Dialogics vs. modular prefab

I read an essay today called "Architecture and nature at the end of the 20th century: towards a dialogical approach for sustainable design in architecture." The author, F. J. Soria Lopéz, mirrors my concern that the dominant vein in sustainable architectural practice is that of the technological, the deterministic, and the physical. There isn't much mainstream attention paid, it seems, to spiritual, poetic, and aesthetic human needs in the search for a more natural architecture. This is a critique that can be applied to LivingHomes, but in thinking along these lines, I realized the critique is not nearly so simple..

Lopéz derives his idea of a dialogical architecture from the idea, first put forth by M. M. Bajtin in The Dialogic Imagination that works come in two forms: that of a dialogue, and that of a monologue. The dialogic work acts as a conversation that incorporates previous works, acknowledging the many surrounding factors that contribute meaning to the topic at hand. This is in contrast to a monologic work, which answers, corrects, silences or just continues a previous work. To Lopéz, a dialogical architecture is one that acknowledges all the factors of sustainabilty; that is, not just the matter of saving energy and minimizing footprint through amazing new technology that controls all physical factors of a building. But rather, all the humanistic, spiritual, literary, and aesthetic associations of a building. In order to do this, a dialogical sustainable architecture must recognize and incorporate such things as collective memory, place, beauty, viewer response, viewer experience, etc. in addition to the usual scientific factors of climate, topography, geography, material availability, etc.

What this means, for a prefab architecture that hopes to make a significant national impact, is that the pre-designed, modular, and necessarily systematic units must somehow accommodate not just geographical and climactic disparities (already a challenge enough), but also differences in local culture. It's a lot to try and fit into a pre-fab standard.

Lopéz's essay is a rallying call to reform the entire way we conceive of and work with sustainability, but it brings up the question of whether it is possible to reconcile the minute customizability that dialogism requires with the mass-manufactured mentality behind pre-fab. LivingHomes one day hopes to be a cheap, or at least mid-range, widely distributable, world-changing type of private shelter available throughout the U.S. But if it is to achieve this, it would most likely need to impose some sort of uniformity across all of its designs (a uniformity which is more than obvious in the existing models). This uniformity is anathema to the idea of a truly dialogic architecture, which seems to me to always speak of an individually commissioned architect, coming into a community to do very local, very specific case studies, and designing a very custom structure for that particular space and time. Lopez cites Aalto and Wright as inspirations for the type of architecture that he envisions; however, Aalto and Wright were almost always working for individual wealthy clients whenever they built houses, so they were more free to express the poetic and the spiritual than the architects of LivingHomes.

Perhaps there is a way to reconcile the two, to build truly sensitive, sustainable homes that are also prefabricated, modular, and ultimately widely available. Perhaps there is a collective memory and aesthetic sensibility common to all humans that could be tapped into by a particularly sensitive designer-architect, to make a widely-distributed green home that IS, to some extent, dialogical. But I haven't, in my reading, found any mention of what that might be yet...

For the purposes of my thesis, I definitely need to acknowledge this difficulty in analyzing LivingHomes. It is hard to be perfect, to incorporate everything, when you are trying to achieve environmental good through popular success; prefab all becomes invariably tied into economics and practicality - what could be built at a factory and how far could it be shipped etc.. Is it even necessary, then, for LivingHomes to try to incorporate slightly more artistry and rhetoric into the way its buildings are designed? The answer, I still think, is yes. Because that, at least, is possible, even when perfect dialogism isn't.

three themes in the search for a more natural green architecture

These will form the basis for my new outline:

1) awareness/connectedness
2) humbleness
3) empathy

news clip

Clipped from recent LA Times article, "Eco Friendly Consumption? Critics Don't Buy It":

"It's cynical on the part of the manufacturers and the people who want to sell this stuff," said Andrew Szasz, a sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara and author of the new book "Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed From Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves."

"In a world where people want to continue to aspire to middle-class consumption patterns, but they are also wanting to feel like they are responsible citizens who care about social and environment issues, how do they reconcile that? They go shopping for something that declares itself to be ecologically friendly."

I need to check out that book. (Eco-criticism, anthropology, psychology, and now sociology! I might be taking this interdisciplinary mandate a bit far, but it's been wildly rewarding and eye-opening so far... so why not?)

marketing, the media, and millionaires, oh my!

I spent a few hours today researching Ray Kappe and LivingHomes as per a reader's recommendation. After gleaning all the info I could from Livinghomes.net (which turned out mostly to be marketing hype), I found my way to LexisNexis and did a few searches on "green houses," "sustainable homes," and the like in US publications. (Livinghomes turned up more than a few times, unsurprisingly.)

I'm finding that the way that green homes are discussed in the press and blogosphere and marketing materials supports my initial hypothesis, that by and large, the philosophy behind sustainable architecture (or at least, sustainable residential architecture) is tied more into economics than ecology.

Reading all these articles and browsing the LivingHomes website, I am confronted with catchphrases like "casual comfort," "sleek elegance," and other hackneyed lifestyle descriptors. It seems that green homes are more about ego than awareness: owning one would certainly give anyone a sense of moral superiority, material self-indulgence, and a hefty "cool factor." But it would hardly give me a sense of why it is important, in the first place, for green homes to exist: ecological balance, environmental justice....

On a completely biased, highly opinionated note: while watching the LivingHomes tour of Steve Glenn's home, I actually got a little disgusted with the product placements and continual featuring of consumptive excess. It's great that he has a home media center by Microsoft and some nice vintage furniture pieces, but it begs the question, "What foundations are this company really built on?" Is it built on a love born of understanding for nature and a sense of honest stewardship for the earth, or is it built on a fetish for energy-saving hot tubs, exotic materials, and "dumplings and soy milk lattes"? (Yes, that also came from the tour.)

I admit that there will always be a little bit of the latter, but I really get no sense of the former from the online tour... or does it not matter as long as a decently well-to-do public can be seduced into gobbling it up, because, in the long run, it IS better for the environment?

Luxury green homes!?

I know, I know... haven't blogged in a month or more. This is just what happens when art projects engulf one's life. I have a lot of catching up to do, so catch up I will:

I am still focusing on critiquing sustainable architecture (for their aesthetic and experiential sense of disconnect from nature), but hopefully I'm getting closer to the focus I needed. I want to look at high-end, architect-designed green homes in the United States that always make it into coffee-table anthologies of cool new architectural design. (Funny, because this actually goes back to that very first outline I wrote, the one that I thought wouldn't work...) Members of the design/architecture blogosphere sometimes critically refer to some of these as "one-offs" because they are used by architects to show off their more extreme ideas, at the pleasure of very wealthy clients - which already highlights some obvious issues with this whole idea. Just a few of them are:

- Zero Energy Home by Zoka Zola in Chicago
- Sea Train House by Jennifer Siegal in LA
- 156 Reade Street by John Petrarca (Studio Petrarca) in NY
- 1310 East Union Street by Davild Miller (Miller/Hull Partnership) in Seattle

Another example that I found particularly interesting for its repeated appearance in popular press lately is:

- Wired Home by LivingHomes in LA

...but it is not really a one-off in the true sense. Well, it IS customized but it was also "pre-fabricated" which meant that it was built from parts that could be 80% assembled in factory and then shipped on-site to be put together quickly and easily (and money-saving-ly). But it is architect designed ("custom") and it is extremely expensive, for a not-too-big house. (Yes, it cost $4 million, is filled with custom fittings and high-tech gadgets, and is pretty much a glass box; thank you Mies van der Rohe)

Challenges and thoughts and notes to self...
One challenge with this is deciding... should I tackle one or more projects? I could just pick one project in particular and analyze it to death (in a good way). Or I can pick two and compare/contrast them. But even if I pick one to server as my central focus, I could still bring in other projects to "bounce" off of it.

But should I focus on an architect or company?
Right now, my inclination is to steer away from focusing on a particular architect or architectural firm and just look at specific built projects. If I chose to focus on the architect rather than the building, issues surrounding a particular practitioner's style/aesthetic or philosophy would come into play and that's not what I am interested in; I am interested in built projects. I am toying with the idea of focusing on LivingHomes, a company that's been mentioned copiously both in the published press (newspapers, etc.) and in the online blogosphere, because they have a lot of built examples. But then I might get embroiled in issues of what it means to be making pre-fab homes, market trends, consumer wants/needs, etc. Plus there are other companies sprouting up left and right that practically mirror what LivingHomes does (super-green, pre-fabricated homes for the upper-middle class, basically) - Marmol Radziner Prefab and Jennifer Siegal's Office of Mobile Design are a few of the more well-known. If I chose one, I might as well analyze them all as they all work in practically the same vein.

On the other other other hand, I could choose one project from each of these three well-known design companies (I almost forget to call them architects because their work is so sleek and aesthetically considered) and just use them as "prototypical representatives" of this new pre-fab trend which Arts/Living writers at the New York Times think is becoming the next big, cool revolution in housing. That would allow me to make critiques that could have an overarching application.

Could I see it in the flesh(glass/steel)?
It would be ideal if I could actually visit a project. I just found out too late that the Wired Home in LA tours ended TODAY, my first day back in CA for Thanksgiving. One day too late!! Aaah. Oh well, there are other opportunities. (But it would have been awesome...)

Dealing with the obvious
This issue is so recurrent, it's going to need addressing sooner or later, so perhaps in the introduction I need to discuss the public's view of green homes as expensive, aesthetically daring, and out-of-reach. The copious coverage of high-end green homes in the popular press definitely contributes to this myth. Turns out there are definitely lots of current attempts (and some budding successes) at creating budget-sensitive green homes that look like a normal home. Example: IdealHomes built their first prototype of a zero-energy home in Oklahoma last year that costs less than $200k. (article) It's not New York Times front-page material but it's marketable to the middle class...

After all the thinking experiments...
What it comes down to is basically me deciding which particular projects to focus on.