We are trying to define 'green' design motivations in architecture, as something with an extremely pure motive, something with no blemish or no second agendas. If we were to write the truth about green materials, eco-thinking and passive design, the reality would contain a few more aspects.
The analogy I might use, is that famous movie about the Watergate scandal, in which two young news reporters (not part of the existing established journalism scene at all), manage to capture their big break. That is what many young and gifted creative professionals have to do, in order to level the playing field. They are required to think outside the box.
There are two dozen different avenues that consultant architects can get carried down, and become quite insistent upon. If you look at each generation of architecture, there is always something new, something original which that generation discovers, which it uses to try to distinguish itself from all previous generations.
It has an awful lot to do with the lock that existing practitioners can get on the business of architecture - because it is a business, which is strongly defined by social tie networks.
That is, the amount of financial resources needed to finance the business, does not exist in an open market. Instead it travels around defined routes. You need something 'new' in order to disrupt those defined routes ever so slightly, so that it causes a little bit of chaos, and out of that chaos the up and coming generation of architects manage to win their deserved share of the market.
That is, this particular aspect of 'new-ness' that comes about with every generation of architects, has a lot to do with new generations trying to gain some market differentiation, with the previous one.
The architects who first decided to use concrete as a material, must have seemed a lot like the pioneering green architects of today. I am sure that the architects who used concrete, must have been looking partly for that factor that would enable them to 'stand out from the crowd', and to capture some of that market share, which younger generations needs to struggle to obtain.
Frank Llyod Wright for instance, was one of the first to use concrete. Wright himself wrote at some stage, that concrete had been the 'gutter rat' of building materials. I forget the example quotation, but he was describing a building material that had no pedigree whatsoever. It had been regarded by those in the loop, as something down right dirty and nasty.
Prior to his use of the material, it had been a civil engineering material mainly. It could never have been considered a material which a self respecting established architect would have included in his palette, in the way that Wright did.
But then again, Wright had nothing to lose. He was a young engineer and self-trained architect without any social network. If he was to put make some impact and attract any would-be innovative thinking clients, he had to think far outside the box.
You can witness in the work of Frank Llyod Wright, an effort in the prairie style of his earliest years to produce something which looking unlike anything that came before.
He used his special knowledge about cantilevers and reinforced concrete mechanics, in combination with a sense of spatial design to offer the 'market' for residential design, something entirely new and seductive. The early work of Frank Llyod Wright and the early passive house and eco home builders of today is separated by many decades in time.
But in other ways, the motivation is not dissimilar. The methodology of using scientific calculations, in order to understand the possibilities for design - that is not dissimilar.
Many people assume that Frank Llyod Wright was driven by some burning creativity inside of him, to reach for new boundaries. But in fact, part of that drive was tied up in the requirement of all young architects to stretch what is possible in the envelope of residential construction - in order to create a niche, a base station - in their assault on what is a 'locked' market.
Locked tightly, that is, by the previous generation of architectural practitioners, of whatever colour they may be.
My thesis is therefore, that if Wright and other young architects in previous generations, had had a ready supply of commission work from a pre-existing market (say they inherited a pool of clients through some means), their incentive may not be as strong, to go to the greater lengths as we see in the early Wright house, or the early north American passive structures.
Brian O' Hanlon
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