Building – ArchaNatura

The Natural City

January 1, 2024

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Today, we have the opportunity to create far happier and healthier human life.

This goal or desire of course is not new. What is new is our growing modern accumulation of health-related science – physiological, psychological, sociological, and ecological – describing in more certain terms what this effort entails, how it best might be achieved, and where it can begin most easily.

As I will explore with you in concept and practice, and again confirming intuitions we have had for centuries, contemporary science underscores that happier and healthier life for all people is an outcome, endeavor, and indeed created condition that is at once realistic and waiting, with all or most of its needed features adequately understood and within our grasp (for a more careful summary and synthesis of this science, see Our Three Natural Paths and its free companion Three Paths Community Health Program).

The Natural City Graphics-1

Importantly, in our discussion, and as is my custom, I will take happiness as sustained positive feeling or emotion, and health as the more fundamental or ultimately selected natural quality that is sustainability or durability itself – and whether as respects an organism, group, species, or system. As a practical and empirical matter, happiness appears to follow health closely in nature, and also to be a general signal and motivator of health, especially in stable conditions of life.

Overall, the science of creating happier and healthier modern life suggests a three-part approach, or underlying model of action, and one employed simultaneously at the communal or local and societal or global levels. First, and fundamentally, is for us consciously to seek and prioritize these outcomes, and notably above all, which demonstrably is not evenly or even commonly the case today. Second, and unsurprisingly, is for us widely to use available empirical science to guide us in this naturally broad, complex, and overriding effort. Third, and given inevitable imperfection in our understandings and actions, is for us continually to adjust, improve, or evolve our sense and seeking of happiness and health, in order to achieve these core and related natural aims of life more readily, and more durably.

This three-part and only seemingly simple process for progressing modern happiness and health may strike you as obvious, even as it remains largely unused and overlooked in our time – with the natural, and naturally foundational, advancement of our health and ensuing happiness routinely subordinated to other goals, preoccupations, and formulations. As I have written about elsewhere, these alternative aims and efforts can be framed helpfully as surrounding or broadly emerging from the historically new, naturally isolated or indifferent, and discernably less happy and healthy phenomenon that is human competition for wealth. This now frequently dominating state of life in turn is well-approached as occurring in place of and keeping us from more widespread, more naturally advanced and advancing, and predictably more harmonious and enduring cooperation for health. Crucially, and as you can confirm for yourself, our exploration of conscious, scientific, and evolving human cooperation for health reliably leads us to the conclusion that we now collectively must live much more carefully or attentively with our science, with one another, with our natural happiness and health, and with health-bestowing nature.

These critical and observable premodern and modern social dynamics underscore that, although far happier and healthier life may be waiting for us in a scientific age, action in this direction must confront and overcome substantial barriers to realizing our new potential to design and build our communities, societies, and thus lives for transformed, and naturally transforming, happiness and health. As suggested, and as you will see in the science-derived construct or model for happier and healthier human life I will introduce, movement toward appreciably healthier or naturally superior conditions today appears to involve a basic shift and thus change in the general direction or emphasis of modern life and society. In practice, this means stopping a great deal of what we now do, and often making more than incremental or modest adjustments to the ways in which we currently think, organize, plan, design, build, and live.

Making these essential and life-altering ideas more pointed and palpable, and now specifically addressing those of us who plan, create, and finance our modern built environment as their profession, I concurrently and more emphatically would say this: there is something deeply flawed, irrational, self-limiting, far from optimal, recurrently unhappy and unhealthy, and thus unnatural in the ways that we design and build our communities, cities, and societies at present. Around the world, our existing planning, design, and development practices routinely and measurably squander natural resources and human effort, precariously pollute and impair our planet’s ecosystems, and simultaneously diminish our environment and ourselves. Relatedly, and again measurably, our development methods also frequently and now needlessly create insecure and unstable communities and societies, perpetuate strained and unsustainable human relations and conditions more generally, leave us individually less fit and well than we readily might be, and in all produce much less human happiness and health than is possible in our time – and naturally will be necessary in time.

Against these important and intersecting shortfalls in our modern design and development practices, our opportunity to plan and build life in superior and more advancing ways – and thereby naturally or quintessentially to create superior and more advancing conditions of health for all people, and even all of life around us – once more appears to begin from and depend on our new science-enabled ability to understand and construct life in more careful, deliberate, foreseeing, and beneficial ways. For all of us, but again especially those of us in and funding the design and development professions, this inevitably means better comprehending why and improving how we build the structures and thus structure of life, and in turn steadily and ultimately acting in ever more patient, informed, reflective, prospective, and health-minded terms.

To consider these naturally essential and now pressing themes more deeply, concretely, and actionably, I will introduce and explore a science-synthesizing, healthfully-remaking, and far-reaching model for modern design and development, one that I call the natural city. As you will see, this alternative and remarkably simple approach to community and ultimately societal design makes clear, conceptually and practically, that my introductory ideas are substantially true and ready for urgent attention. As part of this discussion, the natural city model will demonstrate how an array of limiting and largely inherited shortfalls in modern quality of life can be simultaneously, systematically, and fairly easily remedied, beginning in our time, and again largely through superior or more health-minded design and development practices.

In keeping with my overview graphic above, and as you will see in our exploration of the city, the natural city is a tangible, practicable, and ready alternative to our dominant modes of community and societal design and development today. In all, the natural city aims at, and appears likely to produce, immediately much happier and healthier modern people, communities, and societies. At the same time, the natural city also aims at, and similarly appears likely to produce, human life that is recurringly or enduringly efficient and effective at achieving these core natural aims, leading to far more stable and sustainable conditions in time than is probable at present. Importantly, this increased stability and sustainability is for our societies and species, and interrelatedly, for all or much of natural life on our planet as well.

As its seemingly, and thus instructively, contradictory name implies, the natural city first is very much a city – though importantly, one envisioned as becoming societal and eventually global in scale – affording the social, economic, efficiency, and intellectual advantages of urbane, interconnected, dense, and cosmopolitan human life. At the same time, and in keeping with its name, the natural city also is an urban entity innovatively placed directly in and subordinated to the natural landscape. Owing to this second essential attribute, the natural city thereby is a construct seeking the reliable physical, emotional, perceptual, informational, and ecological benefits of human life in close proximity to and intimacy with the natural world, and not only to and with itself, as of course was our long, long-evolved, long-enduring, and health-advancing ancestral condition.

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Exploring Curtain-Style Walls

December 15, 2020

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By Mark Lundegren

A major architectural and building technology advance in the last 100 years has been development of what is now known as the curtain wall. As the name implies, curtain wall design and construction involves treating building exteriors as an integrated and often patterned or fabric-like surface, instead of an assembly of independent elements.

With the advent of high-rise and large-span steel and steel-reinforced modern buildings – often fabricated with interior columns and cantilevered floor and ceiling edges for efficiency – there has been a basic shift in construction needs and techniques, and in the design of building exteriors in particular. These buildings no longer require massive load-bearing perimeter walls, but often do benefit from greater glass or glazed exterior surfaces to increase natural light penetrating their deep interiors. From these changing demands and opportunities, the innovation of the modern curtain wall emerged.

In curtain wall construction, fairly lightweight, generally non-load-bearing, and often significantly glazed walls are attached to the outer perimeter of floor and ceiling slabs or joists. This can speed prefabricated construction of exterior walls and reduce large building costs overall, while permitting both more active or intelligent wall systems and greater design creativity when planning a building’s appearance. As outlined, once building walls become lightweight or curtain-like, and figuratively are draped from roof to foundation, new design opportunities emerge, and notably ones mirroring the flexibility of designing fabrics or textiles. If a designer can imagine a wall pattern of material and/or glass, a curtain wall likely can be constructed to match, again much as with woven draperies and given the new freedom from exterior load-bearing demands in modern interior-supported buildings.

While curtain wall techniques initially were intended for skyscrapers and large institutional buildings, curtain walls and their load-bearing siblings, window walls, quickly found an expanded place in residential and smaller-scale buildings. Beginning with the modernist architectural movement in the 1920s, the use of large, significantly glazed, and often textile-like patterned walls increased in small building design, reflecting the curtain wall style and often substantially opening living spaces to the outdoors or courtyard areas. In some parts of the world, curtain-style walls are now common in residential and light commercial construction, though this is less the case where more traditional architectural and popular tastes prevail.

My photo montages provide visual illustrations of these ideas, here focusing primarily on residential and smaller-scale construction, rather than the now near-universal use of curtain walls in larger buildings. The upper-left image in the first set of photos of course is an archetypal example of traditional construction, with heavy load-bearing walls supporting the building’s floors and roof, and doors and windows essentially cut or punctured into the exterior wall surfaces. To the right of this photo is a fairly dramatic but equally typical example of a residential curtain or window wall, in this case one that is nearly all glass, and where the building is or at least appears to be unsupported at its edges.

As you can see from this contrast, these are very different construction approaches and building designs, and both aesthetically and in the environmental and spatial relationships they foster. Importantly, the two opposing photos on the lower portion of the first montage highlights that while curtain walls often are mostly glass in larger buildings, this need not be the case, and often should not be, especially when constructing the exterior walls of smaller buildings in a curtain style – again owing to optimal building cost, lighting, and energy-use considerations.

The next collection of photos, immediately above, further contrasts traditional and curtain-style wall construction, and reinforces the idea that they are quite different in both approach and result. As you can see comparing the top two photos in this set, traditional heavy wall and independent openings on the left give way to a lighter, more subtle, and fairly seamless curtained or textiled effect. In the right photo, the building walls, windows, and doors are largely integrated into a larger and patterned whole.

Across the bottom of this second set of images, I have used two contrasting photos highlighting that these ideas apply beyond rectilinear construction. Here, the traditional door and window placement of the left steel arch building – a construction system which often requires no load-bearing along its end walls – is very different from the more open, inviting, and elegant curtained approach on the right. That said, the second design plainly is far more expensive and energy intensive than the first, especially for a small-building application. As such, an altered curtain-style approach, with less glazing overall and more insulated elements, likely will be superior in many designs.

The remaining photos explore the many possibilities for using curtain-style walls in residential and small building construction. In these photos, we can see the potential for curtain and window wall designs to be elaborate, simple, and at many points between. This sampling of curtain-style or textile walls also highlights how the approach reliably adds openness to building spaces, provides a more flowing or integrated aesthetic overall, and increases feelings of both spaciousness and situatedness.

While reviewing these photos, it is worth noting that the use of curtain-style, patterned, or integrated window-walls tends to modernize structures, and the approach can be at odds with or require extra attentiveness when working alongside traditional building designs. As highlighted above, it also is important to again emphasize that the approach often requires care and the judicious use of glass surfaces to keep building costs and energy-use in check, especially in smaller buildings (though low-cost solar electric power may reduce these constraints in the future).

However, since curtain-style walls generally increase feelings of enjoyment and building spaciousness, they often can allow construction of smaller buildings with equal occupant utility or satisfaction, thereby naturally mitigating their added costs. And while on the topic of minimizing building scale and expense, I would add that curtain-style walls can be employed in concert with and add new openness to residential and commercial courtyard buildings, and thus may aid wider use of this at once old and new approach to higher-density but privacy-preserving community design.

Let me end our discussion of curtain-style walls by returning to the important idea that residences and smaller buildings often will need less glazed or glass-intensive walls than modern high-rise and other large-scale buildings, once more since less exterior lighting is needed and to control building costs and energy use. Interestingly, when searching for photos of small buildings with only partly glazed curtain or window walls, I found few examples, and many of these were from traditional pattern-emphasizing or textilized Japanese architecture.

This limited set of contemporary examples of the approach suggests waiting opportunity for new exploration of partly-glazed curtain walls in smaller buildings, and also where we might look for initial inspiration and guidance in this area.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of ArchaNatura.

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Photo credits: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Better Than Nothing Design

January 1, 2020

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By Mark Lundegren

I would like to propose a bold new minimum standard for architecture and building – that of better than nothing.

This may seem as though I am lowering rather than raising the design bar. But if it does, it is worth spending a moment considering what we typically mean with the word nothing.

For me, in this context it means a building site that is in a natural or undeveloped condition, or one that is naturally returning itself to a wild state. As such, nothing is actually something, usually far from something negative, and indeed often something quite complex and inspiring, as my photo below reminds.

Undeveloped Nature – Nothing By Human Hands, And Yet A Dramatic Something

In this light, what we design and build too often can be seen as worse than nothing, since it degrades or subsumes wild nature, or is better than before only because a natural area previously had been beat into true or abject nothingness by others.

So, instead of lowering human design and development standards, my intent is to significantly raise, renaturalize, and inform them. By seeking to create in ways that are better than nothing, we have the opportunity for buildings and communities superior to their original natural condition, and not merely ones resurrected from oblivion and mediocrity. Importantly, this work naturally includes not only ensuring elevated aesthetics relative to natural conditions, but also natural autonomy, sustainability, self-renewal, functionality, and health-promotion too.

You may object, thinking I have cherry-picked the above photo or am romanticizing about wild nature. If so, my second photo provides examples of four vacant suburban lots, all currently for sale and awaiting development.

Four Vacant Sites Currently For Sale, All Undeveloped Nothings and Yet Beautiful Somethings

Scanning the four sites, perhaps you will agree that all are naturally beautiful and uplifting somethings, even as they are undeveloped, and thus nothing to some or in a sense. As waiting case studies in better than nothing or nature-informed architecture and construction, I could and would challenge you to conceive of development approaches that genuinely do better than these examples of natural nothing.

Of course, as wild or re-wilding natural ecosystems, all four sites again are not only beautiful, they are also resilient, interacting, evolving, healing, energy-harvesting, resource-managing, and waste-recycling, as is all or most of living nature. Each site equally is complex and synergistic, a store of value or outcome beyond the combination of its parts, in service of a diverse community of organisms, and a worthy lesson and foundation upon which to understand, and indeed demand, natural design excellence .

Once Marginalized Site Restored, Transformed, And Now Protected By Human Ingenuity And Love

I will leave you with one more photo, as you consider our opportunity for raising design standards to mimic and then enhance nature, and her landscapes and lifescapes. This is a before and after photo of a small stream in rural Pennsylvania, in a wild area previously farmed, mined, and logged nearly into unrecognition.

Since then, the site not only has been restored, but transformed into something new, remarkable, and uplifting by human intelligence, creativity, excellence, and love of nature.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of ArchaNatura.

Tell others about ArchaNatura…encourage modern natural design!

Ultra-Low Water Use Buildings

October 1, 2019

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By Mark Lundegren

There are many reasons we might be interested in ultra-low water use.

To begin a list, we might live in an area which has low rainfall and limited water abundance. We may want to reduce expenses from high water use, wherever we live. We might seek to stop unsustainable draws on local groundwater, and thus perhaps ensure adequate spring and surface water for natural wildlife and the carbon-sequestering ecosystems around us. Or either practically or philosophically, we may wish to build off-grid in as many ways as possible, be free of centralized utilities and their bills, and live with a higher degree of natural autonomy, freedom, and resilience than is typical today.

Whatever our motivations for examining and pursuing this goal, let me say upfront that genuinely radical reductions in water use are normally possible in much of the industrially developed world, without significant reductions in our material quality of life. As we will discuss, thanks to modern technology, and in most areas – and almost always in ones with above 30 cm (12 inches) of annual rainfall – it is possible to live a fully modern life with on-site captured rain and other precipitation as our sole source of water.

Wikipedia: Residential Water Use in the U.S. and Canada (link/credit)

Importantly, while our discussion will focus on residential or domestic water use, all of its its lessons are directly applicable to commercial and institutional buildings. On the other hand, water use in industrial manufacturing is clearly a separate and more ranging topic, with different issues and differing opportunities across various industrial sectors.

However, while we will only briefly touch on this area here, the case of both industrial and domestic food production is worth highlighting as part of our core discussion. Simply put, with careful water consumption, the use of modern permaculture techniques, and movement to more natural and naturally water-conserving perennial food systems (a topic I have summarized here), the above rule of deriving all needed water from on-site precipitation also broadly applies to agriculture as well.

Lastly for this introduction, our discussion notably will assume the presence of abundant low-cost electricity, a proposal that seems reasonable, across the developed world at least, in our era of increasingly low-cost solar collectors and batteries (a trend I have explored here).

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Building Design For Printability

August 1, 2019

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By Mark Lundegren

Architects, builders, planners, and developers are doubtless aware that 3D printed buildings and larger communities are on the horizon, with early prototypes now in the popular and professional press. In this approach, large three-axis printers, or alternatives such as ones pivoting from a central point, are used to place materials in a specific order via design and printing software.

While this potential is well-recognized, at least three important aspects of this likely change in construction methods may be overlooked. First is that it will both require and strongly incentivize new Design for Printibality (DFP) standards and practices. On one hand, this will be necessary to enable reliable use of the technology, and also encouraged by the fact that machine-printed buildings with high DFP quotients – from backyard sheds to urban skyscrapers – may become substantially less expensive to construct and maintain than traditionally-built ones.

To Sense Potential Changes, Consider Which Form Is Easier to 3D Print

Second, as my intentionally provocative photo suggests, perhaps few of us have considered how radically DFP may alter building design and engineering, and the typical building shapes and fine-scale design features that we typically employ and take as given today. But to quickly understand this prospect, consider that much of human architecture, historically and in our time, has a low DFP quotient and is likely to be strongly disfavored or disincentivized by 3D technology.

Third, perhaps just as few of us are aware that DFP standards exist already, owing to the rise of desktop and industrial 3D printing, that these standards appear broadly applicable to building design at all scales, and also that they likely offer a significant window onto future building design and construction.

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The Most Efficient Building Form

June 1, 2019

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By Mark Lundegren

Do you wonder if common building forms or approaches are the most efficient possible?

Since much of architecture and design today, as in the past, is concerned with aesthetics, norms, status, expression, and therefore communication, you may suspect the answer is no, and even strongly no.

But before you answer, let me point out that when we think of form or design efficiency, we can mean more than the direct costs or immediate resources and energy involved in constructing and using buildings, along with the larger settings they create in combination, as important as this is to determining efficiency.

In a complementary and informing way, we also can consider the indirect costs of buildings and developed areas. This crucial but less obvious category of costs or efficiency factors is often substantially overlooked, taken as separate from or beyond the scope of building and development, or expediently treated as “free” to some degree – thereby becoming externalities, or public or unborn costs, in the terminology of economists.

Importantly, indirect building and development costs can be as significant as direct ones. They include the often unexamined costs of pollution, dislocation, future inflexibility, sprawl, resource degradation, eventual obsolescence, and the potential for blight. As a practical matter, such indirect and commonly overlooked costs are essential to understanding the true cost, and thus the true efficiency, of any design, building, or developed area.

Fortunately, we can simplify this complex topic for a general discussion by recognizing that two basic design principles or features often substantially predict both types of costs, and thus the general efficiency of building and development. The first of these principles is that development, buildings, and spaces that are more compact or reduced in scope will tend to be less resource-intensive, less costly overall, and therefore more efficient, as long as they meet essential needs or are effective solutions overall.

The second principle is that buildings, infrastructure, and material inputs using renewable resources – and failing this, readily recyclable or reusable ones – will tend to be less costly and more efficient overall as well, by often producing fewer externalities or indirect costs for others to contend with in time. There are of course exceptions to these two rules. But overall, it is a much more difficult general case to advocate for expansive and non-renewable building and development on efficiency grounds, even as this is still our most common approach to building today.

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Low-Cost Courtyard Homes

June 10, 2018

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By Mark Lundegren

In our era of increasing excess, but also increasingly inaccessible excess, there is now an important counter-trend – one favoring mobile homes, smaller homes, and even tiny homes. This trend often seeks to promote less expensive living, less encumbered living, more intentional living, ecologically greener living, or all of these complementary goals at once.

While this overall movement has produced many interesting designs and innovations, one home feature that is frequently lost or missing in the pursuit of smaller or more minimalistic homes is privacy, and especially private outdoor space. Fortunately, this omission is readily avoided and there are a number of ways of preserving or creating private space as today’s architects, builders, property owners, and developers downsize the footprint of housing.

Model Of Small Classical Courtyard – An Option For Modern Minimal Living

Simple steps to increase home privacy generally involve the use of natural or artificial screening around a building site, which can result in designs that are creative, functional, satisfying, space enhancing, and quite beautiful, as I wrote about in Rethinking Walls & Fences. However, sometimes we will want a solution that creates greater privacy, and especially greater acoustical and visual isolation, than screening and similar approaches may afford. Here, we can look to pre-modern urban and suburban building to see an earlier widespread method for creating significant household privacy, especially on a small scale or in fairly dense living conditions. As my title highlights, this method involves the use of courtyards.

The idea of bringing courtyards to modern minimal living and small or tiny home designs may seem an extravagance. But the truth is that, except in mid or high-rise urban cores, courtyards can be created simply and inexpensively, for little more cost than the land the courtyard occupies. Indeed, sometimes courtyards even can be created almost for free, as in the case of mobile living on public lands or when reconfiguring inefficiently designed spaces. And as the focus for this discussion, homes themselves also can be designed from the start to be naturally self-screening or area-enclosing, creating private courtyard spaces automatically, as they are built and quite simply.

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Green Building: More Than LEED

June 19, 2017

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By Mark Lundegren

In many countries today, there is a rapid movement toward green building.

Often, however, this goal is cast somewhat narrowly – as creating buildings that require little or no external energy for their daily use, or fabricating structures with a fairly high degree of autonomy.

While this goal is laudable and has led to a number of important innovations, there are at least two broader, more rigorous, and ultimately more socially beneficial ways to conceive of green building design.

A second, broader conception of green building also considers the amount and nature of resources that go into the initial construction of buildings. In this expanded definition, architects, builders, developers, and regulators seek to: 1) minimize resource use during building construction, 2) reduce reliance on non-sustainable or non-recyclable resources, and 3) build in ways that are either minimally impact or positively enhance land, water, and air quality around buildings and their communities. As you may know, this sense of green building design is increasingly more common – and can be explored at green building.

A third and still more expansive definition of green building further extends the concept to include consideration of the long-term ecological and social impacts of building and development overall. In particular, this view enlarges our analysis to assess the relative effectiveness of building and development patterns both at meeting human needs and promoting human health, including the essential foundation of all natural health that is ecological sustainability.

What Is The Correct Scope For Green Building & Development?

Importantly, and often somewhat unintuitively or inexpeditiously, the natural – or renaturalized – goals of meeting human needs and promoting human health generally lead to a basic rethinking of traditional building design and construction practices, along with community and societal development norms more broadly. This is a complex topic, but let me point out that the aim of serving human needs and promoting overall community and societal health invariably must consider how building and development impact people generally, and how these efforts can serve the greatest number of people.

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Wasting Space – And Time

January 16, 2017

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By Mark Lundegren

Working with a prospective client recently, a recurring idea in building design came up – the notion of wasting space.

It’s a term designers and clients frequently use, but also one we don’t always consider carefully. Today, I want to provide a framework for thinking about wasted space in design efforts of all kinds, and to highlight two important and common ways of wasting space in building design. In their essence, these two ways are creating space that is either too full or too empty. And by avoiding each extreme, we can reliably avoid wasting both space and time.

In the client discussion I mentioned, we were considering two design ideas for a project. The designs each had the same enclosed floor area and basic plan, but differed somewhat in the amount of garden space and walkways around the living areas. Overall, the first design was slightly more compact in its total dimensions and the second had a somewhat larger total footprint, owing to the expanded garden and walkway areas. But all other things were equal, and the two designs had identical interior proportions. So, is it correct to say that the larger plan had more wasted space?

Enormous, Luxuriant Space – How Much Of It Is Wasted?

The first design clearly used less space and in this sense was more efficient or compact. Similarly, the second design can be seen as using space less efficiently, or as containing more unused or unfilled space. But the second design was also more compelling and livable, and felt much larger and more open than its modestly greater dimensions might have suggested. One might argue, then, that the second design was a better use of space – especially if both designs were affordable or within budget, which they were in this case.

These considerations point to two fundamental, sometimes competing, but not mutually exclusive goals in spatial design – the task of achieving adequate efficiency or compactness and then sufficient elegance or extension. Both goals are integral to excellence in natural design, and arise again and again in a variety of creative and artistic domains (for example, even in the non-visual arts of music and writing). In total, ensuring both efficiency and elegance is a challenge we all must often repeatedly address and resolve, if we are to design and create successfully.

As my sunset photo above suggests, in an important sense space is never wholly wasted if it is elegant. And the 150 million kilometers of extension that lie between us and the sun are hardly wasted space, even in strict utilitarian terms, since the earth would warm and life would be curtailed if this distance were much less. More artistically, our solar system and larger universe likely would be far less elegant – or less mysterious and intriguing – if either were tightly compact and plainer to the eye.

Still, efficiency considerations are a natural concern in design, art, and fabrication, since all uses of space and other resources have costs and alternatives, and never only provide benefits. At the same time, there is a certain marvel with or satisfaction in the efficient or dense use of space, though this is rarely enough to be a substitute for true elegance in design (again, with useful analogies in music, writing, and other artistic domains).

But just as the single-minded pursuit of elegance can overlook or miss efficiency considerations, a preoccupation with design efficiency can unduly, and often needlessly, impinge on essential design elegance. In practice, both inadequate efficiency and insufficient elegance are reliable ways to reduce natural excellence in design and to waste space. And both shortcomings are likely to occur whenever designers, builders, or clients act inattentively, or without an essential understanding of these twin natural needs when creating.

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Rethinking Walls & Fences

November 1, 2016

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By Mark Lundegren

Judging by building and architecture around the world, there seems to be a strong tendency in us to clearly delineate the places where we live, and to physically set them apart from those of others.

This delineation of our living spaces may be for security, to afford privacy and quiet, for exclusivity and status, or simply to follow local custom – custom often rooted in our agricultural past, but perhaps with older and more natural origins.

Though most take the practice for granted, it is distinctive and noteworthy. Imagine, for contrast, a system of architecture with minimal personal or family space and copious shared or community areas. Such systems exist, ultimately may be more beneficial for us, and have been proposed by modern architects (such as Le Corbusier). But they are not the norm, especially amid modern affluence and individualism.

Our enclosure or privatization of space of course begins with our residences themselves, and is often limited to our indoor residential space when we live at high densities. But in the lower densities of our suburbs and exurbs, this process nearly always extends outdoors to some degree, and quite frequently all the way to the edges of the property we own or use.

In practice, land enclosure at our personal or family property boundaries commonly takes the form of perimeter walls, fences, and other barriers, which visibly demarcate, and practicably domesticate, all of the land we own or occupy. This traditional mode of dividing and demarcating private space maximizes the area we have available for our exclusive use, may offer legal advantages, and often provides other practical benefits.

But this segregation of our living spaces in what we might call a maximalist manner has a number of disadvantages too. It can be expensive, especially on larger properties. It can be bad for local ecosystems, reducing wilderness and limiting the ability of wild animals to naturally move through settled areas. And as my photo above suggests, perimeter barriers and spatial maximalism can lead to a dominating and constricting built environment overall – for everyone, regardless of which side of walls or fences we find ourselves.

Given these limitations, I’d like to highlight a ready alternative to traditional perimeter walls and fences – an alternative that avoids many of their shortcomings, while providing distinct, more useable, and often far more interesting private space. This approach employs architectural barriers in a more restrained, attentive, and creative way, and in particular pulls them back from the boundaries of our residential properties.

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