Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • Hight - Designing Ecologies

    Uploaded by

    josefina
    156 views11 pages
    Artículo Designing Ecologies por Christopher Hight

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    PDF or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Report this Document
    Artículo Designing Ecologies por Christopher Hight

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    156 views11 pages

    Hight - Designing Ecologies

    Uploaded by

    josefina
    Artículo Designing Ecologies por Christopher Hight

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    of 11
    Designing Ecologies _____— Christopher Hight ______ EMERGENT IDEAS, ECOLOGICAL THINKING ‘What we need is an ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on. Slavos Zitok. in Defense of Lost Causes (2008) ‘fenvironmental transformation is this century’s greatest concern and central narrative, ecology is perhaps our most important epistemological and ontic framework for understanding and projecting possible futures." The term “ecology” simultaneously refers to a general epistemological and ontological framework as well as scientific study of interaction between systems and their assemblages into (temporal) coherences. In recent design, ecology has served as a poetic metaphor, techno-scientific imperative, and aesthetic justification. It has been employed to argue for a return to traditional architecture and used for the ‘most rococo parametricism, ecological awareness has become an accreditation requirement and a marketing tool. Thus, even as ecology increasingly serves as a general paradigm and central organizing narrative for our culture and the contemporary imagination, as the term proliferates, it is in danger becoming a shibboleth applied to everything yet meaning almost nothing. Once transposed from science and nature, it can all too easily be reduced to quotidian sything is interlinked and interacting in complex ways. Greater specify is therefore required, along with a theoretical problematization of the transposition of ecological concepts into the design fields. ‘Modern narratives of rupture, progress, and utopia are being rewritten as eschatologies of environmental calamity—both ongoing disruptions (droughts, hurricanes, ete) and novel threats (massive coastal flooding of newly constructed megacities due to sea-level rise, superbugs resistant to antibiotics and spread via sbal transport, and so on). Walter Benjamin famously presented Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus as an iconie image of modern progress and its history, propelled incessantly into the future on the winds of change, its startled look taking in the debris field left its wake? It was upon this tabula rasa that the Radiant City and other utopian urban visions were to be constructed. The modem angel of progress has been recast as a vengeful Gaia, or Mother Nature (this volume’s ‘oxcerpt of Daniel Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies tracks such anthropomorphic personifications of Nature), The tabula rasa has become the thick infrastructural strata, and the future utopia has inverted as the “remediation” of toxic brownfield sites, The debris feld of modernization and progress has been supplanted by what CS. Holling terms “creative destruction” as systems lurch out of one steady-state and into a different parte: Even as delineations of the constructed and “natural” environments have blurred, the capacity of design to articulate their relationships seems to have withered, with experimental architecture relegated to the role of compensatory icons and urbanism dominated by the palliative confections of New Urbanism. Paradoxically, certain designers and related scholars articulated the promise of renewed agency via the ecological. By the mid-1990s, the urban environment could no longer be usefully understood through the dualisms of Culture versus Nature. Rem Koolhaas famously declared in §,M,L,X1’s paradigmatic text, “The Generic City?” that what we used to cell the “city” now worked and looked more like landscapes. His novel presentation of architecture and urbanism culminated with a series of images of a rainy Singapore taken through a car window. The images are more haptic than optic: one can smell the ozone produced as rain is vaporized by superheated pavement and feel the humidity mote readily than delineate form or recognizable figures of architecture, landscape, or the city. In these photographs of a generic landseape-city, Koolhaas deployed the very technology of reproduction that Benjamin once aid drained the original of its aura into a endless cycle of exchange, to produce a powerful environmental ambience and presence. Modernist space was here replaced by literal atmosphere, Buildings, trees, sky, smog, and pavement blurred in the mist through the rearview mirror as our Dutch angel of the new sped down the motorway. Koolhaas’s images of the environmental dissolution of architecture and urban form evoke the sorts of entangled blurring of an ecological worldview ‘while also presenting it as an existential crisis for the design fields in an uncanny epistemological parallel of Holling’s concept of creative destruction: the urban environment has suddenly transformed from one coherent state (that of the classical city) into another organization, necessitating radical adaptation of the discrete systems of knowledge that had evolved within the previous state lest they go extinct because they are no longer fit for the new environment. Charles Waldheim, for example, has argued that landscape design effectively “usurped” architecture's place at the top of the professional and professorial food chain. of organization. 8G chuistopher Hight Theory and Design in the Ecological Age, Thus ecology operates for the design disciplines as both catalyst of innovation and eternal disruptive force in a similar way that industralization did for Modernist architecture in the early twrentieth century, or as technology served following World War Il. For example, in his conclusion to Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Reyner Banham mapped two ways out of the impasse that he had chronicled through his account of modern architectural history: choose either to conserve the discipline and risk becoming irrelevant to a technological age oF utely retool architetural knowledge and practice but in doing 80 “discard” the cultural identity of architecture as a field of knowledge. A series of subsequent articles extended Theory and Design’s conclusion’ There were, Banham argued, two Janus-facad identities of “Architecture.” Ono was “tradition,” the disciplinary and cultural identity given by accumulated knowledge upon ‘which one would operate and innovate, The other was “technological,” an attempt to determine design ae a science. Both presented problems for Banham, Hee was concerned that the technological and science-driven architectures could all too easily lead to “unorganized hordes of uncoordinated specialists {who} could flood into the architects’ preserves” Rather than make architecture relevant, this inundation would simply dissipate its sophisticated design knowledge. Yet Banham also believed that formalism was profoundly retrograde and amounted to disciplinary navel-gazing? To extend Banham's colorful metaphor ofthe architectural diseipline as a fortress of knowledge, while retrenchment into cultural tradition may fortify its walls against the hordes" of technological barbarians outside, it may also lose any strategic importance as the would-be invaders simply sweep around it. Those who guard the gates will soon discover that they have become docents in a museum of fossils. Banham presented a route out of this impasse in his book Arctesure ofthe Well Tempered Envtonmeny, ithe medelaion of the environment, Echoing his arguments about technology in genera, cavironmental control systems are both disruptive to the tradition of uechitecture and the condition of possibilty for a truly contemporary architecture by shifting from a focus on form, mass, and stability to program, ilmosphere, and systems of exchange. Environmental control systems served is literal exemple, and while far from “green,” they were seen as a harbinger fe ren of architectural knowledge and practice from walls and form to environment and interactive systems. In ee narrative, the origin story of the imitive hut was to be replaced by the campfire, a Thus, in the nine — between Theory and Design and hcienaned Environment, a significant shift appears to have occurred in which a critca’ iegnosis ofa crsis is converted into a projection of an alternative, Barb's work is of course just one coordinate within a broader transformation oa vor ergence of ecology and the environment in the 29608, One might aso int te Rachel Carson's 1962 Silent Spring, often understood as mankind « net period of environmental awareness and political action, while Ten McHarg’s 7 ese Design With Nature delineated an environmental determinist paradigm o landscape design. Ey acer Architectures” of the science/technological andthe cultural/social reflect what Bruno Latour has called the “modern constitution ‘of knowledge. In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour details this. jeonatiniee ao nceisting of two domains that ‘must remain absolutely distinct’ These domains were Nature and Society, and as a corollary, Science and Culture. Drawing rom his previous work in the history and theory of science, Latout ‘maps this bicameral division in specific ‘scientific experiments and sbeact philosophical concepts. This separation began, he argues (unsurprisingly), by the so-called Kantian revolution in which phenomena ‘and concepts on the one pee end noumena and things in themselves on the other were purified inte pane trinet areas in a way they were not previously, withthe latter accessible ty though their concepts within the subject. The division allowed any toconstruct what he believed to be a stable and systematic philosophical «ee tectonies’? Yet once this purification occurred, Latour argued, many ace thought trie to “overcome” this divide, Hovever, he also claims that aepor ofthese attempts simply managed to widen the gap by collapsing ino ‘one pole (phenomenology and logical positivism are two oppored examples). Such apparent “bridges” did not overcome Kant’s epistemological structure aan aah ast reifed a logical distinction into ontology and pethos. Things 20 Tihs continually ‘purifed” into one pote or the other. At its postmodern ar rymus, everything becomes a construction of social, cultural, and linguistic conventions. There is no truth or reality, just ideological tropes and “reality- effect At its scientifi extreme, everything cultural or social should be treated as if it were natural and studied as such. Nature or Society, Science or Culture, is alternatively transcendent or immanent. Yet, Latour argues, this creates ‘a series of paradoxes, among them that Nature is understood as immanent ocially and culturally constructed) even though we simultaneously embrace the anti-anthropocentrie notion that there is a vast realm that exceeds us; similarly Society-Culture is treated as transcendent even though of course it is constructed, One can see here how such paradoxes provide the armature for Banham’s two Architectures of Science and Culture. ‘While one might think we have moved beyond Banham’ obvious Nature/Culture binaries, the encounter between ecology and design has followed Latour’s paradoxical modernity. Significant leaders in landscape architecture and architecture have positioned ecology (and the environment) as antagonistic or even fundamentally disruptive to the cultural tradition of their respective disciplines. For example, Preston Scott Cohen and Erika Naginski’s contribution to Ecological Urbanism approaches ecology has a harbinger of disciplinary doom, In their presentation, nature seems a vengeful and uninvited guest at athe salon of culture as ecology that threatens to “negate the project of architecture.” They argue that positioning ecology and biology as a model for digital design and an ethical imperative for sustainable architectures necessarily, “reject{s] the cultural, social and symbolic life of forms.” For them, architecture is a system of knowledge that requires autonomy from its “environment” in terms of the discipline and, to a large degree, the building's relationship to its surroundings. Moreover, itis this separation (purification) that allows for evolution of the environment (because it is constructed). Rather than embrace ecology, they seeketo tum the tables and position the discipline as a means of eritical thinking, “provoking” and “demystifying” the camouflaged ideologies that are smuggled invunder the banner of the ecological and sustainable. Likewise, Penelope Dean’s “Never Mind All That Environmental Rubbish, Get On With Your Architecture” isa scathing indictment of scientifically «lotermined applications of ecology and environment in architecture. For )bean, William MeDonough and Ken Yeang exemplify an approach to the environment in architecture as “applied scientific solution over sociocultural trejection or formal innovation” If techno-scientifc discourse is given the authority to determine design, then environmental “performance ceteria no longer serve the discipline per se, but rather the aber-eategory of ‘environment’ Here the terms environment, nature, and action are positioned wean isomorphic negation ofthe discipline, culture, and thought (respectively). Dean argues for “a reorientation of architectural ambitions back towards the tends of a larger disciplinary agenda where the production of ideas and concepts srould be reasserted, once again, as one of the central tasks of architecture.”® Pavironmental issues would not necessarily be excluded but they would be subordinate” to architecture, “understood frst and foremost as an intellectual diseipline-a sociocultural practice—as opposed to an applied science’"* Her principal example ofthis approach would be the inclusion of environmentally Focused architects within historical and theoretical curricula, While this may ‘contribute to “advancing the plurality of ideas" about the environment and its problems, it is also an argument for what Latour describes as “purification” of erjeace and nature from society and culture (respectively).” Such arguments Scoupy Latour's paradoxical modemity. For Dean techno-scientific discourses dangerously assert a despotic authority through claims to natural “truth” sven ae culture is presented revealing the true constructed “nature” of these concepts. Dean concludes by proposing that history and theory courses should pay closer attention tothe history of the environment in order to develop Pe aral resistance to the techno-scientific authority. In this way, historical and theoretical scholarship serves as a vaccine, inoculating the body of architectural (Culture) knowledge with a bit of dead viral matter from Nature ‘Other designers and theorists have taken the converse approach, in which ecology becomes a critical instrument for the questioning and expansion beyond historical cultural conventions of the design disciplines. For cxample, recent arguments for operational processes and organization have stten explicitly attacked representational aspects that could be considered ‘constitutive to landscape architecture since it emerged as a distinct field. In

    You might also like