| 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 László
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.
Peder Anker is an associate professor of
the history of science at the Gallatin School of Individualized
Study and the Environmental Studies Program at New York University.
He is also the author of Imperial Ecology, Environmental
Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945. |
