Genus loci: "the prevailing spirit of a place, implying the conscious act of developing the character of a given place rather than imposing a foreign character on it." *
Emil Nolde, Landscape in Red Light.
Adapt to your environment, said Alexander Pope some two hundred years ago, create spaces that speak of and to their origins, he entoned: be relevant. Tap into the genus loci. Where the genius locii of lore were protecting spirits of a place, they now refer to a philosophy of design, an approach to space, the thought that guides the gardening hand.
The world holds so many ways of being, an unfolding collection of universal stories of unwavering diversity, mud-hut after sky-rise after alpine chalet after breeze block; it says : stop, look, value. We design to preserve and protect, and we interpret.
*Illustrated Dictionary of Architecture Copyright © 2012, 2002, 1998 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved