Bauhaus or Treehouse? THPVP: a vital regeneration

Here you can find out more about

• The earth overshoot day
• Basic ideas of the Human Purpose Village Project
• Why Bauhaus and tree house have something in common

 

2. August 2023

The day I am writing this up is a so-called “World Day”, but this one strangely receives little to no attention in the media. There is the World Stollen Throwing Day (3 January), the Unemployed Scent Tree Day (2 February) and Eraser Day (15 April), among others, which also appear in serious publications from time to time for general amusement.

However, what is probably the most important world day of all, Earth Overshoot Day, is usually dismissed with a collective shrug of the shoulders when it is mentioned in the media’s frenzy over miscommunicating politicians, rock star missteps, astonishing stock market developments, heatwaves and Saudi Arabian football salaries.

What is (not) celebrated on this day?
On this day, all of the earth’s natural resources that could be replenished within a year are used up for that year.
Today, this is already the case this year.

Does this event go unnoticed because it’s so hard to remember – after all, it doesn’t fall on the same day every year? According to the Global Footprint Network, the date of the Earth’s overload has advanced by almost two months in the last 20 years, and almost 40 per cent of the natural resources consumed this year can no longer be replaced.

Is it because this measured and calculated ecological situation of our planet, despite or because of all the sustainability assurances and initiatives, despite net zero targets in the distant future, diesel driving bans and heating laws and also despite drastic warnings from the UN Secretary-General and mysterious IPCC scenario abbreviations such as SSP1-1.9 to SSP3-7.0 on climate change … that all this information leaves only a ghostly, shadowy impression in our perception and experience of life?

Or is this perhaps a fundamental, inherent problem of the description of the world that is deeply rooted in collective and individual consciousness and on which modern, western and global scientific and economic civilisation is based?

Metaphysical materialism

In this description of the world, measured quantities take absolute precedence over perceived qualities, resulting in collective and individual cognitive dissonance.

This is because the scientific description of the living world takes what the senses and consciousness of human perception show as the starting point for quantitative measurements that explain the properties of the perceived objects.

The world that we as humans experience as one of chairs and tables, apples and strawberries, of heat and cold, of colours and sounds, i.e. a world full of qualities (sitting comfortably on/at chairs/tables, enjoying apples/strawberries sour/sweet, sweating/freezing in heat/cold, seeing yellow flowers/hearing streams rushing etc.) mutates in the scientific view into an “un-real” world of measured quantities: Tables/chairs become dimensions, apples/strawberries become DNA sequences, heat/cold become degrees, colours/sounds become electromagnetic vibrations.

The funny thing is that science likes to infer to its factuality, but in reality it is “meta”-physical, operating in an abstract beyond of measurements.

Metaphysical materialism turns the physical objects in nature perceived by the senses into a statistically processed mental construct of “facts and figures” that is now digitally mapped by electronic intelligence, which suggests materiality but is in truth only an image that eludes physical existence and human experience and also draws an artificial and sharply drawn dividing line between subject and object.

THE FLOOD OF DATA AND STATISTICS

To top it up: The objects of these measurements – the natural environment, including the beings (including us humans) that populate it and all qualities of life – become an epiphenomenon of these descriptions, chimeras, mythical creatures. Health becomes a productivity factor; illness becomes a hospital or vaccination statistic – or, depending on your point of view, a yield factor -, education and creativity become a national gross national product factor, etc., forests become cubic metres. And the conversion takes place in monetary value.

The result: an enormous flood of data and statistics that are losing more and more of their information content and offer less and less orientation and guidance for human life in the real world. Even the artificial intelligences, the latest marvel of metaphysical materialism, are no longer familiar with it, invent things or know nothing about things that are natural to real human cognition.

In addition, AIs and the data image of the world that they copy ever more perfectly for the digital-metaphysical description are increasingly faced with the problem of fundamental entropic disorientation or: suffering from Model Autophagy Disorder, MAD. This is because when training AI models with data generated by AIs themselves, it turned out that this leads to an “autophagic” (self-consuming) loop and the AIs became “MAD” (crazy), literally “dissolving” (e.g. high-resolution images became pixel noise).

The authors of the study came to the conclusion:

“Our main conclusion for all scenarios is that without enough new real-world data in each generation, future generative models are doomed to continue to decline in quality or diversity.”

In other words: Without the real experience of the world, without living and dying, without original biological consciousness/experience/thinking/feeling, which feeds the digital matrix (as in the film) again and again, not only does this illusion dissolve, but biological life itself is also deprived of the “negative entropic” impulse, as Erwin Schrödinger (the quantum physicist with the cat) called it.

Destruction of the biosphere

However, the “meta-physical” statistics of Earth Overshoot Day – which for the reasons mentioned above do not seem to lure anyone out from behind the stove – sum up the entire problem of our global civilisation: This system destroys the biological basis of our physical human existence through the unsustainable use of natural resources.

The result is well known: poisoning and destruction of the biological environment essential for survival, decline in biodiversity/extinction of species, disruption of water cycles, poverty/exploitation, corruption, etc. and, as a result: climate change.

Through constant self-referencing to abstract economic statistics and figures, the imaginary world of global technicised materialism has also set in motion a self-consuming, locust-like process (as mirrored in its spawn of artificial intelligence).

To illustrate the dimensions of this process, it was fitting that on 2 August 2023, Fortune Magazine published its new list of the world’s 500 largest companies, which have a combined annual turnover of USD 41 trillion and employ 70 million people worldwide.

Among the top 10 companies on the list are three companies that extract natural resources from the earth “for free” and are known as notorious polluters: Saudi Aramco, Exxon Mobil and Shell.

In most cases, ESG (Environment, Social, Governance), i.e. the consideration of the impact of economic activity on the environment, social conditions and fair, transparent decision-making and administrative structures, plays a rather subordinate role in their economic activities.

The Human Purpose Village Project

Against this background and in this context, the project idea of a living space for people on a village scale was developed, in which the real needs of people, their perception and their world of experience play the central role in a clear and comprehensible way.

The core element of the Human Purpose Village concept is therefore a fundamental renaturalisation of the biosphere – certainly using appropriately adapted techniques and technology (and also AI systems).

Within the framework of the Human Purpose Village, both the ontological question of the location and integration of humanity in the biosphere and its purpose in the evolutionary process on the planet will be explored as a model on the meta-level, and villages will be realised on the object level in which – depending on cultural and external circumstances – the vast majority of concrete human living needs are met in harmony with nature.

The title renaturalisation means that a human approach and the precise observation of natural phenomena in the “world of chairs and tables” and their symbiotic, often rhythmic relationships need to be harmonised with the findings of science, in particular the systems sciences of biology and ecology.

Form follows function

When the architect Mies van der Rohe was asked what the core of the classic Bauhaus philosophy was, he replied: “There is no art and no design. There is only one culture in which art and design take different forms.”

Applied to the Village project, this means “There is a culture in which design, architecture, infrastructure, art and the human community enter into a harmonised relationship with the processes of nature and take on different natural forms.”

If art, design and craftsmanship were integrated into a common concept in the Bauhaus and functionality was realised in pure, simple form with high-quality materials and a rather unadorned colour scheme, the form in the Human Purpose Village – “in the tree house” so to speak (the play on words is too charming to omit) – follows the given natural environment and its diverse and colourful offerings and makes use of the highly intelligent, often symbiotic and circular solutions of the biosphere.

Research and development in this field has produced a variety of extraordinarily aesthetic and practical solutions, from mycelium insulation materials, sand bricks and multifunctional recycled building elements to innovative, resilient complete buildings made of natural materials such as wood and bamboo and ingenious space-saving dwellings in the golden ratio, which can be excellently insulated, cooled and heated.

From Bauhaus to tree house culture

The “tree house” architecture and infrastructure are based on principles such as permaculture, recyclability, longevity, compostability, bio-systemic functionality, low impact/use and more.

When arranging and positioning residential buildings and utilities, the design and layout of the facilities takes into account the geomantic, biogeometric and energetic conditions of the respective locations.

The Human Village Project wants to take on a pioneering role, to be a model that can be replicated under a wide variety of circumstances – so that one day no more Earth Overshoot Days will have to be committed and calculated.