History lessons

Finally, at the gentle prodding of various professors, I have started to read into the history of the environmental movement in the U.S. And it's proven very fruitful: in just a few chapters I have already gained many new ideas and perspectives that reading endless architectural theory books never seemed to provide (once again bolstering my concern that the world of architecture, like art, is sometimes a little too self-involved).

One new perspective is stems from thinking about the 60's idea of utopia, as revealed in the optimism not just of commune hippies but the prosperous post WWII nation in general. In that age, as author Hal K. Rothman put it, Americans wanted to have their cake and eat it too - to them, it seemed possible to have beautiful wilderness areas preserved for their amusement while at the same time continuing on with their tremendous prosperity and economic growth. However as the decade wore on and prosperity began to put strains on natural resources (energy, lumber, land, etc), it turns out the "utopia" was a false one that only appeared so to certain segments of the American population. (HEY!! There's a hummingbird flying around my window! SO COOL. Sorry, that was completely not related to anything I'm talking about.) To workers in the lumber industry, pressure from environmentalists who
demanded better, cleaner, healthier human and natural habitats meant that they have fewer logging areas, fewer jobs. Though you could criticize the logging industry plenty for caring only about feeding the market and not on more long-term goals such as sustainable harvesting of virgin forests, at the time it ultimately down to people were at risk of losing their jobs and livlihoods.

Anyway, so the idea of utopia is faulty in more ways than one, and basically it came down to economics: utopia fails, in this instance, to be realized because not everyone can be economically happy and sound in such a world where environmental concerns dominate. To an environmentalist that sounds like anathema to their goals (because nothing is worse for the environment than overt, myopic concern for the bottom line), but perhaps this is a different, useful way of framing a look at LivingHomes and today's booming "green goods" market.

The idea inherent in LivingHomes is utopic beyond compare, and it seems (so far) to be rather ingeniously flawless. Thanks to the strides we have made since the 60s in recycling, sustainability studies, technology, alt. energy research, etc. etc. etc. it is now possible to support economic wealth and prosperity while also being friendly to the environment. This seems, more clearly than ever, to be the message inherent in LivingHomes' mission: to provide luxury at no cost to one's sense of ethics - something which was impossible before due to limits in technology.

To explore this idea further might be a good move I think, as so far my critique of LH has been rather one-sided, focused on its faults rather than its hopeful idealism and redeeming qualities. Of course, looking at LH as an act of idealism and utopic aspirations doesn't come without its doubts and critiques, but it offers a more historically-based approach that isn't only dependent on contemporary eco-philosophies...

falling into a gap?

One thing that has been bothering me lately about this thesis, which up until now I haven't been able to place my finger on, is that I am essentially attempting to apply the dense theories and subtle thinking of academia to what is ultimately and essentially a product that caters to consumer popular culture... and, well... just how valid is that? (I feel as if I am attempting to discuss rugby using only literary analysis terms, or economics using Middle English or.. you know.)

In reading an article from Design Issues about biophilia vs. technophilia in design culture today, I came upon a statement that I've probably encountered dozens of times already: "The idea that technology cannot be an anodyne for society's ills is a relatively recent development." What stopped me this time around was the fact that I had just so recently been casually browsing an issue of Wired magazine, in which a giddy faith and excitement about technology is overtly quite alive and well. What do you mean, people are losing faith in technology? For normal people, the type of "normal" people over at Dwell magazine, who are raving about LivingHomes, who are paying attention to Steve Glenn's every move, their faith in technology doesn't seem to be taking a hit from the supposed jadedness of the academic world. To the normal world, the academic way of looking at their world may as well not exist. And yet.. the normal world is where actions need to happen, solutions need to be found. I am clearly identifying problems with the aesthetic glorified by LH in my thesis, but because it is couched in the thinking of academic spheres, how will those problems ever be solved in a real-world way, a way that affects investors, builders, and homebuyers?

I've always worked under the assumption that if I happen to have the ability analyze something deeply and poetically (i.e. I've been armed with all the rampant theory and learnedness of four years of an expensive liberal arts education), then by all means apply I should apply it to anything and everything, be it the cheese on my hamburger patty, the most recent Tate Modern show, or a line of sleek and alluring residential homes in Southern California.

On the other hand, I have this nagging suspicion that none of this research will ever bear any real world relevance to the design and construction of actual homes in the future, even though I am really enjoying it. My whole reservation about writing a thesis in the first place was that a semester-ful of knowledge and writing will get us no where in actually suggesting improvements to the state of affairs in Green housing today, in getting closer to tangible solutions. The real estate market operates on principles of marketing, consumer desire, etc. not on the poetry of Whitman or academic descendants of Thoreau's transcendentalism or the writings of cultural philosophers, no matter how thought-provoking and spiritually uplifting. I've been trying desperately to find academic work that bridges the gap between cultural theory and sociology/economics but I'm only finding texts that fall squarely in one camp or the other. And I'm not sure that I have the background and authority to do the bridging myself. (Or the time, for that matter.)

So... any suggestions? Or have I just been thinking about this too much?

Either way, it's definitely too late to back up now, and as I said, I do enjoy theory and academia.. I just wish other people outside of college would take the time and energy to think the same way about these houses as the way I am trying to think about them now.

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.