UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PROF. S. YOUNES

 

 

 

 

On the Nature of Dwelling Our Capacity for Urban Dwelling within Remarkable

Natural Landscapes

COURTNEY HADDICK 12/8/2014

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We currently live in an age of an obsession with separating each element of human life into a

series of zones. This has been evident most in urban planning strategies in the United States since

the early 20th Century1. The extent of this tendency towards zoning, however, has been simultaneous

with a change in the way we regard nature and landscapes. People today consider the natural

environment as something to be grouped into a zone of its own, and separated from those in which

we live, work, shop, etc. There has been a great divorce between a natural getaway and daily urban

life.2

This is clearly evident in the national park system in the United States, in which natural

landscapes deemed remarkable and worth preserving are sectioned off as an area separate from all

other development, and the generally accepted belief today is that preservation of these areas

necessitates a ban on all construction and development. The zones of human living and interaction

with nature have been completely separated, and the view for many decades was that the landscape

was a “cultural heritage that must at all costs be preserved intact.”3 Similar to many historical

preservationists, there was a belief that the landscape should be preserved, exactly as it is, without

any additions, subtractions, or alterations in any way, for future generations.

Others, such as Adolf Loos in his essay Architecture, have allowed for building within these

landscapes, but only the simply fashioned, functional structures of rural lay folk, unpracticed in

architectural design4—something harkening back to Laugier’s famous primitive hut.5 He argues the

imposition of the architect is what truly introduces discord into a serene scene. This concept has

been accepted today by many, who accept “historic” traditional structures scattered throughout a

landscape, but balk at the thought of thoughtful, designed building.

This has not always been the case, however, and there are many historic examples of the

complete opposite attitude throughout Europe. Until recently, it was still believed that one can

preserve the natural beauty of landscapes while still inhabiting them. In fact, in some iconic

landscapes, moments of small, dense urban settlement have actually enhanced that beauty, not

detracted from it. Cinque Terre Park in Italy is an entire National Park designated around a series of                                                             1 Beverly J Pooley. Planning and Zoning in the United States (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Law School, 1961), 42 2 Marta Pozo Gil, “Wild City: MVRDV—Weaving Nature and the Urban” in Architectural Design: The New Pastoralism, Landscape into Architecture (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 50 3 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins, and Other Topics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 11 4 Adolf Loos, Architecture, 1910 5 Marc‐Antoine Laugier, An Essay on the Study and Practice of Architecture (London, 1756) 

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small towns perched on rocky cliffs along the Northwestern coast. (Fig. 01) The coastline would, of

course, still be a beautiful sight had it been left undeveloped. Yet the reason this place is so

remarkable and attracts thousands of tourists annually, is because it has been developed. It is a

natural landscape that includes human habitation. This raises the important question of whether or

not urban development can conceivably be considered within a landscape as part of nature.

If we are to move away from the current method for preserving nature by banning all

construction, we must acknowledge that we can both preserve nature and build at the same time.

The two concepts are not mutually exclusive. In building, we are imitating nature in both her laws

and her products.6 We are anthropomorphic beings. It is natural for us to build shelter in which to

dwell, just as beavers create dams, bears dens, etc. It is also our natural tendency to dwell in

community, as do bees, termites, prairie dogs, etc. While human intelligence has allowed us to

develop construction technology beyond that of other animals and enhance the functionality of our

                                                            6 Samir Younes, “Nine Themes in Modern Architectural Theory” lectures (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, 2014) 

Figure 1 View of Vernazza, Italy, in Cinque Terre National Park

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dwellings, it remains that it is a completely natural occurrence within an ecosystem for human beings

to build dwellings and for those dwellings to be grouped together in a prototypical urban way.

To allow this concept that architecture and urbanism do have a natural place in their greater

geographical settings, one must establish certain necessary principles in their design. These principles

apply on two scales, the architectural and the urban. This essay will explore the urban.

THE URBAN SCALE

Many of these principles can be observed in examples of traditional towns, and have been

adopted by the current New Urbanism movement towards a return to the principles of traditional

town planning. The natural growth of hamlets, towns, and cities allow the preservation of their

geographical context, whereas current suburban development practices do not. One of the most

important elements of traditional planning that has been abandoned for suburban sprawl is the idea

of urban edge.

Nature tends to organize herself in cell-like growth patterns which intrinsically necessitate an

edge. Similarly there must be a finite edge to the manmade “cell” of human development where it

meets the natural world. In this way, we must imitate nature in her products and understand that our

cities must have an edge. They must terminate. There must be a point at which one acknowledges a

break between human habitation and the rest of nature which we inhabit. Not every square of land

must be developed across the country. There must be a point at which the development ends. The

greatest enemy of the preservation of a landscape is suburban sprawl, which completely disregard

and need for an edge in development.

Rather than tending toward this sprawling growth, we must again look to nature in her laws

to understand natural progression of growth. When a hamlet begins to evolve into a village and

eventually a true city, this growth should occur similarly to any other organism—as a series of cells

which together make up a living thing7. Each of these small cells has a center, a nucleus, just as each

neighborhood of the city has a center, accessible on foot by those residing within that center. The

whole city is made up of many of these cellular neighborhoods, as an animal is made up of

numerous individual cells.

                                                            7 Brad Houston, “Back to the Future: A return to Principles of Traditional Town Planning,” (Notre Dame, October 01, 2014) 

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Now what makes up these cells? When returning to the consideration of natural human

tendencies to settle communities, density is one of the most important trends that will arise out of

necessity. A person must be comfortably able to access daily necessities on foot. This concept has

been described by modern urbanists as the fifteen-minute walking radius, and this radius helps give a

concrete size beyond which one cell ends and another begins. Within each of these neighborhoods,

one must be able to easily access daily needs. If follows then, that the edge of the city is an envelope

made up of the joining of the various outer reaches of these fifteen-minute radii. Even in a small

town, once you begin to zone a city into suburban residential zones you create a dependence upon

the car for access to daily needs. The walking radius is no longer relevant, and the radius accessible

by vehicular transportation becomes a vague idea, and the concept of finite edge is lost. The result is

the suburban sprawl surrounding nearly every large city in the United States, and across the globe.

This is acutely visible in the valleys of the Rocky Mountains where a large city once fit coherently

into a beautiful natural landscape, as in Salt Lake City (Figure 02) and Colorado Springs. The

suburban sprawl that has grown up around these cities has spread like a mold, creeping up the bases

of the surrounding mountains with no end in sight.

Figure 2 View of Salt Lake Valley, Utah, looking west

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TECHNOLOGY AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE EDGE

Modern technology has allowed us to disregard what would previously have mandated a

natural edge to a city. Looking again to the Salt Lake Valley, the mountains themselves once served

as a natural break where development ended. In a traditional town, it would be imprudent to not

only build on the top of a mountain and expect residents to make a daily commute down to the

valley floor for daily life, but to build in that location at all. To build on the top of South Mountain,

the location for numerous residential developments in the past fifteen years, developers had to

physically remove the top of the mountain, an endeavor that exhausted an absurd amount of

embodied energy, and to what end? Now high-end residences are appearing exactly along one of the

largest fault lines in the western United States. Simply because we are capable of developing

suburban neighborhoods somewhere does not necessarily mean we should do so.

One of the simplest ways to ensure a finite edge to the city has been, in this case and many

others, completely overlooked. Nature has provided us with topographic guides upon which to build

our cities. Mountains and cliffs are excellent examples of these guides. Edges of cliffs and bases of

mountains mark a distinct point at which natural settlement ends and the surrounding nature begins.

For one, the dramatic change of conditions makes functional urbanism difficult at this edge. Imagine

living at the bottom of a cliff and having one’s daily needs perched upon the top. The distance on a

map from one point to another may be only a few yards, but in reality the amount of ground

between the two makes this completely unrealistic. This is not to introduce an argument that towns

should only exist atop cliffs or below them, or even in the side of a cliff itself! Indeed there are

numerous examples throughout history and the world that prove both to be successful. This in only

to say that one town ought not crossover between both. The problems arise when the developed

area seems to bleed out over the edges and has no clear line of division. This sort of finite edge is

clearly visible when considering the historic Italian hill town of Orvieto8 (Figure 03). The city sits

upon a “volcanic plug,” and is surrounded by shallow cliffs around its entire perimeter. Upon

reaching the edge of these cliffs, the buildings end and the natural context picks up where it has left

off. It would be completely impractical to live at the base of these cliffs and intend to carry out ones

day-to-day life in the city above without necessitating the use of a car to make the commute. Respect

                                                            8 Samir Younes, “Nine Themes in Modern Architectural Theory” lectures (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, 2014) 

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for the functional requirements of urbanism leads to a perfect correlation between the city’s edge

and the natural landmark upon which it was built.

This is not to say that we cannot or should not consider cars in urban planning. Of course

modern vehicular transportation has its many advantages. We should not, however, necessitate that

a person must depend on a car for daily transportation when planning contemporary towns. Town

planning cannot involve multiple zones separated by acute topographic divisions which must be

traversed multiple times daily, necessitating a car. However, we cannot simply close our eyes and

imagine that cars do not exist and that all towns can be designed with only pedestrian paths laced

through them. There are many excellent examples of small hill towns that have incorporated both

pedestrian and vehicular traffic while still respecting their site’s natural topography and boundaries.

An excellent example of this is the city of Montepulciano in Italy, where the major vehicular traffic

is linked by pedestrian pathways to ascend steeper terrain and follow topographic curves that would

be impractical for cars to maneuver. The streets existed long before cars were a part of the town’s

urban infrastructure. When cars were introduced, instead of enacting large-scale demolition projects

Figure 3‐Orvieto, Italy, a city built from the stones quarried from the site upon which it sits

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to remove buildings and level massive areas of land to accommodate modern streets, they chose to

work within the existing framework. Existing roads that were capable of accommodating cars were

adapted slightly to do so, and those that were not remained the domain of the pedestrian and the

occasional daring motorist. The result today is a town whose topography and infrastructure still

respect the natural conditions of the site, conditions which preexisted the human intervention.

When daily needs are within walking distance, street networks have the ability to become more

flexible. 9

URBANISM WITHIN A GREATER LANDSCAPE

Returning to the concept of the city’s relationship with topography, we must not only

consider the topography of the site upon which the city sits. All cities exist within a greater natural

context. Sometimes this may be constant and flat as far as the eye can see, like the Great Plains of

the American Midwest, where the city rises up as a landmark of its own. On the other end of the

spectrum, it may be that this is context is the low mountains of the Scottish Highlands, where a

village is nestled amongst the crags and fields of green. Perhaps it is the steep slopes of Alpine

Switzerland, where the small town of Kliene Scheidegg sits, overlooking the valley below. Each

unique landscape has led to the evolution of a town which is unique solely because of its setting. The

public spaces affording views between crags in that Scottish village would be severely out of place

on the beaches of Costa Rica while the plan of Kliene Scheidegg, responsive to the mountain terrain

atop which it sits, would be random and irrational if the site were instead the Interlaken Valley 1,500

meters below. The topographic responses of urban morphology ought to pertain not only to a

specific site, but to its surrounding landscape as well. When we look at a city or town, we must look

at it as part of a larger landscape. This concept is particularly crucial in the planning of new

communities, where a landscape is, as of yet, still untouched by human development. One must

seriously consider how the development will affect the view of the landscape from afar.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF SCALE

Returning to the claim that urban dwelling and city-building is a very natural tendency of

mankind, we must acknowledge that the scale of our dwelling and communities is far larger than any

other example within nature. This makes siting of communities the most crucial consideration when

                                                            9 Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins, 55 

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we modify our natural environment. Cities become unnatural impositions on nature when site

selection is irrational and irrespective of its context.

For example, in Salt Lake City, Utah, consider the new neighborhood development that has

spread across the top of South Mountain. Widely regarded as a highly detrimental development to its

natural surroundings, the first phase of development included the leveling of the entire ridge of the

mountain. Previously, the mountain had remained largely undeveloped, as it lies along the Wasatch

Fault Line. The iconic topography of the mountain forming the southernmost end of the Salt Lake

Valley had remained constant since the beginning of urban development there 200 years ago. This

new development was imposed on the landscape with only real estate value in mind, exuding

promises of homes with beautiful views over the valley. No attention was paid to the effect the

leveling of the ridge would have to the view from the valley.

We are not ants, building an entire thriving community in a mound which is at most a few

feet wide and visible to outsiders only when we are immediately in front of it. We cannot afford to

be careless about where we chose to develop. Every community will inevitably change the landscape

that it is a part of, and we must take care to ensure that change is for the better. One way to do this

is to take care to alter the existing topography as little as possible. Look again at Cinque Terre, in

Italy. The way the towns cling to the cliffs and slopes, following all the dramatic shifts in

topography, is part of why they are so picturesque. In recent decades, we have abandoned the

concept of touching the earth as lightly as possible, to add to it rather than detract from it.

SENSE OF PLACE

Another example we can take from nature “in her products” is the cohesive character of

natural environments. For an urban development to be conceivably considered part of its natural

setting10 the community must be inherently tied together, with endurable building techniques and

local, sustainable building materials creating a coherent architectural character and helping to

establish a sense of place within that community. If building materials are local, this strengthens the

argument that the community is of the place, and when viewing it in a larger context, it creates the

sense that this cluster of human dwellings truly belongs in that place. The town of Orvietto, in Italy,

is an entire town build of stone quarried from the site upon which it was built. This is just one of

                                                            10 Stephen A. Mouzon, The Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability (Miami: Guild Foundation Press, 2010) 

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countless examples of historic towns throughout the world which seem to have be born directly

from their surroundings.

By using local materials in building the town itself, we can also limit the impact of our

interventions on the environment. On the one hand, we can minimize the embodied energy

consumed in building by avoiding complex chemical processes required to manufacture synthetic

materials, and the energy required to transport those materials across long distances. We can also, by

utilizing local materials, decrease the number of highways and large roads imposed on the landscape.

Some of the most charming small towns in the Rocky Mountains are accessible by winding dirt

roads, impractical for use by large trucks transporting steel of precast concrete slabs. These

unobtrusive roads winding up the canyon can be maintained by opting instead for local materials.

Traditional cities and traditional architecture certainly have their shortcomings, but this does

not mean we should dismiss them as a thing of the past, from which should no longer look to as

precedent. They represent earlier endeavors by mankind to, in the words of Norman Crowe, build

“a second nature…as an alternative to living exclusively within the natural world.”11 We have

continued to strive to perfect this second environment, and have increasingly separated ourselves

from the real one. The traditional city struck “a balance between man, nature, and the built

environment” and that balance has been lost in our race for technological perfection. 12

One must also mention the detrimental nature of foreign and synthetic materials on an

environment in the future, once buildings reach the end of their life span and begin to decay. By

using materials such as locally quarried stone, or native wood in construction, the city not only fits in

with its environment, but also limits the harmful effects it will have on that environment. This is not

to say that we must ignore all advanced in technology, or pretend that they do not exist. It is merely

to point out that if our intent is to share our environments with the rest of nature surrounding us,

we must take care to weigh the benefits of these new technologies against the effects they will have

on the place.

                                                            11 Norman Crowe, Nature and the Idea of the Man‐Made World: An Investigation into the Evolutionary Roots of Form and Order in the Built Environment (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995), 230 12 Norman Crowe, Nature and the Idea of the Manmade, 230 

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HOW TO PROCEED FORWARD

These optimistic ideals about how to coexist with nature in landscapes of outstanding scenic

quality13 have come as a reactionary response to damage which has already been done. We cannot

dwell on what has come to pass, however, but instead must take this as inspiration for future

development. As J. B. Jackson discusses in his essay “The Necessity for Ruins,” it may be that we

needed this period of neglect to truly comprehend the damage to landscape that has occurred over

the past several decades. Human nature inclines us to feel reminiscent of times past, of elements of

culture lost. This reminiscence fires us to work to restore what we feel was lost, and often that which

we restore is a fiction we create out of our nostalgia. What we “recreate” may not have ever existed

as such in the past, but in our desire to return to a previous, better state of living, we can create

something even better than that which existed before.

I believe going forward that we can use this inspiration to return to a respect for our great

landscapes. We can, in some ironic way, thank previous generations for their neglect of our

landscapes, to spur a desire to better respect them in the future. We are living now in what has been

deemed the “urban century,” with the global population not only increasing in number, but also

dramatically increasing in the percentage of populations living in urban areas.14 Society is witnessing

a dramatic migration out of rural areas and into cities. We must be careful to ensure that the growth

of cities, both new and existing, is carried out in a manner which sets up future generations for

success and simultaneously preserves nature for the enjoyment of posterity. Once we have

developed a positive cohabitation of people with our environments, we will finally become aware of

the value of our surroundings and we will be encouraged to strive for its protection and extension.15

                                                            13 Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins,  78  15 Gil, “Wild City”, 52 

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Works Cited

Crowe, Norman. 1995. Nature and the idea of a man-made world : An investigation into the evolutionary roots of form and order in the built environmentCambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.

Gil, Marta Pozo. “Wild City: MVRDV-Weaving Nature and the Urban.” In Architectural Design: The New Pastoralism, Landscape into Architecture, edited by Mark Titaman, 48-55. London: John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

Gorringe, Timothy. 2002. A theology of the built environment justice, empowerment, redemption Cambridge, U.K. ; New York : Cambridge University Press.

Houston, Brad. “Back to the Future: A Return to the Principles of Traditional Town Planning.” Lecture, Students for New Urbanism, Notre Dame, October 01, 2014.

Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. 1980. The necessity for ruins, and other topicsAmherst : University of Massachusetts Press.

Laugier, Marc-Antoine. 1756. An essay on the study and practice of architecture. explaining the true principles of the science; and directing the gentleman and builder to design and finish in every article, with judgment and taste. illustrated with figures, elegantly engraved, explaining the five orders, their several parts, and just proportions. with a frontispiece, designed by mr. wale, and curiously engraved. to which are added, directions for the embellishment of cities, and for the laying out of gardensLondon : printed for Stanley Crowder and Henry Woodgate, at the Golden-Ball in Pater-Noster-Row.

Loos, Adolf. Architecture, 1910

Mouzon, Stephen A., and Kennedy,Robert F.,,Jr. 2010. The original green : Unlocking the mystery of true sustainabilityMiami : Guild Foundation Press.

Pooley, Beverley J. Planning and Zoning in the United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Law School, 1961.

Wright, Frank Lloyd, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, and Frank Lloyd Wright. 1992. Frank lloyd wright collected writingsNew York : Rizzoli ; Scottsdale, AZ : Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

Younes, Samir. “Nine Themes in Modern Architectural Theory” lectures, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, 2014

Images

Figure 01-View of Vernazza, Italy, in Cinque Terre National Park http://beautynamazingworld.blogspot.com/2012/12/cinque-terre-italy-colourful-place.html Figure 02-View of Salt Lake Valley, Utah, looking West http://www.100besteverything.com/best-cities/wallpaper-SaltLakeCity-104128905.html Figure 03-Orvieto, Italy http://www.inlovewithtuscany.com/magnificent-orvieto.html