Global warming and concerns about sustainability recently have
pushed ecological design to the forefront of architectural study
and debate. As Peder Anker explains in From Bauhaus to Ecohouse,
despite claims of novelty, debates about environmentally sensitive
architecture have been ongoing for nearly a century. By exploring
key moments of inspiration between designers and ecologists from
the Bauhaus projects of the interwar period to the eco-arks of the
1980s, Anker traces the historical intersection of architecture and
ecological science and assesses how both remain intertwined
philosophically and pragmatically within the still-evolving field
of ecological design.
The idea that science could improve human life attracted
architects and designers who looked to the science of ecology to
better their methodologies. Walter Gropius, the founder of the
Bauhaus school, taught that designed form should follow the laws of
nature in order to function effectively. With the Bauhaus movement,
ecology and design merged and laid the foundation of modernist
architecture.
Anker discusses in detail how the former faculty members of the
Bauhaus school -- including L?szl? Maholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer --
left Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s and engaged with ecologists
during their "London period" and in the U.S. A subsequent
generation of students and admirers of Bauhaus, such as Richard
Buckminster Fuller and Ian McHarg, picked up their program, and --
under the general banner of merging art and science in the design
process -- Bauhaus-minded architects began to think ecologically
while some ecologists lent their ideas to design.
Anker charts complicated currents of ecological design thought
spanning pre-- and post--World War II and through the cold war,
including pivotal changes such as the emergence of space
exploration and new theories on closed-system living in space
capsules, space stations, and planetary colonies. Space ecology,
Anker explains, inspired leading landscape designers of the 1970s,
who used the imagined life of astronauts as a model for how humans
should live in harmony with nature. Theories of how to design for
extraterrestrial living impacted design and ecological thinking for
earth-based living as well, as evidenced in Disney's Spaceship
Earth attraction as well as in the Biosphere 2 experiments in
Arizona in the early 1990s.
Illuminating important connections between theories about the
relationship between humans and the built environment, Anker's
provocative study provides new insight into a critical period in
the evolution of environmental awareness.
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