Page 12 - the NOISE October 2012

A s Permaculture is about creating ‘sustainable’ agricultural systems, and ultimately a ‘sustainable’ culture, it is
important to take some time to understand what ‘Sustainability’ means.
I use an axiom with my students that archi- tecture is literally the physical manifestation of philosophy. All architecture begins with a belief in how humans should be living on this planet. Based on this belief some force in soci- ety commissions the creation of a building or infrastructure system that will enable people to live in accordance with that belief.
Skeptical? Think about structures such as the Great Pyramids or Gothic Cathedrals. Entire cultures were shaped around these construc- tion projects, massive structures requiring massive resources and had massive impacts on their respective ecologies. They made their belief a real physical fact of the world. Once the buildings and infrastructures are created, the people of the culture are committed to living out that philosophy every day. Through ar- chitecture the philosophical system becomes engrained in them and they accept it without conscious thought or realization because they have no other physical choice.
I wonder what future archaeologists who study our most prominent buildings will deter- mine was the paramount belief of our culture?
Before you can make a design that is sustain- able, you have to understand what Sustainabil- ity means and what it is. If your philosophy of Sustainability is incomplete, or incohesive, your designs and through them what you manifest into the world will be as well. Before we discuss what Sustainability is, let’s explore the history of how we became non-sustainable.
When discussing how we became non- sustainable I always point a square finger of blame at the ‘International Style’ of architec- ture as popularized by the Bauhaus School of Architecture and their contemporaries, which brought us an explosion of concrete, steel, brick, right angled structures, the International Building Code and the Modern world as we un- derstand it. The International Style has resulted in an ecological and cultural catastrophe for
the world and it is important to understand the philosophy behind it, and why it was embraced as a positive step forward for humanity.
The International Style was predominantly born in Europe. What many of those modern architects saw in European culture was a his- tory of architecture being used to create ag- grandized manors and castles to create a class stratified society. The structures allowed the ruling class to enjoy an opulent lifestyle and to horde resources away from the masses. This was dressed up as Classical European Architec- ture. It can be easily and well argued that with- out this architectural paradigm there could have been no monarchies as we understand them, as without the architecture to support it, they could not have created the fortresses nec- essary to enforce their rule.
It is a matter of historical controversy, but some, myself included, believe that the Bau- haus architects and their contemporaries were driven by Communist philosophy. They sought an architecture that would eliminate class dis- tinctions and create a society of equality with the highest possible standard of living for all. Regardless if they were exactly Communist or not, their new form of architecture was literally the manifestation of their humanitarian phi- losophy. They rejected the notions of region- alism and traditionalism in design, which they believed held cultures back from embracing new concepts, keeping resource poor areas in squalor while enabling a decadent standard of living for resource-rich areas.
With the rejection of regional and traditional design came the rejection of local resource use in architecture. Modern construction materials had to be shipped from far off industrial cen- ters, which required the creation of a massive transportation infrastructure. Modern designs did not allow for traditional cultural habits and lifestyles. With the loss of these traditions, we also lost the wisdom of how to live best in har- mony with the environment.
Across time, cultures used local materials and appropriate strategies to create shelters with comfortable interior environments. With the rejection of regionalism and traditionalism
by the International Style, modern architecture has replaced appropriate environmental de- sign wisdom with HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning) systems. Modern shel- ters are designed so that their interior comfort requires a constant input of electricity from a power plant that needs fuel to be constantly harvested and burned.
The International Style incorporated new feats of chemical and structural engineering to create industrially mass-produced construc- tion materials. Along with these new industrial- ized materials came strip mining, deforestation, and an increased consumption of fossil fuels to both produce and transport these materi- als. Instead of living off local resources and traditional livelihood, those plugged into the Modern architecture were now being “paid” to reap their own natural resources and send them away so they could “afford” to purchase and power the modern architecture they had been sold. Where Imperial powers used to ac- complish this with martial force, it was now be- ing done with architecture. On an international scale, laws and government policies shifted and this new, modern, standard of living was exported all across the globe.
Not all of the architects associated with the International Style came from the Bauhaus school. Also instrumental in the creation of the modern International Style was the Swiss architect LeCorbusier. He nearly single hand- edly created what we recognize as the typical skyscraper and the grid-ridden metropolitan road downtown. Ironically, his urban designs garnered much criticism at the time and were rejected, yet the basics of his designs have be- come the template for almost all major urban centers since. A consequence of his design theory was that as civic, business, industrial and apartment complexes took over the city center, land prices became prohibitive to own- ing a homestead within the city.
Seeing the death of the American home- stead as a cultural travesty, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled his design for
“Broad Acre City,” which called for single-family homes surrounded by a one acre plot of land for food production. These homes would be
affordable because the land would be outside of the expensive city center. While Broad Acre City only existed on paper, it presented an in- fluential vision of how to develop housing to accommodate the newly returning GIs of WWII and the expanding baby boomer generation.
In the late 1940s, the first modern suburb of Levittown, New York was constructed. The land for the suburb was viable agricultural land that was bought up and converted to land for housing, a trend that would become a standard strategy in suburban expansion. This strategy destroyed the local food resources of city after city, and was the death knell of American agrar- ian and naturalistic culture. Levittown shared many design features with Wright’s Broad Acre City, but instead of an acre of viable gardening land, each home had a small yard filled only with lawns. Farmlands were pushed further and further away from the city, requiring petro- leum-dependent food delivery infrastructures to feed populations. As the Levittown model proved financially viable, it spread ravenously, creating urban sprawl. Suburbs chewed up the ecosystems that ringed the cities, often being named after the very ecological features they destroyed such as Shady Pines, Hidden Lakes, or Oakwoods.
Working together, the International Style of Architecture and LeCorbusier inspired city centers, and the bastardized version of Broad Acre City that was the Levittown model cre- ated a resource hyper-consumptive system, reliant on the automobile — destroying both food security and local ecologies, and caused a cultural degeneration. However this is not the whole story, as you cannot determine the Sus- tainability of a society without looking at how it produces food.
The current philosophy of the modern ar- chitecture of food production is based on the “Green Revolution,” an agricultural revolution started in the late 50s and early 60s to increase the world food supply. This revolution had
some philosophical similarities with the devel- opment of the International Style of Architec- ture. This revolution depended on abandon- ing regional and traditional food sources and
12 • OCTOBER 2012 • the NOISE arts & news magazine • thenoise.us