'status recognition'. In a complex community, both are required to some extent, and I don't think one more-so than the other.
I might try to start with 'what are the indicators in this community of unmet needs, and then what aspects of the built environment can be used to address those unmet needs?' I would think that in first world communities, the answer would be 'not much'. I would think in subsistence communities (where people spend nearly 100% of their time trying to meet needs) the answer would be 'lots'. Where it would get very complex is in between poverty and affluence, where the question may have to evolve to 'what are the obstructions within the community that prevent needs from being met, and then what aspects of the built environment can be used to remove those obstructions?'
Of course, that presupposes a specific community. I think you may be asking about a green-field condition, where there is no pre-existing infrastructure that is required to be considered. In which case, I think I have to go back to Mars example - what is the necessary ultimate condition, and how do you work backwards from that point to the existing condition of a blank slate? What are the potential unintended consequences of the choices being made to get to the ultimate condition, and how do you ensure there is sufficient resiliency in the system to allow for adaptation as those consequences appear? Can you be sure that the costs/burdens associated with the development do not exceed the benefits for any portion of the community (eg, social justice)? Is the ultimate condition going to be able to allow a community where all needs can be met?
Hmmm.. You've got me thinking now...
I do appreciate for very interesting question and excellent comments.
Congratulations!
Everyone has put forth fantastic discussion pieces and resources. I will be taking notes from your comments to help me narrow down to a thesis.
To add to the discussion, I will bring up subjects based on varied subjects from comments given currently at the top of my head.
The environmental factors change our living circumstances as well as our adaptation. For the human species, it has been a very long time since we have seen significant changes in our anatomy. The physiological changes could be generalized as an effect of genetics and the mutations involved between how our body reacts to the environment and our exposure to it. We tend to "train" our adaptation in "physical appearance/anatomy." I understand that this is an extreme generalization. However, the point is that there are very little differences between us and the people 100 years ago unlike finches as described by Darwin, changed beaks depending on what food sources were available and the environmental exposure. It could be safe to say, based on this comparison, that the human species has not changed for more years than we may have official record of, thus a plausible reason to believe in religious texts. Thus, the bible and other religious texts and anthropological evidences can help us understand our rudimentary beings by finding the similarities between them as people have changed the texts for personal means or language differences.
Culture has formed because of religion, habits, accepted norms of society, and the needs of the environment as we are exposed to them. Thus, it would be difficult to remove culture from the equation of the built environment. However, if there were alternatives to the same solution, then problem solving would be easier than trying to manipulate cultures. Cultures change as well just as the environment does, thus culture cannot fully be a reliable root.
Mutual benefits between us and the environment is what we consider as a competition rather than- a gift. Even in the animal kingdom, we study it as taking rather than giving. (These thoughts are stemming from "true stewardship as described in religious texts" and the reason we have "green thinkers/saving the environment.") However, if we chose to see it as a gift rather than reaping rewards, how would that change the perspective of culture and survival? What if Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is for the basis of survival but not the basis of living? For example, morals say we should be unselfish and actions of service, "be as lilies of the valley," they do not worry about what they eat or how they shall live. This would make sense in a socialist community or mindset. Excluding governmental laws, a socialist microsystem (family and community) could work if the built environment supported living in your own mutually beneficial environment. Thinking green living/green giving.
I am going to pause my commentary here until I can finish it later.
From a psycho-social standpoint, the first premise is the survival of the species: we adapt to our environment to promote the best outcome. Our habitats are designed based upon our acquired previous knowledge to best serve the promotion of positive outcomes to provide the best quality of life that supports the expansion and protection of our genetic lines. Man differs from most other creatures to to his ability to acquire new knowledge that is the base upon which we build future knowledge. Cultural differences in housing are based upon the unique challenges of supporting mankind across very differing environments and the knowledge that has been attained and promoted within a given region with specific resources.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280777065_Come_Fly_With_Me_Bird_Property_Rights
Article Come Fly With Me: Bird Property Rights
Well, since you ask such a wonderful question ... it made me laugh. Thanks. But I find myself producing a comment that is perhaps a bit more critical of the parameters you set. I hope it is helpful.
Maslow's Hierarchy in light of architecture are grossly primitive assertion and in a certain sense a completely silly. You are right, the problem of intimacy in his hierarchy is problematic; its breaking point, I would assert. It leads to the public sphere and to the need for taking consciousness in hand. The first thing is to throw Maslow's Hierarchy out the window, and watch it smash down, with satisfaction.
I would ask you Chloe why it would should be necessary to eliminate specifically human characteristics, and even individual characteristics, to get down to what makes us live in order to find out what is essential in housing? Taking this in extremis would imply that what is sea slug's needs are the same as a human being, is the same as a gorilla a cheetah, a spider, a tree and a carrot. In principle it seems ridiculous then.
It is in fact nevertheless true, but in a direction if taken to its essence that leads to the same argument I'm going to produce here. But that is a long discussion via spirituality with a few leaps due to precedents not native to western academic culture, with another discussion to attach it to architectural practice or housing practice and policy, or even as philosophy of housing ... so I'm taking an other path.
In practice, the human being has conquered the needs to survive. Survival is easy for us in the sense of animal/body survival. This is been a fact for thousands of years. No one can deny that, and this is the first place that Maslow's Hierarchy is a bit weird in terms of how it is generally used. However, our survival is challenged with effects that have nothing to do with whether we can survive in terms of food and defense — in the wilderness. We challenge our survival due to our consciousness and what we do with it. We challenge our survival in our consciousness embodying the entire world's living kingdom, its natural kingdom in our awareness. We have built 10's of thousands of nuclear bombs and warheads of which 14,000 remain. These can annihilate everything many times over.
So if you want to discuss survival, you need to face consciousness in the sense of a human consciousness and it's awareness and the purpose of dwelling, which is inherent in consciousness in that discussion. If you do this, then something new, something human-human rather than animal-human will come of it.
As it is, the direction your question leads is the same direction we already have. Your premises and your proposal, even if we stripped the world of all human housing, would result in the same housing we have because you are proposing a reactionary scenario. This is common in architecture. Even so-called radicals such as Archigram or Coophimmelblau (to name two better know exemplars) are actually at their hearts reactionary ultra-conservative, unquestioning of the premises of architecture as we have it, in order to exploit it. So I would suggest that you can revise your questioning as you propose it here on the site to terms of viewing architecture through the lens of conscious awareness rather than the body.
Architecture can never be measured. It gives measure to the immeasurable. But that measure is always a particular locus, which includes its community. Human consciousness, it's awareness and the purpose for that within Nature, has extents that reach beyond, into the immeasurable. This questioning, (which I have undertaken via bringing spiritual practice 'near' architectural practice), will lead to 'new' kinds of housing. No new kind of housing of any sort or category will function, however, without a similarly orientated community around it. So in this sense, we are at the threshold of a paradigm change which leads society, as architecture always has. It will take time, and may not result in projects so easily.
What you were proposing seems reasonable and allows you to write and research and probably get funding, but it is as old as Decartes, and we are at the end of that now. At the same time, since you are proposing a radical change stripped of all the forms we've already used, maybe you were looking for something like this. I have taken the openings you provided to poke at the issue of somehow again redeveloping the idea of humanity as 'animal that is housed', which is a non-sequiter right off the bat.
Those how lead a privileged live do not understand the needs of people that are not privileged. Maslow's base is still part of the picture and just because you have to decide what counties beach you are headed to this next vacation does not mean that more than 25% or almost one in four people around the world are still worried about where the next meal is coming from. This goes to the base of the problem. This is an existential question of understanding more than just class.
The argument in light of the evidence that humans have conquered the hierarchy of need is a misguided statement. If such large percents of the world can not even feed themselves then even housing is a larger problem than I first thought.
Architects design for the upper class unless they realize the problems of the world and work to solve the issues of hunger, affordable housing, and the needs (even basic needs) of the poor.
We need to make sure that people understand needs and wants and desires before they build their second home on the French Riviera.
The poor of the world have to decide if they eat today or if the try to find something to cover up the hole they dug for their waste.
Do not misunderstand me I am one of the privileged but I think all the time how to build better less expensive or affordable and even housing to last many life times not just decades. This is why I started Global Green Building LLC.
I knew that my children would be raised in a part of the world that this would not be an issue unless we teach them to understand the needs of others. One person may not be able to change the world but every "one person" needs to understand why.
George
Hi George,
This is a quick response to your submission. I'm sure that any one who's done some research doesn't know that we turn between 30 to 50% of the food that is grown into garbage or do something else with it whereby it is not eaten. Not only in the west, but in poorer countries like India that stockpile mountains of grains only to see them ruined by poor management based in greed and corruption. The data is coming out now that proves that we have sufficient means to support ourselves even at 7 billion souls, even with all our devastation of the planet. So far at least.
The people you are referring to in your post who are suffering, are suffering at the hands of their brothers and sisters. This survival in human cultures, not nature. They are not allowed to produce the food they need due to political, economic or financial structures we create, or in the case of changes, to move to places which are more fruitful. The lack of education and/or support of indigenous ways is for the same reason. It is for the same reason that we still have 14k nuclear warheads. I would argue that it is the thinking that supports Maslow's Hierarchy and supports the animal-human that creates this.
It is by no means that I have a discriminatory view of those were not surviving. Nothing in my post says that I have means of any sort. Your assumption is not right. I did get a good post secondary education, before that, not so much
I would submit that it is discriminatory to attribute humanity's malfeasance as a natural attribute exterior to humanity. This is a form of blaming the victim. We starve and have no homes due to our brothers and sisters. In a more important way this thinking is a colonizing of the poor as poor by concealing the real source of their trauma and calling them animal-humans because of their poverty. Being poor is a human creation. Anyone given the chance can be the same as a Princeton professor if they have the capacity in them. Just today I read that a Somalian refugee who arrived in Canada as a 16-year-old has become a cabinet minister of the Canadian government.
Does poverty make one an animal? No. However keeping our brothers and sisters in poverty and justifying it with academic thinking allowing it to go on every day makes all of us animal-humans. That is our condition now, but not our nature or capacity.
Michael K,
Forgive my rant. I did not mean to take it out on you. I do agree with most of what you say.
I just want the world to work together and not as a have and have not world. To do this sometimes we must go back and reevaluate the basics of life and liberty. You and I both work and live in a free country and understand the struggles from a much different point of view than much of the world. This does not mean that we can not work to solve some of the issues from a design standpoint that will allow better ability to make people able to worry less about the where to live and am I going to get enough to eat today and more about how do we live in peace and happiness....
I understand this may be impossible but worth shooting for.
Evolution is basically exploitative in nature. Happiness is a wild goose chase, and totally relativistic, based on our instincts. I congratulate Chloe for asking a noble question.
It is difficult to unlearn what we know however it is important that what ever we do in the built environment it should be such that fits into our environment enough of copying things that are not sustainable in our climatic regions.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Psychology