Landscape Architecture: Waller Creek (10.27.2005)

I think the most important aspect of campus architecture is its ability to create a balance for the students. For example, the destruction of nature provokes the question “Whither shall the youthful student now betake himself, what relief will he find, for his eyes, wearied with intense reading, now that the pleasant stream is taken from him” (315). Nature offers a relief from studies, a “psychological therapy…what the mind cannot supply” (660).

Outside of campus architectures’ benefits for the students are the benefits for society. Fundamentally, “beauty is not a luxury; it is a necessity, a positive agency of survival, a deterrent to the terrorism with which our world is infested. And in cities-most of all those which, like ours, are growing too fast-we should be giving high priority to preserving every natural pocket still available, with the practical aim of helping preserve ourselves” (661). Beauty and nature is a necessity for, as Jones explains “If it doesn’t really ‘keep me young’ as we sometimes sentimentally allege of our elderly pursuits, it may keep me from aging as rapidly as otherwise I might; and I have been perennially grateful for my brief yet almost daily contact with earth and rock and flowing water along this beautify stream”, meaning that active involvement in nature keeps people healthy (662).

With this understanding of beauty, is it easy to see why people furiously look on at the destruction of nature? One possible outlook is offered by a student at Cornell in his blatant statement “’to say this space is needed for cars is sad’”, reflecting the obvious objections toward the destruction of nature.