Hello, I have been browsing this forum a lot, as I was unsatisfied with the content of my last internet community and have been considering creating my own, when I found that this is almost exactly what I would have made.

Well, I took a pretty large dose of a psychedelic substance and hiked off into a fairly untouched expanse of woods, and for the first time I was completely blown away by the way nature operates and our incredible discord of rectilinear living and thinking with nature's nonlinear interactions.

I felt very strongly that the blight of human action on the environment was the paradigm of cartesian and aristotelian thought itself, and the blight on the human spirit was the disconnect from how the natural, or gaian mind works.

I don't think we can live in harmony with the environment with our trend of ever expanding rectangles and boxes in the wiggly world of nature.

I am in the green building business but really I don't see a lot of promise in the current popular designs. The most transformative design in my opinion is the geodesic dome not just for its efficiency but in the mathematics and psychological effect of living in the design.

Anyway I would love to hear how you think we might shape our living areas and communities to bring about a more intuitive understanding of how nature works and how it will render us more in tune with the earth's intelligence. Can anyone suggest reading material on such a subject?

The rectilinear versus organic is a recurring theme in architecture, with the rectilinear usually winning out for economic reasons.

http://www.evesgarden.org/

Interestingly, Frank Lloyd Wright effectively mixes rectilinear with organic:

http://newamericanvillage.blogspot.com/200...ts-organic.html

Thanks for the introduction to FLW.

Are you aware of any research or theories on the environmental psychology of organic or curved architecture?

One interesting anecdote is this:

One architect tried an experiment with an office building with curved (circular) hallways. It turned out that such a building confounds social interraction. With straight hallways, you can see people coming from a distance and you can get ready to talk to them as you pass, so it aids social interraction, but in curved hallways, people surprise you because you come on them suddenly.

That's sort of interesting, but I suppose the more you see people the more you tend to interact.

I'm thinking more along the lines of what happens when we lessen the frequency in which our built environment conditions us to think as if the world IS made up of rectangles. Rectangles are almost never found in nature, but triangles and platonic solids are everywhere. It seems that if we moved to a triangular paradigm, cooperation with other species and elements would become dramatically easier. However, we are stuck in the rectilinear - we are constantly reminded, in practically every human invention, of the illusion that this is a rectilinear world.

I am wondering if this viewpoint corresponds to polar thinking that produces views of good and evil, natural and synthetic, self and other, either this or that.

So, one psychological curiosity is whether a paradigm shift will affect fundamental beliefs. Another curiosity is whether it will affect ingenuity in our technology to help meet basic physical needs.

On the other hand, the artificial (straight lines, right angles) can be seen as supplemental to the natural. The Japanese bring (a small piece of) nature into their yards with bonsai or (if space allows) a naturalistic garden. Nothing stops us from creating our environment to our liking.

Polar thinking may be more a function of the natural structure of the brain/mind than an artifice. E.g., the pleasure-pain axis, and the hot-cold, hard-soft, good-bad, large-small, etc. dichotomies.

Also consider this experiment in natural computing: Take a thread and tie it to a stone. Hold the end of the thread still so the stone hangs down. The string forms a perfectly straight line pointing to the center of the earth. It's at right angles to the horizon. All human artifacts are possible because they are allowed by natural law.

straight lines can be seen as a supplement to the natural, but as far as I know right angles are only a side effect of nature's usage of triangles. the stone on a string is not perpendicular to a physical object but a metaphysical tangent to the curvature of the spherical earth. and, a sphere can be approximated by way less triangles that squares.

it's true that human artifacts only exist as permitted by natural law, but the clash of forces is very apparent. For one thing rectangle based structures are much weaker than triangle based. Buildings collapse under tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes, but not geodesic structures (geodesics are much more material efficient too).

Electron configurations and molecules form in triangle-based platonic structures as well.


I guess perceived polariites are probably a function of correct perception of nature. It is the beleif that each polarity is an absolute that might be influenced by living environment - one flat surface on the bottom, one flat surface on top - everywhere. So this must be how things are.


Joseph Campbell once made a very sharp distinction in how aboriginal desert cultures differed from aboriginal forest cultures in their worldviews due to the psychological effect of expansive openness versus immediate enclosure.

Salt crystals are a cubic lattice. A wireframe box is unstable, but a box formed of rectangular areas (plywood, for example) is rigid.

Are you speaking of permaculture?

Permaculture deals with agriculture, not architecture. I would like to take a workshop on permaculture sometime.

Is it possible that a gambling oil futures might be a temptation for banks that are already underwater from a trillion dollars worth of mortgage-related deals that have gone south leaving the banking system essentially bankrupt ?. According to me there are three things that are driving up the price of oil
1 The falling dollar
2 Speculation
3 Buying on margin.