January 21, 2021

Building

(Flowing)

“When we build, let us think that we build forever.” — John Ruskin   

Integral architect and educator Mark DeKay, in his impressive new book Integral Sustainable Design: transformative perspectives, reconciles divergent knowledge arenas and priorities while establishing integral sustainable design as a unique practice, ideal for this time of environmental and communitarian crisis. It’s author, Mark DeKay, prods the profession and asks,what design challenges lie beyond whole systems design? And how can we shift our focus from ‘doing’ design to ‘being’ design? DeKay, a professor of architecture and director of Graduate Studies, College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee, has crafted an accessible introduction to the fascinating emerging field of integral studies as applied to the practice of architecture. Integral Sustainable Design: Transformative Perspectives is itself a breakthrough work of design, that makes a much-needed contribution to the field. Design is nothing if not sense-making. But until now, no study has ever mapped the explanations for why modern and postmodern design has continued to produce ever-expanding fragmentation and waste rather than coherence. The realm of sustainability is no exception, the design fields have mirrored the partial and qualified successes of other disciplines. Mark’s book does just that and in a voice that welcomes and enlists everyone’s capacities.

Applying integral theory to the context of architectural design history, we might say that every epoch has its architectural dignities as well as its architectural disasters, evolving and in turn transcending what proves un-resourceful, while incorporating what is valuable. DeKay’s book skillfully details precisely such developments and anticipates future possibilities for designers of habitus. His skillful choice of a range of contemporary and historical examples, drawn from every continent, elucidates what an integral approach to designing for sustainability might look like. From an integral studies view, this mainstream ecological architectural approach is considered partial because it deals only with the manifest physical world and thus is skewed toward what can be located, measured, and quantified (reduced, reused, and recycled). In the integral view, our object-oriented, status quo design methods are partial because they omit the interior dimensions of subjective individual and collective experiences. For example, individual interpretive dimensions of experience, if they are accounted for at all, tend not to be integrated with robust analytical data and building performance metrics. Seen in larger perspective, such partial approaches are shortcomings by no means unique to the design professions; they typify a common bias toward exteriors and surfaces that can simply be described as a monological characteristic of Modernity.

Until this book, no author had connected the dots from the still-emergent field of integral theory to design in such a way as to give clear instructions for its application, particularly to sustainable architectural practice. Integral Sustainable Design is a vivid map with examples, that offers possible reasons for why postmodern approaches to sustainable architecture do not reliably deliver the catalytic outcomes that one would expect given the overall promise of and excitement around whole systems design for architecture and urban studies. In fact, this book can be seen as a kind of explanation for the failure of sustainable design in general to really take root, thrive, and achieve that widely anticipated and catalytic social tipping point. He duly criticizes normative modern and postmodern architectural pedagogy for nearly exclusive emphasis on the empirico-spatial world of objects and systems. At the same time this book celebrates gifts and “dignities” of the entire spectrum of world views expressed as architecture; the Tribal, Traditional, Modern, Postmodern and Post-postmodern. Integral Sustainable Design points toward practical ways to apply integral theory to the daunting challenges germane to the realm of sustainable design and architecture. DeKay situates typical problem spaces faced by designers and architects within an accessible, carefully staged introduction to the rather complex AQAL (all-quadrant, all-level) framework that is core to Integral Theory. Noting that designers are actually skilled at pattern recognition and development, he applies the four perspective AQAL framework to sustainable architecture and identifies the perspectives of each of the four quadrants as follows, “Shape form to Maximize Performance” (the objective behaviors perspective); “Shape Form to Guide Flow” (the objective systems perspective); “Shape Form to Manifest Meaning” (the subjective, cultural perspective); and “Shape Form to Engender Experience” (the subjective and sensory perspective). As the reader is drawn, via stunning color plates and evocative language, into the thoughtful critical analysis of historical and contemporary approaches to architecture and habitus, she simultaneously inhabits the clear space afforded by integral analysis. In part II, Levels of Complexity in Sustainable Design, we are introduced to a subtlety that will engage any designer wishing to take human-centered and/or biomimicry driven design thinking methodologies to the next level of challenge. Integral perspective-taking, here applied to architectural history via examples that DeKay calls Unfolding Prospects of the Interior and Exterior Perspectives, provides a compelling demonstration of the value of a design awareness grounded in all quadrants of the AQAL and valuing the contributions and insights and developmental orientations of all “prospects”.

I appreciate the well-reasoned staging of the major chapters as the author first introduces the reader to Integral Theory with a basic orientation to the quadrants, and then adds further discernment by describing the views from each developmental level within each quadrant or “prospect” (his term for a Kosmic address or developmental niche). Later, in Part III, Ecological Design Thinking: Six Perceptual Shifts and Part IV, Designing Relationships to Nature, the author wisely simplifies the integral lines and levels of development as Traditional, Modern, Postmodern, Integral and Transpersonal for clarity, and then performs a sensitive analysis of relationships to nature at each of these levels throughout history in the form of perspectives on the nature of Nature. Along the way, he transcends yet includes the wisdom of such giants of whole systems design and architecture as Frank Lloyd Wright, Fritjof Capra, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim_Van_der_Ryn, and Christopher Alexander, balancing these representative cases with plenty of examples drawn from non-Euro-western sources and from outside the canon of architecture. DeKay explicates the career contributions of Sim Van der Ryn architect and author of Ecological Design and Design for Life, as exemplar of Integral thinking in design noting his synthetic sensibility. “The grand project of Integral Level Sustainable Design is the synthesis of cultural and natural orders, interpenetrating, as reflective of a singular underlying structure revealed paradoxically through many views” (DeKay 390) DeKay also notes the high action-logic evidenced in the extraordinary master of nested order, Christopher Alexander and his visionary A Pattern Language “Because the theory of pattern languages is the only truly process-based theory of building, it is possibly the design theory with the most potential as the basis of an ecological architecture, and perhaps also as a major aspect of Integral Sustainable Design Theory”(DeKay 296).

Ken Wilber is famously quoted as saying that the culture gap and the environmental crisis are one in the same. “Because the startling fact is that ecological wisdom does not consist in understanding how to live in accord with nature; it consists in understanding how to get humans to agree on how to live in accord with nature.” In a low-key yet authoritative manner, DeKay demonstrates that designing integrally is an inside job; it begins with one’s own consciousness. He challenges the architecture profession and the schools that feed it to create a culture of transformation. “What we designers need is….a Designer’s Integral Yoga,” he writes and sets out body, mind, spirit practices for cultivation of the being of the designer. These practical injunctions take their cues from sources such as Integral Life Practice (Shambhala, 2008), a whole-person practicum for embodiment filled with tangible pointers for any designer wishing to engage, to align, and to integrate their whole being and who aspire to lead the next generation of sustainable practice. In Part IV, Metaphors and Injunctions for Deep Connections, and what follows, DeKay gives poetic concluding remarks and inspirational next steps toward a general integral theory of design.

Challenging the profession as well as to the individual designer to walk the talk, Mark DeKay’s vision of an integral design practice constitutes an entirely new way of performing the role of designer with our whole being. Integral Sustainable Design models the empathic and embodied capacities demanded by today’s challenges, while underscoring the awesome responsibility that each designer holds.

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