style with substance

carving our niche

Moving toward our green future can start by reflecting on the enduring lessons left by those who came before.

By Vishu Magee Photograph by Bill Steen

This article first appeared in Winter 2010 Su Casa

Looking ahead for solutions to our problems has always been a mainstay of the American character. Whether it’s pioneers pressing ever westward or engineers inventing new gadgets and entire technologies, we’re a can-do people accustomed to regarding challenge as opportunity.

Today is no exception. Certainly we have no shortage of problems facing the universe of design and construction: quite aside from the stalled economy, we face high building costs, dwindling resources, myriad health issues, and inconvenient truths regarding carbon footprints and climate change.

Characteristically, we have responded to these challenges by developing green technologies for both renewable energy and conservation; for water recycling and water quality; for more responsible disposal of solid and liquid waste; and for nontoxic materials that preserve both the environment and our health. Green-building codes, tax breaks, and revisions to school curricula have also come into play. This is as it should be. The green economy, if there is to be one, will involve a process of applying any and all know-how to the task of reengineering our lifestyle.

But a disturbing obstacle remains—our refusal to give up or even moderate our consumerist way of life. As a nation, we have mortgaged ourselves to the hilt, paying the debt forward to our grandchildren. Carbon emissions also apply. Even if we stopped all emissions now, consequences for the next generations are dire. Americans seem to have the notion that we can live any way we want as long as we can make our credit card payments.

Such a shortsighted and destructive attitude has no place in a green future. We can’t solve our problems with a green shopping binge any more than we can redeem ourselves by relying on tomorrow’s magic techno-bullet. In fact, we are much more likely to heal ourselves by looking toward the past and considering how older cultures lived successfully on the land.

One example is Europe, where the national characters are not conditioned by a history of perennially expanding outward. Europeans tend to look back, deriving satisfaction from tradition, family, and a sense of place. Generally speaking, they do a good job being content with less and excel at living in densely populated communities while preserving farmland and open space. We would do well to take a page from their book.

Another society to consider once lived right here in the Four Corners. The Ancestral Puebloans (we used to call them the Anasazi) may not be your or my direct forebears, but their claim as the original people of this land is almost mythical in scale. Theirs was a civilization in every sense of the word, with thousands of people inhabiting major hubs such as Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde and thousands more occupying a network of small outlying pueblos scattered throughout the region.

These people knew how to thrive in places I can only visit for as long as the contents of my backpack will sustain me. A thousand years before we “discovered” solar design, they built their dwellings on south-facing cliffs that baked in wintertime sun, storing heat in the thermal mass of the stone pueblos as well as the surrounding sandstone. Most of these structures tucked beneath overhangs, which provided shade and natural cooling in the summer and shelter from rain and snow year-round.

The Ancestral Puebloans had little in the way of tools, livestock, and technology. But they were adept at finding sites that offered safety from enemies, soil and water for food crops, wood for fuel, and habitat for hunting and gathering. Bottom line: it worked.

Romanticizing ancient cultures can be a trap. Who knows if they were happy? My guess is they were as content with their scant means as we are with our opulent lifestyle. All indications signal that they shared a solid sense of their place on this earth, marked by a rich religious and ceremonial life. They evolved a complex society with the ability to live in dense, tightly knit communities. What’s more, they had surplus food in their granaries, sophisticated craft work and building techniques, and they traded far and wide.

Judging by the admiration we have for their artifacts, the Ancestral Puebloans had a lot going for them. Today’s stonemasons find themselves hard-pressed to equal the beauty of Anasazi stonework, even with the help of diamond-tipped saw blades and steel chisels. Most of us don’t realize that those tightly fitted stones were typically covered with mud plaster (itself frequently painted). To me, putting that degree of care into a wall that is going to be plastered over bespeaks a level of pride and integrity seldom found in today’s buildings.

We’re all familiar with certain iconic Anasazi motifs: the taper of the walls, the keyhole doorways, the simple wooden lintels. The kiva itself, with its hand-hewn ladder connecting the Underworld with the Upperworld, is as eloquent an archetypal structure as you will ever find. The great kiva of Casa Rinconada displays a remarkable alignment with the trajectory of the sun, while other Chaco Canyon buildings are also laid out according to cosmic principles. On a smaller scale, we can see this same attention to universal patterns and energies in the spirals and serpentine motifs of Anasazi pots or in the wonderful shamanic figures painted or inscribed on sandstone walls.

In the end, however, this civilization died, and the Ancestral Puebloans migrated with virtually no trace. Some say this was due to drought, while others suggest that their system was simply too successful—fuelwood and other resources became depleted, and their civilization could no longer be sustained. Their own passing is their final, somber lesson for us: we must look ahead and apply ourselves to problem solving on a grand scale. We must look back, as well, and learn from both the triumphs and failures of the past. But in the present, we must look within and reinvent both our lifestyle and ourselves so that our tenure, and that of our grandkids, can be sustainable.

Vishu Magee designs homes around Santa Fe and Taos. He is the author of Archetype Design: House as a Vehicle for Spirit. Contact him at archetype-design.com.