Learning From Indigenous Technology

Julia Watson's growing body of research traces the infrastructural, architectural, and domestic designs that have worked for millennia.

By Anthony Paletta

Western architecture is adept at building “hard” solutions to managing nature. Concrete and other impermeable materials rigorously wall off the natural ebb and flow of nature–both destroying ecosystems and often ensuring that these variations will become all the more intense somewhere else. But there are more nimble solutions around th…