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.