...

"The history of the modern movement has been one of a long-standing flirtation with technology; but the marriage never seems to have consummated. The emphasis of the discipline for some time has lain with the visual manipulation of the formal and symbolic elements of building. One feels that invisibility of structural function has been intuitively recognized, but increasingly sidetracked aesthetically into the creation of spatial effects: the ambiguity of inside/outside in the glass wall, the dematerialization through the use of glass at corners (as in the Gropius Faguswerke), the reflections in the great curtain walls (like the United Nations Building), the feeling of lightness given to massive concrete structure by mounting the whole structure on pilotis. This has given us the very great architecture whose individual works are superbly poetic evocations of certain aspects of machine technology. But such emphasis may in fact operate negatively because we so manifestly require real technological solutions to minimal shelter needs." -- John McHale, R. Buckminster Fuller, New York 1962


Not much has changed since this book was published. In my classes, the vocabulary is still the same; the obsession with the abstract, with spatial deconstruction has not passed. And it is all superbly poetic, true. But the rational and effective design philosophy of Buckminster Fuller -- call it technical, if you will -- is literally nonexistent in my undergraduate curriculum. Is it wise for the liberal arts to focus so much on how to think that it completely eliminates the how to do? The "art and science of generalized and anticipatory design competence" (Fuller, emphasis added) should not be disregarded. Architecture can be poetic, but it should also be polemic. It should address basic human needs, like housing, in the form of comprehensively designed solutions. Attempts at such solutions do exist today in the form of Earthship Biotecture, for instance, but unless such practices are widely adopted and aggressively applied*, scattered sustainable houses make absolutely no dent in the international lack of housing stock.

In 1927, Fuller predicted that 2,000,000,000 (that's two billion) new homes would be required in the world in the next eighty years (by 2007). He was not far off. In 2008, an estimated one billion people lived in urban slums, a number that is expected to double by 2030 due to unprecedented worldwide population growth almost solely concentrated in urban centers. Moreover, that number does not include the number of people who are homeless or living in substandard housing that is not part of a recognized slum. Whether Fuller's plans are ever implemented or not, can a solution truly exist for a problem as prevalent as this. Perhaps, with ingenuous design and socioeconomic policy reform... but for now, too many young architects (but not all, not all) are preoccupied with creating spatial wonderlands that are outside life's universal context.







*I do know that Michael Reynolds and Buckminster Fuller have very different ideas about how sustainable housing should be built -- local mobilization sourcing materials from around the site (manual labour and garbage) versus energy-efficient prefabrication using industrial materials (machinery and technology) -- but that is a discussion for another day.