From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design
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Global warming and concerns about sustainability recently have pushed ecological design to the forefront of architectural study and debate. As Peder Anker explains in From Bauhaus to Ecohouse, despite claims of novelty, debates about environmentally sensitive architecture has been ongoing for nearly a century. By exploring key moments of inspiration between designers and ecologists from the Bauhaus projects of the interwar period to the eco-arks of the 1980s, Anker traces the historical intersection of architecture and ecological science and assesses how both remain intertwined philosophically and pragmatically within the still-evolving field of ecological design.
GLOBAL Design NYU: Elsewhere Envisioned
For the first time in its history, NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study gathers leading-edge architects, designers, and theorists to address design issues that affect global ecology and the environment.
This exhibit of architectural models, drawings, animations, and projections, combined with a two-day symposium, brings together designers, scholars, and innovators to showcase design research as it relates to visionary architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, and ecological planning.
Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.
We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is “as close to the beyond as to things near” when we evoke “our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere.”
GLOBAL DESIGN | ELSEWHERE ENVISIONED is directed and curated by Gallatin professors Peder Anker, Louise Harpman, Mitchell Joachim with support from the Gallatin Design Collective.
Sponsors include Susanne Wofford, Dean of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU Office of the Provost, Global Research Initiatives Program; NYU Office of Sustainability; Gallatin Community Learning Initiative; NYU Environmental Studies Department.
http://www.gdnyu.com/
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My Interview in The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
2. The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts
Article in The Observer “How the ‘ecosystem’ myth has been used for sinister means” by Adam Curtis.
BBC has blocked the video from youtube, use one of the following links:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/
http://rutube.ru/tracks/4487452.html?v=2baf06c898b2262d9b20ac3b3382effc
Broadcast on BBC Two, 9:00 p.m. Monday, 30 May 2011: A series of films exploring the idea that we have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.
This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components – cogs – in a system.
But in an age disillusioned with politics, the self-regulating ecosystem has become the model for utopian ideas of human ‘self-organizing networks’ – dreams of new ways of organising societies without leaders, as in the Facebook and Twitter revolutions, and in global visions of connectivity like the Gaia theory.
This powerful idea emerged out of the hippie communes in America in the 1960s, and from counterculture computer scientists who believed that global webs of computers could liberate the world.
But, at the very moment this was happening, the science of ecology discovered that the theory of the self-regulating ecosystem wasn’t true. Instead they found that nature was really dynamic and constantly changing in unpredictable ways. But the dream of the self-organizing network had by now captured our imaginations – because it offered an alternative to the dangerous and discredited ideas of politics.
Ecological Communication
“Ecological Communication at the Oxford Imperial Forestry Institute,” in Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies, Christina Folke Ax (et.a.) (ed.) Ohio University Press, 2011.
The essays collected in Cultivating the Colonies demonstrate how the relationship between colonial power and nature reveals the nature of power. Each essay explores how colonial governments translated ideas about the management of exotic nature and foreign people into practice, and how they literally “got their hands dirty” in the business of empire. The eleven essays include studies of animal husbandry in the Philippines, farming in Indochina, and indigenous medicine in India. They are global in scope, ranging from the Russian North to Mozambique, examining the consequences of colonialism on nature, including its impact on animals, fisheries, farmlands, medical practices, and even the diets of indigenous people. Cultivating the Colonies establishes beyond all possible doubt the importance of the environment as a locus for studying the power of the colonial state.
Get the anthology: US $ | Project MUSE
Viewing the Earth from Without or from Within
“Viewing the Earth from Without or from Within” with Nina Edwards Anker, New Geographies 4 (2011), 89-94.
Scales of the Earth
The first Apollo images of the Earth have produced a perspective enabling humanity to act on Earth and its nature as if it controlled it from “outside.” The recent developments of satellite technologies have had a significant impact on the modes of representations as well as the conceptions of geography and space. Today, the visualization modes of geospatial information, which offer layering, zooming and panning navigation tools that capture world landscapes through vertical perspectives, reinforce the concept of the Earth as an “object.” Furthermore, the integration and superimposition of geographical information strengthen the Universalist ideal of knowledge while reducing it to a scientific and abstract visual database. This new “geography from above” -the home, the city, entire territories, the Earth itself, the Monn, Mars and beyond- redefine our environment, subjectivities and practises. With such tools at hand, architects conceive of the geographic as a possible scale, site of intervention and design approach.
The scale of vision, viewpoint and qualification of space made possible by satellite imagery reframe contemporary debates on design, agency and territory. In volume 4 of New Geographies, we invite sumissions of articles and projects that critically address the relationship of space with such modes of representation. What are the characteristics of such an integrated elevated vision and what geographical knowledge does it bring forth? In this data-space, which information is to be retained as relevant? How is such an analytical space to be subsequently interpreted and experienced? What are the cultural, political and environmental repercussions of a vision celebrated as objective and Universalist? what new global issues and debates do such scales of vision raise and how do such visualizations of the Earth-as-home intesect with concerns of ecology and calls for global awarness?
From Social Psychology to Ecology
Arthur Tansley once amazed his botanical friends by arguing that the psychologist Sigmund Freud was the most important thinker since Jesus. It was indeed remarkable statement for a man who is known for his contributions to the field of ecology. Yet Tansley was also a keen contributor to research on sex-psychology and I suggest here that some of his ecological thinking emerged from his work in social psychology.
Saving Nature: Religion as Environmentalism, Environmentalism as Religion
Tarjei Rønnow
Saving Nature
Religion as Environmentalism, Environmentalism as Religion, Lit Verlag, 2011
In 2009 my friend Tarjei Rønnow died suddenly of heart failure, 41 years old, leaving his two beloved sons, along with his companion, family, and a large group of friends behind. Words cannot express the sorrow I feel for this terrible loss. Among his numerous writings he left us an unfinished manuscript for his Ph.D. thesis, which I have edited so that it could become available to the public. It is my hope that his theses will inspire others in the same way it in numerous ways has inspired me.
Saving Nature approaches environmentalism as a belief system. It explores the impact of environmentalism on faith communities and vice versa, and analyses how environmental worldviews, values, attitudes and discourses affect religion. By drawing on sources in the sociology of religion and environmental sociology, the study sheds light on the religious dimensions of environmentalism. Rønnow locates the quick growth of environmentalism in the history of allegedly secular modernity, and interprets environmentalism in the context of modernity’s re-sacralization.
Miljørørsla – ein romodyssé
“Miljørørsla – ein romodyssé,” Studentersafmunnet i Bergen, University of Bergen, Feb. 27, 2012
“Når jorda blir et romskip. Økologisk design fra Bauhaus til Øko-hus,” Vitenskapsteoretisk forum, NTNU Trondheim, March 3 2012
“Miljøhistorien: en romodysse,” Dept. of Archeology, University of Oslo, March 9, 2012.
Oreskes and Conway
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.
Isis, 102:3 (2011), 589-590.
Edvard Munchs Aulamalerier: Fra kontroversielt prosjekt til nasjonalskatt
Edvard Munchs Aulamalerier: Fra kontroversielt prosjekt til nasjonalskatt (Edvard Munch’s Aula Paintings: From Controversal Project to National Treasure), with Patricia G. Berman, (Oslo: Messel Forlag, 2011).
[Norwegian] I 1911 skulle Universitetet feire sitt hundreårsjubileum. I den anledning ble Aulaen på Karl Johans gate bygget som en storslått gave og markering av institusjonen. De elleve maleriene som pryder Aulaen hang ikke der ved åpningen, men ble alle malt mellom 1909 og 1916 i en atmosfære av kulturpolitisk kontrovers. Munchs Aulamalerier ble malt etter intense interne dragkamper blant kunstekspertisen, for så å forårsake en like spent offentlig debatt om deres kunstneriske verdi. I dag er de en nasjonalskatt. Denne antologien dokumenterer malerienes dramatiske historie fra de første skisser til den tekniske forfatning de nå befinner seg i snart hundre år etter tilblivelsen
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Harman
Peter Harman, The Culture of Nature in Britain
Environmental History, Oct 2011, 727-728
Scandinavia: Norway
“Scandinavia: Norway,” Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, (Detroit: Gale, 2008), 233-236.
Outer Space & Moon Treaty
“Outer Space” and “Moon Treaty,” in The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (eds.), Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Jan Christian Smuts
“Jan Christian Smuts,” New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, (Detroit: Gale, 2007), 483-4.
Jimena Canales
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