Read. Ponder. Share. Challenge me.

I'm struggling with my architecture this semester. I've embraced green ideas and strategies and believe so fundamentally that this is the new modernism; a greater response to International Style and Industrialization. Mostly I'm struggling with forms and appearance. I'm not obsessed with "ideal" forms but I don't feel that my building designs embody my ideas. My buildings become containers for ideas, rather than the ideas themselves. I just don't know how to do the latter. In the Apartment Project I was aware of this shortcoming, but my jury either didn't pick up on it or never mentioned it. In the Library Project we just completed they did. He said it's almost as if I didn't need to talk about the building, that the other issues and ideas I was exploring were another aspect of architecture that we don't always appreciate fully. So of course I'm thinking, yea buddy ok well this is 402 studio I had to make a building, and I asked him how I could have both (because I'm not going to stop looking at cultural exigencies but I have to be a better designer-- because thats just how I am). He said "simplify", in many more words. I thought about it and I agree, totally valid and I can do that. I think I get it. This is a skill I haven't practiced, especially not in Courtney's studio where we work hard to generate and explore concepts but less on editing and refining them.

Now I'm reading Cradle to Cradle which says that the goals if the International Style were social as well as aesthetic, which has evolved into "a bland, uniform structure isolated from the particulars of place--from local culture, nature, energy, and material flows...[which] reflect little if any of a regions distinctness of style."

I believe in this (green) as a movement because I believe in architecture's ability to catalyze and embody social changes. That's why this needs to be a movement and this movement will inevitably need to be a "style" (think "style" as in imageability).

What is this image?

It seems obvious to say it's place specific. Does it embody the contemporary place or does it embody what we believe the place should be? (ie. does it look like DC now or does it look like what I feel DC should look like)

Is there a more specific form than: long rectangular bar building with greater exposure in the N/S directions.

In his lecture for Emerging Green Builders, Prof. Etlin talked about new green buildings looking "machine-like". This is odd to me considering that loads of 21st century architecture is based on the machine metaphor. I need some examples to know exactly what he has in mind. So if the machine is the metaphor for Modernist aesthetics, and arbitrary expression is the aesthetic for post-modernist/contemporary architecture, what is the metaphor for green revolution architecture? Is it biomimicry?

How obvious does this metaphor need to be? I ask this because I feel that, at least for now, building users need to understand the breadth of possibilities for sustainable architecture but also how it works so it can influence their own environmental consciousness. I think it was less necessary for everyone to understand that the Unite d'Habitation was a ship... I mean it reflects some communistic ideas about dense living which I'm all for but I'm talking about buildings that scream "I'm carbon positive and look how comfortable you are."

"Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do." Cradle to Cradle. 16.