In a corner of the uni­verse, a star is spin­ning. A star that means every­thing to us because it is our home. It is a place of excep­tional beauty, diver­sity and exu­ber­ant nature, of which we are a part. It must be a tem­po­rary mis­take for us to go against nature in the pur­suit of short­term inter­ests, for how much more reward­ing, how much more beau­ti­ful it is to do as nature does and strive for per­fec­tion. Noth­ing in nature is out of place, no stone in the wrong posi­tion: nature itself, how­ever it appears, is nec­es­sar­ily beau­ti­ful. This beauty draws us in and is where we relax and feel at home. Places that have grown over cen­turies, old cul­tural land­scapes or Ital­ian hill­side vil­lages fill us with joy. We feel at home where every­thing has its place: in the park, by the lake, in the open coun­try­side. Yet we have designed cities accord­ing to the needs of cars and shop­ping cen­tres accord­ing to the scale of max­i­mum profit. We have con­creted over entire land­scapes ignor­ing man and his nature. It is time to cor­rect this. Back to nature does not mean sac­ri­fice but profit because the beauty of nature is pur­pose­ful, sus­tain­able and there­fore eco­nomic.

We live in a time where com­pletely dif­fer­ent places start to look the same. It’s the same logic which is indis­crim­i­nately at work there: the logic of the quick and cheap, of the arbi­trary. The result is sep­a­ra­tion, nature is locked out, the short­term goal is the mea­sure for every­thing. As a con­se­quence, beauty expires because it is more than the sum of its parts. If you replace one of them care­lessly, then the cal­cu­la­tion no longer works and we lose our home. We only feel good if every­thing is right, if the indi­vid­ual ele­ments of our sur­round­ings har­mo­niously inter­twine. We feel good because we are allowed to be human, because our envi­ron­ment com­plies with us.

Nature and urban­ity are only oppo­sites where we have gen­er­ated them with glass, con­crete and asphalt. »The world is a process of our think­ing,« wrote Ein­stein, who added: »It cannot be changed with­out chang­ing our think­ing.« The fact that it can be done dif­fer­ently by think­ing dif­fer­ently is shown for exam­ple with the Bosco Ver­ti­cale in Milan, a ver­ti­cal forest with 900 trees rooted in the facades of two high­rise build­ings. It was cre­ated by the archi­tect Ste­fano Boeri with eco­log­i­cal and aes­thetic den­sity – decades after Hun­dert­wasser had planted a »tree tenant« on the first floor of a rented flat in Alser­bach­strasse in Vienna. The tree grew along the window and amazed passersby. The vision­ary later out­lined his pro­gramme with the phrase: »Roofs must become forests and streets must become green val­leys.« Hun­dert­wasser tack­led the urban land­scape with bright colours and round shapes like excla­ma­tion marks. But you need whole sen­tences to do the same thing with nature because the design vocab­u­lary of nature is extremely com­plex but not strik­ing. Its beauty unfolds in its struc­ture, rhythm and rep­e­ti­tion.

Beauty always involves func­tion­al­ity: nature doesn’t know super­flu­ous­ness. Even the splen­dour of a flower serves a pur­pose and appears sub­limely beau­ti­ful because of this: noth­ing can be left out or added. Besides form, mate­r­ial and appear­ance, it needs another qual­ity for us to feel some­thing is beau­ti­ful: time. Beauty must prove itself. Only some­thing that stands the test of time and lasts decades later is truly beau­ti­ful. In order to pre­serve it, it is nec­es­sary to think in cycles and not in short­term trends. Good is what remains, what sur­vives. Beauty is not a short­term effect but only flour­ishes with sus­tain­abil­ity. Some­thing that is sus­tain­able, that holds together, is auto­mat­i­cally beau­ti­ful. It inte­grates itself nat­u­rally into the respec­tive envi­ron­ment and merges into it. This is why grown struc­tures create well­be­ing and why the per­ma­nent brings com­fort.

Flora and fauna are the result of an ongo­ing process of adap­ta­tion. Nature is above all prac­ti­cal: any­thing that doesn’t work or is super­flu­ous is devoured by the weather or evo­lu­tion. What remains is clar­ity, endurance and renewal. For thou­sands of years, man has shaped his world: we have cul­ti­vated deserts, cre­ated cul­tural land­scapes and pre­served habi­tats worth protecting.It’s up to us: what we do, under­take or pro­duce must be per­ma­nent and still make sense decades from now. This is how the world will remain a beau­ti­ful place for us. We have the tech­ni­cal oppor­tu­ni­ties, resources and knowl­edge for this.

Let’s get started, let’s get on with it!