ROMI KHOSLA Aesthetics of Architecture THE primary aim of man has always been that of survival. The greatest threat to him is one of extinction. He is at once a biological and a social being—a cultural being with natural origins. Certain types of behavior have .primarily natural instinctive origins (reproduction, eating), while others have cultural origins (fashion, craft and so on) The mean^ of man's survival are expressed directly in basic relationships between him and the community (marriage, kinship, clan, caste) and between him and nature (hunting, cultivating, mining). Expressed in a diagram, a culture is built on this basic triangular relationship. NATURE (Life Support System) COMMUNITY^____________VMAN (Group) (Individual) figJ. The degree of civilization that a culture may be said to possess depends upon the fineness with which this triangular base is kept in balance over the course of time. Thus tribal cultures may be considered to be highly "civilized" if these relationships are finely balanced. Conversely sophisticated urban cultures can be highly "uncivilized" because there is little evidence of this triangular relationship being in balance* Non-literate man lives