Consumerism?

If I were to take a new direction, would it save my thesis? I am trying to think back to what initially attracted me to the idea of studying LivingHomes.. I think much of it was due to the fact that I am a steady reader of "green" (and rather trendy) weblogs and it has repeatedly come up in the popular press. Moreover, I am interested in gadgetry and the technophilic Wired magazine recently had a sensational, headline-making home built by LH for them. It may suffice to say that I was seduced by LH's ability to make headlines, but not satisfied by how much I knew about it, so I undertook this project to see if I could learn more.

In the process of learning more, I learned how LH may well have been overrepresented. in my mind. In the wider context of sustainability, it is but a tiny sliver, more concerned with business feasibility, it seems, than seriously tackling larger issues of sustainability through community intervention, education, or politics. Though it has saturated, for a while, the media, I'm still not finding mention of it in the academic literature, except in passing. Jennifer Siegal's Office of Mobile Design is even being taken more seriously (Siegal is, perchance, also a recent darling of the popular green and prefab architecture blogospheres.)

This is probably because, after all, LH is a business venture - a development firm - rather than an architectural design office. It outsources design work to consultants and big-name architects such as Ray Kappe, a move that feels more like branding than of putting forward a particular architectural stance. In the end, LH seems more about marketing a product - green upscale living - than working to solve the societal issue of sustainability through proposing creative alternatives.

Clearly consumerism then becomes a big part of the picture. At this point it may well be worth looking into the relationship between consumerism and sustainability, as embodied through LH's marketing programme. Chapters could be built on first arguing that LH is promoting a product rather than an ideology, and then later deconstructing the pitfalls of this approach to sustainability. There should also be a section or chapter on why consumerism might be a viable approach to the question of sustainability despite that its fundamental premise - the valuation of material goods - seems allergic to some basic approaches to sustainability - making do with less, respecting the biosphere, etc.

The only question now, though, is how to bridge the gap between architecture and all this. Conceivably I could write a similar paper, making similar points, using... I don't know... Whole Foods organic pine nuts (yum yum)... or any other "green" product... instead of a house. But I guess that's where the first or so chapter would come in - arguing that even a house can be packaged this way, into a consumer product. Hmmm.. yes.

Forget this trying to prove that LH and sustainability is Modernist or not Modernist stuff... who really cares if you can call it by one name or another? It doesn't change the way it influences society and the public. It doesn't aid in community building or urbanization or changing the American landscape. (And this is why writing a thesis is hard: finding things that might actually matter to write about...)