Man-Nature-Dessign

Abstract

Relations between man and nature began with man as an integral part of the animal kingdom one to three million years ago. Gradually developing stone and fire technology, he emerged as a decision-making creature, able to change the landscapes in which he lived. By 10, 000 years ago Neolithic villages were comparable to Third World villages today.
Man was not alone. The other half fo the human race was-and is-woman. Together they became people.
The invention of money and the development of trade were the beginnings of the world economic system in which we live today. As a human invention, subject to its own demands which generate constant change, economics has always tended to conflict with the organic stability of natural systems. This is now major and world-wide.
Design, as the process which determines the forms which will result from change induced by man, is and always has been a universal human process. However the goals and results of most design, disciplined by economic demands, are a far cry from the potentialities, and occasional products, of conscious quality-oriented design, often called professional.
Over several thousand years of conscious quality-oriented architectural-landscape design various contrasting approaches have developed: classical/Renaissance and Romantic/Oriental, formal and informal, mechanical and organic, influenced by the varying world visions of the hard and soft sciences and the clientele.
The man-nature relation is expressed most clearly in confrontations and interactions between architecture and landscape. The design impulse which seeks strong new forms in the environment, originating in shelter and agriculture, progressed through architecture into landscape forms and indoor-outdoor relations.
Buildings and their surroundings often became one problem rather than two or more. Continuity in space and time imposed demands for the repetition of historic forms. These in turn produced fixed systems which became irrelevant to current problems, and generated design revolts. The movements from Old World to New strengthened the search for better environments. Now we begin to settle down in the One World which Wendell Wilkie foresaw.
If people are developing more cooperative and harmonious ways to live with nature, what are the implications for environmental design?