Rewilding Architecture

How about habitat restoration as a form of landscape architecture? For example, my alma mater built some new residences a few years ago, and instead of leveling the earth and planting a lawn around them, they kept the slope of the terrain intact and re-introduced prairie grasses native to MN.

Hmm, perhaps you’ve set up a false dichotomy in your mind in regards to wilderness vs people?

You may want to think about ways to reintegrate humans & wilderness. People are animals too, we’re “allowed” to have impact, we just need to make sure it’s a positive one.

Anyway, that’s my perspective…

“How about habitat restoration as a form of landscape architecture?”
-BlueHeron

“You may want to think about ways to reintegrate humans & wilderness. People are animals too, we’re “allowed” to have impact, we just need to make sure it’s a positive one.”
-jhereg

Habitat restoration is appealing…

jhereg, right on, but architecture is about building and sculpting stuff. Asking folks to be mindful is probably outside my discipline.

Well, I’m going to make a pretty generalized statment here and say that any kind of architecture which makes/serves money isn’t going to be very mindful.

But there are architects/landscape architects who have found ways to work with the local ecosystem instead of against it. There is, of course, the long precedent of construction methods of indigenous people. There are also professional modern architects who design pre-fabricated homes that are non-toxic to the earth and which require little to no energy inputs (they can be used completely off the grid). And the landscape architects who designed the project at my college let the place itself do most of the “designing” for them.

This would be a good topic for a separate thread. I’m going to move some of our posts into a new thread and get a conversation going outside of the Introductions page. :slight_smile:

I confess: I have very little understanding of architecture as a discipline. It does seem tho’ that architecture (landscape or otherwise) can help direct attention.

If it can, then, that alone could bear quite a bit of rewilding fruit.

Have you looked at permaculture at all? Generally speaking the folks focusing on it aren’t trying to undo domestication, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have great ideas that can help us rewild. In particular, I’m thinking about the concept of zones. You may want to check it out.

You may also want to look at Keyline water systems, to get a sense of what sculpting the earth (literally, in this case) can do. Again, Yeoman didn’t have any desire to undo domestication, but… I always did like the old fire thief stories…

I dunno, hopefully this helps a bit.