Le Roy and the Eco-Cathedral
A wilful Frisian garden of stacked rubble, and what it might remind us about self-organisation, emergence, and the art of not intervening.
In Mildam, a village in the Dutch municipality of Heerenveen, stands a structure that resists every familiar description. No architect designed it, no blueprint preceded it, and not a single stone was fixed with cement. It is called the Eco-Cathedral, and it is — one might say — a living argument for the idea that order need not always be imposed from above.
Its maker was Louis le Roy (1924–2012), an artist and — a word he preferred for himself — an ecotect. In the 1960s he acquired a plot of just over a hectare, planted trees and seeds across it in an entirely arbitrary fashion, and then began to dry-stack the construction waste of road builders — clinkers, paving stones, concrete blocks — into walls and towers, some as high as eight metres. After that, insofar as it is given to a person to do so, he stepped back. Nature and time would take over his work, and that, he insisted again and again, was precisely the intention.
On an information panel beside the site stands a sentence of his that struck us, and that prompted this piece:
"Let chaos do its work, until the whole forms a complexity that arises of its own accord."
For anyone occupied with complexity science, it is a remarkably precise formulation. Le Roy was no systems theorist, and yet this sentence touches on something that, in our field, has a name: self-organisation.
What the stones do not do
The usual assumption holds that structure presupposes a builder — an ordering hand that knows in advance how the whole should look. Le Roy contested that assumption in practice. He sorted the rubble, he stacked, he planted — and then let go. The form that subsequently emerged was not of his devising. It arose from the interplay between the stones, the seeds, the weather, time, and the countless organisms that settled into the structure along the way.
In the language of complexity science this is called emergence: the appearance of an ordering at the level of the whole that cannot be reduced to, and could not have been predicted from, the individual parts. No one designed the Eco-Cathedral in its present shape, and yet it is unmistakably ordered. The order did not lie in a plan; it arose from interaction. That a person, working without cement and without a design, can let such a form come forth is — to our minds — a more vivid lesson than many a textbook offers.
The courage not to intervene
There is a second element that gave us pause, and it lies more subtly. Le Roy's most important act was not the stacking, but the waiting. He refused to correct nature when it took a direction he had not foreseen. The moss that overgrew the stones, the tree that rooted in an unexpected place, the subsidence that tilted a wall — to him these were not errors, but parts of the process. To intervene would have meant imposing his own ordering on a system that drew its very richness from being allowed to deviate.
Here the story touches on something the clinician will recognise. In the consulting room the urge runs deep to correct, to steer, to guide the process toward a predetermined outcome. And sometimes that is indeed necessary. But complexity science reminds us that a complex system does not always allow itself to be steered in the way we imagine, and that relinquishing control — tolerating a phase in which the outcome is not yet fixed — need not be a failing, but may be a condition for change.
We phrase this deliberately with caution. Our aim is not a romantic plea for passivity; a person in distress deserves no clinician who looks on as one looks at a garden. The point is something more precise: the distinction between steering and forcing, between creating the conditions under which something new can arise, and imposing a form the system would not have found of its own accord. Le Roy created conditions. Complexity did the rest.
Time as an ally
What the Eco-Cathedral asks for above all is patience on a scale that makes us almost uncomfortable. The foundation that manages the work thinks not in years but in centuries; the aim is to let the structure endure well into the third millennium, so that as rich an ecological system as possible may develop. Time here is not an obstacle to be overcome, but the actual builder.
This too may be translated, with due modesty, to our practice. Much of what matters in a treatment does not unfold at the pace of the treatment plan. A system needs time to release an old ordering and to find a new one — and that time does not always coincide with the number of sessions a reimbursement framework permits. The Eco-Cathedral reminds us that some forms of order simply cannot be hurried.
A modest conclusion
We do not wish to stretch the comparison further than it can bear. A person is not a garden, and a psychological upheaval is not a pile of stones one may leave to nature. Analogies are not proofs, and the Eco-Cathedral proves nothing about mental healthcare.
And yet. Standing among those overgrown walls, one sees with one's own eyes what complexity science finds so hard to put into words: that order can arise without a designer, that letting go is not a synonym for giving up, and that time, if one lets it run its course, can be a form of care. Le Roy called himself a time rebel. Perhaps, it seems to us, there is something of that rebellion for mental healthcare to learn.