Ecological Design and Education 313judged truly beautiful will in time be regarded as those that raised the human spirit
without compromising human dignity or ecological functions elsewhere. Architec-
ture and landscape architecture, in other words, are a means to higher ends.
Eight, the education of professional designers requires substantial changes. As
much art as science, the design professions are not simply technical disciplines,
having to do with the intersection of form, materials, technology and real estate.
The design professions such as architecture, landscape architecture and urban
planning are first and foremost practical liberal arts with technical aspects. Writing
in the first century BC, Vitruvius proposed that architects:
be educated, skilful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have fol-
lowed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medi-
cine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory
of the heavens (1960, pp5–6).That is a start of a liberal and liberating education. Design education, therefore,
ought to be a part of a broad conversation that includes all of the liberal arts. In
George Steiner’s words:
Architecture takes us to the border. It has perennially busied the philosophic imagination,
from Plato to Valery and Heidegger. More insistently than any other realization of form,
architecture modifies the human environment, edifying alternative and counter-worlds in
relationships at once concordant with and opposed to nature (Steiner, 2001, pp251–252)In countless ways all design, even the best, damages the natural world. Extraction
and processing of materials depletes landscapes and pollutes. Building construc-
tion, operation and demolition creates large amounts of debris. Agriculture inevi-
tably simplifies ecosystems. A new breed of ecological designers, accordingly, must
be even more intellectually agile and broader, capable of orchestrating a wide array
of talents and fields of knowledge necessary to design outcomes that can be sus-
tained within the ecological carrying capacity of particular places.
Nine, education is aimed in some fashion to heal us by the systematic cultivation
of reason, thoughtfulness and memory from the more egregious problems inherent
in the human condition. As a further step in this progression, the design professions
ought to be regarded as healing arts, an ideal rooted in Vitruvius’ advice that archi-
tects ought to pay close attention to sunlight, the purity of water, air movements and
the effects of the building site on human health. The word ‘healing’ has a close affin-
ity with other words such as holy and wholeness. A larger sense of the profession that
architect Thomas Fisher (2001) deems a ‘calling’, would aim for the kind of whole-
ness that creates not just buildings but integral homes and communities.
Compare, for example, the idea that ‘architecture applies only to buildings
designed with a view to aesthetic appeal’ (Pevsner, 1990, p15) with architecture
defined as ‘the art of place-making’ and creation of ‘healing places’ (Day, 2002,
pp10, 5). In the former, design changes with trends in fashionable forms and