On skin as "ecotone": quote is by Glenn Murcutt, interviewed in Neil Jackson, The Modern Steel House, E & FN Spon, 1996, p.171. "I actually use the wall as, in landscape terms, an ecotone. That's the change between two systems in the landscape, from water to land, and it's a very high tension zone. Where do children play between the ocean and the beach? They don't play absolutely up on the sand. They don't play way out on the water. Children love that interface between the land and the sea. And just getting into the sea where it's dangerous enough for them to feel safe. And in architecture, for me, that zone of the wall is so important. It has got to do so many things. Like your forehead, to your eyebrow, to your eyelid, to your eyelash, to your eye. There are so many zones operating to give that eye protection apart from the fantastic, phenomenal speed of reflex action when anything hits your eye, compared with catching a ball, for example. For most of us, the eye is so responsive and so fast. Those sorts of things, I think, are most lacking in architecture - that understanding of skin, what is happening at our skin level here. There are so many systems operating between the bone structure, the sinews - the operation of each, where the combination, the sum of those parts is greater than any of the individuals. And they need one another so one is working with the other. I'm trying to incorporate those sorts of systems in buildings."