ENVIRONMENT AND DESIGNI begin with a point I have made frequently: that it may be more useful; to use a term such as environmental design rather than architecture, since one cannot consider buildings in isolation. People live in systems of settings ranging from smaller than rooms through buildings, open space, neighborhoods, cities, regions and so forth. One then needs to ask how “environment” and “design” may best be conceptualized.
I begin with a point I have made frequently: that it may be more useful; to use a term such as environmental design rather than architecture, since one cannot consider buildings in isolation. People live in systems of settings ranging from smaller than rooms through buildings, open space, neighborhoods, cities, regions and so forth. One then needs to ask how “environment” and “design” may best be conceptualized.
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“Environment” initially is another rather global term which nees dismantling before it becomes useful. This, again, can be done in various ways. For example, environment can be conceptualized as a system of settings within which human life takes place. These systems of settings, the components which make them up and the linkage and separations in place and time, their meaning etc. are highly variable culturally and need to be discovered rather than assumed.
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Secondly, the environment can be conceptualized in a variety of ways, given that it consists not only of things, but also of people. At the very least, then, it is a set of relations between people and people, people and things and things and things. More specifically various of this have been proposed which I will not review here. One that I find useful which combines design and environment is that the design of environment is the organization of four things: space, time, meaning and communication. It then becomes possible to consider, discuss and investigate the implications of each for a given culture. This dose, of course, raise the question of what “design” means.
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“Design” needs to be seen as any purposeful chang of the above four components and their physical expression. Thus almost anything humans do to alter the face of the earth and anything they build is design—not just what professionals do. In fact, as I have long argued, preliterate, vernacular, popular and othe such environments are particularly illuminating regarding cultural responsiveness; they also comprise most of what has ever been built so that they must be considered if any valid generalizations about environment-behavior relations are to be made.
As in all this discussion, specifics become crucial, whether about culture or the environment. For example, space organization(and form) are not the same as shape and, in most cases, more important. In some cases, however, shape may be more important, for example in terms of identity, religion, cosmology, etc. Thus, once again, what is important needs to be discovered not assumed.
