Building Natural Architecture

In Jeanne Gang's architecture speech, she looks at cities not as urban agglomerations, but as habitats. And like habitats in the wild, she believes that urban habitats can fall out of balance -- in fact, she posits that many cities' habitats currently are.

To draw a further parallel to nature, Gang discusses how ecologists task themselves with investigating a natural environment to discover how various things are interconnected: how the landscape affects the flora, how the flora affect the fauna, how the fauna effect one another, and so on. Gang translates this ecology to cities, attesting that aspects of cities are interconnected. Individuals, climate, design, and community all have a profound effect on the urban environment, and Gang and her team have been applying these insights in their studies and buildings.