So, it’s Christmas Eve. If you are reading this you have probably
survived the malls and the shopping chaos. You have probably spent more money
than you had planned. You have probably bought a whole lot of stuff that you
don’t really like for people who don’t really want more stuff. But this is our
tradition, or rather this is what we have been lead to believe is our
tradition. Even those of us who do not come from the land of snowy pine trees,
jingle bells and basted turkeys have kind of begun to play along with the
“season” and obediently do year after year what is expected of us.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the year-end break. I love
floating in the pool, not shaving and pottering aimlessly around the backyard
in those moth-eaten khaki shorts that my wife told me to throw out some time
before the 1994 elections. But, when I am quiet with myself and think about it,
I see that what I love most about Christmas holidays is that there is less “stuff”.
There is less driving, less school, less work,
less email, less meetings and less clothing (at least in the backyard).
It is perhaps in this time that I slow down my mind enough
to ask myself: “If having less makes me so happy, why do I spend so much of my
life energy trying to get more? “ A curious question actually, and I am not
sure that I can answer it for myself completely in my own life. But what I am
more interested to talk to you about in this column today, is our cities and
the buildings in them. Because it seems
to me that the ways in which we have complicated our lives with more and more
stuff, is reflected back at us in the shape and form of our cities and
buildings that grow more and more complex, less and less efficient and further
and further away from the ideal of “natural beauty” that remains embedded
somewhere deep inside each and every one of us.
So, what I am dwelling on in my mind these holidays is the
question: “Can we find beauty in the process of simplifying our cities and the buildings
in them?”. For me, this quest for
simplicity must be a one that understands the city as a living function whole;
perhaps in the same way that the beauty of the flower or the butterfly comes
out if the simplicity of the design solution as a response to the “whole”. The
design of the honey bee colony seems to me to be the simplest, most efficient
way of pollinating flowers while feeding honey to young bees. Therein lays its
beauty. But our cities are not like this. Our buildings are not like this. Rather,
they invent complexity. They reflect in-elegant clumsy solutions of our busy
cluttered minds.
The most efficient and simple way to put bread on the table
is surely not to be a worker in a giant bread factory in order to earn just
enough wages to buy bread. The most efficient and simple way to deal with
rainwater can surely not be to pay taxes to build a bureaucracy to run a massive
storm water systems to lead perfectly good drinking water off our roofs through
complicated concrete channels to the sea, while catching other rainwater deep
in the mountains in expensive dams and piping it hundreds of kilometres right
to your toilet where you flush it into yet another pipe that takes the water
away again to be collected in one big smelly lake before being dumped again, in
the sea.
No, of course it does not make sense. But we have become so
tired from working so hard to accumulate more “stuff” that we have forgotten
that it even had to make sense in the first place. But before you think that I
am going on about bread making or water reticulation, I am not. I am asking
myself for example: “ Is there a simpler more beautiful way to educate my
children?”, “Is there a simpler more beautiful way to provide quality food for
my family?”, “Is there a simpler more beautiful way to provide shelter for my
family?” “Is there a simpler, more beautiful way to see to it that my family is
clothed?”
The sad truth is that I, like you, know that there are
simpler and more beautiful ways to do all these things. We also know therefore that
there are simpler design solutions for the buildings and cities that must
accommodated these things.
I, like you know,
that if we were to have the courage to change, we would be much happier people
on a much healthier planet.
But……where to find
this courage? Perhaps it is here, in my backyard somewhere? Perhaps in the cool
shade of the Avocado tree?
