Invited Proposal
Aldo Leopold Legacy Center (2003)
Michael Roy Iversen, Urban and Campus Ecology (MRI-UCE)
Project Consultant: Conceptual Design
This proposal was submitted to the Aldo Leopold Foundation for the architectural design of the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, an education and interpretative center to be located near the site of the historic Leopold shack, outside of Baraboo, WI. The interdisciplinary project team was led and assembled by Michael Roy Iversen, Architect, and comprised of Wheeler Kearns Architects, IBC Engineering Services, Inc. and Conservation Design Forum.
The project team was unique in that it employed an interdisciplinary approach, one that included collaboration between professional architects and engineers with expertise in sustainable design, as well as a botanist and ecologist (Dr. Gerould Wilhelm, Principal-in-Charge / Conservation Design Forum).
The design philosophy for this project was to create a natural design aesthetic informed by the specific ecological aspects of this site and building program. Much of Leopold’s work was informed by literature, which overlapped with his own writings, teaching and work. This design project provided the opportunity for continuing this evolution of thought and ecological conscience, and expressing it as physical form.
PROJECT INTEREST
Our interest in this project is based on the opportunity to architecturally express Aldo Leopold’s philosophy on ecology, aesthetics and ethics in the physical form of the Leopold Legacy Center. The design philosophy of Michael Roy Iversen, Architect, has always been based on the natural science of ecology, and more specifically, the ecosystem model. The principals of ecology, as espoused by Sir Arthur Tansley, Eugene P. Odum and Aldo Leopold, form the basis for a ‘design ecology’, which is simply expressed as the orchestration of energy flows and material cycles.
The challenge of creating a natural design aesthetic informed by the specific ecological aspects of this site and building program, rather than an artifactual aesthetic which currently serves our built environment, represents a unique opportunity. Much of Leopold’s work was informed by literature, which overlapped with his own writings, teaching and work. This project provides the challenge of continuing this evolution of thought and ecological conscience, and expressing it as physical form.
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
Our design philosophy is based on the principles of ecology. In the same way that an ecosystem works, so does the built environment. This viewpoint applies to the various scales found in the built environment, whether a single material, building, community, city or region.
In very simple terms, an ecosystem is a dynamic, closed-loop system, that is, things are constantly entering and leaving, as inputs and outputs. The system is defined by a boundary, such as a prairie or a forest. The input environment is composed of energy and materials (nutrients and organisms). These inputs are then processed by the system into resultant outputs. The output environment is composed of processed energy (stored, converted, consumed) and material exports. Therefore, an ecosystem may be functionally diagrammed as energy flows and material cycles (hydrologic, carbon, nitrogen, etc.). Within each system there are processes, such as feedback loops, energy circuits, heat sinks, etc., which are governed by the laws of nature (photosynthesis, decomposition, etc.) and evolution.
Leopold himself explained this very principle in his essay, A Biotic View of Land (1939), with his biotic or land pyramid. “Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added by absorption, some is stored in soils, peats, and forests, but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life.”
In this described system, if we replace the ecosystem with any component of the built environment, such as a building, we notice a significant difference in the output environment. Energy flow inputs are partially transformed into waste byproducts (pollutants and heat energy), as are materials cycles (solid waste and pollutants). In nature, the concept of waste does not exist. In a human-made environment, or open-loop system, design inefficiency is represented by waste.
If one uses the ecosystem as model for the design process, then a design epistemology can be derived on minimizing or eliminating the concept of waste. Not only would form follow function (as per the specific needs of the client), but form would need to follow energy flows and material cycles as well (as per the specific needs of the natural environment). The expansion of the paradigm ‘Form follows Function’ to allow the inclusion of energy flows and material cycles is the essence of design ecology.
From this new paradigm, a newly informed aesthetic would need to emerge, based on the language and sensibility of ecology. Leopold understood the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. He continually described a “natural esthetic” in his writings, defining the meaning of art, as “the drama of the land’s working.” (The Role of Wildlife in a Liberal Education, 1942). Leopold was cut from the same cloth as Prairie School architects, by seeing beauty not in the artifactual and contrived, but from the utilitarian and natural aesthetic that evolved from ecological processes.
Our design philosophy is based on the continuum of thought shared by Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, Henry C. Cowles, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Eugene P. Odum, Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold. It is based on the relation of people to land, and the resultant ethics and aesthetics.
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.
It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Leopold Aldo, adapted from The Ecological Conscience (1947), for use in A Sand County Almanac (1949)
Michael Roy Iversen 