The Buzz of BEE

Martin Dickie RAIA, RAPI

Education, in the sense of man's being educente (led out from) the monological fixations of ignorance, involves also being led into, intro-cente (introduced to), the new awareness of the dynamic fluidity of the infinite persistence of complex-yet-systematic integration of universal principles.
R. Buckminster Fuller: Total Thinking 1949 republished in The Buckminster Fuller Reader Penguin 1970

A readiness to explore the new.
Drawings of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia by English primary children following a talk from visitors.

We are living on the exponential slope of progress. The graph we have all seen showing technological innovation that started slowly in the Bronze Age and accelerated in the Industrial Revolution has now grown too steep to comprehend.As a boy, my father drove a pony trap. In his lifetime he saw the universality of motor and air transport, public broadcasting, the fax and the personal computer. In my lifetime I expect to experience a range of innovation and change that will be just as stunning. And change will be the background of the life of my children. The one vital thing for survival in their times will be flexibility.

I expect that one of the most important professions in years to come will be that of the interface engineer, people with the imagination to generate the next generation of metaphors that will rope the abilities of technology to human comprehension. We are already programmed by some of the devices that we use regularly. Have you ever tried to drive a manual car with your feet crossed over? Learning to drive habituates our lower limbs to perform the different tasks needed and it is a hard task to unlearn such a skill. Now that many millions of people can touch-type and are trained to the limitations of the Qwerty keyboard, it will persist for many years despite our understanding of its limitations. Our kids are learning new skills; driving through virtual places with three fingers on the keyboard. This will be one of the control systems of the future and may well be the way that we control vehicles if we ever need to drive them manually.

In contrast to the technology of domestic and communication devices, present-day building construction has hardly progressed at all. The few Buckminster Fuller inspired attempts to mass-produce capsules are novel curiosities. We still stick small units of baked earth on top of each other to make our houses. The reason lies in those areas that we cannot reprogram; our animal core that seeks security and safety in the familiar. And why should this change? These are the repositories of our history; the reason that we are as we are and the proof that change is only on the surface.

We must understand what in our makeup can be trained and altered without damage and what is necessary to satisfy our animal needs. This is the strongest of reasons for educating children to look at the world around them. Only an educated, perceptive and questioning population will be able to resist the adverse effects of the forces that are likely to be imposed on us. Who questioned the electromagnetic effects of high tension transmission lines on people living nearby in the technological fifties? Fortunately we know enough now to question the siting of telephone towers and to demand proof that they are not injurious before they are strewn through our domestic landscapes. Perhaps this will also include questioning the logic that requires three systems, three sets of towers and three times the visual pollution for the sake of competition.

Buckminster Fuller believed that, even in the fifties, the need was for generalists, not specialists. His rationale reflected the need in a world before global communication for each ship to act as its country's ambassador, for each captain to understand the full implications of his actions including the use of force.

Change will come even more powerfully from resource constraints. It is already clear that the West cannot continue to use up resources and to despoil the planet as it has done for the last fifty years. Our environmental problems have not been caused by the consumption patterns of the South but by the lifestyles of people in the North. And still they talk of growth. The Earth cannot sustain the consumerist lifestyle of the people who follow it now, let alone those who aspire to it. The more so since the people who are seduced by the images of Western consumerism are often those whose present lifestyles more nearly approach sustainable levels. The "poor" people who use little electricity because the supply is inadequate should be our examples, not we theirs. Technology can promise much but will never avoid the constraints on energy, water and cost and the 'advanced' countries will need to contemplate a lowering of their profligate lifestyles.When the water wars start in the Middle East, it should be a signal to all of us to husband our resources.

And this is the great "buzz" of Built Environment Education. I give primary level children drawing tricks to describe the insides of rooms; at university level I detail the limitations of our urban development process. And at all stages between, I find students ready to consider a wider and more critical viewpoint, to look with fresh eyes at the world around them and to ask penetrating questions. We as architects owe it to the whole community to use our own awareness and to stimulate questioning attitudes in new generations.

I have great faith in our children. Kids are generally fair and far-sighted unless we poison their minds. Each generation is however the victim of the one before. It has to accept the world as it inherits it and can change only the elements for which it has levers. My father's generation embraced the technology almost without question. It was new, it was exciting and there were no negative experiences to advise caution. The difficulty, as with global warning of acid rain in the UK, is that the results may be distant in both time and geography; disputable and hard to attribute to their original cause. But our generation has questioned, has seen that there are limits and our children, though they may blame us for not going far enough, have far more windows through which to examine the world and more levers with which to influence it than in my father's rose-coloured world. I like to think of the power of the pen, of literature, to change the mental space in which we operate. By writing his novel '1984', George Orwell made it hard for the things that he saw as the dangers to come to pass.

Will the levers that we have now be enough? Globally, I doubt it. There are too many other irrational voices shouting around the world. The West has made a god of narrow monetary values and has forgotten that there is a side to all of us that has needs that cannot be valued. We have ignored what Christopher Alexander calls "the Quality Without a Name". But there is hope in the clear perception of children and the interest of students of all ages in the issues of the environment and global equity. We can all fell the "buzz" of BEE. The programme appears unlikely to continue at a federal level but there is much that can be done by the States and by all of us individually. From their training architects have a responsibility to educate and to open eyes. We are not only responsible for some 30% of energy use but we are aware of it and therefore need to let others know what problems exist and what directions there are to solve them. This is a challenge for us all.

There is no safe level of exposure to low-level ionizing radiation. There is no level of ionizing radiation which does not damage cells, including ovum and sperm cells, and cause genetic damage, which may result in mild or severe cell mutations and cancer. "Permissible levels" of radiation are what Rachel Carson called, in writing of pesticide tolerances, a sanction for slow poisoning of people.
Hynes, HP: The Recurring Silent Spring 1989

As long as we have cities and technology, does it matter whether we sense our place in nature? Yes, for many reasons, not the least of which is that virtually all scientists were fascinated with nature as children and retained that curiosity throughout their lives. But a far more important reason is that if we retain a spiritual sense of connection with all other life forms, it can't help but profoundly affect the way we act.
David Suzuki: Inventing the Future 1989

We tend to overlook the fact that nearly all major disfigurements of the earth have been created by mankind. The impoverished lands of Greece, Spain, and India, the man-made deserts of Australia and New Zealand, the treeless plains of China and Mongolia, and the deserts of North Africa, the Mediterranean basin, and Chile all attest to the fact that where there is a desert, man has been at work.
Victor Papanek: Design for the Real World 1984

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual person's story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.
Christopher Alexander:The Timeless Way of Building 1979