HOW CAN TRADITIONAL INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE INFORM CONTEMPORARY BUILT ENVIRONMENTS?

TRAVEL EXPERIENCES

Lurujarri Trail, Broome, 2008. 9-day walk with Goolarabooloo people.

Garma Festival, 2008. Biggest indigenous cultural festival in Australia.

Central Australia, 2009. Desert people and desert landscapes.

LESSONS
‘Don’t change the landscape to suit you, change yourself to suit the landscape’. (Noel Nannup) We need to change our environmental attitudes, to understand the interdependency of all things and take responsibility for our actions and their effects. We need to restore our spiritual connection with nature. The wellbeing of the environment and our own are interwoven. Other ways indigenous knowledge can inform built environments: understanding local seasons and adaptive behavior, Climate-responsive design, Native plant uses – food, medicine, timber and textiles, Songlines – storytelling and moving through landscape, Paintings and landscape representation…

HOW CAN DESIGN NURTURE THE HUMAN SPIRIT?

Nature offers us something more than the material world, something spiritual. (Ellis Stones)

Most first-world citizens are concerned with material wealth. Our values centre on economic growth and our lives are driven by material accumulation. This has become the precedent towards which the rest of the world now aspires.

Genuine wellness requires full development of the human spirit and a deep connection to our environment. When we become sick spending time outside is seen as a remedy for physical and psychological problems. We associate wellness with the environment.

Frans Hoogland, an elder of the Goolarabooloo community in Broome, explains this reciprocal relationship, ‘In order to keep country alive, you have to experience it, you
have to get the feeling for it, and when you get the feeling for it and reading the country you can help keep it alive. You can communicate with it. Unless you can communicate with it you won’t be able to help keep it alive … We have to dig a bit deeper, but we settle on the surface. We don’t go to what is in our bones, that feeling … that … brings you right back to yourself. You become very aware about yourself … See, you are that land, and the land is you. There’s no difference. It’s hard to see the difference between nature and yourself. We have separated from it because we are told it is separate. We made a division between the garden and people. We put people on top. We have people and then everything else. So people got separated from nature and don’t see themselves as a part of nature anymore. But we are part of it.’ (Roe and Hoogland, in Listen to the People, Listen to the Land, 1999, p.18)

Our wellbeing, both physically and spiritually, is dependent on a relationship with nature. Therefore, humanity needs opportunities to interact with nature, especially in cities, which is where around half of the world’s population now live. Nature moves us, it makes us feel something deep in our hearts … you could say it makes us feel whole.

ARCHITECTURE AS A NEW TOPOGRAPHY

Tokyo City, Google Earth

Built environments are becoming so complex that they’re creating their own micro-climates. They have distinctive processes, including water and wind flows, light and shadow paths, temperature cycles etc. Built environments have similarities with certain ecosystems in the natural world, from which valuable lessons can be gained through biomimicry. For example, the architecture of Federation Square has similarities with the landscapes of central Australia. The plant communities of central Australia could inform a planting design strategy for this urban landscape.

Kings Canyon, Central Australia AND Federation Square, Melbourne

The idea is to explore what built surfaces plants can grow on. Identifying suitable growing mediums and water regimes are two key challenges. Prevailing drought conditions and water restrictions mean that plants need low water requirements. Furthermore, the diversity of surfaces in built environments, from horizontal, diagonal and vertical, as well as accessibility issues means that setting up irrigation systems and soil substrates can be difficult. This is why native plants need to be studied to see how they cope with these problems in the natural landscape.

Fitting in, Eucalypt sp.

Thinking about architecture as a new topography is not about creating gardens as much as creating ecosystems that act as environmental infrastructure, specifically tackling the issues of urban water management, heat island effect, passive solar design, habitat corridors etc. The intention is to create more livable built environments, for humans and animals alike.

This approach will provide people with opportunities to interact with nature, offering something more than the material world, something spiritual. (Ellis Stones) It also means that architecture and landscape need to be considered as two aspects of the same environment, and inevitably should be designed simultaneously.
We will need to think about the built terrain in new ways as urban environments become more consolidated to support growing populations. Infiltrating cities with ecosystems needs to be considered with other goals such as decreasing car-dependency through public transport use and designing for pedestrians and cyclists.

Biotectopia, DSL Group work

This is an opportunity to go beyond the limited views of plants as mere decorations and explore their other uses for food, medicine, timber, textiles, and water/air/soil managers.

COPENHAGEN STORIES

To change our relationship with the world, we must know the stories of those being affected by climate change. This will capture our hearts and change our minds, science does not make us feel anything but skeptical.

Indigenous climate change conference

COPENHAGEN WILL INSPIRE US

I think that Copenhagen will actually change the world, but I think most of the change will happen in people’s minds rather than in political circles.

The event itself is a demonstration for a whole new way of life, form communication to transport … All these new precedents are being set and AS LONG AS THE MEDIA DOES ITS JOB OF RAISING AWARENESS ABOUT ALL THESE ALTERNATIVES then change is possible.

The web is making sure that everyone is absorbing all this stimulus and whether you are directly or indirectly affected, it will slowly permeate society’s across the world.

Its terrific that Indigenous people and knowledge has been given a significant platform … its the connection that they share with the environment to which we must all aspire.

I think these people and events will touch our hearts and minds … but I think that these messages will be communicated through the web, not TV or radio. The government has too much control over the media but facebook, twitter and blogs etc are the only public forum we have.

50 things to know about COP15

Klimaforum 09

COP15 Behind the Scenes blogs

COP15 Climate Thinkers blog

Melbourne in Copenhagen 2009

Children’s Creative Climate Camp

DESIGN WITH KINDNESS

Provide a seat for weary legs to rest.

Offer shade from the summer heat.

Create cover from the rain.

Allow the opportunity to bask in the winter sun.

Give people the chance to retreat into nature, to be surrounded by plants and listen to falling water.

Plant flowers to add colour to the day.

Make a safe corridor for the birds and animals to get from A to B.

Give plants the opportunity to express themselves.

After all, its the simple things that count …

Where do you come from?

After seeing Bangarra’s retrospective ‘Fire’ I asked myself, where do I come from?

By “where” I don’t mean physical, geographical space. Its more like mind space … personal values, beliefs and attitudes. Its the space from which you choose and act.

You can see how connected Bangarra’s dancers are to their environment and to each other (to life) just by watching them move. Whether its projections onto people’s bodies, playing with shadows, a human-sized version of schoolyard finger elastics or mud slides you find yourself amazed by where they come from.

I think maybe we’ve lost where we come from, lost that connection to life … or is it that we simply act (and interact) in new ways?

You have strength when you know where you come from, you can see it in those dancers.

‘GARDENS ARE FOR PEOPLE’, THOMAS CHURCH

Church specialised in everyday landscapes that were strongly integrated with their surrounding environment. However, first and foremost was a simple practicality which enabled his principles to relate to so many contexts.

‘LIVE WITH INTENSITY’, ROBERTO BURLE MARX

RESPONSIBILITY
‘design for the good of other people … I think that the landscape architect has a special mission to create gardens for other people so that they can have the right to live in a balanced way.’

LIFE
‘I think it is very important to understand the period in which we are living … the good artist is the one who shows a little of what is happening in our lives … [and] incorporates elements from the past [like the Portuguese graphics used at Copacabana]‘.
‘Everyday ought to be a day of discovery. I think that discovery is one of the most powerful events life can give me.’

CREATIVE EXPRESSION
‘I use everything that I think will help me express myself … You can not have too big a crescendo. You have to have one big crescendo then you subordinate the other crescendos. You can not have many things that have the same value … [it depends on] what you want to subordinate and dramatise.’

PLANTS
Burle Marx made many plant collecting expeditions and discovered several new species. The idea at his Sitio was not only to have an extensive collection but also to have a large plant vocabularly that could be used in his projects. Burle Marx believed that through the use of new plants you could create new expressions in the garden, that might have not otherwise been possible.

His work didn’t copy nature, but transformed nature to create art. He composed plants in such a way that they would be able to express themselves.

One of Burle Marx’s icons was the Xaxim column, which were essentially concrete columns surrounded with slices of xaxim (or tree fern trunk) that was keep moist from a pool below, into which epiphytic plants were embedded.

(Sources: Video on Roberto Burle Marx, and notes by Jeremy Pike)

PLANT DEPOSITS IN THE AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE

Twins

The Neighbours

The Family

The whole Community

LEARNING FROM DESERT ENVIRONMENTS
Could we use the Desert Rose (Alyogyne hakeifolia) to plant container gardens in Australia’s cities?

What about Mulla Mulla (Ptilotus sp.)?

CLUES FROM INNER MELBOURNE
Fern growing near the banks of the Yarra River.

Buildings become the setting for Australian plant life.

PROCESS
1. There has to be a niche with its own micro-climate in the first place.
2. Wind causes sediment deposits over time.
3. Plant seeds are blown in.
4. When there is enough moisture plants germinate and eventually colonise.