Environs (IT) - the built environment

The principles of integral ecology extend into apithology with the design of the built environment for Hester Brook Retreat. When the domain of the human species becomes a landscape feature that preserves, sustains and ehances the natural environment linking social, economic, natural and built capitals into the one design we approach not just ecologically aware design, but apithological design.

Hester Brook Retreat has comissioned Paradigm Architects for the conceptualisation, design and development of the built environs for the Retreat.

Design Approach

Paradigm Architects' award winning designs follow their three design principles of:

These principles complement the three dimensions of apithology, being to:

1. preserve - what is there by appropriate use of materials, aspect, sypathetic lines,

2. sustain - the values which support a continuation of the present now and in the future, and

3. enhance - the whole by the experience of the alignment between all of the parts.

To consciously bring together the elements of good design into an apithological environment was the essence of our design brief.

Apithology and Architecture

The principles of apithology both integrate and expand the principles of sustainable architecture.

In this project we recognized that, as an undisturbed conservation zone, all the stages of the builtform process (from inspection, to construction, to demolition) would involve degradation, but appropriate use could also include preservation. As the site has no prospect for connection to any utilities (other than the sun and atmosphere) the functionality of the forms must be self-sustaining indefinately, being truly sustainable and sustaining as to their energy and material needs. As an integral ecology project, the main collaborator is the ecology of the site itself. The land and its inhabitants become the clients (the human end-users are simply caretakers of the design process) with the aim of collaboratively enhancing that ecology.

The specifics of the brief included the following:

Design Brief

1. Footprint: The first principle of apithology (preserve) recognizes that the built environment at Hester Brook Retreat must embrace the foundation principle that we tread lightly. Following the induction that 'everything is habitat' we recognize that any physical structure and its installation will involve many impacts. Access from front-gate-to-site will involve ecological management, with the problem designed into the architectural solution, so that only a temporary imprint remains as evidence of us as a once-visitor, both for the building and its visitors, in both construction and use.

2. Materials: The second principle of apithology (sustain) meshes with, and does not exclude, the first principle.Hester Brook is a jarrah-forest. Sustainability extends here to the transformation of the site based natural-capital into equally beautiful manufactured-capital. Resources used in the design should take into account, not only their lifecycle costs from a sustainability perspective in terms of embedded energy and transport emissions off-set, but also the potential for local sourcing (for example, the Greenbushes mine is within 20km and has been a source of tin for over 100 years).

3. Viewscape: The third principle of apithology (enhance) poses the question of can the man-made form ever really enhance an already naturally balanced ecology. At one level this can be in the visual enhancement of the enironment in terms of aesthetics (at multiple levels of depth). It also includes the functional enhancement in terms of utility (i.e. the capture of rainwater that forms a resilience for the existing open-cycle ecosystems, but not a storage use that supports an artificial and unsustainable state). The principle to be followed is that any interventions into the system must enhance the system. As an example, the viewscape at Hester Brook is already naturally perfect. The architecture philosophy required is one that enhances those natural viewscapes and landscapes, but does not detract from them by the imposition of the builtform. A challenge in itself.

4. Movement: Any good architecture must take into account the physical effects of flow; airflow, wind turbulence, reflective light impacts, soil erosion and flood movement - to identify just a few. As apithology incorporates integral levels of depth, this means interpretative dimensions must also be taken into account in the flow. This means that flow includes the felt experience from the perspective of all visitors, including other species. For example, Hester Brook is a major wildlife corridor and most of the potential building sites are near established marsupial trails that provide a human-animal network through the property. The movement needs of all of the existing residents, not as objects, but as sentients with interior depth, is part of the design brief.

5. Resilience: The natural environment at Hester Brook is essentially in a restorative phase. The 80 year re-growth from timber operations, the 30 year impact from grazing and the 10 year impact from human interventions are almost complete in their reformation. The environment itself is subject to periodic restorative fires with decades of visual effects and perennial flash floods which last only a few hours. The builtform at Hester Brook must be resilient in the same way, able to withstand fire and flood unscathed (like the jarrah and river gums) while at the same time being able to decay when the lifecycle of the non-recyclable components is complete (as evidenced in the forest by the leaf litter and the many termite workings). One present project is the removal of all human evidence of physical intervention on the property (other than that which is culturally significant). Eventually only the apithological builtforms will remain.

7. Scale: In evolutionary terms survival of the fittest means, not the strongest, but that which fits best into its niche in a complex ecosystem. As a bounded ecosystem, Hester Brook Retreat has just enough size to have autopoesic properties and is self-sustaining, but has defined limits on the scale of internal change. Within it are a number of micro-ecosystems that also are of a size that can sustain themselves, but only within the scale of impacts on the rest of the system. The size of the built environment is therefore not set by human needs, but instead the scale of human use is set by the systems' ecological needs. The utility of the built environment will define, expand and limit the human use that is appropriate. Buildings must be scaleable within these limits to set the boundaries for the human interaction with the Retreat. Success will be in balancing human consumption needs (e.g. water and wastes) and their effects with the ecosystem. This brief is different, as instead of being scaled up to the human use required, the architecture will set the parameters for the human habitation possible within the already healthy apithological ecology.

7. Legacy: Hester Brook is a legacy asset. As the project has timescales that extend sustainability thinking way beyond normal return-on-capital equations its legacy is really the intangible of enduring principle proven in practice. The architecture concepts within it therefore need endurance and resilience. However, as the changing nature of the human experience has changing needs, so must the builtforms we use. Like moods they should be able to be changed. These moods may be 20 years. They may (in terms of climate change) be Gaia's 9000 year mood. The legacy is permanent but fluid. Therefore the removal time benchmark for the built environment at Hester Brook is 16 man hours (i.e. four workers in an afternoon) per base-housing unit. As quickly as we arrive we must be able to leave - while 'at all times acting with good grace like we plan to stay'.

8. Perspective: Because apithology is informed by the epistemology of integral inquiry, the eight indigenous perspectives of being-in-the-world (Wilber 2003) must all form part of the inquiry process. While they may not change or influence any part of the apithological design of the final builtform, their cognizance and integration is the way in which that design will ultimately be assessed. The integral inquiry process for apithological architecture requires us to examine the phenomenological, the psycho-structural, the ethnocultural, the hermeneuetic, the systemic, the social autopoetic, the empirical and the physically tangible. The material densities, quantities used, social forms enabled, standards complied with, cultural exchange facilitated, meaning generated, wellbeing enacted and experiences felt are the categories of perspectives for inquiry into the enduring success of this project.

Potential Sites

There are a number of potential sites on the land for various forms of building. The four existing sites for visitors (summer camp, spring camp, autumn camp, winter camp) suggest four different seasonal uses and four different forms. Each has different gradient and access aspects that suggest different types of sustainable use. A Main Camp site exists at the treeline in the north facing cleared space.