Robert J Morton
Robert J Morton |
The human life-form was built to inhabit the Garden of Eden. It desires an idyllic paradise with an ambient temperature of 30 to 40°C at 30 to 40% humidity. It longs for the fractal beauty of a garden world of colour, swathed in a myriad shades of green and flanked by the soothing twinkle of sunlight on clear water.
Introduction | Basic Model | Analysis | Environments | Physical Realization
But this idyllic paradise sure ain't where I live! The ideal habitat of the human species is certainly not the convoluted concrete of Commuterville. It may have done so once, but the Garden of Eden no longer occurs naturally on Planet Earth. Most of it is too cold, too hot, too dry or too infested. It is now up to us to recreate, from what we find, wherever we may be, an environment with the necessary ingredients for comfortable living.
The earth now offers little food for humans that can just be picked off trees and eaten. Most of what we eat must be prepared and cooked to make it edible. Cooking requires fire. Fire is therefore the traditional focus for eating. The cooking fire became the counsel fire. People sat around it and considered society, economics, life and the universe. Now as then, the erotic dance of flames upon their stage of glowing embers exudes a benign power which inspires the mind and soothes the soul.
A fire in the open is ideal in summer. But summer is short. Universal warmth and comfort are usurped by the hostile chill of winter. Nature loses her gown of glory. Food is scarce. Paradise is lost. Human life can no longer survive without the added protection of shelter. Our fire must be enclosed. It must become the focus of a survivable domain within. This could never be the paradise of summer. But it allows us to endure until summer returns.
I see the circle as the most practical shape for a shelter to enclose an open fire in order to create a warm protected environment. This was, as I understand it, the practise both of the Ancient Britons and of the Native Americans. It created a place where a group of a dozen or so could gather round in comfort to eat or take counsel. Come the night they could also sleep there. To my mind, such a place must be central to anything which could be rightly called a home. Home is therefore not a term I could ever apply to the modern rectangular suburban box with its lifeless radiators and clinical decor.
But this focal point of food and counsel lacks personal privacy. Other protected spaces must be made in which to sleep, wash, dress, think, work, play, defecate and store things like food, fuel, tools and toys. It may be expedient for some of these spaces to be directly connected to this 'place of food and counsel'. It may be better for other spaces to be separated by the 'outside' to minimise the nuisance of noise, smell and dirt. The 'place of food and counsel' must however have a direct view of, and access to, its natural hinterland. It must also be able to open up sufficiently to allow it to become at one with, and the focus of, its natural surroundings during the warmth of summer.
Its immediate hinterland is enhanced to form a garden. In this garden are fruit trees, nut trees and many kinds of vegetables flanked by a plethora of herbs and flowers. Pleasant scents permeate the air. A shallow pond glistens in the sunshine. A narrow vista, framed with sandstone, looks out to a clear distant horizon on a calm open sea. A footpath beckons through an enchanted portal into an infinite warm bright woodland furnished with a seasonal carpet of tiny wild flowers. Birds sing above the distant accompaniment of breaking spray. A little field and tree plantation are the sources of our food and fuel.
Alas nothing is permanent. The earth is a crucible of change. Climate changes. Land erodes and accretes elsewhere. Migration is inevitable. Our ideal home must therefore be vehicular. It must incorporate, or at least offer attachment to, a source of motive power and instruments of global navigation. Hence, when forced by circumstance, we whom it protects can move on to recreate our Garden of Eden in a new place.
We must remember always, however, that moving-on places a moral obligation upon us to return the place we leave to nature in as good a state as we originally found it when first we arrived. We must take with us all that is artificial. We must leave nothing to harm or pollute the mechanisms of nature. When we arrive in our new place, we must strive to make our presence have as little impact as possible upon its natural state.
So how do I go about designing my ideal home? By considering its purpose. And that is to provide a secure and supportive environment or container for each of a specific set of familiar and well defined human activities. In other words, the tool I use to arrive at the design of my ideal home is activity analysis. And from this I build a general activity model of my home.