The inside and the outside are abruptly separate. There is no way of being partly inside, yet still connected to the outside; there is no way in which the inside of the house allows you, in your bare feet, to step out and feel the dew collecting or pick blossoms off a climbing plant because there is no surface near the house on which you can go out and yet still be the person that you are inside.
Compare it with the house in our main picture, where there is
I 6 8 CONNECTION TO THE EARTH
continuity. Here, there is an intermediate area, whose surface is connected to the inside of the house—and yet it is in plain outdoors. This surface is part of the earth—and yet a little smoother, a little more beaten, more swept—stepping out on it is not like stepping out into a field in your bare feet—it is as if the earth itself becomes in that small area a part of your indoor terrain.
When we compare the examples, there seems little doubt that some deep feeling is involved, and we are confident in presenting this pattern as a fundamental one. But we can only speculate about its origins or why it is important.
Perhaps the likeliest of all the explanations we are able to imagine is one which connects the earth boundness and rootedness of a man or a woman to their physical connection to the earth. It is very plain, and we all discover for ourselves, that our lives become satisfactory to the extent that we are rooted, “down to earth,” in touch with common sense about everyday things—not flying high in the sky of concepts and fantasies. The path toward this rootedness is personal and slow—but it may just be true that it is helped or hindered by the extent to which our physical world is itself rooted and connected to the earth.
In physical terms, the rootedness occurs in buildings when the building is surrounded, along at least a part of its perimeter, by terraces, paths, steps, gravel, and earthen surfaces, which bring the floors outside, into the land. These surfaces are made of intermediate materials more natural than the floors inside the house—and more man-made than earth and clay and grass. Brick terraces, tiles, and beaten earth tied into the foundations of the house all help make this connection; and, if possible, each house should have a reasonable amount of them, pushing out into the land around the house and opening up the outdoors to the inside.
Therefore:
Connect the building to the earth around it by building a series of paths and terraces and steps around the edge. Place them deliberately to make the boundary ambiguous— so that it is impossible to say exactly where the building stops and earth begins.
BUILDINGS
/
/
| brick terraces/ |
|---|
 |
| I\ |
I
{
Use the connection to the earth to form the ground for outdoor rooms, and entrances, and terraces—entrance room (130), PRIVATE TERRACE ON THE STREET (140), OUTDOOR ROOM ( 1 63) ,
terraced slope (169) ; prepare to tie the terraces continuously into the wall which forms the edge of the ground floor slab, to make the very structure of the building feel connected to the earth—ground floor slab (215) ; and where you come to form the terrace surfaces, use things like hand-made bricks and soft-baked crumbling biscuit-fired tile—soft tile and brick (248) ; and further out, along the paths a little distance from the house, leave cracks between the tiles to let the grass and flowers grow between them—pavinc with cracks between the stones (247). . . .
decide on the arrangement of the gardens} and the places in the gardens;
| 169. | TERRACED SLOPE |
| 170. | FRUIT TREES |
| 171. | TREE PLACES |
| 172. | GARDEN GROWING WILD |
| 173* | GARDEN WALL |
| >—< | TRELLISED WALK |
| LO)—i | GREENHOUSE |
| 176. | GARDEN SEAT |
| f". >—1 | VEGETABLE GARDEN |
| 1—<00 | COMPOST |
| 169 TERRACED SLOPE* |
|---|
 |
790
. . . this pattern helps to complete site repair (104). Where there are buildings, it ties into the building edge (160) and can help form it; and it helps create the connection to the earth (168). If the ground is sloping at all, this pattern tells you how to handle the slope of the ground in a way that makes sense for the people in the building, and for the plants and grasses on the ground.
❖ ❖ *5*
On sloping land, erosion caused by run off can kill the soil. It also creates uneven distribution of rainwater over the land, which naturally does less for plant life than it could if it were evenly distributed.
Terraces and bunds, built along contour lines, have been used for thousands of years to solve this problem. Erosion starts when the water runs down certain lines, erodes the earth along these lines, makes it hard for plants to grow there, then forms rills in the mud and dust, which are then still more vulnerable to more runoff, and get progressively worse and worse. The terraces control erosion by slowing down the water, and preventing the formation of these rills in the first place.
Even more important, the terraces spread the water evenly over the entire landscape. In a given area, each square meter of earth gets the s..me amount of water since the water stays where it falls. Under these conditions, plants can grow everywhere— on the steepest parts of hillsides as easily as in the most luscious valleys.
The pattern of terracing makes as much sense on a small house lot as it does on the hills around a valley. Proper terracing on a small lot creates a stable micro-system of drainage, and protects the top soil for the local gardens. Our main photograph shows a small building that is built on a terraced site. Once the terracing has been accomplished, the building can fit to it, and stretch across the lines of the terrace.
At both scales—the house lot and the hills—this method of
conserving the land and making it healthy is ancient. “Only very lately has modern anti-erosion practice, for example, through contour ploughing, managed to match the effectiveness of traditional methods of terracing long practiced in countries as far apart as Japan and Peru.” (M. Nicholson, The Environmental Revolu-tion, New York: McGraw Hill, 1970, p. 192.)
At the scale of hillsides and valleys, China is making an impressive attempt to reclaim her eroded land in this way. For instance, Joseph Alsop, “Terraced Fields in China”:
In the Chinese countryside, no effort has ever been spared to get a maximum crop with the resources available. Even so, I was hardly prepared for the “terrace fields” that they took me to see in the farming communes around Chungking.
The countryside hereabouts is both rocky and largely composed of such steep hills that even Chinese would not think of trying to grow rice on them. The old way, ruinously eroding, was to grow as much rice as possible in the valleys: and then plant the hillsides, too, where soil remained.
The new way is to make “terrace fields.” The rocks are dynamited to get the needed building materials. Heavy dry-stone walls are then built to heights of six or seven feet, following the contours of the land. And earth is finally brought to fill in behind the stone walls, thereby producing a terrace field.