knowledgeable,
Issue 1 efficient, and purposeful
June/July 2010
design
Tr u e Green
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Ethics and Sustainability
Sustainable Design... It takes both vision and experience to build an environmentally sustainable future. Green design is design that goes beyond being justefficient, attractive, on time and on budget. It is a design that cares about how such goals are achieved, about its effect on people and on the environment. An environmentally responsible professional makes a commitment to constantly try to find ways to diminish design’s impact on the world around us.
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By Alastair Gordon
True green
By Allan Chochinov
1000 word manifesto
Before we can begin a meaningful discussion of sustainability, we must acknowledge its faulty framework,
spout against sustainability
Swedish designer and environmentalist.
meet Olof Kolte
Leo Kempf Design – Because we can – Anti-nu on Etsy – Beyound Green –
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nada bike
Bicycles are the new cars.
Project M
transport
Free Green
sustainable housing plans
shelter
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Find out what’s ripe this season in the sustainable design front.
Leo Kempf designed this house for his cat, Olive, complete with a panoramic plexi-glass window, a thick sheepskin rug, some small paintings for the walls, and a cardboard scratching porch.
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by day, creative director at way basics, purveyor of revolutionary furniture. By night, designer of furniture, products, brands & sites. We’ve all heard of pieces of furniture that act as conversation pieces, but how about a table that not only starts conversations but actually looks like a giant speech bubble? Brilliant! Constructed entirely of scrap pieces of cardboard, Leo Kempf’s conversation table is sturdy, witty, and an excellent option if you’re looking for a coffee table that will get your guests talking every time they come over. The Conversation Table by Leo Kempf is made to do just that, start conversations. The Kempf design is made out of scrap cardboard and is made into the shape of cartoon speech bubbles. The design is both eco-friendly and conversation-friendly. The Conversation Table is super light and super sturdy. A perfect marriage of eco-friendly and design conscious! Inspired by Frank Gehry’s “Wiggle Chair,” the Conversation Table is made out of several sheets of corrugated cardboard stacked on top of one another and cut to form a speech bubble shape. To save on material, Kempf then uses plywood spacers between the layers of cardboard. The resulting table is handsome, lightweight and offers space to store or display items.
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Leo Kempf Design
Leo Kempf Design
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The conversation table will be on display at 360 See Gallery in Chicago along with a matching curved wall-shelf and recycling bin using the same materials. We’re glad to see yet another talented designer demonstrating the versatility of cardboard in so many new and exciting ways.
Because We Can Uber-hip, sustainable interior design Why can’t we work someplace this cool? We’re not really sure why workers in offices designed by Because We Can designs would want to leave at the end of a work day. Steampunk cubicles ... Giant octopus tentacle cushion seating ... Client goals like “make our office an over-the-top, amazing and fun place to be so we can attract and keep top talent” ... All done with an eye on sustainability. We’re so there! This Oakland, California, interior design and custom furniture outfit is driven by the eco-friendly creative energy of husband-and-wife team Jeffrey McGrew and Jillian Northrup. They call Because We Can a design-build studio, “a mash-up of designers, artists, architects, fabricators and builders that handle the design and production of interiors, buildings, furniture and products.” The company creates not only unique workplace environments but also one-of-a-kind pieces for the home.
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No matter how high the team soars with its imaginative designs, sustainable materials and building practices remain the foundation. “Building something always means something else is destroyed,” claims the design duo on their web site. “We’re in it for the long haul, so we focus on using sustainable, recycled, and/or local materials and labor. We don’t want to work with toxic materials or in a bad environment and our clients shouldn’t have to live with such things either. We also try to make our projects in the most efficient way possible and make them to be as effective as possible, so that they will last a long time and be gentle to our world.”
Because we can
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marked fresh Client: Three Rings, San Francisco, CA. Mission: Make our office an over the top, amazing and fun place to be so we can attract and keep top talent. Services: Complete interior build out from Interior Design to Fabrication. Scope: Seating for 20, Game Room, Lounge and Secret Room at half the cost of cubes.
Anti-Nu reclaimed everything on Etsy Don’t Buy New... Upcycle! http://www.etsy.com/shop/AntiNu As a frequent shopper of online handmade marketplace Etsy, I was excited to stumble upon Anti-Nu’s shop full of buried treasure. The collection sold by Anti-Nu is a virtual thrift store and curated collection of found objects that are very much worthy of a second life in your home. “I just can’t believe how much we humans consume unnecessarily. Look around, see what you can use that’s already here. The older an item is, the better quality and character,” the storefront states. Some favorites include vintage camera cases, dishware, filing boxes, picnic baskets, and spice racks, all at extremely affordable prices.
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Anti-nu
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This page:
Vintage Small Porcelain Doll $12.00.
Opposite page:
Vintage Plastic Display Letter E $15.00.
Beyond Green is a traveling exhibition co-organized by the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, and by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and circulated by iCI. The exhibition is curated by Stephanie Smith.
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The holistic approach of sustainability seeks to transform the ways people make, use and dispose of the stuff of everyday life. This emerging strategy emphasizes the responsible and equitable use of resources and links environmental and social justice. By doing so, it moves past a prior generation of more narrowly eco-centered or “green” approaches to architecture and industrial design. Sustainable design is being practiced around the world not only by artists, designers and architects, but also by a growing number of activists, corporations and policy-makers.
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Balancing environmental, social, economic, and aesthetic concerns, sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life and is reshaping the fields of architecture and product design. Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art explores the influence of this design philosophy on artists who combine a fresh aesthetic sensibility with a constructively critical approach to the production, dissemination, and display of art. The exhibition includes existing works, commissions, and previously presented work that has been “recycled,” spotlighting ways in which artists are building paths to new forms of practice. Many of the artists work collaboratively and leaven serious social aims with playful, off-the-grid spark, updating the Bauhaus notion of form following function or more recent Beuysian social sculpture. Their approaches range from the metaphorical to the pragmatic, sometimes serving as models for audience activism.
Beyond green
Toward Sustainable Art
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Beyond Green:
meet Olof Kolte by Alena Krasovskaya Olof Kolte is a Swedish designer and environmentalist. He recently gave a lecture where he explained his opinion that design, rather than sophisticated technology, can help achieve sustainability in the modern world. We wanted to learn how Kolte's concerns about radical climate change, uncontrolled consumption of non-renewable resources and urban sprawl have compelled him to communicate this message to people. You are a teacher, and a civil engineer, and an artist, and a designer... How did you come to think about sustainability issues?
I think
I came across the term as such for the first time when I was studying at the Royal College of Art in London. We did a project there called, “A journey into sustainable furniture design,” and had a lot of guest lecturers. The one who gave the greatest impression was Edwin Datchefski, he made a workshop with us. At that time I really enjoyed it but never thought much about it before I started teaching a course in packaging design at Lund University. I was given no instructions on how I was supposed to teach it, so I went to study trips with my students; you know, Lund is called the Mecca of packaging, we have a lot of packaging industries there. Once I became familiar with this industry, what struck me most was that we, as consumers, don’t realise its scale. But once you are in a factory, you realise how much material is being used for something seemingly so trivial. And that was the beginning of my interest. 14 keep June/July|2010
I started to read and I realised that it was not only the packaging industry, but rather the whole pattern of human activities that is affected. In the future, we need to re-learn how to develop products and services with limited natural resources in mind. Today, most natural resources are traded as commodities, if you can pay the price for it, use it and/or process it, and sell the product on the market. The consequences and the bill for the affect on the eco-system are picked up by society. Many destructive activities, use of ending natural resources or misuse of renewable resources, are sanctioned by nations or
international agreements, many times under the blessing of “free trade”. But very few people seem to care that those resources are limited. You begin to understand that most of what we’ve been doing is really destructive. However, what is even more important is that not only are most of the activities destructive per se, they have been expanded to a global scale. But don’t you think that the solutions you’re suggesting are good enough for the developed Western community, but may not be suited for the developing world? Third-world countries often cannot afford expensive solutions, be it technology or design, and in a way they are forced to pollute…
You know, it has been said that “third-world poverty is a luxury we can no longer afford.” It is true that in these countries people are left with no choice: environmental issues are the last thing one thinks about if you are struggling to feed your family. It’s difficult to tackle this challenge since the distribution of assets on the planet is quite unfair, to say the least. We in “the West” are extremely bad role models, and we are behaving totally irresponsible in that we are selling the new rising nations our old technology. At your lecture, you spoke about the Internet as the “driving force in the explosion of productivity” in the modern world. Is it a good or an evil from the sustainability standpoint?
Back in history,
a written word was a means of any activity’s organisation. You can well imagine that at that time writing systems were used to regulate the division of a harvest, or to transfer messages to people, or to announce upcoming events. You could have passed the information to people; you could have educated them, or enabled them, to make use of those opportunities they had not been aware of otherwise. But simply writing has never been as much influential as the Internet: it’s an extremely powerful means of communication. When used in an efficient way, it can encompass an incredible mass of information.
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that “the age of the three-thousand mile Caesar salad is over.” We need to re-establish regional economic interdependencies, as regional networks have been totally destroyed by hypermarkets and big-scale retail chains. In this time in history, there is no excuse for letting big corporations operate on the simple logic of generating “cash, full stop” determine the fate of the human kind.
I would say we need a shift in the working of every
So how are you going to make them listen?
heard about urban sprawl? It is a term for low-dense, poorly planned construction of new buildings around our towns. Big parts of Reykjavík are planned like this. There is no way that you can introduce a cost-efficient public transportation system in this kind of urbanisation. We need to build with high density if we want to cater for good infrastructure and preserve soil. We will need farmland close to cities. We will have to produce food locally. The American author James Howard Kunstler has said
We want to be optimistic, and this feature sits deep inside the human character. Generally, we should be prepared to stop using destructive technology such as the internal combustion engine, and scale down all of our activities. Afterwards, we need to encourage developing countries not to follow our path and jump over the industrial age based on fossil fuel. This can help scale down the environmental impact dramatically and perhaps save us.
And will it bring us hope? Let’s hope that we will see the starting point of some intelligent thinking! *
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No, European city centres are fairly well planned. Have you
First, you need to inform people, and then you can only hope that they, based on this information, will start to act. You must then use your power as a citizen, professional, political creature to influence the development. We all have to be prepared to put our vote for someone who we think will create this change, and perhaps not for the simple solutions offered by short-term thinking political opportunists. Unfortunately, most of the politicians today are of this kind.
But what about the architectural value then? The downtowns of many European capitals, like Prague, are masterpieces of architecture and a priceless cultural heritage of mankind. I simply refuse to understand how one can tear this beauty apart.
I guess it’s about education, everything comes back to it.
Meet
planning authority; they play a key role in this development. In the way we plan the society, we determine what kind of transport systems we use. We need to plan densely, and with great variety so that you won’t need to use a car. The necessity of the individual automobile should be reduced, and wise ecological planning could help us here. Most of what has been built since 1930s is rather poor in its quality. Before World War II, they did not plan the cities for the individual automobile as the system of transportation, so now we have to correct it, tear some parts of the cities apart and construct anew.
meet
I remember the same thing you’ve said about internal combustion engines, that life can be good without them. However, we are so very dependent on them that if we stop using them overnight the whole economic system will collapse. Would you say it should be a gradual change or a drastic jump from one condition into another?
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Once upon a time, there was a tribe that believed it had discovered a means of improving its people's lives. It employed these means, and life improved. For many generations, its descendants followed suit, believing that life would become better still. Then one day they realized the very ideas, practices, and tools that had been improving their lives were quietly degrading certain conditions required for their continued existence. This is where we find ourselves today. Life has become more comfortable for many of us, but at a considerable and mounting cost. If we are to somehow escape this cycle, we must recognize that modernity has proved exceptionally good at producing theoretical blind alleys, and that any discourse on sustainability must avoid the trap of becoming yet another modern solution. We've seen how easily sustainability can be undermined: Poland Spring's "eco-shaped" plastic water bottle, Cadillac's hybridelectric Escalade, Chevron's asking if we are "ready to be part of the solution." No doubt the charm of green consumerism lies in its ability to link enlightenment, liberation, and gratification, producing a fiction in which consumption negates its own impacts. These perversions are so easy to carry out because the current discussion of sustainability is both conceptually incoherent and politically inadequate. Even its general definitions ship the chains of logic by doubling back on themselves. From Jason McLennan's popular The Philosophy of Sustainable Design, for example: Sustainable design aims to "eliminate completely through skillful, sensitive design the environmental impact of the physical objects and services of the built environment." The circularity would be comical if it weren't so disquieting. Sustainability is difficult to critique not because it presents an unassailable set of principles, but because it is so shapeless and empty that it is nearly impossible to locate. Like pornography or obscenity, sustainable design is evidently so obvious that it needs no clear definition. To begin any truly coherent discourse of sustainability, design must acknowledge several overlapping conditions. First, there is our problem of objectsâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;the notion that we inhabit a world composed primarily of things rather than one of innumerable processes spanning extraction, production, consumption, and degradation. By and large, the design mind remains fixated on those brief moments when the object assumes its preordained form: the product. Too often neglected are the tremendous expenditures of energy and resources that are marshaled toward its formation and the handling of its synthetic corpse. Linked to this is the problem of newness. The life span of the
by John May
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manufactured product has, since the 1970s, been exponentially reduced through explicit design strategies, erasing an entire collective psychology of durability in a single generation. Newness itself has been the chief product of the advertising and branding industries for nearly a half a century. Designers have been sold on, and have helped sell, not just disposable goods but also the idea of disposability. These problems find their alibi in our blindness to a larger issue: the problem of externalization. Buried beneath the boosterism of "green infrastructures" lies the historical fact that the effective distribution of modernity's many wonders (clean water, cool air, glossy products) has always depended on externalizing its by-products to an imagined "outside": the inner city, the rural hinterlands, the global south, the upper atmosphere, the inner lung. In material terms, these accumulations always outpace the pleasures. Landfills leak toxins, asthma rates soar in cities, strange ecologies form at coastal sewage outlets. Among the many gifts left us by the late Max Sebald was a lengthy work of poetry entitled After Natureâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;a most unnerving and elusive phrase. As always, a certain mystery surrounds Sebald's language. Does the title indicate a romanticist's impulse, as when a sonata is composed "after Mozart" or a play written "after Brecht?" Or is he describing a point in time after which nature is no longer a sensible referent? If the latter, the poem becomes a kind of eulogy, a lest rite for a natural world that has disappeared before our eyes. I prefer another, more hopeful reading, in which what has passed away is not nature itself but the idea that the natural world can be measured, managed, and organized through technology into resources. It's an idea that continues to justify and nourish our misguided engineering dreams, which remain so blind to the past, to the endless list of failed projects and well-planned solutions that continue to go awry. The current discourse on sustainable design rings hollow because we have barely begun to acknowledge the consequences of our modern methods, and already we have ceded too much ground to intellectual confusion and the smooth concision of greenwashing campaigns. Sustainability today is more image than theory or politics, and design must confront its complicity with this image of a world "sustained" by incessant innovation, responsible purchasing, and efficient infrastructures. Until then, sustainability will remain little more than a glossy media avatar of domestic modernism perfected, of life swaddled in the soft, stylish comforts of a well-fertilized Petrochemical Green. A Perpetually New Green. A Suicidal Green. *
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Hippocratic Before Socratic
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Metrics Before Magic
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Do no harm
is a good starting point for everyone, but it’s an especially good starting point for designers.
Stop making crap
Screws Before Glues
June/July|2010
Teach Sustainability Early
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su tainability design Context Before Absolutely Everything
Climates Before Primates
By Allan Chochinov
1000 word manifesto
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...designers are feeding and feeding this cycle, helping to turn everyone and everything into either a consumer or a consumable. And when you think about, this is kind of grotesque. “Consumer” isn’t a dirty word exactly, but it probably oughta be.
Hippocratic Before Socratic
Screws Before Glues
“Do no harm” is a good starting point for everyone, but it’s an especially good starting point for designers. For a group of people who pride themselves on “problem solving” and improving people’s lives, we sure have done our fair share of the converse. We have to remember that industrial design equals mass production, and that every move, every decision, every curve we specify is multiplied—sometimes by the thousands and often by the millions. And that every one of those everys has a price. We think that we’re in the artifact business, but we’re not; we’re in the consequence business.
This is lifted directly from the Owner’s Manifesto, which addresses how the people who own things and the people who make them are in a kind of partnership. But it’s a partnership that’s broken down, since almost all of the products we produce cannot be opened or repaired, are designed as subassemblies to be discarded upon failure or obsolescence, and conceal their workings in a kind of solid-state prison. This results in a population less and less confident in their abilities to use their hands for anything other than pushing buttons and mice, of course. But it also results in people fundamentally not understanding the workings of their built artifacts and environments, and, more importantly, not understanding the role and impact that those built artifacts and environments have on the world. In the same way that we can’t expect people to understand the benefits of a water filter when they can’t see the gunk inside it, we can’t expect people to sympathize with greener products if they can’t appreciate the consequences of any products at all.
Stop Making Crap And that means that we have to stop making crap. It’s really as simple as that. We are suffocating, drowning, and poisoning ourselves with the stuff we produce, abrading, out-gassing, and seeping into our air, our water, our land, our food—and basically those are the only things we have to look after before there’s no we in that sentence. It gets into our bodies, of course, and it certainly gets into our minds. And designers are feeding and feeding this cycle, helping to turn everyone and everything into either a consumer or a consumable. And when you think about it, this is kind of grotesque. “Consumer” isn’t a dirty word exactly, but it probably oughta be.
Systems Before Artifacts
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Before we design anything new, we should examine how we can use what already exists to better ends. We need to think systems before artifacts, services before products, adopting Thackara’s use/not own principles at every step. And when new products are needed, they’ll be obvious and appropriate, and then can we conscientiously pump up fossil fuels and start polymerizing them. Product design should be part of a set of tools we have for solving problems and celebrating life. It is a means, not an end.
Teach Sustainability Early
June/July|2010
Design education is at a crossroads, with many schools understanding the potentials, opportunities, and obligations of design, while others continue to teach students how to churn out pretty pieces of garbage. Institutions that stress sustainability, social responsibility, cultural adaptation, ethnography, and systems thinking are leading the way. But soon they will come to define what industrial design means. (A relief to those constantly trying to define the discipline today!) This doesn’t mean no aesthetics. It just means a keener eye on costs and benefits.
Design for Impermanence In his Masters Thesis, “The Paradox of Weakness: Embracing Vulnerability in Product Design,” my student Robert Blinn argues that we are the only species who designs for permanence— for longevity— rather than for an ecosystem in which everything is recycled into everything else. Designers are complicit in this overengineering of everything we produce (we are terrified of, and often legally risk-averse to, failure), but it is patently obvious that our ways and means are completely
1000 word manifesto
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antithetical to how planet earth manufactures, tools, and recycles things. We choose inorganic materials precisely because biological organisms cannot consume them, while the natural world uses the same building blocks over and over again. It is indeed Cradle-to-Cradle or cradle-to-grave, I’m afraid.
Balance Before Talents The proportion of a solution needs to balance with its problem: we don’t need a battery-powered pooper scooper to pick up dog poop, and we don’t need a car that gets 17 MPG to, well, we don’t need that car, period. We have to start balancing our ability to be clever with our ability to be smart. They’re two different things.
Metrics Before Magic Metrics do not get in the way of being creative. Almost everything is quantifiable, and just the exercise of trying to frame up ecological and labor impacts can be surprisingly instructive. So on your next project, if you’ve determined that it may be impossible to quantify the consequences of a material or process or assembly in a design you’re considering, maybe it’s not such
a good material or process or assembly to begin with. There are more and more people out there in the business of helping you to find these things out, by the way; you just have to call them.
Climates Before Primates This is the a priori, self-evident truth. If we have any hope of staying here, we need to look after our home. And our anthropocentric worldview is literally killing us. “Design serves people”? Well, I think we’ve got bigger problems right now.
Context Before Absolutely Everything Understanding that all design happens within a context is the first (and arguably the only) stop to make on your way to becoming a good designer. You can be a bad designer after that, of course, but you don’t stand a chance of being a good one if you don’t first consider context. It’s everything: In graphics, communication, interaction, architecture, product, service, you name it—if it doesn’t take context into account, it’s crap. And you already promised not to make any more of that.*
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THE FULFILMENT OF HUMAN NEEDS WHILE MA INTAININ G THE QUALITY OF TH E NATURAL ENVIRONMENT INDEFINITELY sustainable
True Green Counterculture Architecture
By Alastair Gordon
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But while the shaggy â&#x20AC;&#x2122;60s may be up for review, they come this time with a haircut: theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been separated from the cultural revolution that drove them. But can you have true sustainability without a global change in lifestyle?
Notions of sustainability, ephemeralization, simplifying life, and reducing our carbon footprint have come full circle and seem more urgent today than ever before.
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Arcosanti tower. Arcosanti has been built by volunteers and workshop labor over the course of 30 years. It’s primary function is to serve as an Urban Laboratory. With an Elevation of 3,750 ft Arcosanti sits in a unique environment, different from urban Phoenix with lower average temperature.
With hallucinogenic drugs as lubricant, college dropouts who had never built much of anything felt empowered to move into the wilderness and create whole new communities. A group of Yale architecture students, led by Dave Sellers and Bill Rienecke, were sick of Modernist theory, moved to Prickly Mountain, Vermont, in the mid-’60s and started building houses with their own hands. A group of Princeton students, led by Steve Badanes, called themselves Jersey Devil and followed suit.
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It’s a good time to look back to the originating seeds of green, to the anarchic 1960s and Bucky Fuller’s philosophy of “ephemeralization,” doing more with less. Conspicuous similarities can be detected between then and now, certainly a general lassitude and loss of confidence in the status quo, along with the urge to save our planet. Conventional parameters of city, community, family, and housing were all thrown out in the psychedelic era, seen as part of the same mind-set that brought carpet bombing to Vietnam.
Steve Durkee and other members of USCO (“Company of Us”), a multimedia collaborative formed in New York in 1964, conjured up the idea of “Solux” in early manifestos and then went forth and built their “spiritual dude ranch” on a mountainside near Taos, New Mexico. (The name changed from Solux to Lama.) Anything seemed possible since young people were willing to give up the comforts of middle-class affluence and live in a state of what Ivan Illich, Austrian philosopher and anarchist, called “voluntary primitivism.” They did without television or plumbing or central heating while learning the ways of the compost heap, the privy, and the communal washtub.
Are we still waiting for the green version of the Villa Savoie or the Farnsworth House? There is no unity or single direction apparent.
In 1965, a group of art students founded Drop City, a domed commune in Colorado. “Houses in our society are walls, blocking man from man, man from the universe, man from himself,” wrote Bill Voyd, one of the founders. Paolo Soleri was preaching arcology, a combination of architecture and ecology, back in the early ’60s, and instead of just theorizing, he went into the Arizona desert like an Old Testament prophet and began to actually build Arcosanti, the prototype for a new kind of organic, highdensity city (without cars) surrounded by natural wilderness. It still thrives today, 38 years later.
True green
So much depends on the perception of a postpetroleum future, a single tree, melting ice caps, Al Gore’s waistline, innovations in alternative energies, and CEOs who convince their boards to go green or, at least, adopt the rhetoric of green. Meanwhile, Americans are consuming more, buying more needless stuff, driving bigger SUVs, living in denial, and dumbing down. So can we still look to architects and planners for new attitudes and new paradigms? Good architecture, like some of the freestanding houses in this issue, can help shape our expectations and give us an idea of what the future might bring, truly sustainable or not. “Green” may be a pill that’s harder to swallow than one imagined, and maybe it’s not so bad to talk about aesthetics after all:
Without Architects and D’Arcy Thompson’s 1917 On Growth and Form were popular sources of inspiration.) In his fervently utopian proposals for Mesa City (1955– 60), Soleri was studying seedpods and stamens. Others, borrowing Soleri’s siltcasting techniques, built mounds of earth, covered them with concrete, and scooped out the dirt when the concrete had set. In 1972, Aleksandra Kasuba created a cocoon dwelling in the woods of Woodstock, New York, by pulling stretch fabric between the branches and trunks of different trees. “The approach was spontaneous throughout,” she said. Fourteen people lived inside the ghostly membrane during Whiz Bang City East, an alternative gathering held that summer.
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In 1970, Charles Harker and members of the Tao Design collaborative—most of them disillusioned students from the architecture program at the University of Texas, Austin— built “Earth House” working without plans, improvising as they went, weaving strands of PVC piping into nestlike configurations and then spraying the structural skeleton with polyurethane foam. “All design is spontaneous,” said Harker, who compared the process to the metamorphosis of a butterfly. Around the same time, Bob de Buck built a house that resembled a giant anthill in the desert near Truchas, New Mexico, using scrap wood scavenged from building sites around Albuquerque. “Tools not to have: straightedge, square, level, plumb,” advised de Buck. Steve Baer, itinerant hippie builder and inventor of the “Zome,” drove by one afternoon and mistook it for a heap of garbage until he got closer and began to see the beauty of its weird, fractured anatomy.
For many New Age utopians, Fuller’s geodesic dome offered the greatest promise, with its single embracing space, ideal for collective living, maximum enclosure constructed from minimum material. There seemed to be an inherent magic in all things circular. “Corners constrict the mind,” wrote one hippie builder. “Build circular musical structures and help destroy rational box-reality,” declared another who believed that the square had contaminated every aspect of Western civilization from the sandbox to the grid of corporate Modernism. While hundreds of domes had been built by 1959, Fuller’s vision flowered in the mid-to-late ’60s when the children of the counterculture adopted the dome as a symbol of both resistance and solidarity. Indeed, it could be seen as the seed for a whole new civilization, one that was communal, selfsupporting, nonhierarchical. Its simple geometry suggested a multifaceted crystal, the eye of God, a circle of fellowship, and the mysterious oneness that so many had experienced on LSD and Psilocybin. “You merge with the dome; its skin becomes your skin,” said one geodesic convert. Modernism and the cult of the machine seemed corrupt. Who wanted to live in a soul-withering box? Who really wanted to live in Corb’s machine à habiter? Instead of steamships and airplane fuselages, young architects were studying bird’s nests, honeycombs, bowers, anthills, and beaver dams while condemning the monuments of the modern movement as so many “architectural bombing runs.” One longhaired builder explained, “We want our homes to spring from the soil like trees.” (Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 Architecture
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Notions of sustainability, ephemeralization, simplifying life, and reducing our carbon footprint have come full circle and seem more urgent today than ever before. But while the shaggy ’60s may be up for review, they come with a haircut, shorn as they are of the social/ cultural revolution that drove them. And the question remains, can you have one without the other? True sustainability without sweeping social change? True green without revolution? One thing is for sure, something’s gotta give. It might not take a revolution but sustainability is not going to happen without some form of lifestyle change. Consumers beware: When one hears companies like Exxon, General Motors, and Merck Chemical talking green, then you know it’s probably time to check in with Alice and slide back down the rabbit hole. *
While ideas from the outlaw architects would filter quietly into the mainstream, the movement as a whole, the urge to build like beavers, was later dismissed along with LSD, tie-died T-shirts, and free love. Ronald Reagan, when running for Governor of California in 1967 said, “There will be no more Morning Stars,” referring to the infamous free-land
commune in Sonoma County. He rode the reactionary upswell all the way to the White House. The proverbial genie somehow was put back into the bottle. By the late ’70s and early ’80s, architects started talking more about Palladian villas than biodegradable privies. Domes were dissed. (They leaked.) Walls and doors were seen as good things. People wanted privacy, not the communal bean pot. Hollow Corinthian columns and faux facades filled the architecture magazines while talk of solar, sustainable, or recycled design was shrugged off, seen as something of an embarrassment, a holdover from funky, Birkenstock-wearing hippies.
True green
In the funky, self-build revolution, making shelter was seen as an act of personal transformation and revelation. This credo was spread by word of mouth, by contact high, by a kind of telepathic interconnection that was also known as grokking. It was just there, somehow, in the air, the back-to-nature vibe, the need to make shelter, the need to uncomplicate one’s life. There was scrounging and recycling of old materials, living off the spoils of straight society. “Trapped inside a waste economy, man finds an identity as a consumer,” wrote Bill Voyd. “Once outside the trap, he finds enormous resources at his disposal—free.” Voyd and other pioneers at Drop City learned to chop the metal tops out of junked cars and shape them into building panels. Other free-form builders learned to work with bottles, mounds of earth, mud bricks, old tires, and bales of hay. Hippie surfers in Big Sur, California, fabricated driftwood houses and lived there happily until the Coast Guard bulldozed the funky structures into the sea. A more permanent community was established across the border on Hornby Island, British Columbia, by U.S. draft dodgers and self-build architects who fashioned surprisingly sophisticated shelters using only driftwood.
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An in-house team of architects, designers, and engineers develops the plans and runs energy simulations to determine savings in different climate zones. Free Green generates most of its revenue by including product placements from advertisers in its plans, such as suggestions for bamboo flooring, low-flow bathroom fixtures, and solar panels. A paid "premium" membership option offers additional plans, without product placements. Although only a handful of plans are currently available, more than 40,000 copies have already been downloaded from freegreen.com, and the company plans to introduce at least 10 new designs each year. "That means we've given away about 60 million square feet of design work," says Uyeda. When posted online, architectural plans are simply "another form of media," he says. "And media can go viral." Hale County on bikes," Bielenberg says. â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Tim McKeough
How do you encourage home builders to go green when they can't afford the services of professional architects? Provide architect-designed sustainable-building plans for free. That's the idea behind Free Green, an online service that has been giving away construction documents since April 2008. Founded by friends who met at Cornell University while working on the school's 2005 Solar Decathlon entry, Free Green hopes to significantly accelerate the adoption of sustainable-building practices across the U.S. "It's not just about how we can produce better designs," says Ben Uyeda, the company's chief architectural officer. "It's about how we deliver design."
Shelter
Free Green www.freegreen.com
shelter
Sustainable housing plans
Project M's Nada Bike "membership card" is a no-nonsense $100 single-speed frame (no parts) that users build up however they wish.
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Bielenberg's name should be familiar. In addition to his graphic-design studio C2, he is the founder of Project M, the activist-minded educational venture modeled after the architect Samuel Mockbee's Rural Studio program, which has organized numerous do-good design initiatives, often focusing on Mockbee's beloved Hale County, Alabama. This is the umbrella under which Nada is operating. Project M alumni have spent the past year building and test-driving six frames, and participants have assisted in conceiving the brand and its website. Bielenberg says their involvement will only increase: Under the advise of Brooklyn-based Bamboo Bike Studio, Project M is setting up Nada production near its Hale County headquarters. Starting this year, the facility will harvest local bamboo to make all future membership cards. "We're trying to get Hale County on bikes," Bielenberg says. â&#x20AC;&#x201C;David Sokol
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"It's time to take our power away from the oil companies and the car companies and the greedheads who run them," Nada Bike's website proclaims. A $100 enrollment fee gets you a Nada "membership card" â&#x20AC;&#x201C;actually a barebones bike frame that can be built out according to the member's desires. "There's no markup," says Bielenberg, who worked with a Taiwanese bicycle manufacturer to realize Nada's first production run. "It was the only way to get it as cheap as I wanted it to be. Now it's almost an impulse purchase." Frames sit in his San Francisco design studio ready to ship.
Bicycles are the new cars. Rebel youths may once have cultivated jalopies, hot rods, and lowriders, but today they're customizing fixed-gears and cruisers. No doubt many have swapped four wheels for two with the greater good in mind, but graphic designer John Bielenberg wants to raise the political consciousness of the bike movement. In October he and fellow bike fanatic Brian W. Jones launched Nade Bike to capitalize on bikes' DIY intrigue while touting their environmental credentials.
Transport
Project M www.nadabike.com
transport
nada bike