Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Lessons Forgotten...

It has been a month since I started work. It has been interesting for more than the usual reasons. Once or twice a week, we have seminars, either in house or hosted by architects/vendors or other people in the industry to talk about interesting or 'latest' things that are currently happening. One such seminar today made me lose my focus on what the speaker was saying. I was busy remembering my grade 3 science text.
This man was talking about the 'new' method of storm water harvesting..its cheap, bio degradable and aesthetic. Can you guess what he was talking about? Stripping out all the technical jargon, he was talking about planting trees! I was at first amused, on introspection aggravated. In all the pace of modern developments and the race to build more and more, we forgot how it all was before we butt in. Dont get me wrong, I am not hinting that we live in jungles, but probably this is the time we should start thinking about a more responsible and channelized mode of development. Development needs more planning, not just in terms of resources, time and finance but to see how nature can be best preserved. I know there is a lot of "green construction" these days and a lot of input from environmentalists, but I say we go a step farther. Why deplant trees and then plant new ones elsewhere? It amuses me to think that architects cannot work around existing nature. They who come up with mind blowing architecture including all shapes that god ever invented...making lives of engineers as miserable as possible, cant they put imagination to more useful uses?