Housing Nature

Architect John Lautner would have been 100 years old this month. NPR had a piece on our local radio station about Frank Lloyd Wright thinking Lautner the second best architect in the world and how Lautner houses brought nature IN to the living space. In Los Angeles, which Mr. Lautner named the ugliest city in the world because of its concrete rivers, maladaptive housing style and smog, his most famous house is the "Chemosphere" overlooking the San Fernando Valley just off Mullholland Drive. A glass doughnut sitting atop a pedestal that must be approached by private funicula, this mushroom shaped home is iconic, intriguing and certainly the most interesting feature of the hillside community.

The home in which I grew up is also a Lautner house in Echo Park, near downtown Los Angeles. Nature certainly was part of my childhood - inside and outside. The red concrete slab floor was laid over copper tubing which circulated hot water through it providing “radiant heat” in winter. That warm slab floor - level with the grass just the other side of huge plate glass sliding doors - invited critters of all  sorts to come right in. Black widow spiders, centipedes, scorpions and once a rattle snake found homes within our home. The creepiest feeling was to see a centipede fall from the ceiling and not know exactly where it landed. Automatic reflexes last a lifetime evidentally. To this day, if I see a small something fall I go upside down and shake my head and swat my hair - just to make sure that any creature with way too many legs is not IN my hair. 

The other thing that flowed freely through our home was water. Whenever it rained hard enough to saturate the hill behind our house, the rice paddy pretending to be our back yard would flood and all that water would seek its lowest level which was the downward slope on the other side of our house. In winter we had an indoor heated wading-pool - which was great except for touching the refrigerator or record player, which could be a shocking experience!

I wonder about John Lautner’s dedication to bringing the natural world into the living space. Was it born of not wanting to box people in? Or of refusing to relegate the wildness of nature to beyond doors? Either way, I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Lautner.

One of my personal heroines is Robbie Davis Floyd, cultural anthropologist, author (Birth: An American Rite of Passage), lecturer, mother and champion of birthing mamas world wide. Robbie uses the story of “The Three Little Pigs” as a metaphor illustrating how humans have systematically pushed away or otherwise tried to control everything that’s wild.

Little Pig Number One represents the Hunter/Gatherer era of humans on the planet. “Number One was fond of play, so he built his house with hay. With a hey, hey toot he played on his flute and danced around all day.”*  Food was fairly plentiful after the Ice Age. Men went after wild game while women and children collected roots, grasses, berries and whatever other edibles were to be found in the pristine garden of Eden. There was leisure time to “talk-story” around the evening campfire, play music on mastodon scapulae or logs, sing, dance and have a pretty good time entertaining one another while passing on the cultural values to the young ones. I can imagine that many of the stories were about the unpredictability of the natural world and the deep respect needed to live right along side myriad creatures... or how we lost Glorg last winter to a hungry Sabertooth Tiger.

“Number two was fond of Jigs so he built his house with twigs. Hey diddle diddle he played on his fiddle and he danced with the lady pigs.”* Piglet Number Two stands for the agrarian folk who began to domesticate animals and stay put for some time, planting crops to ensure more stable (they thought) sources of food. They didn’t have quite as much free time to cavort in nature and, in fact, expended quite a lot of effort in keeping at bay the wild things that ate their crops and livestock.

“Number Three said, ‘Nix on tricks. I shall build my house of bricks.’ He had no chance to sing and dance ‘cause work and play don’t mix.”* Davis-Floyd uses the term “technocracy” to describe our current human plight. We’ve pushed nature so far from us that the wild element (the Wolf) is about as subdued as we can make him. What we’ve lost is connection with the natural world, and as a result, the wild side of our own nature. In addition, countless species are becoming extinct due to our selfish and ignorant behavior which is polluting the entire planet. Our technical wizardry has landed us in hot (and caustic) water.

Robbie Davis Floyd extends the metaphor to describe the birthing practices around the world where these three lifestyles still prevail. Yes, there are hunting/gatherering tribes. When a pregnant gatherer goes into labor she secludes herself, squatting in the bushes or in her rudimentary home and gives birth - very soon to return to her duties and to the care of her family. The human female body is designed to be adept at bearing and giving birth to babies with ease. Our bodies have been preparing to give birth since we were an egg inside our mother's infant body when she was floating in our grandmother's dark and quiet! The process is meant to work - well!

Rural farm folk tended to have midwives come to support their women in labor. Still a basic trust of nature prevailed, but let’s have someone skilled and familiar with the process on hand to support the birth, shall we?

Industrialized society views a woman’s body as a machine. The distrust of birth as the natural process it was meant to be is so extreme that women are thought to be incapable of giving birth and so must be delivered. Many more machines are employed to extract babies from the womb than I can name here. From forceps to vacuum extracters to Caesarean Section - babies have imprints of the mechanization of birth written on their sweet flesh and embedded in their psyches.

Do we really have to wonder why the world is so crazy? We’ve barred nature from entrering into our homes and into our hearts. What have we truly lost? How do we get it back?

Perhaps the Occupy Folks have the right idea... let’s camp out on the grass, sort things out and reconvene when we’ve regained some balance between nurturing Nature and the human heart on one side of the equation and appropriate use of technology on the other.

Perhaps Lautner’s adamantine efforts to bring nature in was more than an artistic statement; perhaps it is a pro-survival strategy after all. 


And hey, if something falls from the ceiling, simply turn upside down, shake your head and swat at your hair.


*Lyrics from "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" by A. Ronell and F. Churchill