Ecotourism in the architectural imagination

While sustainability has become an imperative today and a key idea underlying contemporary reorientations of design practices and theories, most research endeavours have been devoted to improving efficiency or performance related to material resources or emissions and few to understanding the impacts of these on society—and fewer yet on design thinking and culture. In this paper I investigate sustainable design’s reorientation of the visual expression of architecture. I explore the ways in which designers go beyond the current requirements of environmental norms in order to maintain a creative balance between form and content, and the extent to which this has become a practice in Canada. In order to describe a new set of design responses and their visual language, I analyze a corpus of design competitions from the fields of architecture, landscape, and urban design in Canada. My methodological hypothesis considers competitions as both “laboratories” for designers and epistemological devices that reveal changing design practices and values to researchers. Bien que la durabilité soit aujourd’hui devenue un impératif et un concept clef motivant les réorientations contemporaines que connaissent les pratiques et théories de la conception, la majorité des recherches se consacrent à l’amélioration de l’efficacité ou de la performance liée aux ressources matérielles ou aux émissions, alors que peu d’entre elles s’attachent à la compréhension de leurs impacts sur la société, et encore moins au « design thinking » et à la culture. Cet article enquête sur le design durable entendu comme culture visuelle émergente en architecture. Nous explorons la façon dont les concepteurs vont au-delà des normes environnementales actuelles afin de conserver dans leurs projets un équilibre créatif entre forme et contenu, entre éthique et esthétique. Nous analysons un corpus de concours organisés récemment dans les champs de l’architecture, du paysage et de l’urbanisme au Canada. Notre hypothèse méthodologique avance que les concours sont à la fois des « laboratoires » pour les concepteurs et des dispositifs épistémologiques pour les chercheurs, à même de révéler les transformations majeures des pratiques et valeurs de design.

This book contains the edited papers of the First International Conference on Harmonisation between Architecture and Nature (ECO-ARCHITECTURE 2006), which took place at the Wessex Institute of Technology Campus in the New Forest, UK.

Fielding Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, 2004

This essay intends to explore the outlines of a working epistemology for “Ecovillage Designers” – designers of sustainable human habitation systems. This innovative group of cultural pioneers is currently experimenting with multidimensional, integrative models of ‘sustainable human habitat,’ in a diversity of scales and forms. Technically, “epistemology focuses on the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge. It thus examines the defining ingredients, the sources, and the limits of knowledge” (Moser, p. vii). Or, one might simply ask, “How do we know what we know?” In the context of this essay, that question may be restated: “How do designers of ecovillages ‘know’ when they’re making sustainable design decisions?”

2013

Over the past decade, new approaches have emerged to renewable energy education to address the needs for sustainable energy supply systems. In addition, unlike conventional architectural education, which does not cover renewable energy issues in its curriculum, these days, renewable energy education has an identity of its own within the discipline of architecture. The fluid and multi-layered structure of the environment requires a broader perspective with a more expanded, cross-boundary knowledge and skills. In addition, a set of academic obstacles impeding the development of sustainable architectural education is explored such as ambiguous definitions and lack of experts in this field. This paper mainly concentrates on the structure of architectural studies and the significance of environmental design. The study presents a descriptive reading through the experiences in the environmental design studio in the Architecture Department-Epoka University, and in this sense evaluates the o...

Architecture_MPS

It is widely acknowledged that the mantra of sustainability has triggered a fundamental reversal in the core of design practice: If the original purpose of architecture was to protect humans from the destructive actions of nature, today it should protect nature from the damaging actions of humans. But sustainable design is far from being a coherent body of fully totalized ideas: it has a broad spectrum of disputing interpretations that oscillate between the deterministic models of energy control and technological efficiencies, and the moralistic and romantic approaches that attempt to see in nature and natural processes a fundamental way to de-escalate the global urban footprint and its associated patterns of consumption. However, mainstream green design has been evolving by progressively absorbing the narrative of deep ecology. Nature has been being integrated into architecture literally, by inserting vegetation onto buildings; digitally, by bringing environmental data into the des...

Landscape and Urban Planning, 1993

Two intersecting trends of the time s-the growth of the $2.75 trillion world tourism industry and the growth of environmentalism as reflected in the high level of international participation at t:re 1992 Earth Summit-focus attention on the ideals of sustainable development and ecotourism and create a new niche for landscape architecture and urban planning. These overlapping fields have long attended to problems of conflicting values. aesthetics, recreation, and leisure. Many of the activities and products traditionally associated with design and planning are appropriate to tourism projects. Guidelines for enhancing this framework to treat directly the special problems cf ecotourism include early investigation of sociological and ecological features, involvement of broker and local populations in the planning process, and extrasensitivity to issues of site selection, design, scale, and monitoring. In responding to the ecotourism challenge, landscape architects and urban planners will need to hone their abilities to work with multidisciplinary teams and to converse productively about preservation and development ethics.

Architectural Design, 2009

Ecology and the Environment, 2008

Sustainable design is a complex and elusive thing to define, to design, to measure. A fully sustainable architecture would be one constructed within a fully sustainable culture, a culture within which all inputs and outputs are considered, designed. To move to a sustainable design and building practice in Western culture requires a major paradigm shift: it requires that we rethink our cultural habits from first principles; that we re-conceive the very notion of what buildings and cities are, rethinking them as generative, as active sites of production rather than as inert objects. This requires a re-location from traditional Western notions of building as permanent and static, towards building as organism, plant or landscape, as active and regenerative agent changing under inhabitation and in response to diurnal and seasonal shifts. Such a move requires a destabilising of the Western model of separate disciplines of urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design in favour of modes of thinking and making which move fluidly across all of these contiguous disciplinary territories. This paper explores Western and Oceanic notions of culture and nature, it tracks how cultural understandings are made manifest within built fabric. In doing so the paper offers an opportunity to rethink dominant Western models of space making, to move into a field of theorised practice in which culture and nature, building and landscape are interspersed and contiguous. Such architectural landscapes offer the potential to be regenerative habitats, artificial landscapes that generate food and energy; collect and filter water; remediate waste into new resources; offer native habitat to local fauna and flora; and create interior habitats that are strongly connected to the natural environment.

2020

2004

By 'ecology' here I refer not just to the science of ecology (landscape ecology or cultural ecology) today, but also to the holistic, open-system and dynamic/process orientation the science ecology takes. By 'ecological' I mean a life-based, environment-oriented, evolution-directed reasoning and outlook. I like to therefore 3: Tulip Fields 4: Korean Wrapping Cloth So, as I talk about 'landscape' and 'design', both a 'Dutch subject' and Dutch strength, I like to talk more specifically about the unresolved tension between Modernity and Environmentalism. I believe that this tension needs to be explained and resolved to ensure Dutch leadership in 'integrative' and 'sustainable' environmental design. void here all ideological, fundamentalist, deterministic, conservative and even totalitarian characterization of the ecological approach to architecture and landscape architecture (as for instance in the case of rejection of 'foreign' or 'invasive' plants). Science is neutral, and art, as the aesthetician Herbert Read correctly noted, is a biological phenomenon. 3 (Cohen, ; Koh,1978). 4 Fitch, 1968 10: Attacking the modernist destruction of the ancient urban fabric of Paris, F.J. Batellier 11: Seoul, Korea 4. The cost of modernity, however, has been far more disastrous in East Asia than Europe, particularly in many rapidly industrializing nations without participatory democracy. This is in stark contrast to how the West has successfully assimilated Eastern philosophy and aesthetics in the beginning phase of Modern art and architecture towards the late 19 th century and early 20 th century. 5. Searching alternatives to Modernity, architects and landscape architects had engaged natural and social scientists in a lukewarm manner in the late 1960's and 1970's. Out of frustration of not getting out of their own 'box', and their inability to find a proper aesthetic language and design strategy, to go beyond Modernity, some of them went back to Modernist art with its self-referential and elitist attitudes. This is then the 'new modern', or 'soft modern'. 6. Without new language of design to effectively displace the old, in this case Modernity, even Ian McHarg, a pioneering proponent of the ecological approach in landscape architecture, was anti-architecture and anti-city, and favored the 'Romantic' English 'picturesque garden' and rustic,