ABOUT NEW WEST LAND COMPANY, INC.
“An environmental ethic will come into existence not primarily through the logical elucidation of new philosophical principles and legislative strictures, but though a renewed attentiveness to this perceptual dimension that underlies all our logics, through a rejuvenation of our carnal, sensorial empathy with the living land that sustains us.”
David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous
After many years of internationally acclaimed architectural practice as principal and co-founder of Roto Architects, inc, Clark Stevens saw the need to position his practice “upstream” in the flow of decisions that go into creating architecture. As a life-long naturalist, Stevens had long looked to the Land- its forms and many communities- as the basis for form- and place-making. In 15 years of practicing, teaching, and writing about architecture, the Land emerged for him as more than a source of information for the making of buildings, but as the basis for a type and ethic of architectural practice. As the pioneering ecologist Aldo Leopold postulated early in the last century:
When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.
Too often an architect is asked to make a “good” building- increasingly a “green” or “sustainable” building- in a physical, cultural, social and ecological context (a site) that is the result of a prior decision-making process completely at odds with this goal. Too often we are asked to make good buildings in bad places, or rather, in places made bad by the lack of informed (designed) prior decision-making. New West Land Company was founded to provide design services and coordinate the efforts of numerous specialized and skilled collaborators from project inception (visioning) through construction, guided at each step by a Land Ethic. To this end, we engage and coordinate specialists in many fields, most notably resource and restoration ecologists, attorneys and estate planners familiar with the financial opportunities available to conservationists- for-profit and non-profit alike, often in collaboration toward a mutually beneficial outcome. Our practice collects project visioning, strategic planning, land use design, development and architecture under a single practice type: place-appropriate inhabitation.
“place” whether we are working to conserve or create, in a building or a landscape, is about celebrating storied landscapes.
“inhabitation” is a term that suggests nesting, or integrating, and its root reminds us to be mindful of habitat, the health of our places and that that of our neighbors human and more-than-human
“appropriate” is the key principle in our practice methodology and the least reducible to rules or codes. It is the part of our mission that causes us to continually question our motives and practices. “Appropriate” looks different in every place we work, but generally precedes other terms and concepts like “limits” and “scale”, and can always be evaluated in relation to the health of the Land, necessarily including its human communities:
… the integrity of local ecosystems… alone can determine for the appropriate scale of human work. Without propriety of scale, and the acceptance of limits which that implies, there can be no form- and here we reunite science and art, We live and prosper by form, which is the power of creatures and artifacts to be made whole within their proper limits.
Wendell Berry-from the “The Way of Ignorance”
“Appropriate” action then, is about scale and form; the business of designers. We are in the end designers- developers of form- as well as conservationists. We are trained to identify and create spatial conditions that support cultural and ecological health, that integrate and teach the human community how to better inhabit the Land. Both cultural and natural conservation can be measured in spatial terms. Healthy landscapes have varied but distinctive spatial characteristics- a pattern of solids, voids, volumes, concavities, convexities and edges, as well as a particular kind of "storied" cultural overlay.
We are a service organization, and as such hold a deep respect not only for the Land, but also for the budgets and financial return requirements of our clients. We must always create value for the place and for our clients, partners, and often their investors. In the for-profit world, there is never a simple definition of appropriate. Our work must always be evaluated in relation to the alternatives- can we satisfy the client’s requirements and leave the place better than we found it? Will it be better left alone? Can we locate for them a more strategic property that is certain to allow for a conservation outcome? Not every potential client that comes to us has a project that we can appropriately serve. And even if we are engaged early enough to help guide sustainable initial choices, development remains a fluid and a dynamic process. So we must continually check in with our principles, our Land Ethic, our conscience.
The first principle of ecosystems in sometime defined as “diversity builds capacity”. We also believe this is true of cultural systems. Our process utilizes analytical and design tools to locate the patterns and elements of landscape that make a place and a community, in order to conserve and extend those characteristics as land use change occurs or is contemplated. Our collaborative, expanded design process seeks to quantify the spaces, forms and cultural uses of the “place” that has been created by the community’s interaction with their landscape. In this way transformation can be designed to be site specific, balanced in natural and cultural composition, and scaled to what is best about each community.
