Blurred Sustainability
"Architects have been aware of the issues for sometime, of course, but the proportion of those committed to sustainability and ecological practices has remained small. And until recently, much of the work produced as sustainable architecture has been of poor quality. Early examples were focused mainly around the capacities of simple technologies to produce energy and recycle waste. Sustainable architecture, itself rudimentary, often also meant an alternative lifestyle of renunciation, stripped of much pleasure. This has changed, and is changing still."
Wouldn't the most sustainable architecture be no architecture at all? Something that leaves no waste, no footprint, no negative effects, but instead gives back to the environment. But would an architecture that only gives back to the environment be practical for people? It would require immense lifestyle changes, a change in the perception of what architecture is and needs to be and varying methods of change in material use. Would this be a major setback in architectural design, or a means of needed change in architecture of the future? This starts a discussion about the limits of what architecture can be, while outline what architecture still needs to do, for both people and the environment.
The Blur Building by Diller Scofidio is an example of "non-materiality" in design, and by its nature, a completely sustainable space. Practical? Probably not, but it introduces new thinking into the possibilities of design and space. "The public can approach Blur via a ramped bridge. The 400 foot long ramp deposits visitors at the center of the fog mass onto a large open-air platform where movement is unregulated. Visual and acoustical references are erased along the journey toward the fog leaving only an optical "white-out" and the "white-noise" of pulsing water nozzles." This invokes an experience out of the building users and much like Phillippe Rahm, creates an architecture that is all about perception. This design uses the earth (water) as its main material and definer of space and begins to have interactions among all the three ecologies, both social, environmental and mental because of invoking the by standard. "In this exposition pavilion there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself. Is an experiment in de-emphasis on an environmental scale."
Wouldn't the most sustainable architecture be no architecture at all? Something that leaves no waste, no footprint, no negative effects, but instead gives back to the environment. But would an architecture that only gives back to the environment be practical for people? It would require immense lifestyle changes, a change in the perception of what architecture is and needs to be and varying methods of change in material use. Would this be a major setback in architectural design, or a means of needed change in architecture of the future? This starts a discussion about the limits of what architecture can be, while outline what architecture still needs to do, for both people and the environment.
The Blur Building by Diller Scofidio is an example of "non-materiality" in design, and by its nature, a completely sustainable space. Practical? Probably not, but it introduces new thinking into the possibilities of design and space. "The public can approach Blur via a ramped bridge. The 400 foot long ramp deposits visitors at the center of the fog mass onto a large open-air platform where movement is unregulated. Visual and acoustical references are erased along the journey toward the fog leaving only an optical "white-out" and the "white-noise" of pulsing water nozzles." This invokes an experience out of the building users and much like Phillippe Rahm, creates an architecture that is all about perception. This design uses the earth (water) as its main material and definer of space and begins to have interactions among all the three ecologies, both social, environmental and mental because of invoking the by standard. "In this exposition pavilion there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself. Is an experiment in de-emphasis on an environmental scale."
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