Nature and the Idea of a Man-Made World by Professor Norman Crowe

In Nature and the Idea of a Man-Made World (MIT Press) Prof. Norman Crowe argues that we have lost a vital balance between the built environment and nature by neglecting our traditional motives for building in the first place. His approach to understanding the built environment is to see it as a sort of nature in itself, revealed through an exploration of the evolutionary roots of form and order in the built environment, beginning from a time when human settlements first emerged in lonely isolation among the wilds of nature. In counter distinction to our understanding of architecture and urbanism today, with its reliance on the abstractions of post-Enlightenment science and an increasingly commercialized culture of economic quantification, Prof. Crowe articulates values that animated architecture and urbanism until our own time. Explorations include the quest for unity in things man-made, the ancient idea of harmony, approaches to the inevitability of change in the quest for timelessness, and the idea of the city as the manifestation of all of these things and, especially, their relationship to the natural world upon which we ultimately depend.