Kim Pemberton
Sun
CREDIT: Stuart Davis, Vancouver Sun At St. Paul’s church, Rodney Cottrell used sacred geometry for a wheelchair ramp sheltered by a curved canopy.
Have you ever walked into a building and it just felt right?
You may not have been able to explain why, but there are invisible reasons that some places are more spiritually uplifting and healthy than others, says Vancouver architect Rodney Cottrell.
The 46-year-old is one of the few architects in North America consciously working at creating “holistic” spaces in the built environment. He is also the founder of the only registered “holistic architectural” firm in Canada. (There are about two dozen in the U.S., he says.)
“It’s combining energetic and physical aspects of form to create space,” explains Cottrell.
“It’s beyond energy efficiency to include human energy and earth energy. It comes across as a bit esoteric to the bricks-and-mortar people I work with in the building industry, but if you take a look at the last 10,000 years of human experience and knowledge, why wouldn’t you want to learn from that instead of ignoring it?”
That means Cottrell’s work not only deals with traditional architecture but incorporates such concepts as feng shui, sacred geometry, Platonic solids (spheres, pyramids, cubes), and golden proportions (a geometric equation where everything “fits perfectly”).
“It’s a case of bringing in all that knowledge and looking at a given site, a given client, to create the best space,” he says.
Knowing a client’s date, time and place of birth, Cottrell says, helps when applying feng shui principals to their living space. Feng shui is the Chinese practice of positioning objects based on a belief that qi, the vital force that sustains all living things, must flow freely in a healthy environment.
Placing a building’s main entrance on the east side, where “fresh, new untainted energies would enter each day” would be an example of applying feng shui to architecture, Cottrell says.
While he realizes all this may sound like “hocus-pocus” to some, Cottrell believes it will become more commonplace in the future — particularly in a place such as Vancouver, where so many people embrace an “organic, holistic lifestyle,” he says.
“There’s something about the energy of this particular part of the world that when you follow your heart, things spark. . . . I strongly believe that when you close your mind to something you close the door.
“We are already world leaders as a building and design community, but people still seem to be largely blind to the making of space — pulling in the ancient with the best of the modern.”
Cottrell says he himself came to practise holistic architecture by fate.
After getting his urban geography degree in 1981 from the University of B.C., his goal was to work in town planning and become “Mr. Brady with the big house and beautiful wife,” he says.
But there were no jobs available for town planners in this economically depressed time. Fate stepped in, and Cottrell learned by chance that King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, known as the “builder king,” was on a global search to find astronomers to build the world’s largest optical observatory. Cottrell took a crash course in astronomy and applied for the job.
He was one of 600 Canadian applicants, and ultimately among the 12 selected who were then flown to Saudi Arabia. On top of a mountain in the desert one night, Cottrell says, a profound experience determined his course.
“I had an epiphany — no voice of god or flash of light — but it was a total instant imparting of knowledge that everything is connected and everything is conscious. That moment changed my life. I began to search for human knowledge to incorporate into my life.”
After two years of working for the king of Saudi Arabia, he returned to Canada and pursued a degree in architecture at Carleton University, where he graduated in 1990. In 1997 he registered his holistic architectural firm and began applying ancient knowledge in his architectural work. Born and raised in Victoria, Cottrell came back to B.C. because he appreciates the earth’s energy here — particularly in Victoria, Vancouver and Nelson.
These places, he believes, are well suited for residential developments because they are “much more centered” than other parts of the Lower Mainland.
“The earth has its own energy,” he says. “There are huge amounts of energy that flow from the mountain to the valley towards the sea. We need to be in places of repose and calm, especially residential areas.”
Cottrell says Richmond, much of the Fraser Valley and New Westminster from an “energetic level happen to be parts where the [earth’s] energy is sweeping across the landscape.
“In Vancouver the energy is starting to get calm, but further upstream and into the narrow part of the funnel around New Westminster, it’s a more vibrant, active, restless energy,” he says.
Nelson, he adds, has a nice energy because “it’s held within the palm of the mountains in such a way [that] the energy neither stagnates nor rushes across the town of Nelson.”
Cottrell says every place, every room, imparts a feeling for the people who live there.
“When you walk in you [know] whether it feels good or not. Holistic architecture is about love and celebration. Those are the key words,” he says, then quickly adds: “My field is challenging. I wouldn’t want to be seen as the consummate New Age person.
“I still love the study of quantum physics, and I have a demanding scientific and logical side to my mind which is constantly in dialogue with this other side,” he says.
But, he says with a smile, it’s his intuitive side that always wins out.
HOMEWORKS
Besides his work in holistic architecture, Rodney Cottrell is the coordinator of a unique outreach program run by the Architectural Institute of B.C. (AIBC) called Architects in Schools.
The program promotes public awareness, education and advocacy regarding architecture and is aimed at students from kindergarten to Grade 12.
The program, founded in 1994 by AIBC, focuses on promoting the study of the built environment as art, science and as a manifestation of social values and ideals.
B.C. architects, intern architects and architectural students work in partnership with interested school districts, schools and teachers to develop meaningful classroom activities related to the built environment. Volunteers are also available to speak on architecture as a career choice.
For more information on Architects in Schools contact AIBC’s communications department at (604) 683-8588, ext. 308 or
e-mail [email protected].
© The Vancouver Sun 2004