Design Ecologies: Essays on the Nature of Design

Edited by Lisa Tilder and Beth Blostein, this interesting book has twenty contributors comprising 16 essays and grew out of a symposium of the same name. The editors state that they have set out to explore how "ecological design" operates "synergistically across design disciplines." Blostein explain that while, "the nineteenth-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel defined ecology as 'the comprehensive science of the relationship of the organism to the environment,' they would go further and add, 'in which each living organism has an ongoing and continual relationship with all elements."

In the first essay, designer Bruce Mau describes his team's Massive Change project. The Massive Change project was a series of installations that was originally curated by the Vancouver Art Gallery as a project on the future of design. The show was such a controversial success thst they then toured. Mau remarks, "conditioned by an apocalyptic future, people lose their ability to imagine a future. They become self-interested. The most insidious by-product of this doomsday thinking is apathy." Mau states that "a project which sees the welfare of all life," and promotes Stewart Brand's "enlightened self-interest" thesis, is a path of "informed optimism" as well as information sharing and new solutions.

The next essay, by designer Cameron Tonkinwise, poses the question, "if we designed our way into unsustainability...do we have to design our way out of it...or do we desperately need new, other-than-designing ways of responding to these large-scale problems?" Tonkinwise suggests perhaps either argument is too stark. He asks, "can we redesign designing?"

In his essay, Weeding the City of Unsustainable Cooling, Tonkinwise writes a detailed and lucid examination of the unenvironmental window air conditioner issue in New York, and the impossibility of demolishing everywhere that requires them. Tonkinwise asks, "so what would it take to accomplish the task of quickly removing window box air conditioners from New York?" Reminding us that early New Yorkers sweltered often without complaint and that air conditioners may have 'conditioned' humans to a false reality of what is normal in summer, he acknowledges that some people cannot live without air-con, and it would be ableist to assume otherwise. Likening a.c. boxes to a weed species, Tonkinwise asseses the massive "artificial dependencies" that they represent, and poses that the cooling of urban buildings must then be seen as "a constellation of colliding desires." The task must not become "a determination of the minimum atmospheric conditions necessary for existence as a requirement for totally rebuilt sustainable cities," says Tonkinwise. Instead, he calls for a pressing need to change and to create "new desires, not less desire." He concludes that only "reversible moves" avoid designs that do not arrogantly scrap everything in the hope of getting it right.

I found the essays in this book intriguing and provocative, with a range of discussions and intense examinations of both materials and the historic excesses of design as well as the worthiness of excess in certain contexts.

In "Green Screens: Modernism Secret Garden," essayists Robert Sumrell and Kazys Varnelis shine a hard light on green design. Evoking the previously under-examined social role of the fern bar, which was a windowless space popular in earlier decades where singles could meet, they point out that singles were also emboldened to connect in an atmosphere where a collection of indoor ferns were actually slowly dying. "The fern acts as a mediator of the impersonality of modern life...as something between the living and an object." Remarks the essayists, "as an early moment of ecological architecture, the fern bar makes the moral duplicity of green design apparent...But in giving themselves up, the ferns allowed their patrons to do what they really wanted, to seek self-gratification. The green movement today allows us this too...ratcheting up consumption, green design makes the world our fern bar."

The level of examination evident in the "fern bar" piece is typicsl of the essays in this book. Stylish and also at times vexing, it wasn't quite what I expected from writers critiquing the aims of their profession. The rest of the essays however are also like this, relentless and eloquent examinations of architecture and its role.

In the final essay, titled Towards a Productive Excess, author and editor Beth Blostein examines the days when architecture and power stations came together to create monumental designs celebrating the "glory" of energy production. In promoting new beginnings, Blostein proposes, "nothing short of a renewed architectural exuberance is required." Citing the example of energy-generating buildings that invite a new kind of city, she asks us to imagine the emergence of a "model of energy as an ever-convertible, fluid asset." Blostein couples this with her interest in movable and pre-assembled structures. She suggests we consider "HOK's stadium for the 2021 London Olympics," which was deliberately designed to be disassembled "after the games, and rebuilt for the next Olympic hopeful, Chicago." Says Blostein, "as a large-scale endeavor, this exuberant, pervasive energy production will allow contemporary culture and its technological needs to thrive and develop, and allow a place again for the delights of excess."

Tilder, L., Blostein, B., & Amidon, J. (2012). Design ecologies: Essays on the nature of Design. Princeton Architectural Press.