Wednesday, January 14, 2009

No moralizing here.

Renzo Piano calls his new building for the California Academy of Sciences in the San Francisco Golden Gate Park a “soft machine.” Apparently, it sounds better in Italian, but in any language it is a green gimmick. The type I love to ridicule. No professions, unless it is the politicians and civil service of both parties, are more vested in green hype than the building trades--architects, interior designers, furniture makers, engineers of all makes and models, all construction trades from plumbers to sub contractors, and venture capitalists. They ripped down classical structures and threw up (literally) buildings that looked like cereal boxes on a kitchen shelf, then covered up that mess with "post-modern" full of peaks and valleys and round windows, and after leaving most cities and their budgets in a shambles, are back with a new idea--going green and reducing the carbon footprint. I can hardly stand to look at some of the architectural student projects for survivors of hurricanes and earthquakes.

“Piano saw the roof as a metaphor for the entire project. “I saw it as topography,” he adds. “The idea was to cut a piece of the park, push it up 35 feet—to the height of the old buildings—and then put whatever was needed underneath.” From the beginning, he envisioned a green roof that would be an extension of the park and serve as a thermal buffer for the spaces below. “Twenty-first-century architecture must be about sustainability,” he asserts. “This isn’t a moralistic stance; it’s simply what architecture must be.” To really appreciate the full scope of every shade of green, read the whole article in Architectural Digest.

I love it especially when they say they aren’t moralizing.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"We all play in a green submarine
Green submarine, green submarine
We all play in a green submarine
Green submarine, green submarine . . ."

"We all live in a green submarine/
Except George/
Who has probably been reincarnated/
As a beetle ironically/
Cause he really was into the whole mystical thing/
I just liked having an excuse to take acid/. . . "

"We all love our glowing green machines,
glowing green machines, glowing green machines
we all love our glowing green machines
glowing green machines, glowing green machines. . . "

Anonymous said...

Great comments. I am sick of "green". From the Green thermos (a new shape in stainless steel)to green building (a so called new idea of saving energy). In the name of unproven global warning we are leaving morality and culture and returning to the jungle.
Michael Johnson
michael@villagehomesandland.com