AD 208 ECOREDUX – Design Remedies for an Ailing Planet

Description

This issue of AD explores the remarkable resurgence of ecological strategies in architectural imagination. As a symptom of a new sociopolitical reality inundated with environmental catastrophes, sudden climatic changes, garbage-packed metropolises and para-economies of non-recyclable e-waste, environmental consciousness and the image of the earth re-emerges, after the 1960s, as an inevitable cultural armature for architects; now faced with the urgency to heal an ill-managed planet that is headed towards evolutionary bankruptcy. At present though, in a world that has suffered severe loss of resources, the new wave of ecological architecture is not solely directed to the ethics of the world’s salvation, yet rather upraises as a psycho-spatial or mental position, fuelling a reality of change, motion and action. Coined as ‘EcoRedux’, this position differs from utopia in that it does not explicitly seek to be right; it recognises pollution and waste as generative potentials for design. In this sense, projects that may appear at first sight as science-fictional are not part of a foreign sphere, unassociated with the real, but an extrusion of our own realms and operations.

• Contributors include: Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner (HWKN), Fabiola López-Durán and Nikki Moore, Anthony Vidler and Mark Wigley.
• Featured architects: Anna Pla Catalá, Jonathan Enns, Eva Franch-Gilabert. Mitchell Joachim (Terreform One), François Roche (R&Sie(n)), Rafi Segal, Alexandros Tsamis and Eric Vergne.

CONTENTS

• Spotlight: Visual highlights of the issue.
• Lydia Kallipoliti: Introduction: No More Schisms
• John McHale and the Bucky Fuller Revival Anthony Vidler: Whatever Happened to Ecology?
• Lydia Kallipoliti: The Soft Cosmos of AD’s ‘Cosmorama’ in the 1960s and 1970s – Guest-editor Lydia Kallipoliti revives the seminal AD Cosmorama section with a ‘soft cosmos’: a genealogy of ecological material experimentation from the 1960s and 1970s.
• Fabiola López-Durán and Nikki Moore: (Ut)opiates: Rethinking Nature
• Mark Wigley: The Architecture of the Mouse
• Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner: MEtreePOLIS 1901-2111
• François Roche: (Science) Fiction, Ecosophical Apparatus and Skizoid Machines: Animism, Vitalism and Machinism as a Way to Rearticulate the Need to Confront the Unknown in a Contradictory Manner
• Eva Franch i Gilabert: Ecologies of Excess: An Excerpt from a 22nd-Century Architecture History Class – Projecting herself into the 22nd century, Eva Franch i Gilabert asks what would happen if culture was predicated on ecologies of excess.
• Alexandros Tsamis: Go Brown: Inner-Disciplinary Conjectures
• Anna Pla Catalá: Numerical Ecosystems
• Eric Vergne: Dystopian Farming
• Lydia Kallipoliti: Dross City
• Rafi Segal: A Well-Cultivated House
• Jonathan Enns: Intelligent Wood Assemblies: Incorporating Found Geometry and Natural Material Complexity
• Mitchell Joachim: Rapid Re(f)use: 3-D Fabricated Positive Waste Ecologies
• Brian Carter: Counterpoint: Comings and Goings

136 pages, color ills / 21 x 27,5 cm / English