Or a Love Letter to the World
Kate Black
Currently, the state of our world is in a dire position. While humans have tried to combat climate change and work to develop environment solutions or fixes, these attempts are fruitless. Without the renegotiation of our relationship with nature, humans risk allowing our sense of separation from our environment to keep us from making real, meaningful change. In order to improve our relationship with our environment, we must shift the outmoded binaries between what is manmade and what is natural. Timothy Morton raises the concern that humans have created their own containers for items based solely off of a self proclaimed hierarchy which places us at the center of any world. In doing so, humans assign categories of what is natural and what is not. Is a magnolia tree natural? Humans place this item into the metaphorical container of nature, yet, as Morton has pointed out, the magnolia tree remains unaware of that container. In eliminating these containers that place humans at the top of the hierarchy, passive objects and active users can be eliminated. For Morton, “The end of the world” is less a doomsday prediction and instead represents a flattening of the hierarchical arrangement between us and other things.
In trying to synthesize previous works and concepts and move forward with my application, care presented itself at the core of my argument. Upon reading from Critical Care by Joan C. Tronto, the idea of reorienting the idea of care became a focal point. The book proposed that architects do care currently, they just care incorrectly. Architects are caring about the planet from the standpoint of using “things” to give voice to particular sentiments. Because of this, reorienting the concept of care now requires an entirely new way of seeing the relationships among the built environment, humans and nature.
This reorientation proposes that care instead: emphasizes processes and relationships that extend back and forward through time, and concern all of the created relationships. Applying care theory to architecture would involve taking a fundamental shift in perspective: care does not view the completed “thing” - building, park, etc. as its object. It starts instead with responsibilities to care, not only for this “thing” or its creator, builder, or patron, but for all who are engaged in contact through this thing. Instead of buildings as things thinking of them in relationships - with ongoing environment, people, flora, and fauna - that exist through time as well as in space, changes the approach fundamentally. Thus care offers an alternative relational paradigm.
