Reyner Banham, Environmental management :
The surviving archaeological evidence appears to suggest that mankind can exist, unassisted, on practically all those parts of the earth that are at present inhabited, except for the most arid and the most cold. The operative word is “exist”; a naked man armed only with hands, teeth, legs, and native cunning appears to be a viable organism everywhere on land, except in snowfields and deserts. But only just; in order to flourish, rather than merely survive, mankind needs more ease and leisure than a bare-fisted, and barebacked, single-handed struggle to exist could permit.
A large part of that ease and leisure comes from the deployment of technical resources and social organizations, in order to control the immediate environment : to produce dryness in rainstorms, heat in winter, chill in summer, to enjoy acoustic and visual privacy, to have convenient surfaces on which to arrange one’s belongings and sociable activities. For all but the last dozen decades or so, mankind has only disposed of one convincing method for achieving these environmental improvements; to erect massive and apparently permanent structures.
Partial solutions to these problems have always been offered by alternative methods such as wearing a coat in the rain; getting in a tent out of he sun, or gathering around a camp-fire in the cool of evening. But a coat is an unsociable solution, a tent is short on acoustic privacy even though it may be adequate to keep off prying eyes, and a camp fire, while it can provide heat and light enough to make a useful area and ground habitable, is short on all sorts of privacy and offers no protection against rain.
But, over and above considerations of this kind, one must observe a fundamental difference between environmental aids of the structural type (including clothes) and those of which the camp-fire is the archetype. Let the difference be expressed in a form of parable, in which a savage tribe (of the sort that exists only in parables) arrives at an evening camp-site and finds it well supplied with fallen timber. Two basic methods of exploiting the environmental potential of hat timber exist : either it may be used to construct a wind-break or rain-shed - the structural solution - or it may be used to build a fire - the power-operated solution. An ideal tribe of noble rationalists would consider the amount of wood available, make an estimate of the probable weather for he night - wet, windy, or cold - and dispose of its timber resources accordingly. A real tribe, being the inheritors of ancestral cultural predispositions would do nothing of the sort, of course, and would either make fire or build a shelter according to prescribed custom - and that, as will emerge from this study, is what Western, civilized nations still do, in most cases.
Reyner Banham, Environmental management
in “The architecture of the well tempered environment”, 1969
The surviving archaeological evidence appears to suggest that mankind can exist, unassisted, on practically all those parts of the earth that are at present inhabited, except for the most arid and the most cold. The operative word is “exist”; a naked man armed only with hands, teeth, legs, and native cunning appears to be a viable organism everywhere on land, except in snowfields and deserts. But only just; in order to flourish, rather than merely survive, mankind needs more ease and leisure than a bare-fisted, and barebacked, single-handed struggle to exist could permit.
A large part of that ease and leisure comes from the deployment of technical resources and social organizations, in order to control the immediate environment : to produce dryness in rainstorms, heat in winter, chill in summer, to enjoy acoustic and visual privacy, to have convenient surfaces on which to arrange one’s belongings and sociable activities. For all but the last dozen decades or so, mankind has only disposed of one convincing method for achieving these environmental improvements; to erect massive and apparently permanent structures.
Partial solutions to these problems have always been offered by alternative methods such as wearing a coat in the rain; getting in a tent out of he sun, or gathering around a camp-fire in the cool of evening. But a coat is an unsociable solution, a tent is short on acoustic privacy even though it may be adequate to keep off prying eyes, and a camp fire, while it can provide heat and light enough to make a useful area and ground habitable, is short on all sorts of privacy and offers no protection against rain.
But, over and above considerations of this kind, one must observe a fundamental difference between environmental aids of the structural type (including clothes) and those of which the camp-fire is the archetype. Let the difference be expressed in a form of parable, in which a savage tribe (of the sort that exists only in parables) arrives at an evening camp-site and finds it well supplied with fallen timber. Two basic methods of exploiting the environmental potential of hat timber exist : either it may be used to construct a wind-break or rain-shed - the structural solution - or it may be used to build a fire - the power-operated solution. An ideal tribe of noble rationalists would consider the amount of wood available, make an estimate of the probable weather for he night - wet, windy, or cold - and dispose of its timber resources accordingly. A real tribe, being the inheritors of ancestral cultural predispositions would do nothing of the sort, of course, and would either make fire or build a shelter according to prescribed custom - and that, as will emerge from this study, is what Western, civilized nations still do, in most cases.
Reyner Banham, Environmental management
in “The architecture of the well tempered environment”, 1969
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