Place-appropriate
Inhabitation
New West Land Company is a full service organization providing architectural,
land-use design and planning services. We work with landowners, communities,
land trusts and conservation-oriented investors and developers to plan and
build for the cultural, ecological and economic sustainability of the lands
that they steward- regardless of whether they are best measured in square miles
or square feet.
While we are architects by
training, we call ourselves a Land Company, because Land is the physical and
spiritual source of our practice. However,
unlike the old speculative and generally destructive land companies of the
American West, we are chartered to make human community good company for
Land. “An environmental ethic will
come into existence not primarily through the logical elucidation of new
philosophical principles and legislative strictures, but though a renewed
attentiveness to this perceptual dimension that underlies all our logics,
through a rejuvenation of our carnal, sensorial empathy with the living land
that sustains us.”
- David Abrams, The Spell
of the Sensuous
After many years of internationally acclaimed
architectural practice as principal and co-founder of Roto Architects, inc,
Clark Stevens saw the need to position his practice “upstream” in the flow of
decisions that go into creating architecture. As a life-long naturalist, Stevens had long looked to the
Land- its forms and many communities- as the basis for form- and
place-making. In 15 years of
practicing, teaching, and writing about architecture, the Land emerged for him
as more than a source of information for the making of buildings, but as the
basis for a type and ethic of
architectural practice. As the
pioneering ecologist Aldo Leopold postulated early in the last century:
When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.
Too often an architect is asked to make a “good” building-
increasingly a “green” or “sustainable” building- in a physical, cultural, social
and ecological context (a site) that is the result of a prior decision-making
process completely at odds with this goal. Too often we are asked to make good buildings in bad places,
or rather, in places made bad by the lack of informed (designed) prior
decision-making. New West Land
Company was founded to provide design services and coordinate the efforts of
numerous specialized and skilled collaborators from project inception
(visioning) through construction, guided at each step by a Land Ethic. To this end, we engage and coordinate
specialists in many fields, most notably resource and restoration ecologists,
attorneys and estate planners familiar with the financial opportunities
available to conservationists- for-profit and non-profit alike, often in
collaboration toward a mutually beneficial outcome. Our practice collects project visioning, strategic planning,
land use design, development and architecture under a single practice type: place-appropriate inhabitation.
“place”
whether we are working to conserve or create, in a building or a landscape, is
about celebrating storied landscapes.
“inhabitation” is a term that suggests nesting, or
integrating, and its root reminds us to be mindful of habitat, the health of
our places and that that of our neighbors human and more-than-human
“appropriate” is the key principle in our practice
methodology and the least reducible to rules or codes. It is the part of our mission that
causes us to continually question our motives and practices. “Appropriate” looks different in every
place we work, but generally precedes other terms and concepts like “limits”
and “scale”, and can always be evaluated in relation to the health of the Land,
necessarily including its human communities:
… the integrity of local ecosystems… alone can
determine for the appropriate scale of human work. Without propriety of scale, and the acceptance of limits
which that implies, there can be no form- and here we reunite science and art, We live and prosper by form, which is
the power of creatures and artifacts to be made whole within their proper
limits.
Wendell Berry-from the The Way of Ignorance
“Appropriate” action then, is about scale and form; the
business of designers. We are in
the end designers- developers of form- as
well as conservationists. We are
trained to identify and create spatial conditions that support cultural and
ecological health, that integrate and teach the human community how to better
inhabit the Land. Both cultural
and natural conservation can be measured in spatial terms, and healthy landscapes have varied but
distinctive spatial characteristics- a pattern of solids, voids, volumes,
concavities, convexities and edges, as well as a particular kind of "storied"
cultural overlay to which we pay close attention.
We are a service organization, and as such hold a deep
respect not only for the Land, but also for the budgets and financial return
requirements of our clients. We
must always create value for the place and for our clients, partners, and often
their investors. In the for-profit
world, there is never a simple definition of appropriate. Our work must always be evaluated in
relation to the alternatives- can we satisfy the client’s requirements and leave the place better than we found it? Will it be better left alone? Can we locate for them a more strategic
property that is certain to allow for a conservation outcome? Not every potential client that comes
to us has a project that we can appropriately serve. And even if we are engaged early enough to help guide
sustainable initial choices, development remains a fluid and a dynamic
process. So we must continually
check in with our principles, our Land Ethic, our conscience.
A first principle of ecosystems is
“diversity builds capacity”. We
also believe this is true of cultural systems. Our process utilizes analytical
and design tools to locate the patterns and elements of landscape that make a place and a community,
in order to conserve and extend those characteristics as land use change occurs
or is contemplated. Our collaborative, expanded design process seeks to
quantify the spaces, forms and cultural uses of the “place” that has been
created by the community’s interaction with their landscape. In this way transformation can be
designed to be site specific, balanced in natural and cultural composition, and
scaled to what is best about each community.