Connection
Cultural knowledge The forgotten pillar of sustainable practice
Above: A low oblique view from above the Hopi village of Oraibi, showing terraced houses, Arizona, 1898. Public domain image provided by Wikimedia Commons/ George Wharton James/University of Southern California
Cultural knowledge is the forgotten pillar of sustainable practice. It is a pillar that ancestral humans were intimately aligned with, but through the years, the culturally rooted relationship with nature became much less sustainably focused. Because we are generations removed from the cultural knowledge embedded with natural sustainable practices, today’s architectural professionals may think about sustainability in the form of rating systems or “green” design. Ideally, as a society, we never should have separated our knowledge from and relationship to nature in the first place. The way to regain that knowledge is to holistically understand how to overlap and implement the building knowledge of ancient cultures and the ever-advancing technologies of the future. Traditionally, culture is composed of five main subsets: behaviors, values, norms, rituals, and artifacts. As an architectural professional, we can immediately acknowledge our hand in historically creating “artifacts,” but ancient architects played an even greater role in all aspects of culture. In general, architectural knowledge was more widely accessible than it is today because of a slightly differing necessity on shelter. Shelter was still a necessity as it is today, but our ancestors had to build their houses, not buy them, therefore relying on the passing down of architectural, sustainable
48
building knowledge from one generation to another. The need for shelter drove different cultures to use culturally acceptable sustainable principles like gathering locally sourced resources. There also was a deep-rooted understanding that if all the resources to sustain life were to be exhausted, the environment would be changed to the point where that civilization would need to find another home. For sedentary cultures, this migration would cause cataclysmic results for various civilizations because the cultural knowledge of utilizing the known land and resources was not ancestrally understood in the new environment. Today, the principles behind using sitespecific sustainable design knowledge and historical cultural knowledge remain just as important and act as a reminder of why we need to strive for sustainable solutions. Throughout history, it has been noted that architecture is composed of significant examples of site-specific vernaculars. In many cases, their architecture was a physical embodiment of their values, beliefs, and ideologies. Depending on the culture and on the meaning behind the architecture — religious, political, power, or shelter — many ecological footprints have been placed on this earth for architects to learn from. The difficulty with learning about sustainable design from the past is that there may not be an ecological footprint. In many cases, archaeologists rely on verbal or speculative knowledge, which is then what architects must rely on, as well, but there are still excellent examples of ancient architecture that applied sustainable and cultural principles. One of the best examples of cultural knowledge as sustainable practice is in Arizona, in the Hopi village of Oraibi. Founded between 900 and 1100 AD, before the well-known historical site of Angkor Wat in Cambodia was constructed, Oraibi is estimated to be the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States. Obviously, at the creation of the village or any other historical town, modern comforts such as airconditioning or electricity were yet to be invented, but because of cultural norms and knowledge passed down throughout generations, the Hopi were able to maintain comfortability for many generations. Their homes were constructed of mud and stone. They were clustered together and at times stacked on top of one another. Today, Oraibi’s architectural vernacular is
