Ecological Architecture – Divine Order
All architecture, even the most sophisticated, is a product of the Earth in one form or another. We might call this the ‘soil’ of architecture. People travel the world to visit beautiful cities: Siena, Venice, Rome, Krakow, Prague. We fall in love with the Italian hill towns and the beauty and simplicity of African mud buildings, but we fail to explain to ourselves why our ‘advanced’ society cannot create such buildings, towns and cities for itself. If the failure of these buildings and cities is that they lack soul, how can we add soul to the soil of architecture?
The world of form is so all-enveloping and so close to us that we sometimes fail to realise its full power. A piece of cardboard will bend even under its own load; yet change the form by folding it to make corrugations and the same thickness cardboard will carry many times its own weight. A block of cast iron or steel will sink when placed in water, yet the same materials worked into an appropriate form will float and sail across the oceans. When several hundred people crowd on to a transatlantic jet and the load of all those people lift off into the sky, it is the power of form in operation; the power of form ‘performing’ what earlier generations would have called miracles. When a piece of Mozart’s music moves us powerfully to tears it is the same power of form in operation. Although the form of a Mozart symphony is of a different order than the aerodynamics of a Boeing 747 it is nevertheless the power of form being precisely applied in both cases.








