Hi.  I am Steven Stewarts, founder of the

Society for Living Structure.

I have an academic background in architecture, urban design and urban planning, have worked for over 30 years in the commercial real estate industry and sit on the board of directors of a nonprofit affordable housing development organization in New York City.

Time and time again I have been confronted with the fact that each of these roles exists within a particular discipline, a particular professional culture, each with its own worldview and value system, each interpreting the built-environment through its own lens.

Much like the fabled story of the blind men feeling different parts of an elephant and drawing totally different conclusions as to what an elephant actually is, these disciplines focus on specific aspects of the built-environment.

The real estate industry sees the built environment consisting primarily of buildings that are commodities satisfying consumer demand; the architectural world focuses primarily on the opportunity to exercise creativity in the creation of works of aesthetic merit; the planning profession is primarily concerned with rules, regulations and codes in service to what it perceives to be the public good.

This kind of specialization certainly has its place – we need designers, planners, builders, regulators. But the end result, the built environment as a whole, is by nature a complex, unruly inter-meshing of aesthetic design, economic interests, transportation and communication systems, codes and regulations, all intersecting with the everyday needs of us – its inhabitants, as we carry out our day-to-day activities, as we live our lives.

It was with an eye towards creating a space for exploring ways to transcend the less-than-comprehensive focus of the individual disciplines ; indeed a space to transcend the reliance on professional specialists and to tackle the issue of what we, as individuals, as members of local communities, as concerned citizens, as inhabitants of a shared planet, envision, desire, and are willing to work towards in order to manifest a built environment that truly provides for the wide range of human and planetary needs, that is worthy of being one of the central artifacts and primary productions of civilization.

We are, each of us, complex whole beings with a complex hierarchy of needs.  The environment we create, individually and collectively, in order to best organize society, in order to best satisfy our individual and collective needs, must be multi-dimensional, must be of sufficient depth and of sufficient complexity to best support life – the lives of our families, of our communities, of our planet.

The non-human-built portions of our environment, those we label as belonging to “Nature” (as if what we humans build must, of necessity, be set apart as “Un-Nature”) consists of forms and systems that have co-evolved with the other species with whom we share this planet in response to geography, resources, weather patterns.  They have developed their structure through countless adjustments and adaptations ceaselessly seeking a best fit within the “web of life” of our biosphere.

But we, as a species, are not apart from an appropriately broad definition of Nature; we are an intrinsic part of it. Human nature is not the opposite of Nature, it is a subset of it. And the solution to many of the problems of the ever-increasing portion of the environment that is created by and is in service to us, the members of the human species, may well lie in learning and utilizing the processes and systems used by Nature. Not in a superficial mimicking of natural forms, but in utilizing Nature’s creative processes of how forms and structures emerge and adapt, in how Nature creates, maintains and supports a living structure within which life can emerge, exist and prosper.

to best fit to best serve really be a strict demarcation between what we as humans build and the rest of the from nature

the intersection of (FEW EXIST THAT TAKE A HOLISTIC APPROACH)