302 Ecological Restoration and Design
other values. In his interest on harmonizing site, form and function, and using
natural materials and solar energy, in Wright is a precursor to the green building
movement and the larger endeavour of ecological design. And in his often random
musings about an ‘organic society’ he foreshadowed the present dialogue about the
sustainability of modern society.
Ecological design, however, is not just about calibrating human activities with
natural systems. It is also an inward search to find patterns and the order of nature
written in our senses, flesh and human proclivities. There is no line dividing nature
outside from inside; we are permeable creatures inseparable from nature and natu-
ral processes in which we live, move and have our being. We are also sensual crea-
tures with five senses that we know and others that we only suspect. At its best,
ecological design is a calibration, not just of our sense of proportion that the Greeks
understood mathematically, but a finer calibration of the full range of our sensual-
ity with the built environment, landscapes and natural systems. Our buildings are
thoughts, words, theories and entire philosophies crystallized for a brief time into
physical form that reveal what’s on our mind and what’s not. When done right,
they are a form of dialogue with nature and our own deeper, sensual nature. The
sights, smells, textures and sounds of the built environment evoke memories, initiate
streams of thought, engage, sooth, provoke, bind or block, open or close possibilities.
When done badly, the result is spiritual emptiness characteristic of a great deal of
modern design that reveals, in turn, a poverty of thought, perception and feeling.
More specifically, we are creatures shaped inordinately by the faculty of sight,
but seeing is anything but simple. Oliver Sacks once described a man blind since
early childhood whose sight once restored found it to be a terrible and confusing
burden preferring to return to blindness and his own inner world of touch. ‘When
we open our eyes each morning,’ Sacks writes, ‘it is upon a world we have spent a
lifetime learning to see’ (Sacks, 1993, p64). And we can lose not only the faculty
of sight, but the ability to see as well. Even with 20–20 vision, our perception is
always selective because our eyes permit us to see only within certain ranges of the
light spectrum and because personality, prejudice, interest and culture further fil-
ter what we are able to see. Sacks notes that individual people can choose not to see
and I suspect the same is true for cultures as well. The affinity for nature, a kind of
sight, is much diminished in modern cultures.
Collective vision cannot be easily restored by more clever thinking, but, as
David Abram puts it only ‘through a renewed attentiveness to this perceptual
dimension that underlies all our logics, through a rejuvenation of our carnal, sen-
sorial empathy with the living land that sustains us’ (1996, p69). Drawing from
the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Abram describes perception as interactive and par-
ticipatory in which ‘perceived things are encountered by the perceiving body as
animate, living powers that actively draw us into relation ... both engender(ing)
and support(ing) our more conscious, linguistic reciprocity with others’ (1996,
p90). Further, sight as well as language and thought are experienced bodily as
colours, vibrations, sensations and empathy, not simply as mental abstractions.
The ideas that viewer and viewed are in a form of dialogue and that we experience