Perhaps you are familiar with the type of round coin or amulet with a square hole in the center that has been used in China for over two thousand years. It represents the rounded sky that circumscribes the square earth and, more importantly, a set of rational and moral principles that helped the ancient Chinese interpret their lives.
Each culture guides its society and its living spaces in accordance with certain generally accepted norms and beliefs. Today, capitalism guides our lives, as does, increasingly, a reaction to many of the effects of capitalism that we call sustainability. But perhaps the ancient Chinese can help us understand how capitalism and sustainability shape the spaces around us, especially cities and buildings.
Unless you’re talking about an underground nuclear bunker or a storage vault for wine, money, or missiles, a building rises from the ground up into the sky. The ancient Chinese believed that buildings linked the earth with the sky and therefore the natural world with the supernatural. A building was a mystical, if not sacred, space and had to be properly designed to ensure the good fortune of its inhabitants.
The building must be rectilinear and symmetrical, neither too big nor too small for the number of occupants. The main entrance should be facing south, the direction from which good luck and healthy sun came. The sun was represented by the number nine, which was also the symbol of growth, positive action, and fulfillment. The ideal building had the pattern of a 3×3 square. Buildings often had arches, doors, windows, rooms, and columns in multiples of nine.
The ancient Chinese theory of spatial order spread throughout Asia, especially Japan and Korea, and was used to determine the proper height, width, and depth of structures. The size and orientation of a building were not based on its function or use, but on the calculations of a geomancer or master of aesthetics. The calculations became both the site plan and the architectural blueprint to be followed by a builder. The same relationships governed the design of almost everything spatial: plates, houses, temples, tombs, public spaces, agricultural fields, and even government administrative districts, of which there were nine in ancient China.
The rules for the location and design of structures still left plenty of room for distinctive ornaments and ornaments according to the preferences and resources of the owners. The spiritual energy of a building, in fact, is derived from the interplay of individual decorative qualities and communal organizing principles, that is, the interplay of the particular and the universal.
If a building brought fortune (or not) to a family, many buildings could determine the fate of a community, so a city must also be properly designed: symmetrical and rectilinear, with walls, gates and streets facing mountains, rivers. and especially the points of a compass.
The problem for the ancient Chinese was that their cities were already established for a long time. And they were asymmetrical and irregular in shape. Their cosmography guided their lives, but it could be applied to the built environment only selectively: when a new building was constructed or an old one was remodeled, when city walls had to be expanded, or when existing houses could be demolished without protest to build a temple. or a palace for the emperor. It was simply not possible to make an entire city conform to the dominant ideals, standards, and beliefs about geography, architecture, and life in general.
Ancient Chinese city builders faced the dilemma that arises when the prevailing worldview does not match a particular setting and there is no practical way to reconcile differences.
Today, we prefer to use words like science rather than cosmology and planner rather than geomancer, but our image of space is increasingly animated by the concept of sustainability. The idea is to be kinder to the land, water, and sky, especially through the things we do. Our buildings and behaviors must minimize waste and pollution, maximize health and well-being, and optimize the use of natural resources, especially energy. We must consider both the future and the present.
Yet it is not possible to rebuild all inefficient buildings and neighborhoods, replace many roads with rail lines, or require that people not aspire to increasing levels of material satisfaction – actions that could significantly and dramatically align our world with wisdom. of sustainability. And so, like the ancient Chinese, we must be content with individual projects and efforts that leave a smaller ecological footprint: homes with solar panels and reinforced insulation, an energy-efficient office building, a new light rail line, recycling cans and bottles, turning off the lights when we leave a room, and we hope they proliferate, expand, and make a difference before their benefits are canceled out by the impacts of more driving, more air travel, and the higher overall consumption that has been a hallmark of the human life for the last four hundred years.
No worldview has managed to survive capitalism. All, like the ancient Chinese, have succumbed to material consumption. Capitalism feeds on constant and growing consumption, and we cannot conceive of any alternative to capitalism. Sustainability, in fact, does not make sense outside the context of capitalism, because the natural environment that we hope to sustain for ourselves and future generations is threatened by the need for capitalism to expand.