If natural building is in some sense the way everyone used to build, then why isn’t it still ubiquitous today? Ian Svilokos takes this question head on: he explores the historical and spiritual dimensions of building in the wake of colonialism. For Svilokos, the key to advancing natural building lies in addressing the long shadow of colonialism and the reductive construction methodologies it established centuries ago.
You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. . . . This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion. Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. . . . Black Elk ¹
Education in today’s world of natural building has a paradoxical core—the knowledge that appears to be innovative, boundary pushing or niche has been widely known and practiced since humans came into existence. For millennia, humans have known of and passed down an extensive range of natural building techniques, including baking limestone to make natural cement, forming soil into sturdy walls, using grasses as insulation, and even using grasses as structure. In spite of that, we now have sustainability trailblazers investing untold amounts of effort into re-discovering and re-developing these same techniques. Why are we reinventing the wheel? Why do the vast majority of educated architects, licensed engineers, and experienced builders, that are not innovators, not even know of these or any natural building systems? What were the drivers that led to this knowledge chasm? How did our standard building systems come to be so antithetical to the natural world? If we can answer these questions,2 we will have a better chance of ensuring these not-so-novel technologies permeate and persist in our collective consciousness for generations to come. To begin, credit and acknowledgement are due to the indigenous civilizations (and at times the economically disadvantaged communities) that developed the tech currently known as natural building—a building process akin to a farm-to-table meal.3 Over generations, these civilizations assembled a building knowledge-base that became intrinsically tied to their beliefs, daily lives, and environments. A knowledge that works hand-in- hand with Nature. By way of local materials, they simultaneously found shelter from inclement weather, harvested natural forms of energy, and constructed buildings that fully return to the earth when their lifecycles’ end. The uniqueness and ingenuity of these builders and their constructions4 are the foundations that the sustainability-minded populace at present are attempting to comprehend and emulate in order to solve the on-going, self- wrought climate crisis.
Known colloquially as the “Island of the Gods,” Bali is part of the volcanically active Indonesia archipelago and home to an indigenous population that believes in a tripartite universe. The native islanders established villages in the foothills (madya) between the rapidly rising mountains and the vast sea. For them, the high point of the land (kaja) is the seat of the gods, and the sea, or low point (kelod), is rife with malevolent spirits.5 Continuing with this logic, the water that flows from the mountain peaks brings health and sustenance from the gods to the people, then carries away death and disease. Villages are oriented in long armatures, radially around the mountain base, each with a carefully placed knot at its midpoint (picture two interlocking “L” shapes). These knots momentarily capture the naturally flowing water so that it can be collected before releasing it, strategically routing it past the burial grounds (possibly to physically or spiritually cleanse the land), and then finally washing out to sea. The resulting urban fabric of Balinese villages have endured making it difficult to travel perpendicular from village to village—often easier to go to the high point of a village before crossing to a neighboring one.
Across the globe in the Andean highlands of Argentina, the pastoralist Susques people practice a form of animism imbuing their homes with souls. Believing that just as one would butcher an animal before making use of its resources, one needs to perform a fletching ceremony (flecha)6 for a newly constructed home (casa) to relieve the structure of its soul before it too can be used. In a quasi-symbiotic relationship, the homes and the people that reside within them are provided with equal treatment and care is given to all souls. Years later, in the wake of the homeowners’ eventual death, the thatched wooden roof of the home is removed so that the inhabitants’ souls can be free to move on. However, the home is not completely dismantled. The stoneand adobe walls are left in place to slowly erode by wind and rain, extending the structure’s usefulness, now as a memento mori—a memorial of the dead for the living.7 In effect, each family has both a spatial and temporal relationship to their compound (domicillo) creating a strong multigenerational bond to the land and architecture.
Moving to North America, the folklore of native communities have shared an allegorical theology since the Ice Age that equates humans with animals, plants, and even inanimate objects. Spoken histories frequently describe humans as literal brothers or sisters of animals, humans taking the forms of mountains or stars, or rivers and rocks being alive.8 With such an intimate sense of kinship to the natural world, it should be no surprise that a common practice among Native Americans is to trade goods with Nature. To this day, in the same fashion as two humans would make a trade, members of the Potawatomi Nation give Earth (the being) a gift of tobacco leaves before harvesting the sweetgrass (wiingaashk) they need to weave their baskets.9 When a community follows this practice, they ensure people can never take too much from Earth, ensuring the longevity of each other.
Even for rote operations, Indigenous societies build with distinctive manners befitting of their culture. One of the particularly simple aspects of means and methods that is unique from one culture to the next is how they choose to measure. Being able to take a material and shape it to fit a desired space, or to know where to place “this thing” versus “that thing,” requires a system that can describe dimension. Again, bound by their beliefs, daily lives, and environments, Indigenous groups have developed their own ways to measure.
Even for rote operations, Indigenous societies build with distinctive manners befitting of their culture. One of the particularly simple aspects of means and methods that is unique from one culture to the next is how they choose to measure. Being able to take a material and shape it to fit a desired space, or to know where to place “this thing” versus “that thing,” requires a system that can describe dimension. Again, bound by their beliefs, daily lives, and environments, Indigenous groups have developed their own ways to measure.
Certainly not all measurement systems are anthropomorphic, one such being that of traditional Chinese architecture. In the not so recent past, the roof rafter acted as the base module of measurement with the size of all other pieces of the building relating to the rafter. By imperial decree, each class of society was assigned a rafter of a given width (T’sai, again similar in practice to a “meter”) and each class’ rafter was wider than the rafter of the class below.12 Consequently, members of the higher societies end up with larger buildings. With an equally unique perspective on measurement, peoples in certain regions of Cameroon and Zambia use fractal geometries to determine the scale and relationship between individual rooms, between homes, and within the entire village. The Ba-ila use the morphology of their livestock corral (kraal) as the smallest base geometry in its fractal pattern that forms self-similar, ring-shaped villages.13 At the center of the fractal pattern is the home of the village leader and the further the other homes are from the center, the further they are from leadership positions within the village. These systems of measurement of the Chinese and Ba-ila lead to a visual and spatial reinforcement of the communities’ social hierarchy.
For these six societies, and the countless others that have existed throughout history, Nature includes people. This lends itself to both the practice of religion and the social performance of built things to be in a perpetual symbiosis at every scale—city, building, object. While there are certain overarching elements that influence how various indigenous peoples build, including climate and proximity to resources, natural building systems are ultimately a set of choices in service to the spiritual and societal notions of a people’s time and place.
“. . . we made these little gray houses of logs that you see, and they are square. It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square. . . . the Waischus (whitemen) have put us in these square boxes. Our power is gone and we are dying, for the power is not in us anymore. Black Elk14
While the Global South was flourishing in their own right, in Europe the groundwork for colonialism was slowly being laid. Humanism, a core tenant of the Renaissance (early 1400s), centered humans (well, men) in the universe positing them against all other forces, including Nature. By the height of the period (early 1500s), the likes of Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, and their contemporaries were thought to have triumphed over Nature entirely. Coincident with the first modern empires, the Baroque (1600s) ushered in a new wave of scientific observation and the beginning of the end of natural magic—think Galileo, Newton, and Kepler.15 Next to follow during the Enlightenment (late 1700s), Issac Newton promoted scientific observation’s importance to an even higher status simultaneously eschewing both mysticism and religion altogether. The United States continued the global effort to spread Western thought during the Romantic movement (early 1800s) whose ideals still have a grip on most of the “developed” world today. Supplementing this othering of Nature, the monarchical governments leading Europe (and later the US) were wholly intertwined with the Christian Church who serendipitously granted divine rights to colonizers as they set out on their Age of “Discovery.” While the cultural rebirth happening might have been a sign of new life for humankind of the Global North, it was a harbinger of death for the natural world and those who remained in reverence.
Designed by Leon Battista Alberti (ca. 1450 C.E.), the facade of Palazzo Rucellai is a paradigm for the early Renaissance view of Nature—Man striving to outdo the beauty of the natural world. The elevation is highly ordered, borrowing the organizational structure of the Roman Colosseum, demonstrating Man’s ability to control. More importantly, the facade’s ornament has a profound part-to-whole logic not yet seen previously in western art. Alberti designed a series of detailed pilasters, entablatures, and arches then organized them in such a way that the facade as a whole would be visually spoiled if any of these individual elements were missing or altered in any way—just as an animal and its beauty were thought to be due to the consonance16 of its individual parts.17
Following Alberti, after a healthy 100 years of triumphing over Nature, colonization became en vogue among the European states. As each country claimed different regions of the world there were no attempts to learn from the Indigenous groups because they were considered “irrational beasts” who hadn’t yet found God, mastered Nature, or knew of the new western science of the 1600s.18 Among the countless atrocities carried out, merchant and monk set out to “enlighten” those who they saw as savages by actively prohibiting the continuation of any local customs. Needless to say, these myopic viewpoints wreaked havoc on Indigenous peoples and their wayof life. One of the more well-known and swiftest colonizations was carried out by the Spanish who systematically razed all religious iconography and places of worship of the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incans.19 There is no better exemplar of this act of replacement than the building of the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral (1573-1813 C.E.) on top of the Tenochtitlan Templo Mayor (Huēyi Teōcalli) (1325-1519 C.E.)—the temple to the gods of the Sun and Rain. The Conquistadors continued this practice centuries later when traditional native trading routes along the California coast were subjugated, paved and renamed “El Camino Real” so they could connect their 21 Spanish Colonial Missions—now more commonly known as “the 101.”
By the Enlightenment period, Man had become master, exerting complete control over Nature. Renowned for his ability to do so was landscape architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown. His visions called for clear-cutting forests, draining marshes, and grading rolling hills to create what he thought were “improved”20 versions of Nature. His contributions to landscape design led to the creation of the English Landscape Garden style. Praise for the new landscape typology directly led many people to believe that fields of manicured grass are more beautiful than native plants. The fervor for Brown’s rolling lawns led to the prevalence of the single-family lawns of the United States,21 which are arguably a form of agricultural colonization where native plants are replaced with foreign grasses that require untold amounts of water and chemicals to survive.
Near the end of the Enlightenment, revolutionary France had come to establish the Metre (1791 C.E.). This too reflected the evolution away from Nature. Thanks to Vitruvius, we know the Romans of antiquity (30-20 B.C.E) used an anthropomorphic system of measurement just as many of the Indigenous peoples discussed previously. In ancient Rome, the system was based on the idealized human form with the units Finger, Palm, Foot, Cubit, Pace, and Module.22 Then, in keeping with the humanistic times (1570 C.E.), Andrea Palladio picked up this system and revived the module. . . but divorced it from the human form and its last connection to Nature. The architect divided his Modulo into Minuti, Oncie, and Piede Vicentino.23 Eventually, after centuries more influence from European scientists and merchants, came the meter. So, as with buildings and landscapes, so too did the basis of means and methods of construction become divorced from Nature. At this moment, most of theglobe, likely without realizing it, measures length based on the distance a photon of light can travel in 1/299,792,458th of a second.24 Finally, with the advent of Romanticism, raw, unrestricted landscape had cemented itself as the purest form of Nature in the minds of US colonizers. Seemingly benevolent, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Manifest Destiny ushered in the rise of conservationism and the idea that man (white and Christian) would protect Nature from all dangers, including the Native Americans and their indigenous practice of fire ecology.25 As US settlers expanded west they created a system of boarding schools designed to prevent younger generations from learning the spiritual practices of their elders. Children were kidnapped from their families and, among other things, forced to accept Christianity, learn western science and live in wood-framed, square homes as recounted by Black Elk.
A far cry from the wonders of Stonehenge (3100 – 1600 B.C.E), European buildings from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries gradually and systematically broke their connection to nature. Modern Europeans were either against Nature, better than Nature, controlling Nature, or protecting Nature, but never with Nature. There is no more apt allegory for how the loss of natural building knowledge came to be than this centuries-long transformation from one of reverence for Nature, to one of dominance over Nature.
As is true of the many cultural losses and injustices that plague current societies, colonialism was a key culprit leading to the present gap in natural building knowledge. Whether it was conquering empires or “developed” nations, throughout time there have been one set of civilizations imposing their way of life on another set. The strategic vilification of Indigenous technologies paved the way for Western technologies to become the default. Furthering the gap, these non-Natural systems have been improved upon for centuries and codified into law, including for those countries that eventually gained political independence. Living with these vestiges of colonialism, the world is now a place where East Asian and Central American countries have an abundance of bamboo but no building code that deems it an acceptable building material. In some cases, the displacement of certain cultures led to a permanent loss of knowledge. Many westerners cannot fathom that non-Europeans were able to build monumental stone structures (ie: The Pyramids of Menkaure, ca 2601-2515 B.C.E, Giza, Egypt; The Lion Gate, ca. 1400 B.C.E, Bogazköy, Turkey; The 12-angle monolith of the Hatun Rumiyoc Street wall, ca. 1200-1400 C.E., Cusco, Peru), either suggesting that only the mythological giant Cyclops (ie, cyclopean masonry) or aliens (ie, The History Channel spinoffs) had the skill to do so. Just as the universe moves to fill all vacuums, a collective consciousness can not tolerate an informational gap and requires an alternate reality, no matter how illogical.
These attitudes towards communities of the Global South, stemming from the initial Christian interlopers from over 400 years ago, remain entrenched in the schema of many contemporary societies. Ideologically Western Architecture schools breeze through non-Western history, or skip it entirely, meanwhile lauding the writings of architectural critics Marc-Antoine Laugier26 and Gottfried Semper27 who incidentally identified the “good hat, good boots” adage used by today’s natural builders, only to then erroneously strip natural buildings of their spiritual, climatic, and cultural qualities by characterizing them as “primitive”—without a doubt the effect of elevating Western sciences over all else. Equally limiting the acceptance of natural building methods among engineers is the idea that these systems are untested and therefore not safe—so why bother learning them? On the contractor’s side, the systems are perceived to be too risky (that they will leak, catch fire, grow mold, etc) and therefore not worth attempting out of fear of litigation. All in all, a true irony in the quest to battle the effects of climate change given these “primitive” building technologies outperform more recent Western technologies.
Fortunately there is a growing movement that seeks to return to a way of life more analogous to an indigenous one, and a new period in Western thought is taking shape. Spurred by the fears of climate change, views of Nature are starting to circle back to that of a communal relationship between Humans and Nature. The white paper 14 Pattern of Biophilic Design,28 went to great lengths to research and cite studies that support the idea that a spiritual connection to nature is beneficial to human health; the LEED rating system acknowledges that buildings can be detrimental to nature; the WELL rating system acknowledges that buildings can be harmful to human health; and the Living Building Challenge makes the strongest case for a return to natural building seeing as under that system designing or building cannot happen without first gaining an intimate knowledge of the environment planned for development.29 While these rating systems do inch closer to harmony with Nature, they still fall short:natural elements are viewed as resources, not kin; Affordable housing units are sized to meet Federal funding guidelines instead of the needs of each individual person; the experience of a space is rarely tied to astronomical events; and in many cases, a fee can be paid in lieu of meeting a required guideline. Here societal drivers have come into alignment with the notions of traditional building, but any notion of a spiritual connection to Nature is still largely absent making widespread adoption unlikely.
