The dawning of my political awareness took place during the heady days of the late 1960s and early ’70s and that took my views on organic architecture thoroughly into the public realm, leading me to question how whole neighbourhoods and cities could better fit their place and respond to the needs of their occupants. This started me consciously theorising about architecture and cities but I’ve always believed that theory is meaningless unless tested in practice, and I hold strongly to the view that designs, drawings, models and electronic data do not represent ‘Architecture’ unless it can be built. And so I tried to find ways of linking and testing my theory and practice.
Two years spent with my family teaching in Jordan opened my eyes to the deeper historical roots of creating human settlement and confirmed the enormous political and cultural importance of buildings. Walking through the ruins of cities of the Decapolis, seeing the jungle murals on the walls of a hunting lodge sitting in the middle of what is now denuded desert, hearing from both sides about the settlement programs of the West Bank, all added to my continually growing conviction that the way we build shapes the social and bio-physical environment profoundly — and that this is much more important than concerns about any particular ‘style’.
I studied architecture at the Welsh School of Architecture and in the early ’70s it was already one of the leading schools in the realm of architectural science and the study of the relationship between buildings and the environment so I had a good grounding in climate-responsive design, but moving from cold, damp Wales to Jordan taught me much more on an experiential level!
I’ve always been something of a climate-obsessive and have researched climate change issues on and off for years (my major final year essay in 1975 was titled ‘Climate Consciousness as a Counter-cultural Imperative’!). So when four years after I arrived in Australia the Commission for the Future ran an award-winning national conference called ‘Greenhouse 88’ my climate obsession was stoked. To cut a long story short, a group of us put ‘Built Environment’ on the cognitive map of climate change and formed the ‘Greenhouse Association of South Australia’. With my partner, Chérie Hoyle, networking and organising I was able to focus on developing a conceptual model for architecture and cities designed to fit an era of rapidly changing climate. This became the basis for the theory of ‘Ecopolis’.
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