Regreening the Earth in the 21st Century

A paradigm shift needs to occur between the relationship of architecture and nature. In the past, the two have frequently been treated as separate entities - design a building, a road, or a parking lot and place it on the land. A different approach would be to first examine the land and surrounding environment and formulate a design solution that minimizes destruction to habitat and open space and aesthetically fuses the structure with the surroundings. It is quite plausible that a building be designed that actually creates greenspace; likewise, a roadway can be a park, an alley a wildlife corridor, a parking surface a garden. It is really a matter of shifting our preconceptions of how we define space, structure and nature. The three can be indeed be one in the same.