ABSTRACT
One cannot pursue a discussion of a new contract between architecture and nature without examining the extraordinarily complex cluster of meanings associated with the word ‘nature’. Indeed, one cannot discuss nature free of quotation marks without examining the word itself, its difference from the word ‘environment’, and its use in the binary opposition ‘nature/culture’. There is, for example, the nature that is outside us – the biosphere – and that which is inside us – ‘human nature’. We refer to the Grand Canyon and to Hyde Park as nature. We say certain acts are not ‘natural’, and speak authoritatively about what ‘nature intended’. Ecologists describe an empirically measured nature, and poets and explorers used to celebrate conquering ‘her’. It is an amorphous word that assumes an intuitive understanding of the particular way in which a speaker is using it.1 This chapter will confine itself primarily to a discussion of nature in terms of architecture, and concentrate on another model of nature from the one classical physics presents us with: complexity. For the first time in our history, we are able, technically, to begin to imitate nature’s complexity on an operational level. What has been for centuries implicit in the making of our landscapes and the selective breeding of plants and livestock – that the distinction between nature and culture is often impossible to make – is now explicit. This blurring exists both in our continued interventions in nature – plants that grow plastic, cloned sheep – and in our ‘interventions in culture’ – submarines that move like fish, robots that learn like humans. Architecture, which has always held an ambiguous position between nature and culture, is moving towards an even greater ambiguity as it pursues environmental sustainability.
