“And here he is class! … Ben Small!”
A murmur rose from the thirty-odd 8th graders assembled in front of me as I made my way into their classroom. Clutching my camera and notebook to my chest I inched in the door feeling like an awkward biologist suddenly confronted by the organisms supposedly under investigation. And here I was the one being observed.
“Ben is a student from Lewis and Clark College in Portland.” Said the man at the front of the classroom. “He’s here to learn about our building and see what we’ve got going on.”
“Hello everybody.” I managed to utter.
“You graduate in May?” The tall man asked as he looked at me from across the room.
“Yes.” I responded more confidently, washing my gaze over the diverse expressions worn by the young faces of my audience.
“That’s the goal! Right class?” Another clamor from the group and with that the man turned his attention back to his students and the introduction to the day’s schedule continued uninterrupted.
I’ve never received more of an introduction from someone I had never met, given to a group of people who couldn’t care less.
And yet, this is what it’s all about.
Wrenching my face away from my computer and enjoying the experience of meeting new people and learning about the places they love. I knew I wanted to write my thesis on buildings because I wanted the opportunity to explore places of meaning for people. Buildings are fascinating to me because of the way they contain so much more within their walls than meets the eye. To borrow a useful device from Tim Ingold: we can imagine buildings as if they are made of lines; lines on paper that depict an architect’s vision, fiscal bottom lines, and the lines of history and personal stories that weave together values and politics into decisions and revisions of what a place should be. If we look hard enough at a building, walk through it’s halls and sit in it’s rooms and talk with those who dwell inside it, we might be able to observe the building’s own line. What we see may very well be more than a mere history beginning with drawings, watching the walls rise through construction, until finally ending with the “finished product;” but a long braid of ideas, moments and concepts coming together to create place, while still stretching forward into the future. Everyone brings their own line to weave into the fabric of a place, and each new string shapes the overall appearance and future composition of the work. Some may choose to focus on a small patch of the work, while others step back to admire the work as a whole. However…
I found myself in Hood River Middle School (HRMS) that day on a mission to disentangle the web of lines I saw lying before me in the shape of a building. And I couldn’t have asked for a better guide. Michael, the man at the front of the class, shared his impressive history of engagement with and contribution to the HRMS Music and Science wing, one of two Living Building’s I’m investigating for this thesis. My goal in dissecting the lines of these two buildings is to find where the “life” comes from to make a building truly “alive” (or “living”). The Living Building Challenge’s website (the organization that writes the protocol and certifies Living Buildings) says that Living Building’s resemble flowers: they get their energy from the sun and their water from the rain, they consume CO2 (or at least don’t produce any!) and are beautiful. But I knew that a net-zero building (a building that produces as much energy and water on site as it consumes in a year), no matter how good it looks, is merely a “sustainable” object. To be alive a building had to do more, it had to act.
The first thing Michael asked me as he made his way through the jumble of desks and furiously scrawling 8th graders was if I felt comfortable. “I do.” I lied, I was a little hot. I had my big wool jacket on to ward off the crisp winter air blowing strongly outside in the perpetually-windy, ever-beautiful Columbia River Gorge.
“This place’ll do that to ya.” Michael remarked before welcoming me again to his classroom.
I removed my jacket, and instantly felt the warmth of the classroom creep onto and up my skin, making it’s way along my spine and warming me thoroughly. It wasn’t a dry heat, but more of a sensation of warmth, like the feeling of being wrapped in a cozy blanket. The kind of heat that fills you up from inside-out instead of blowing over you, drying you out like a raisin under the hot air out of a hair dryer. The sensation results from radiant heat, and in the case of HRMS specifically the radiant heating system installed in the floor. As Michael later explained to me, one of his favorite aspects of the classroom is the smart climate control system which monitors the space, turning on ventilation only when CO2 concentrations are unfavorable, artificially lighting the room according to the amount of sufficient sunlight, and heating or cooling the space passively through heat exchanging tubes that run 6 feet underground out into the adjacent football field and back into the building’s concrete floor/thermal mass. “It just makes everyone feel comfortable in here.”
In a sense, this climate (or environment) system is one way in which the building actively participates in the experiences of those who enter into it, and in another sense this is the same sort of mechanical responsiveness we can observe elsewhere. Is this where the “life” of Living Buildings is located? I think not.
A few days before I visited HRMS I had the opportunity to tour another Living Building, The Bertschi School, as part of my research. It was in this school (actually on their website long before physically visiting the place) that I first glimpsed the potential location of the “life” in a Living Building. I saw it first in the way the building engages with those who use it, fleeting at first it seemed, and then through accounts from my interviews I saw the “life” of the Living Buildings emerge more steadily in the relationship maintained between the buildings and those who use them. The type of engagement between building and user I observed in the Bertschi School, and most recently at HRMS, is different from some smart climate control system; it’s a type of engagement that goes directly to the core of the individual’s experience of learning, and of dwelling (being). What the school building itself becomes, in these two cases, is a dynamic place and pedagogical tool used to educate students about their own entanglement in systems ranging from the carbon and water cycles to the construction process, from the market of available building materials to growing food and producing energy and heat on the limited solar budget associated with life at 46 degrees North latitude. What these buildings do, and how they “come alive” is by providing a dynamic environment that requires attention by the students and inspires curiosity. Just like human bodies, the building has systems of ins and outs that need monitoring and attention. And just like the systems we can observe in ourselves the connections between the systems that make up the building are apparent. Students learn about the relationship between sunlight and heat and electricity, and between this system and how it drives the water cycle, and furthermore the connections between these two systems in photosynthesis and evapotranspiration in plant life. A building becomes alive when it is understood as a dynamic nexus of intersecting and intertwining systems, and when other living things (sentient beings) can see/observe not only how these systems interact but how the various ways in which they come together impacts the functioning of the “thing” in question. Students can see when the building’s systems are more taxed because of their behavior. They can see the buildings energy load decline when they choose to wear sweaters and turn down the heat. Sure, you could say “Well, the building itself doesn’t care whether or not it’s working harder. It’s not alive.” But that’s missing the point. The building is alive insofar as it is engaging with the student’s experiences, informing the decisions they make and the behaviors they exhibit. Of course, in a way all buildings do this, but few, I would argue, do so as actively or, dare I saw, with as much agency as “Living Buildings.”
If a building can make you feel more connected to the world (by understanding and being able to situate yourself in a web of large interconnected systems) after your experience with/in it, then therefore isn’t there something that sets this place apart from all other buildings you’ve interacted with previously? Coupled with appropriate pedagogy, can’t we say that these places truly come alive and take on agencies, personalities even, of their own? Just as we individual humans are braids or tapestries of lines of each other, can’t a building be a “living” individual made of the same conditions (a nexus of connections) as we are?
Furthermore, evidence of student input and energy (vitality) is visible in both schools. The students care about these places and feel ownership and responsibility for them. As Michael even mentioned about the building itself, “There’s something special about kids taking care of a living thing.” The place is alive and imbued with an energy in vibrant and tangible ways. And this is where I find the three major components of my thesis (Philosophy, Architecture, and the Anthropocene) come together to inform one another so elegantly. Philosophy, specifically phenomenology (and if you need more specific taxonomy, Architectural Phenomenology), accounts for the experience of engaging with a building. This approach places the importance of analysis on the relationship between subject and “object” and the experience of such interaction. That is, in this case, the theory of architectural phenomenology explains how individuals engage with a building (such as the Living Buildings of the two schools) and provides a framework through which to analyze the relationship between subject and object. By applying architectural phenomenological concepts and by analyzing the way a building interacts with those who use it, we can approach an understanding of how Living Buildings come alive. The next step is to understand how architecture can be informed by the anthropocene, and how the anthropocene can inform architecture. I believe architecture, as a way of designing our immediate environment (environs, that which surrounds) can capture salient concepts for life in the anthropocene and through experience (phenomenology) of these designs, communicate them. I won’t belabor what these ‘salient concepts’ are right now, but suffice it to say they revolve around understanding the individual as a nexus of connections, situated in a large network of converging systems, celebrating complexity, and yada yada yada. Quick congrats if you’ve read this far, btw. Pat yourself on the back. That is how the anthropocene informs architecture, by asking the discipline to define/design/reflect a way of life valid for our period of unprecedented climate change, and human impact on the Earth. Finally, we come full circle, from philosophy through architecture and the anthropocene, back to… Philosophy? That’s right, by thinking about architecture as a way (a method) for conveying the important lesson of connection in the age of the anthropocene, we can update, if you will, vital understandings of what it means to dwell. Ultimately, I hope to have created my own web of sorts, by having drawn lines between architecture, the anthropocene, and philosophy. By weaving together these concepts like architectural phenomenology, living buildings, and anthropocene ethics I hope to show how each is informed by the other, and how collectively they may contribute to the ever-changing task of “charting a path into the anthropocene.”
Lastly, a quick update: I know this post is longer than it should be, and I’m only making it longer by blathering on about that now! But it has provided a fun opportunity to think through my concepts again, especially in light of my recent experiences in these physical (and more?) places. I’m grateful and honored to have been treated so well by the two school’s upon which I’m basing my case study. The efforts of your staff have greatly facilitated my research process and made it a joy. The information I collected in those visits is outstanding and I will work to analyze it in the coming days. I hope to stay in touch with my “tour guides,” as well as reach out to more sources for information to inform my inquiry.
And I think that’s about all for now folks. Thanks for reading, come again.