In ‘An Architectural Practice as an Integral Organisation’ award-winning architects Anna Cowen and Vernon Collis describe how their practice is deeply informed by Ken Wilber’s Integral/AQAL model, as well as by Brian Robertson’s “Holacracy” model, Dee Hock’s Chaordic design process, A.H. Almaas’s Diamond Heart Inquiry process and more.
For more about one of Cowen and Collis’ innovative developments, the Mbekweni housing development, see ‘Waste gets to work’, Financial Mail (2006), by Sasha Planting. The articles describes how the project uses “local rock and ‘waste’ building material destined for the dump”.
“Expecting communities to accept and adopt our way of building beacuse it’s a ‘clever idea’ or the ‘right thing to do’ is naive,” says Collis.
“The ideas has to be supported by its cultural context. For instance, using waste from industry for construction needs to be framed within localised belief systems otherwise it remains an imposed idea and will not endure.”
* If you have an integral-related, or developmentally-aware, real-world project or strategy which can be include on the Integral Strategies website, please e-mail Matthew Kalman. *
