Is a Building Alive ...
... as active participant, rather than as a passive container for life?.
Back in 2016 at the first COST Restore training school in Lancashire, we held an open discussion on whether buildings could indeed be living, whether they are sentient or are just completely inert.
Notes made then and added to over the years in notebooks, writing and posts, have revisited this theme many times, as I did this weekend with a Guardian extract from Robert Macfarlane on his just published book Are Rivers Alive. In the first paragraph, he hits home with a comment that while we may not be able to comprehend what a living river would be, we almost certainly know what a dead river is.
And so it is with buildings - we may not fully feel what a living building is, should or could be - but we know and feel a dead building when we are in one. It is that difference between the buildings that Zap us with life, energy and feel-goodness compared to those buildings that just Sap our energy, drain our health and dumb any sense of feeling.
We are in the process of rethinking sustainability leadership, rethinking education, rethinking built environment design, rethinking construction process for an ecological age. And importantly we are rethinking buildings and structures as healthy, living entities: as living buildings. FutuREstorative, RIBA, Martin Brown 2016
Following is my narrative, making sense of thoughts and notes from over the years on living (as in sentient) buildings, how we feel living buildings and how we feel dead buildings, on how Living Building Challenge and Vastu Architecture are close to seeing buildings as sentient entities, fundamentally alive and conscious, on writers through the ages that have articulated such feelings that aid our understanding, from Aristotle and ‘amina’ via Stuart Brand, William Wordsworth, Satish Kumar, Christopher Alexander, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin, David Whyte and others.