Ecology and Industrialisation

Budnitz Bicycles, Model nº1 (93 componentes)

In 1868 Ernst Haeckel defined ecology as the science of relations.¹ Of interest here is the open origin of the term and lack of exclusiveness or of any reference to the natural surroundings, to biology or to life.  Along these same lines, French sociologist Bruno Latour asserts, “ecology is not limited to matters of nature”.² The decisions made in any sphere have an environmental impact and, when operating in the sphere of politics, architecture, or even domestic affairs, where or not we are aware, we alter a habitat which always transcends the scale of our intervention.

Lucien Kroll refers to an architect as imaginative, creative, wilful, but “in a way deaf, one who only wants to create what he alone thinks, who cannot be involved in plurality, who cannot summarise life”.³ This is perhaps why, among many other issues, industrialisation has not led to the degree of development and perfecting of society that it rightfully should have. From Fuller to Sota, to Breuer, Price, Prouvé and Ch. & R. Eames, light-tech, built with increasingly less circulating raw material failed last century to overtake the bourgeois model of stone, brick and sprawling cities, happily appropriating themselves of land in a global economic system ignoring its social and environmental repercussions. This market jungle has come to constitute an asphyxiating “dystopian reality”.⁴

In the face of capitalism’s ability to bowl over, the most renown architects responded with utopian designs (Archigram), theoretical writings (Banham) and the development of their own building solutions tacked through the overacting of new or high-tech technology (Rogers). All of this has occurred only in the best of all cases, irrespectively of other later attitudes based on artistic or philosophical pirouettes that, to a large extent, pointed in the direction of the eroding credibility of society at large. Lucien Kroll stresses that “Ecology must change its ways”.⁵

Light architecture now can (and must) meet the challenges that today’s society poses openly from this new paradigm of complexity and entropy. Speed, flexibility, transparency, economy, participation, creativity free of formal speculation, reuse, shared resources and services, energy savings and waste prevention: a science of relations.⁶ Industrialisation is evolving towards a system of open building, enabling the exchange of components and DIY / DIT and minimising economic investment in assembly.⁷ Therefore, the shift in model from industry for the sale of products to industry of component management (designed to dismantle), enables closed cycles of material that bring about a significant reduction in the environmental impact of architecture in its many manifestations. Nearly 20 years ago, Lucien Kroll wrote “Industry must be governed by a social project”^.8 We applaud this idea and work towards it. And add: industry must be governed by an ecological project.

Text translated by Beth Gelb