Why Green Is The Real Postmodernism

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Why Green is the Real Postmodernism

WorldChanging Essays

[ a design-theory rant ]

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001467.html

In the design world, Postmodernism is still just Modernism. Look at the design of the last hundred years. It's all the same, compared to previous eras of history. Sure, you can spot differences between 30's and 60's and 90's styles if you want, but they're no bigger than differences between different simultaneous movements (for instance, Constructivism vs. Dadaism, or Italian Futurism vs. Harlem Renaissance). The human psyche doesn't turn on a dime, and anything that can be switched to in a moment's notice will be forgotten equally quickly. Anything that has resonance will take generations to grow, flower and die. And even a dead tree will not go away until new life has broken it down to use as fertilizer.

This is why green design is the real post-modern movement: because it is the first movement after modernism that has something new to say (rather than trying to declare itself different from modernism without having anything new to rally around) and yet is still a kind of modernism, a fulfillment of some of modernism's central goals: functionalism and future-fetishism.

If "a house is a machine for living in", don't you want that machine to function well? Don't you want a machine that keeps you healthy and comfortable and doesn't need much money or maintenance or raw materials to keep running? You don't want a machine that makes you sick and which you need to keep pouring expensive oil and electricity into to keep it running. When Corbusier coined that phrase, it was just rhetoric describing an uncluttered aesthetic; in fact, many modernist buildings, including those by Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, were known for functioning poorly--plagued by leaky roofs, structural problems, and premature aging/wear. Nowadays, without the rhetoric, green architects talk about indoor air quality, energy efficiency, comfort zones, and the like; what they're really talking about is making good machines for living in.

Modernism's future-fetishism was all aflutter about how technology was changing the world--speeding us up, shrinking the distances between us, bringing comfort and convenience to the masses. That was great fun, but after a hundred years of it we've become technology-saturated enough to be jaded about it. The Jetsons are not the goal anymore. Green design is equally fetishistic of the future, but on a new, more mature level, where we have gone beyond exploring what is possible--basically anything we can imagine is possible--and exploring what we want the future to be. The world wars and the cold war taught us that the power of modern technology and industry can take us as far or farther than we would ever want to go, so we have to be careful about picking the direction. Green design is the first design movement to think it through on the grand scale.

Oh, and for those ardent fans of Postmodern social theory, have no fear, I'm not criticizing it here, it is another story. It's definitely different from the that of the Modernist age, but it is what Modernist social theory should have been in the first place, it merely took a while for the academics in literary criticism and social theory to catch up to the art/architecture/design world. In a show of great give-and-take, though, Postmodernism's decentralized (and multicultural) relativist values have come back to lead the design world into the more socially-conscious realms it is now exploring. Perhaps this is another reason why green design is the real Postmodern design movement.

Posted by Jeremy Faludi at October 26, 2004 03:22 AM | TrackBack