Introduction

The salvation of the human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility.

—Václav Havel

In the fall of 2008 after the beginnings of the financial meltdown on Wall Street, I started getting frantic calls and e-mails from both young and seasoned architects who'd been laid off and also a smaller number of communications from people who worked on Wall Street—mostly young but also some more senior people. I'm not sure why they contacted me—the architects might have known about me or read my books—certainly not the Wall Streeters, whom I did ask, "Why are you calling me?" Their answer was that they were referred to me by mutual friends.

My response took me back to backpacking experiences. Occasionally, when I was backpacking alone in western wilderness mountain areas, I would get lost. I had maps but GPS was yet to be invented. My first response was panic. Then I would sit down quietly and breathe slowly into my core, a place I now call "the inner self"—a sanctuary to go into when one is in difficult times. I would breathe, shut down my frantic mind, and follow the wordless intuition, which emerged from deep within my core.

My reply to those who contacted me was, "When you feel lost, throw away your mental maps and find a safe place, a sanctuary within yourself where your deepest self and inner truth lives." Some of my correspondents would stutter and end the conversation right there. Others would ask if they could visit me at my home on the rural coast of Northern California, and I met with quite a few.

I suddenly found myself acting as a life guide. Why was I willing to do this? I'm a member of the "Lucky Generation" born during the Great Depression of the 1930s who came into the workforce in the 1950s as America began a period of tremendous expansion and growth following World War II. When I graduated with a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Michigan in 1958, I had lots of job offers, and not because I had been an exceptional student. Gordon Bunshaft, chief of design at Skidmore Owings and Merrill, then the top corporate firm in the country, offered me a job in New York. Touring the drafting room, I was dazed by the sight of more than a hundred men in white shirts and ties hunched over their drafting boards.

This was not for me. I flew to San Francisco and found many smaller offices that were hiring. After a few years completing my internship, I started teaching in the architecture program at the University of California, Berkeley, and also started an office with a high school friend from New York, Sanford Hirshen. In my academic career, I was mentored in my work by department chairs and deans who were very supportive of my interests, even though they didn't fit into the mainstream architectural program at the time. Our young firm did significant work in low-cost and innovative housing and we had great clients.

When the calls came in from desperate young architects in 2008, I knew it was time to do what I could for other designers who did not live in a time as generous, optimistic, and supportive of innovation as my contemporaries and I had.

I feel gratitude toward an empathic older generation that nurtured and guided me as a young architect and teacher. My generation and the post-World War II baby boomers that followed have the opportunity to enable today's younger generation in their lives, which are more difficult than ours were. That is a task we should be grateful to accept as our legacy to a younger generation. As we get older, we hopefully feel ourselves more deeply living the truth of our inner selves; and sharing that with a new generation is something we can give to those who will follow us.

In this book, I share my thoughts and experience about the design of our world today. I focus on both the strengths and the weaknesses in our approach to the design of our communities, regions, and buildings with a critical eye and suggest how we can help create a better world for others and ourselves. Mine has been a long journey. As Steve Jobs said, "You can only connect [the dots] looking backwards." The biggest lessons I've learned relate to caring for others and being true to myself. Carlos Casteneda once said, "Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't then it is of no use to us."

My lifetime focus has been shifting the paradigm in architecture and design. We now think of design primarily in relation to the infrastructure we live in and with: buildings, transportation, automobiles and highways, trains and buses, airplanes and airports, oil and natural gas lines, electricity, water and sewer systems, phones, computers, TV and radios. There is little focus on the people who use and are affected by this infrastructure. There is still little thought given within design professions to how someone will use a space or a building. The design brief or program is generally prepared by the client and defined mostly in terms of square foot requirements for different uses. Basically, design leaves out any real understanding of human ecology or end-user preferences. How many office workers would voluntarily choose to spend their working lives in windowless cubicles? Although it seems like common sense, the field of post-occupancy evaluation that I helped to found in the 1970s is still not broadly accepted. Post-occupancy evaluation uses observation and interviews as tools to uncover how occupants actually use and respond to the designed environments they live and work in.

This disconnect from end use allows designers to design without empathy for humans, to separate the work from themselves, and still too often, to design without empathy for the natural environment. It is not just one of these connections, but all three—to self, to others, and to nature—that are necessary to design for a future that is more humane, equitable, and resilient.

At a time when the gap between the wealthy and the poor is expanding, we're faced with the possibility of peak oil, increasing incidents of human-induced as well as natural disasters (many as a result of or exacerbated by climate change), and challenges to strong in-person community networks brought about by more time in cyberspace than public space. We need to takes steps to reconnect design to the human and natural elements that are being lost at great expense. Design is much more than ratios, regulations, and beautiful 3D models. The way we approach design has implications for human and natural networks and the future of our planet.

Integrating the design of human systems and natural systems for the benefit of humans and the living world is ecological design, an important...