For the ‘Me’ generation, resulting from the 1960s/70s baby boom, instantaneous satiation of desire has been a reality since acts of consumption, through greater access to cash or credit, have never been easier.  The speed at which the desired object or experience can be obtained can lead to an emotional high that is short-lived.  This cycle continues as the next consumer fix is sought.  Consumer goods, and even mass-produced housing, are the product of economic time frames and market economies.  Electronic computer equipment is a classic example of a speeded-up, and artificial time frame, as Moore’s Law dictates that computing power will double or prices halve every eighteen months.  In industrial production design has completely divorced from other time frames.  ‘Evolved design’ embraces the time frames of nature.  Its expression ranges from the very long view (hundreds of generations) to the production of consumer goods where the emotional ‘rush’ of desire and ownership is replaced with a deep user:product relationship.

Tache Naturelle by Martin Ruiz de Azuz, Spain – This simple, minimalist ceramic pot is not glazed in the factory.  It gets its final decorative coat by nature.  The fired pots are hidden in secret natural locations by the owner, a stream, a woodland or a mountainside.  After a season or several months or longer, the owner returns to salvage his/her pot.  Recorded on the sides of the pot is the passage of time and natural interactions, staining, colouring, and burnishing.  Each pot represents change, each pot records those changes, mini-evolutions of material surfaces.

Terra Grass Armchair by N Fornitore, Italy – As a living growing structure this garden chair is constantly changing but its owner clips and prunes the grass to temporarily arrest the process in a surface finish and form.  While the cardboard armature backfilled with soil provides the framework to create the form, this design evolves in a continuous dialogue between owner and nature.
Ecocathedral, Mildam,The Netherlands by Louis Le Roy – the Ecocathedral is a tour de force of design process and systems.  Le Roy commenced this project over thirty years ago on a small piece of land where he arranged for the local municipality to drop the occasional lorry-load of bricks, stone and concrete from demolished buildings.  He re-arranges this raw material into a variety of built structures, terraces and pathways. This is the beginning of a journey into working in space and time, into self-organising systems and natural processes.  His arrangments of building blocks are held together by gravity, there is no cement mortar.  The living world can enter the interstices of his built works to create his Ecocathedral, an environmental, landscape or urban structure that is under constant spatial and temporal dynamic development where people, plants and animals co-operate in a larger natural process.  This journey requires no drawings or plans.  How can you draw a process of 1,000 years, the timeframe Le Roy sees for his project.  Ecocathedral is the sum achievement of one person in space and time.  It represents a design culture free from the restrictions of commercial, social, cultural or political imperatives.  It celebrates slowness.
Highline, New York, USA by Christopher Bribach and Carolyn F Strauss – Most of the great cities around the world are intersected with railway infrastructure, the transport phenomenon of nineteenth century industrialisation.  Within a couple of generations the availability of cheap fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine made huge tracts of railway lines redundant.  Highline is a 3 kilometre section of redundant elevated track.  In response to a competition to find contemporary uses for the site, Bribach and Strauss proposed a ‘participatory ecology of nature, local community and built form.’  They envisioned living architecture, an organic organism whose form and expression was managed by the local inhabitants.  This vision comprises ‘a flexible framework of giant timber bamboo sheathed with a thin yet durable biopolymer membrane with intelligent, self-generating properties.’  Here is the possibility of an environmentally regenerative project which offers community focus and identity.  Shape, scale, space and growth opportunities become a collaborative process between designers, inhabitants and nature.

©2004, 2005 Alastair Fuad-Luke. All rights reserved.