AD 2010 - 4 (80) The New Structuralism (original) (raw)

This issue of 2 explores the remarkable resurgence of ecological strategies in architectural imagination. As a symptom of a new sociopolitical reality inundated with environmental catastrophes, sudden climatic changes, garbage-packed metropolises and para-economies of non-recyclable e-waste, environmental consciousness and the image of the earth re-emerges, after the 1960s, as an inevitable cultural armature for architects; now faced with the urgency to heal an ill-managed planet that is headed towards evolutionary bankruptcy. At present though, in a world that has suffered severe loss of resources, the new wave of ecological architecture is not solely directed to the ethics of the world's salvation, yet rather upraises as a psycho-spatial or mental position, fuelling a reality of change, motion and action. Coined as 'EcoRedux', this position differs from utopia in that it does not explicitly seek to be right; it recognises pollution and waste as generative potentials for design. In this sense, projects that may appear at fi rst sight as science-fi ctional are not part of a foreign sphere, unassociated with the real, but an extrusion of our own realms and operations.