ECOREDUX (BOOK)

ECOREDUX [Book]
Credits: edited by Lydia Kallipoliti

EcoRedux is a special issue of Architectural Design (AD) magazine (2010) including the contributions of Anthony Vidler, Fabiola Lopez-Durand & Nikki Moore, Mark Wigley, Lydia Kallipoliti, Matthias Hollwich & Marc Kushner (HWKN), Francois Roche (R & Sie(n) architects), Eva Franch i Gilabert, Alexandros Tsamis, Anna Pla Catala, Eric Vergne, Rafi Segal, Jonathan Enns, Mitchell Joachim (Terreform ONE) and Brian Carter.

EcoRedux allegorically brings back to life a 1972 issue of AD, which outlined an emerging environmental consensus in the postwar period: a form of ‘synthetic naturalism', where the laws of nature and metabolism were displaced from the domain of wilderness to the domain of cities and buildings.  What happens now though, in the environmental battlefield of a world that has suffered severe loss of resources? At present, the new wave of ecological architecture cannot be solely directed to the ethics of the world's salvation and the rhetoric of confinement. It rather upraises as a psycho-spatial or mental position, fuelling a reality of change, motion and action. Though mindful of the past, the objective of this issue is distant from idealizing and romanticizing the environmental agenda of the 1970s. EcoRedux critically recognizes a recirculatory understanding of the world and its resources and hints towards a new opportunistic ‘materiality' that becomes a requisite part of our discipline.

Links:
http://www.storefrontnews.org/exhibitions_events/events?c=5&p=0&e=427
http://www.archisearch.gr/article/466/ecoredux-manifesto-by-lydia-kallipoliti.htm
 

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.