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In opposition to this oppressive type of urbanism, Ushida-Findlay propose that, by acknowledging buildings from the "inside out" and envisioning city planning from a microcosmic-to-macrocosmic perspective, architects can help empower city dwellers to reshape their own living and working environments.

Such ideas are on collision course with most contemporary urban planning procedures, but they lie at the core of the Ushida-Findlay partnership's concept of "re-engagement."

They propose a way of looking at the city as an infinitely varied tapestry of corporeal, perceptual psychological, botanical, and topographical experiences that relate to what they have termed "psycho-geometry." This is a totally integrated cityscape predicated on the ultimate inside/outside experience.

Building Warm and Fuzzy

In the "Soft and Hairy House" of 1994, Ushida-Findlay demonstrate their surreal sensibility and notion of infusing elements of the outside urban context. The house was built for a young couple in Tsukuba City near Tokyo and based on the development of interior spaces as an expression of what the architects have called "orgiastic potency."

While perhaps more of a comment on the owners' libido than a therapeutic reality of the architecture, the house does present a sensuous explosion of organic forms that fuse, convolute, and metamorphose into each other to produce a compelling environment of fluid membranes and cradling sanctuaries.

The ecologically responsible features of the dwelling include an extensive roof garden, which both enriches quality of life for the residents and provides insulation to maintain a steady interior temperature.

With its indeterminate flow of ceilings into floors, allusions to prenatal existence, and feminine metaphors, Ushida-Findlay's interpretation of house-as-living-organism adds an intriguing cross-cultural dimension. It is full of Oriental and cosmic references that suspend this building somewhere between a Zen garden and a communications satellite.

This question of finding a more integrated urban language — one of the goals sought by Ushida and Findlay — brings up a profound issue in the development of any new environmentally friendly architecture or public space. A major factor in responding to the ecological model of integrated systems is an understanding of nature's capacity to include, rather than exclude.

It is still the tendency of most environmentally committed architects today to impose a building on the cityscape and then rationalize its internalized green features as evidence of the designer's awareness of outside natural forces (while the edifice itself is designed as an insular object).

Ushida-Findlay are tactically correct in "wanting to play interior and exterior aspects against each other, by looking for clues in the city which can generate the design." They are also right in seeking guidance through the lessons of natural phenomena and the relationship of city dwellers to their surroundings.

But the next stage of architectural development — in fact, the challenge to all green designers — should be the integration of buildings with their contexts as seamless fusions of each other; as syntheses of ecological processes already in place, and as monitors of people's subliminal reactions to environmental signs and signals, which can then be translated into billboards of the collective unconscious.

These objectives are the complete opposite of most traditional 20th-century architecture, but they are also the wave of the future.

Association Sens Espace

Motivated by a psychologically oriented and Gaia-inspired set of objectives, Association Sens Espace was organized in the Paris studio of Hervé Baley in 1969 with the purpose of reconnecting people to their origins in the natural environment.

The group is composed of architects, artists, and engineers who support the currently held view of most environmental psychologists that nature deprivation is at the root of an increasing number of mental disorders today.

Reflecting certain aboriginal cultures' beliefs in the value of spiritual transference to achieve a more profound level of earth-centric Identity, this experimental design organization from France seeks a better understanding of blomorphic relationships in the search for a coherence with nature.

Under the direction of Jean Pierre Campredon, Association Sens Espace has taken the position that most contemporary architecture asserts its presence in the environment using a litany of technical systems and aesthetic choices that only increases people's alienation from nature.

The group further points out that buildings can actually impose psychological barriers through design choices, destroying any hope of coherence.

Sens Espace members feel that this problem is infinitely more complex than the partial solutions provided by energy conservation and sustainable construction technology; rather, they see a new role for architecture in the realm of spiritual leadership.

In this respect they propose the idea that architecture be landscape and deal with new levels of plasticity that simulate the way nature stitches together its fabric of organic and inorganic life. Sens Espace is interested in a soft, flexible, morphogenic architecture that takes advantage of the lessons learned from past nomadic lifestyles and the mutable characteristics of nature.

The Sens Espace-designed Cantercel Project, begun in 1988 in association with the Ecole Supérieure d'Architecture in Paris, is a training center founded with the purpose of promoting a sense of harmony with the environment.

While the architectural features include familiar components of green construction — for example, rammed earth, raw wood support systems, fabric coverings, passive solar energy, etc. — there is also a conceptual motivation which the group defines as an evolutionist sensibility.

The principles behind this approach and its built manifestations in Cantercel are to create an ensemble of demonstration buildings, agricultural areas, natural landscape, and outdoor/indoor seminar spaces.

From an educational standpoint, the objective is to simulate the interactive processes of nature, so that building technology and occupants' behavior become a logical extension of the ecosystem.

With this in mind, many of the physical features of Cantercel were chosen for their sympathetic equations in nature, including a lozenge-like central building with a textile roof and a structural pattern of wood columns that mirror the rhythms of the surrounding pine trees (as though the building is bending to the force of the wind).

The main innovation was provided by team member Michael Flach who developed a free-flowing and lightweight support system that, rather than concede to the rigid column grids associated with heavy roof planes, achieved his view of architecture as part of a spontaneous contextual flow.

His success was made physically possible by an extremely economical canvas covering that is held firm in wooden grooves by a series of rods. The fabric is stretched with a rope, forming a diagonal arc and creating a double curvature for strength. At the same time, it forms a union with its surroundings and a spare, contextually respectful, visual presence.

The Cantercel project is a model of interaction that encourages students, professors, community members, and professional designers to develop a living environment where, in the words of Campredon, "Architecture can become the science of relationship and communication, rather than that of protection."

In spite of these rather utopian ambitions (reminiscent of I960s Drop City idealism), Cantercel has become a viable and productive testing ground for eco-sociology and a demonstration of the wisdom of constructing shelter that behaves like a living organism.

The most valuable lessons of this educational center propose that, by trying to find operational parallels in ecology for each element of structure, the builder-as-inhabitant can ultimately recover that lost sense of earth-centric coherence.

James Wines is founder and president of SITE Environmental Design, an architecture and environmental arts organization in New York and dean of faculty of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. His work is internationally known for its commitment to an integration of the arts and the fusion of buildings, landscapes, and public spaces with their surrounding contexts.

This article is excerpted from Green Architecture, copyright © 2000, and is available from Taschen Books and Amazon.com.

Aerial view, the Soft and Hairy House by the Ushida-Findlay Partnership. Photo: Katsuhisa Kida Entrance, the Soft and Hairy House. Photo: Katsuhisa Kida Courtyard, the Soft and Hairy House. Photo: Katsuhisa Kida Cantercel project by Association Sens Espace, in Herault, France, 1990-1996. Photo: association Sens Espace Europe Cantercel project by Sens Espace. Photo: association Sens Espace Europe Cantercel project by Sens Espace. Photo: association Sens Espace Europe House, by Association Sens Espace, in Paris, 1988. Photo: association Sens Espace Europe Green Architecture, by James Wines. Cover photo of the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center designed by Renzo Piano, in Noumea, New Caledonia, 1992-1998. Photo: Hans Schlupp/architekturphoto   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.