From Bauhaus to Eco-house a History of Ecological Design
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"From Bauhaus to Ecohouse" is a short book dedicating itself to a less explored topic: the intersection between design and ecological sciences situated in the geo-political context from 1930s to 1980s. As a biology student, before reading this book, I have just noticed that ecology was a subject with a rather flexible boundary in relation to oth
Actually, I would like to rate the book as 3.5, but since no such option is available and the book certainly deserves some compliment, my rate will be 4."From Bauhaus to Ecohouse" is a short book dedicating itself to a less explored topic: the intersection between design and ecological sciences situated in the geo-political context from 1930s to 1980s. As a biology student, before reading this book, I have just noticed that ecology was a subject with a rather flexible boundary in relation to other subjects when it was firstly popularized in the interwar period. The first three chapters mainly delineated how the Bauhaus designers has developed an (or many?) environmental focus after its exchange with Julian Huxley and H. G. Wells in the School's London era, and how such focus was perceived as a solution to the environmental, social, and political crises Europe met at the dawn of another World War.
The stage shifted to the United States after Chapter Three, and the work of Herbert Bayer, a Bauhaus-trained graphic artist, and Buckminster Fuller, the (now) world-renowned designer, each occupied one chapter. Bayer's ambition to utilize graphic representation of the global human-environment relationship to inspire ecology minded industrial elites, along with his interesting career as an artist at Container Corporation of America, was well illustrated, while the gradual formation of Fuller's (mad?) "genius" and prophet-like figure in the Cold War was probably the most enjoyable part of the book.
Another three chapters mainly dealt with the impact of the concept "Spaceship Earth", which envisioned, and aimed to re-make, Earth as a manageable "close-system" just like a spaceship and its inhabitant as astronauts who ought to understand and obey the rule of the system. The idea of "design with nature" eventually found both likely and uncanny supporters from science and military—while the imagination of space colonization has united both the anxiety about ecological degradation on Earth and the designers/scientists enthusiasm of pursuing human evolution and eco-utopia in the outer space, the author also criticized this style of thought as abandoning the original "humanist" idea of the Bauhaus. The appeal to spiritual and aesthetic values gave way to the military-style calculation and management of energy and material flow for bare survival, and the lack of alternative to the materialist reasoning has also limited other conceptualization of the environment and its true problem.
Generally, its special scope and argument have made the book quite worth-reading. One problem may be related to its length—I truly expect that the author will provide more details regarding the thought of other designers or scientists whose critique of their contemporary eco-design paradigm can support the author's argument. Another problem is that, at some point, the book will be a little bit like "someone believe this and this, which also echoes another person's idea about that and that...", and the order these thinkers appear in the book can sometimes be loosely organized, while their thoughts appear to be more repetitive in the later part of the book. Besides, since the development of ecological science, design, and wider socio-political context of 1980s only occupied a small portion of the book, I personally think that more details concerning how this intersection between ecology and architecture design gradually become salient and accepted by mainstream designers in, say, the 1990s, can be provided in the later chapters.
P.S. I am now reading the author's another book "imperial ecology" which examines the early history of ecology in British Empire, and so far it is a great book!
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From Bauhaus to Eco-house a History of Ecological Design
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/7503617-from-bauhaus-to-ecohouse
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