Our endeavor: help humanity move concurrently into the Solar System & into communion with Earth’s life-giving systems.
Working both outwards & inwards creates an interchange of knowledge & perspective that puts us on a sustainable path to a flourishing planet.
Our Vision
Our relationship to the cosmos has always been humbling, even alarming. The first photograph of the whole Earth, taken in 1967, is said to have helped start the environmental movement and those among us who devote their lives to understanding environments outside Earth are often environmentally-minded. Among the exciting discoveries on other planets of mountains and volcanoes, canyons and dunes, rivers and oceans, atmospheres and storms, glaciers and caves, and a 24-hr day, the truth is that the only place that could pass as a complete home is a whole Earth. Humans have sometimes concluded that the universe seemed fine-tuned for them, but the universe turned out in many ways and all, except one, diminish us. Our Earthliness is logically, chemically, and spiritually inescapable.
It is sometimes said that the human brain is more complex than the universe it sits in. Perhaps the Earth is more vast than the universe it sits in. Its depth goes infinitely inward, through the web of webs of information, energy, material, and meaning that made a molten rock accreted from cosmic dust into a pulsing life-system sending envoys to its neighboring worlds. Earth is the source - both the Cosmist cradle and a Gaian mother. We humans were grown by our planet, quite literally. Our connection to Earth's biological signals, to its energy flows and its epicycles not only made us in the deep past, it makes us whole in lived experience.
We all feel something happening. It's a crescendo of intensification, complexification and abstraction threatening our wholeness and humanness. The destabilization of planetary systems and the proliferation of digital systems have synergized into a wicked crisis that creates a compensatory and intensifying hunger for the embodied, spatial, tactile, and beautiful. These have become the buzzwords of digital life because the real thing is receding. There is a growing imperative to discover, again and anew, our whole humanity through sensory contact with the living landscapes of our physical world and to take these phenomena with us wherever we venture.
Astronaut-like, most members of industrialized societies spend nearly all of their lives indoors, our relationship to nature mediated by architecture, that most archaic technology. Buildings are technologies placed in our raw planetary environments to determine what we let in, what we keep out, and what we frame for interaction. From conception to completion, countless decisions affect how architecture affects us and how it changes the environment. It can be deliberate and visionary about the future it models. No future is there when the world is flattened to accommodate something preconceived. A future is there when our contributions are modeled on reciprocity, the principle of “a give for every take” that created our awesome world.
It is sometimes said that the human brain is more complex than the universe it sits in. Perhaps the Earth is more vast than the universe it sits in. Its depth goes infinitely inward, through the web of webs of information, energy, material, and meaning that made a molten rock accreted from cosmic dust into a pulsing life-system sending envoys to its neighboring worlds. Earth is the source - both the Cosmist cradle and a Gaian mother. We humans were grown by our planet, quite literally. Our connection to Earth's biological signals, to its energy flows and its epicycles not only made us in the deep past, it makes us whole in lived experience.
We all feel something happening. It's a crescendo of intensification, complexification and abstraction threatening our wholeness and humanness. The destabilization of planetary systems and the proliferation of digital systems have synergized into a wicked crisis that creates a compensatory and intensifying hunger for the embodied, spatial, tactile, and beautiful. These have become the buzzwords of digital life because the real thing is receding. There is a growing imperative to discover, again and anew, our whole humanity through sensory contact with the living landscapes of our physical world and to take these phenomena with us wherever we venture.
Astronaut-like, most members of industrialized societies spend nearly all of their lives indoors, our relationship to nature mediated by architecture, that most archaic technology. Buildings are technologies placed in our raw planetary environments to determine what we let in, what we keep out, and what we frame for interaction. From conception to completion, countless decisions affect how architecture affects us and how it changes the environment. It can be deliberate and visionary about the future it models. No future is there when the world is flattened to accommodate something preconceived. A future is there when our contributions are modeled on reciprocity, the principle of “a give for every take” that created our awesome world.
On our world, our species is singular in its ambition and awareness. In our universe, our world is singular in its capacity to nourish us. To continue on in both directions, outward and inward, we need a multitude of different systems.
Different Systems is the architectural practice first imagined by a creative, nature-awed child turned Space architect. I consider architecture to be an all-in-one epistemology, ontology, and craft that gives form to physical relations between you, me, and the world. It is a way of first modelling, then making, the world we wish to live in today and, before long, leave behind for creatures who mostly don't exist yet. Creatures we are and from creatures we come. We’ll go where creatures will go. Inward to the ecosystem, outwards to the solar system.
Jeffrey Montes
Seattle, WA
Seattle, WA
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