Unnatural Cities
Artificial environments, ancient brains and the Greeks
This week, I found two fantastic reads on manmade and non-human environments. Departing slightly from my prior focus on conservation and its history, these readings bled into the realm of architectural history and its interaction (or lack there of) with nature.
Artificial Environments
The first is a short paper by Kevin Bennet titled “Natural vs. Artificial Environments.” Bennet attempts connect the rise of artificial environments to a conflict at the heart of our urbanized society. He explains that our species (most importantly our brains) evolved in small, harsh and nomadic groups for thousands of years — 99% of human history precedes agriculture and modern cities1.
The discovery of agriculture 10,000 years ago gave humans a steady stream of food in a stable location — giving birth to the first “artificial environments.” The growth of the communities, cities and nations that followed quickly outpaced our brain’s hardwiring. In the blink of an evolutionary eye, we found ourselves on an interconnected planet of billions in urban environments that differ drastically from those our brains grew to understand.
Our mental machinery, including emotions, decision-making algorithms, and mate preferences, evolved under conditions that existed more than 10,000 years ago.
While we humans are good at adapting, we are still navigating this new world with ancient minds. At a time when any climate can become habitable through modern construction, we still prefer landscapes and greenery to a conditioned, windowless cellar. We still long for nature. The paper cites a collection of studies that clearly demonstrate the benefits (mentally, physiologically, etc.) of integrating natural environments into urban design — a way for the modern world to speak to that part of our brains that resonates with the non-human.
Researchers estimate that by 2050, two-thirds of humans will live in urban areas. Cities can be places of outsized opportunities for individual growth and environmental progression. The densification of populations has long been supported by environmentalists for its efficiencies. Bennett seems to be reminding us that while humans may gravitate to urban environments, there is still a gap between our ancestral minds and the places most of us inhabit. I believe putting urban design and dissatisfaction in this evolutionary context is quite enlightening.
The Natural and the Manmade
The second work is a transcript from a lecture by Vincent Scully titled “Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade” — presenting the thesis of his book by the same name. The talk focuses on Scully’s ideas on the relationship between manmade structures and the natural world which, he believes, is “the most important topic in architecture.”2 Through architecture, man finds a way to mitigate nature’s horrors and make the natural world digestible. He explains that most cultures have made use of some variation of two great “stratagems” in their buildings.3 One, where humans imitate the natural world in their architecture — bringing nature’s power down to the human level. The other is the opposite, where humans assert their power over nature. The latter was invented by the Greeks, “and we’ve been involved in it one way or another ever since.” 4
The Greeks brought, for the first time, the human force and form into architecture. Where all other cultures had designed their buildings to imitate and intensive the natural world, Greek architecture projected a divinity of humanity — placing it in a new relationship with the nonhuman world.
In the United States, you feel this in the Sun Belt skyscrapers — that nature really doesn’t exist anymore, that the buildings are all self-referential, that they communicate only with others of their own kind. Thats not Greek at all, but in a way the Greeks began it.
Scully follows the trail of influence through the western tradition, articulating that the human figure remained at its center. From the imposition of cosmic order through Grecian structure to the Roman search for divinity in its manicured “nature.” The Italian gardens led to the geometric simulacrum of the natural world in the gardens of England and France, specifically Versailles — which became the model for capital cities in the United States.5 In the 19th century, these American cities, rooted in the divine human form, ceded their allegiance to the automobile. From the street to the sky, our tallest buildings refer not to nature, but to each other — celebrating the human victory over all.
Scully contrasts this western evolution with the architecture of Egypt, Mesoamerica and the (modern day) Southwest US. The original inhabitants of North America “believed that all live was the same — that human structure is the same as the structure of the mountain.”6 This homogeneity of animacy was reflected in the structures they built and differs markedly from the human form at the center of western architecture — starting with the Greeks. He ends with a grim warning for our anthropocentrism (paraphrasing Claude Levi-Strauss), that “mankind is not safe…because mankind values only itself…unless it can push its sense of respect beyond mankind, then it will never be adequately protected itself.”7
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Kevin Bennett, “Natural vs. Artificial Environments,” Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Science (November 2019): 4
Vincent Scully, “Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 46, no. 2 (1992): 30, https://doi.org/10.2307/3824170.30
Ibid. pg. 30
Ibid. pg. 30
Ibid. pg. 47
Ibid. pg. 50
Ibid.