Sustainably Sufficient - Verse Two

Scarcity, Natural Selection and Entropy

Scarcity - like gravity - is a real problem faced by all living things, not just a bad attitude. Our bodies have a limited ability to store energy. If we don’t find enough food or water, we die.

If we don’t escape predators, we die. If we use more energy than we gain in those efforts, we fail to survive. This is true for individuals, families, societies and ecosystems – regardless of species.

Every living thing passionately seeks to survive and reproduce. As a result of that relentless quest, our nervous systems have evolved a genius for assessing risk.

Even a virus can balance the value of seeking nutrients in its environment against the risk of using too much energy in that pursuit. It weighs its need to escape toxins and predators that might harm it against the cost of the energy it takes to avoid them.

After all, the world is a very dangerous place. Without exception, organisms that can’t master that skill go extinct – so every species that survives on our planet today is born with that ability.

This eons old dynamic lives at the intersection of two interdependent natural processes well known to science. The first is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or entropy.

Many scientists consider entropy the most universal law of nature. The Second Law states that all energy and mass in the universe is running down – or said more accurately – seeking a lower and more stable state of activity.

Living things are what is called “negentropic”. Life is the only known phenomena in the universe that actively works against entropy.

Time has turned mountains to sand and oceans to deserts. Nothing of the physical world we see today existed when life began, yet living things survive.

The second universal process is natural selection. Through consumption and reproduction, organisms push copies of themselves – sometimes with variation - into the future.

You and I consume plants and other animals in order to get the energy we need to survive, converting their bodies into a more “stable” form we call sewage. We are born and inevitably die, but if we survive long enough to pass our DNA on to the next generation, the essence of our form survives.

What this means is that living things have a natural genius for weighing the benefits of an action against its risks. Human beings intuitively know when a relationship, or our internal wellbeing, or an environment is out of balance.

Though we may not be consciously aware of the interdependent nature of our lives – we sense it naturally. We feel uneasy and anxious when we sense things lack equilibrium.

We have evolved this “sixth sense” because over the millions of years during which our kind evolved we have survived the collapse of that balance many times.

When nature at all levels reaches a certain level of instability, it suffers a catastrophic collapse until it finds a new, more stable state.

We know when too many predators die in an eco-system; food species overpopulate, consume the available resources, then suffer a catastrophic die off. We know when we plant the same crop over and over we deplete the soils and our yields decline.

We know when a marriage or partnership loses its balance, peace and love are lost. We know when nations fail to find stability, war erupts.

We know it from simple every day experiences. We know every time we boil water, every time the minor irritations of life burst into anger, every time a flirty smile on a pretty face inspires a fit of passion.

Right now our world is dangerously close to precipitous collapse in a variety of realms. More and more of us feel an uneasy sense of impending danger.

We know we are overpopulating the planet at an alarming rate. We know we are consuming our available resources faster than we can replace them.

We know our fossil fuel based existence is not sustainable. We are in a race to develop antibiotics to kill disease micro-organisms faster than they can evolve into new and potentially more virulent strains.

Our built environment is expanding in the face of that population pressure to the point that we are altering the temperature of the planet, polluting our oceans, depleting our water supply, destroying the diverse web of species that maintain the balance of natural systems.

We know this and it haunts us.

We know that the forces that separate us – nationalism, tribalism, racial and religious differences, and economic inequities – are at war with new and emerging social movements that can bring us together.

We know this. We feel powerless and afraid.

We feel insufficient

Continue to Sustainably Sufficient - Verse Three

Nandaddy's House

(Reprinted from the Summer 2003 issue of the Round Top Register.)

In my minds eye, I was back again playing on that patterned linoleum floor, the walls of the kitchen towering around me. The smell of something baking in the oven filled the room with welcome. My great-grandmother stood over the sink, the gentle clinking and clanking of the dishes gently protesting as she scoured the day's dishes.

I heard the front door open and Nandaddy lumbered into the front parlor. He saw me playing, my eyes lit with joy at his sudden appearance and his voice boomed out. "Come over here and hug my neck!" I jumped up and ran to him. He grabbed me under the arms and I flew high into the sky, laughing deliriously.

Trains would pass by and we would count the cars. In the mornings the rooster would cry and Nandaddy would let me sit on his lap and bounce me on his knee. We would eat grape nuts or shredded wheat with peaches grown in the side yard or other fruit grandmother had put up in the pantry. He would show me the mysteries of the intricate wooden puzzles he kept on the shelf with the cereal.

He would sing a simple song for me and though I did not know it then, it would echo through my mind for the rest of my life.

Ever time I go to town

the boys keep a’ kickin’

my dog around.

Makes no difference

if he is a hound.

They oughta quit kickin’

my dog around

For whatever reason, the power of those memories of my great-grandfather's house still live in my heart with a profundity that is unmatched in my childhood experience. Years spent in other childhood homes left dim images, frail by comparison. In mid life they are ghosts, but Nandaddy’s house is still alive.

There was something about that house...the porch that wrapped around three sides, the forbidding formality of the living room where I had to mind my manners, the Victrola in the middle bedroom it was such an honor to crank, the big, smooth rock, patterned like a turtle shell that propped open the front door, a rock Nandaddy had found with his foot in a pond when he was young.

The peach trees where wasps raised whelps on my forehead, the armadillos staggering into pipes under the house, the pungent smells of outhouse and chicken house, the metallic taste of rain water collected in a cistern, the century plant and its rare towering bloom, the hanging cloth that covered the pantry, hiding jars full of multi-colored buttons.

It was a house of wonder. In later years when I began to wonder about how we are all marked by deep emotional connections to our childhood surroundings, a sudden memory of that house was the key to that awareness. Nandaddy's house still lived in my memory, a house I somehow still inhabited within, a home where I felt loved and accepted. One day on a similar porch in Round Top, it came flooding back into my mind.

I visited many times, but I lived there only about six months, starting in the winter of 1952 when I was less than two years old. It was a difficult time for my mother and me. She was pregnant with her second child and without a husband.

I don't know why I have such powerful memories of that time, and of later summer visits, but every room in that house still lives inside me.

In my work I try to help my design clients come to understand how their own connections to past dwellings influence their experience of "home." I do this in order to guide them towards architecture that they will experience as nurturing and comfortable. I work with them to design external surroundings that consider what I call their "emotional architecture," their internal landscape.

For me, Nandaddy's house is the central artifact of that internal landscape...and for many years, as far as I was concerned, it no longer existed in the real world.

The house, built in 1912 near Cameron, Texas in Milam County had been sold to a neighbor after my great grandfather's death in 1960. We were told the house had been cut in two pieces and moved away. Like my nandaddy, I never saw the old farmhouse again.

My grandmother, Sinia (she would never let anyone call her grandmother), inherited her father's ready smile and determined optimism. Like my great grandfather, she was always a magical person in my life, bigger than life.

Sinia is one of those rare people who make you feel special and important whenever you are in their presence, a skill she developed in her civil service career to the point that she retired as the head of civilian personnel at a major air force base. A woman who succeed in a man's world when few could, she told me the secret to her success was that she refused to learn how to type.

She left a bitter marriage before World War II when my mother was a pre-teen, married the man I always thought of as my grandfather, and made a better life for herself.

That divorce marked my mother in many ways, and through her - me. I never lived with my father. My mother left him before I was born. My sister's father was similarly absent. The men who raised me when I was young were my step grandfather, and nandaddy... my great-grandfather.

I have often thought that perhaps the reason the short time I lived with nandaddy and grandmother so marked me was that it was one of the few times when I was a child that my mother was happy.

But she, like Sinia, was a strong woman. She survived her hard times and became a successful person, a teacher, an author, a historian and a community leader.

One day not long ago, I got an excited e-mail from my mom. She had been talking to an acquaintance who had known her grandparents. He gave her a lead on what had happened to the house. It turned out that it was owned by a black family named Wheeler. My mother had visited with a member of that family who was an aide in the very nursing home where Sinia, now ninety-four year old, faces the last hard days of her life.

All three of us became very excited. My mother and I arranged to see the old house, which sat empty on the Wheeler homestead. It turned out that the Wheeler's grandmother, Ardangia, who actually owned the house, and who everyone called "Dana," was also a resident in the rest home.

The Wheelers were kind. They welcomed our visit, and why not. We had a lot in common. The grandson who would inherit the house, like me, had spent a special part of his childhood in nandaddy's house, and grandparents we both loved faced their final days but a few rooms apart.

We drove far back in the country on dirt roads to a small settlement consisting of five or six modest houses around an old frame church. A long, narrow gravel drive wove through the Wheeler's seven acres to where the old house sat.

Ardangia's daughter-in-law met us there, unlocked the door, and I stepped into my past.

The wrap-around porches were much shallower that I remembered. They had seemed vast and deep in my mind's eye, but I immediately recognized the interior of the house. The Wheeler's furnishings and decor were different, but they had done very little to change the house. A picture window had replaced on window in a front bedroom, and the house was in need of a new roof and considerable repair...but for the most part it was the house I remembered.

I roamed through the rooms, filled with the detritus of Ardangia's Wheelers life...a collage of family pictures tacked to the wall in the front parlor, sons in uniform, family gatherings...a framed portrait of a beautiful African-American woman, all the simple clutter that is left at the end of a life.

I realized that the house had more than one story to tell. It had been central to our family, an important part of our historical story, but after it left us, it had been central to another.

Their lives had been different than ours, different people, different circumstances, different background and culture, but their memories filled the house just as mine and my mother's did.

The echoes of their past, their laughter and tears, their soft conversations and tense moments whispered like gentle breezes through those worn and cluttered rooms.

It was a house filled with voices. They leaked through the sashes of the ill-fitting windows and wafted under the doors like summer dust. They fluttered in the air, muting the light splashing through the dirty windows, and murmured in the cracks between the planks on the walls. Forgotten sounds and smells and images that lived in forgotten memories spoke from my imagination - but felt palpable and intimate and real.

I am going to try to buy that house from the Wheelers and bring it to my land in Round Top.

I may not succeed, but even if I do not, I will always have it in my heart. It is not just a house of wood after all, but a home of spirit, and memory, and dreams.

Whole House Design for Human Beings

The Holistic Approach - Projects designed and built with a holistic approach - that is “from the whole” - are more organized and generally of greater quality than those done without considering the emotional, psychological and circumstantial needs of the inhabitants.

There is less error and a greater percentage of the work is right the first time when designers and clients "think holistic".

That’s one of the secrets to quality construction. Try to get as much of it right the first time as you can. So don't just think about "how to" do your project. Think about how your project can be tailored to your life!

Mistakes can be corrected and often without any great loss in quality, but the loss in time and money can’t be recovered.

Home as Experience

I believe a “home” is not really a building, but rather an emotional experience. A house is made of bricks and sticks, but a home is of the heart.

That experience does not live in a particular building, but inside each of us, and is built over a lifetime. Modern science suggests that it arises over many generations within each family and exists as complex web of emotional/environmental associations in our brains.

Some aspects of our environment stimulate us and help us feel good, and some cause us to respond negatively.

We do not generally think about these critical internal assessments because they are so basic to our everyday experience.

Most of those associations are subconscious. They are part of every decision we make about our living space, but we seldom think about them. They are merely threads in the fabric of our lives.

Each person has different experience of home, different tastes, different needs and lifestyle. For every individual and every family, we believe there is a true home, a home that fits who they are, that nurtures them and expresses their true selves.

When we consider buying, designing, building, redecorating or remodeling a home, a lot of thought goes into our decisions - and sometimes - a lot of anxiety.

But if the experience we seek with that purchase is a suite of feelings, how can we discover it by thinking?

How can you spend your money wisely, make good design or purchase decisions, or effectively redecorate your home if you do not truly know which specific conditions will give you the emotional experience you desire?

How can you reliably purchase or design a home that helps you feel comfortable and safe, happy and at peace, satisfied and proud?