Monday 15 March 2010

ARCHITECTURE AND PINE TREES


I saw these pine trees at a place called Lygra. They are shaped by the weather in an interesting way, as it may look like they're always standing in the wind, but they're not. What happens, is that when buds grow on one side of the tree, they thrive and explode into branches and pine needles, but the buds on the other side of the tree are hit by the cold wind, and dry out and die. In that way, the trees are shaped by the climate to only grow in one direction.

One of the founders of Bergen School of Architecture, who was also the principal for many years, Svein Hatløy, held a speech for our class where he told us that when he and some other people met in the seventies to try and develop a new architecture to replace the shitty stuff everyone was doing back then, they decided that the thing that would lead them, was the local climate. The weather and landscape should be the number one consideration when designing a building.

Seeing these trees made me think of that. Perhaps we still need an architecture shaped by the winds? Perhaps our buildings, although well rooted, should be flexible, and in a different way that just applying movable interior walls? Maybe architecture should be a bit more like pine trees?

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