As reports and revelations about the diminishing credibility of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) continue to unfold daily, there is no question that it has major implications. If the science behind AGW were beyond doubt, it would provide a powerful argument for greater government regulation and economic participation. It would empower a worldview geared against greater personal liberty and a rising standard of living. Accumulating wealth would depend more on subsidies and catering to a marketplace in which supply and demand are dictated by government policy rather than actual needs and wants of free people.
Now that the bandwagon’s coming apart due to the quickly evaporating authority of AGW’s leading scientific gatekeepers, will these same climate-fearing architects insist they won’t be fooled again? Will they gladly go back to merely designing pretty buildings that hopefully fullfill a client’s programmatic needs and budget? Such has been the reality for architects for most of human history, but the last couple of centuries seem to indicate that many designers will latch on to other issues that rely on the self-serving promotion of mass hysteria. These manufactured crises have helped spawn major architectural evolution and innovations we enjoy and often take for granted. However, they have also served as excuses for the abandonment of aesthetics that have bred public contempt for modern architecture and the oppressive dullness that it has wrought to our cities worldwide.
For architects of above-normal aesthetic sensibility, their insistence that their design was based on functional considerations alone seems a bit naive to us nowadays. If one trudges through the oftentimes dry CIAM manifesto published in the 1940’s, one is stuck by how this club elite modern urban planners were so unflinchingly certain in their diagnosis of existing cities, in uncritically accepting population growth projections that often never panned out, and in their conviction that the solutions offered was the only way forward. And then to couch this all in an aura of objectivity and ’science’, it only seems a bit absurd to us today, especially upon taking stock on the havoc the CIAM movement has wrought to urban development in the latter half of the twentieth century.
But hey, they did offer a reasonable solution to all the crises as they were understood at the time. The CIAM city would fix traffic congestion by separating car traffic from people; quality of life would be dramatically better due to abundant parks and greenery; skyscrapers and towers would efficiently organize density while allowing more space for fresh air and vegetation, thus improving the health of its inhabitants. Housing would be of higher quality as well as a lot more equitable. Isolating the workplace from the residence, and confining walking to park-like pedestrian paths would also make life a lot better than what it was before. Still, in addressing the crises at the time, CIAM’s practices begot newer crises: encouraging car traffic to bridge the distance between work and home contributed to air pollution due to heavier auto traffic, the giant apartment blocks helped generated a crisis in criminality and ghettos. Modernism’s rejection of ornament and the human scale, along with copious amounts of concrete helped spawn an existential crisis, in which much of the public still doesn’t accept the works of its cultural elite, whether it be in art or achitecture. For all of modern planning’s collective fervor, their ideas seemed to disrupt cohesive communities and produced the most alienating landscapes.
Never learning from the law of unintended consequences, architects and planners responded to these new crises undiminished. Fears of a global population bomb, vanishing natural resources and a potential nuclear apocalypse led some to focus on sustainability, either as a self-sufficient village (Arcosanti, Drop City) to a new high-tech civilization based modular design (Archigram, Japanese Metabolists). These movements were quite short-lived, due to the fact they tried to address a global crisis in complete isolation from political, economic, and technological realities of the time.
Other architects and planners who were less driven by apocalytpic concerns tried instead to solve the existential crisis of communities and crime by looking backward into a simpler time before modern crises arose. A new classical historicism emerged, in which the restoration of traditional styles effectively addressed the pressing need for familiarity, security, and timelessness in a rapidly changing world. New Urbanism served as its planning arm, aiming to restore valuable social bonds through structuring streets and neighborhoods along traditional patterns. A popular theory of a “Pattern Language” argued that much traditional design resulted from natural experiences engrained in human memory. For the first time in many decades, much of the public responded favorably. Still, to much of the academic elite in the field, historicism was inadequate partly because it was too engrossed in formalism and surface treatment. Large social and environmental problems that afflicting the modern world were not being more directly engaged by a historicist movement that was busy narrowing the scope of architecture back to preoccupations of the past (eg. embellishing exteriors and interiors, keeping the rain out, worring about a building’s ‘appropriateness’). This wasn’t the premodern era where architects were mere artists-craftsment quietly serving their patrons. Now, architects expected themselves to be agents for radical change.
By the time centers of architectural thought, the schools, had rejected the historicists and isolated them to a couple of programs in the U.S. in the early 1990s, a new crisis began to take shape that would inspire many bright young architects from that point onward. Unlike previous crises, where architectural solutions were a bit out of touch with reality, this new one, anthropogenic global warming (AGW), had the potential of putting the design of buildings at the very epicenter of a broad strategy in combatting it. Since a hefty portion of overall carbon emissions (40%) is generated by buildings, architects were now in position to lead the way in devising critical solutions, and thus saving civilization from impending climate-induced collapse. Instead of wallowing in isolation imagining future fantasies as was often the case in the 1960s and 1970s, in the era of global warming, all things are aligned for architects to make a difference. Economic and political entities perceive the cost of climate change to be so great so as to fundamentally rethink how we build, how much our structures consume, and in what other new ways our buildings can perform. The technology has also caught up, thanks to modern computing, with new automated systems in adjusting energy usage, daylight, and enabling all kinds of surfaces to absorb and transmitt solar energy. Knowledge of green design had recently become more systematized, with widely accepted ratings such as LEED. And unlike the efforts of a few decades before, most green buildings looked mainstream, differing from non-green buildings only in terms of specified materials and systems.
All these improvements and advances don’t come cheap, and like anything that bills itself as environmentally friendly, they have yet to be competitive in the market place due to this inherent price premium. Businesses that push green projects can only circumvent this market disadvantage with taxpayer-funded subsidies and intensive government patronage. Supporting these projects thus relies on state policies aimed at regulating the marketplace based on an overruling belief in the public good. As long as AGW presents itself as a crisis that threatens everyone’s well-being, then the government sees itself as justified in redistributing wealth towards companies (and the designers that depend on them) that promote its definition of the public good. To put it crudely, many architects saturated in green orthodoxy, have become willing instruments of the state. This is nothing new in the profession, but it has become a prevailing pattern in the past century for architects to be joined at the hip with all kinds of regimes. To many idealistic architects (which is at least half of them) serving the goals of the state is fine so long as the policies pursued are enlightened. It beats having to make a living in the messy marketplace, to which many of values architects hold dear have either a high price tag or no worth at all.
If carbon emissions from humans are proved to have no affect on climate change, and thus government-led action is irrelevant to stopping what is a complex natural occurence, is it a valid public good? It’s important to remember that although crisis often bring about a lot of wrong-headed solutions, there are just as many innovations that we could not live without. Making buildings much more efficient over its lifecycle as a means of reducing carbon emissions is clearly a public good, especially as it adapts to growing competition for natural energy resources due to rapid economic development throughout the globe (which is also good). Implementing ways to reduce a building’s negative externalities to the environment is also a public good, if it improves air and water quality and minimizes the disturbance on ecosystems.
What is not a public good is expending extraordinary sums of other people’s money when the benefits are either meager or non-existent. Nor is it good when the vast sums of money shield producers from the market discipline, thus slowing real innovation. What AGW has done so far is to force lots of money to be spent on measures that achieve comparatively little benefit but incur an enormous burden for everyone whether through higher overal prices, increased taxes, and the uneconomic elimination of perfectly productive and profitable industries that employs millions. It has also apportioned even more gobs of state money towards subsidizing renewal energy, which, by the immutable scientific laws that apply to them, will remain a highly inefficient and expensive means of producing energy. In buildings, it has encouraged designers to integrate wind and solar generation, which dramatically raises construction cost and maintenance in exchange of providing a small fraction in the operation of the building itself. Another example is that the fear in the carbon produced in the transport of vegetables from farms has gotten a number of young architects to embrace the idea of growing produce on the building, whether through green screen walls or green roofs. Never mind that such practices do not make food cheaper nor make city dwellers better farmers nor our time more wisely spent. And then add to those the extra cost of moistureproofing and reinforcing structures.
Once the urgency in AGW sputters to a standstill, what are architects left to do? Maybe what they have always done, before modern crises appeared on the scene: focus on beauty, strutural soundness and the way it functions in relation to what is appropriate according to circumstances. It does not mean one has to resort to historicist styles or classicism. Rather, we should openly encourage aesthetic and technical experimentation and development, but within the limits placed by reality, such as the client’s wishes, the site’s urban context, natural properties and climate. For the more politically idealistic, these goals don’t go far enough. For the rest of us, it assures a more honest dialogue with the public that we serve, and in return, the public awards us with higher esteem for our creations. An added bonus is that we won’t be portrayed as elite dupes.

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