Lifetecture

On Monday, after we dropped my brother off at the tiny Newport News Airport, my wonderful host Susan took me to see Jamestown. I took a Historic Preservation course taught by Jim Peters and Sidney Robinson at UIC one summer a few years ago, and Jamestown came up, so it was great to see the reconstructed site of the first English colonists to the US in person. The story is controversial: it’s the First Landing, but also the birthplace of slavery, and the impact of this landing on the local Powhatan Native American population was devastating. Before our self-guided tour, we watched a movie in the adjacent interpretative Center. It tried to look at the story from multiple perspectives, but the story told continues to evolve and is still subject to debate.

This “Living” Museum does a great job of offering interaction without shoving it down your throat. Throughout the Settlement Site there are costumed guides who share stories and facts as they are approached, using the voice of whatever population they are representing. We looked at the carefully reconstructed heavy timber-frame village built by the English in 1607. It was great being able to touch and feel the objects and materials presented. The illusion of the 17th Century context was frequently shattered by shorts-clad tourists and modern wheelchairs…but overall, I got a sense of the way people had lived. The little village was a fortress, cut off from its natural surroundings and totally dependent upon the goods, people and objects which were imported from the far-away home of its inhabitants. The rational, orthogonal forms matched those of the villages in England they had left, unsuitable for the climate and terrain in which they were placed.

The Powhatan Village was the opposite. Here the edges were frayed; blending and bleeding into the surrounding context. These “primitive” structures seemed much more evolved, standing roundly in stark contrast to the angled geometry of those we had left in the Colonists’ Village. Everything was woven; structures, mats, coverings, chicken coop; and sitting under a shade sat some buckskin-clad villagers weaving supple baskets so we could see how it was done.

The organic forms of the housing units rested on the site like sleeping mammals. Inside, the bentwood structure was visible and the same simple structure formed racks and beds, which were layered with furs and skins. Baskets and nets hung around as pocket-like versions of storage. The whole structure was simple, efficient and totally blended with the surrounding landscape.

On our way back to the house we spoke about how far we have deviated from the hunting and gatherering lifestyle that epitomized the Powhatan people. The agrarian society that arrived from England saw them as primitive and savage. The Indians thought they were insane to build in a place with brackish water. The people that came to colonize the “New World” were still rooted in the land they came from and their energy was spent trying to recreate their lives in England. We wondered at how the women who arrived later managed…they must have been completely house-bound by the clothes they wore – living there, trapped.

There’s a lightness to the lifestyle of the Powhatan people that was apparent even in the recreation we experienced. I wonder if our new awareness of the toll that industrialized society has taken on the world will lead us back to a way of living which is more hunter-gatherer in spirit? Could this “green” way of life direct a new path in architecture?