{"id":128,"date":"2020-05-08T11:33:05","date_gmt":"2020-05-08T18:33:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/knappr\/?p=128"},"modified":"2021-10-01T22:46:08","modified_gmt":"2021-10-02T05:46:08","slug":"an-eco-design-ancestor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/knappr\/an-eco-design-ancestor\/","title":{"rendered":"An eco-design ancestor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n

I’m re-reading with great pleasure Steele\u2019s Ecological Architecture: A Critical History<\/em>. Today I\u2019m looking at the six-page chapter on Rudolf Schindler. Steele is interested in the way he genuinely unified indoor and outdoor space and experience. Los Angeles set up very favorable conditions, and Steele finds him to be the one who most thoroughly seized the opportunity, already in the 1920s
There\u2019s an important connection to be made between this character of Schindler\u2019s work and the early going of the Top Ten Toolkit, very much part of today’s scene. It is part of COTE\/AIA effort in 2018 to make patterns out of the substantial portfolio represented by the Top Ten projects, 20 years\u2019 worth. The passage that caught my eye comes early on, in Measure 1\u2014Design for Integration:<\/p>\n

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If you can do only one thing\u2026
1. Design a building to lift the spirits and delight the senses.
Of the three Vitruvian virtues — firmitas, utilitas, and venustas — the following nine Measures of sustainable design [i.e. Measures 2-10] will cover best practices for the first two. Integrating Strategies for achieving Firmitas, or firmness and Utilitas, or function, might be difficult, but the formulas are relatively straightforward. If a design team adheres to the rules of thumb for daylight, the resulting building will be well lit or if a project team provides native habitat, the site\u2019s biodiversity will benefit. Developing Strategies for Venustas, designing a building that delights, is a much more difficult endeavor.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve become sensitized to delight as a pressing issue from pursuing the \u2018sustain-willing\u2019 insight, namely that getting to sustainability requires more than -ability, it requires -willingness as well. Like many, I care about beauty, spirit, delight, but have largely contented myself with applauding them when they appear without feeling that they could be campaigned for.
My professional history has, however, taken me along some stepping stones to a more assertive, activist place. The Evergreen program, In the Presence of Beauty; Christopher Alexander on beauty as a covert issue in community design reactions; the presentation of food in Japan, even in low-end places; and so on. They deserve some reflection and articulation, but not here. Here I should just loop back to some of what Steele has to say about Schindler:<\/p>\n

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[The King\u2019s Road house] presages all of the environmental principles later labelled as \u2018sustainability\u2019 in the late 1980s and early 90s: low embodied energy, high thermal mass in the concrete outer walls and floor, natiral ventilation induced by slidding screen internal walls, and the fficienct use of a renewable resource in its timber structure. (p.80)
By removing the intervening walls of glass that Mies van der Rohe had imposed, Schindler finally managed to sweep away Loos\u2019s fears [that the modern world is so harsh that homes should keep it at bay], providing a prototype for a liberated modernism. (p.83)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m re-reading with great pleasure Steele\u2019s Ecological Architecture: A Critical History. Today I\u2019m looking at the six-page chapter on Rudolf Schindler. Steele is interested in the way he genuinely unified indoor and outdoor space and experience. Los Angeles set up … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":111,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/knappr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/knappr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/knappr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/knappr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/111"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/knappr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/knappr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/knappr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/knappr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/knappr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/knappr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}