6.1.2 Of Thunder Birds and Beings: Systemic Architectures Most Ancient

“the four sacred plants are rooted in the place of emergence. The long roots emphasize the importance of connection to the central place of emergence.” Parezo, 1995.

Until the onset of the Age of Discovery [123], the peoples of the third largest continent by land area, of which a 1/3 have been estimated to have lived in the territory today known as California (Starr, 2007), lived in symbiosis with their habitat. Their culture and beliefs imbued with insight of the workings of fire and its regimes, theirs was an architecture of adaption, which synchronous with the seasons migrated not materially, but informatically, from one place to another, and from one season to another. Their mode of transference was a hybrid of praxis and theoria, learning by doing, but infused with mythological meaning and ritual, which passed between generations since time immemorial, was said to have originated from The Great Spirit (Nabokov and Easton, 1989). Built of locally sourced biomass materials, Native American single-story structures, such as the semi-permanent wickiup, which indigenous to the western United States comprises a dome-shaped frame formed from saplings that are flexible enough to endure seismic shaking, yet strong enough to support an insulating layer of Tule [Schoenoplectus acutus] Cattail [Typha], or Giant Wild Rye [Leymus condensatus], were burnt upon the expiration of their use. Thus, like the conceptions of Cedric Price and his collaborative peers, the worldview from which these architectures emerged placed not value on the permanency, but on the performance of structures, and did so within and of a transdisciplinary approach that perceived of the landscape as a coupled human and natural system of which fire is a fundamental part. Evidence as supports that statement lies in the repeated use of fire to create desired ecological states [i.e. fresh grazing] “as far back” as can be reconstructed (Agee, 2000, p.8) and to the extent that the ecological legacy therefrom continues to influence regional fire regimes to the present day (Spies et al, 2014).

Price’s cybernetician colleague Gordon Pask posited that Victorians including horticulturalist, architect, and politician Sir Joseph Paxton, had pioneered systemic [architectural] design (Pask, 1969), but, having done so in the absence of a metalanguage [theory], both peer and public appeared not to fully appreciate the significance of their work (Ibid). Herein, it’s posited that the indigenous architectures of North America, and all other continents, such for example as the stilted villages of the Southern Hemisphere, not merely preceded Paxton et al in developing systemic design, but did so across yet broader spatiotemporal scales. Furthermore, it’s suggested that the origin thereof dates to pre-history, for although, amongst other factors [i.e. landscape erosion], the temporality of its materiality renders physical remains largely absent, a variant of the wickiup’s architectural typology appears to be recorded in Palaeolithic tectiforms [schematic drawings] which found on the walls of caves at Font-de-Gaume, Dordogne (von Petzinger, personal communication, 2018) are dated to 17 – 12 tya (Fairfield Osborn, 2013, p. 812), making it a candidate for the foremost ancient structural type worldwide (Fig. 56). Bringing further anthropological context thereto, if, as hypothesized, the tectiforms represent Palaeolithic shelters as emerged early within human history, it may accommodate for why variations on its architectural theme have been found as far and wide as the Americas, Europe, and Africa.

As ever more archaeological finds expand our understanding of our genera’s evolution, evidence of the emergence of behaviours and technologies is tending to push backwards. For example, while human habitation of the Americas is widely accepted to date to >15 tya, a recent excavation near San Diego revealed markings on a Mastodon’s bone dated to 130 tya, which some palaeontologists posit, though not necessarily H.sapiens, was born of a genus Homo hand (Zimmer, 2017). In time, the combined analysis of archaeological, anthropological, genetic, linguistic, and other data may reveal the specifics of the archaic human journey. In the interim, regardless of whether our ancestors arrived on the shores of the western United States >15 tya or 150< tya, it can be assumed that on doing so they brought more than the sum of their biological parts, for their beliefs, values, and cultures came with them. Mitochondrial DNA analysis suggests the Native American population originated in Central Asia (Bonatto and Salzano, 1997). But, genetics is not all the ancient peoples of these regions shared, for traditional Asian architectures, like those of Native Americans, are built on cosmological foundations: structural design and materiality aligned to belief systems born of astute observations of the natural world and its workings in space and time. Numerous are the etymological clues to humanity’s common cultural ancestry, of which one, “Pan” was discussed earlier. Another, pertinent example is “nature”, which though today largely interpreted in such ambiguous terms as to be rendered all but redundant to science, is ‘born’ of the Latin root natus, singular nominative “natura”, of which the first declension is the “essence of a thing”, others including “the Universe” and “birth” (Etymology Dictionary, 2017, online); present-day interpretations including, “the physical force regarded as causing and regulating the phenomena of the world” (Oxford Dictionary, 2017, online); foremost [known] ancient variant thereof, “Nataraja” [Fig. 57], which is the Sanskrit term for the Hindu god Shiva in “his form as the cosmic dancer” (Britannica, 2017, online), as relates to the Vedic origin myths.

Just over four decades since Fritjof Capra drew parallels between Eastern mysticism and, amongst other fields, particle physics (Capra, 2010), and just under four since James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis marked the arrival of the aspiration of “a unified science” designed to unravel the systemic relationship between Earth’s abiotic and biotic elements (Lovelock, 2016, p. ix), few scientists exhibit Capra and Lovelock’s breadth and depth of transdisciplinary knowledge. As Bruno Latour stated in the early 2000s, “the theoreticians of ecology make no more use of anthropology than of the sociology of the sciences” (Latour, 2004, p.43), this being a statement as still stands today. Hence, few working within the sciences appear aware of the potentialities as become accessible whereupon one acquires literacy in multiple fields, therein the capacity to decipher codes, symbolism, and other modes of communication as, be it at the scale of disciplines or of civilizations, vary, and greatly, in space and time. As in linguistics, symbolism, religion, and mythology, whereupon subjected to systemic examination, vernacular architectures help explain how and why peoples and places as may appear mutually exclusive, are often quite the contrary. Not for want of unanswered questions as are of profound consequence to humanity has this circumstance come about. No matter the rigour of Latour’s critique of mainstream narratives and notions of “nature”, both within and beyond the popular media, government, and industry, scant has been the progress made towards dialogue of such depth as can go beyond “the dichotomies of man and nature, subject and object, modes of production, and the environment” (Ibid, p.2). Now, as then, no matter the ample lip service paid to the term, ‘political ecology’ has yet “to exist”, because now, as then, where policy is concerned, scientific data is largely interpreted as befits the particular ambitions of they in power.

Political interests in combination with ecological illiteracy have sizeably shaped U.S WUI fire policy since migrants from “the least fire-prone places on Earth” imported their “peculiar pyrophobia” to the region some centuries ago (Pyne, 2012, p.167). This issue is central to discussions of land and real estate development in the U.S., where indigenous beliefs, values, and cultures have been under sustained systemic attack since European settlement began. Economically, the matter is manifest in the fact that Native Americans have “the highest rate of poverty of any racial group – almost twice the national average”, of which one causation has been postulated to be the federal government’s holding of reservations “in trust” - the original intent of which was “to keep Indians contained to certain lands”, (Schaefer Riley, 2016, online). In other words, from the outset, the policy prevented against indigenous peoples traversing territories of the same broad spatiotemporal scales as had their ancestors thus hindering attempts to preserve their historically ecologically harmonious way of life. Ignorance of such architectural precedents is so widespread as for the invention of ‘pop-up cities’ to be commonly attributed to Western culture, such for example as when in 2016 an author stated that temporary architecture appeared “as early as 58 B.C.E in ancient Rome”, before citing further, more recent, examples from France, Italy, and the UK (Epstein-Mervis, 2016). However, the above, to use common parlance, were eating the architectural dust of indigenous peoples, including but not limited to Native Americans, who not merely anticipated the concept, but have enacted it for millennia [Fig. 58]. Unfortunately, nigh erasing indigenous cultures from some architectural commentary is but one of the, sometimes subtle ways, in which native peoples are kept, wittingly or otherwise, between a [Standing] rock and a hard place. Nonetheless, as understanding of ecology, and of the Earth Systems more generally unfolds, appreciation of indigenous knowledge and practice is growing, as is awareness of the environmentally synchronous nature of many non-European architectural approaches.

Contemporary issues as arise from U.S. land-ownership and management policy structure include an inability on the part of Native Americans to raise a mortgage, because banks will not lend against reservation land (Schaefer Riley, 2016, online). Additionally, despite an estimated >$1.5 trillion uranium, oil and gas reserves residing on reservations, 86% remain undeveloped, “because of federal control... that keeps Indians from capitalising on their natural resources” (Ibid). However, as has been apparent in news and popular entertainment media [124] of late, development of sorts is occurring on reservation land, but to the detriment of its residents, of which examples include the building of the DAPL and Keystone pipelines (Gambino, 2017; OpenInvest, 2018), and plans for the creation of a border wall (Levin, 2017), about which one reservation resident stated:

“It’s going to affect our sacred lands. It’s going to affect our ceremonial sites. It’s going to affect the environment. We have wildlife, and they have their own patterns of migration” Levin, 2017, online.

Footnotes

[123] Early 15th - Late 18th century.

[124] In reference to an episode of the U.S. televised drama ‘Designated Survivor’ in which the character of President Kirkman, a former architect and urban professor, addresses a dispute over land development on reservation land (Guggenheim et al, 2018).

>Continue to Chapter 6.1.3 here.

The thesis is also available in PDF format, downloadable in several parts on Academia and Researchgate.

Note that figures have been removed from the digital version hosted on this site, but are included in the PDFs available at the links above.

Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.