These places are testaments of exalting our capacity to cooperate with nature instead of subject it. This includes our natural impulses. Instead of suppressed and squeezed into a box, they are sublimated, beautified and being treated with interest (as Joseph Campbell said in his ‘Power of Myth’ talks).
Places like these can be Japanese gardens, with shapes in harmony with those of nature, like a question and answer. Or with sounds and colours that although human-made, appear as a subtle extension of the already existing natural order of the place.
They can also be Croatian beaches, where platforms made of light-coloured concrete project from the craggy white limestone so that the landscape can accommodate our human bodies in comfort while at the same time not disturbing its natural, carved-through-aeons beauty.
The art of blurring these boundaries is one of negotiation with the rights of the natural to remain in its place. We can conceive great things with our minds, but they often are things removed from their real-world context. When we seek harmony with nature, our first ideas are a question that we ask in order to start an exchange where find out what needs we want fulfilled and what visions realised while considering what the natural beauty of a place, and its unique identity, deserves to have preserved and what it deserves to have exalted.
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