From Bauhaus to Ecohouse

From Bauhaus to Ecohouse A HISTORY FROM OF ECOLOGICAL DESIGN BAUHAUS TO ECOHOUSE PEDER ANKER Louisiana state university Press Baton rouge Published by l Copyright © 2010 by Louisiana State University Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the Unitedouisiana States softate America university Press First printing designer tyP Printerefaces and :binder Michelle A. Neustrom : Chapparral Pro, Trade Gothic, Museo Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anker, Peder. : Thomson-Shore, Inc. From Bauhaus to ecohouse : a history of ecological design / Peder Anker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8071-3551-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Architecture—Environmental aspects. 2. Architecture and science—History—20th century. 3. Architecture, Modern—20th century. I. Title. NA2542.35.A54 2010 720'.47—dc22 The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 2009020217 �� Acknowledgments > vii Introduction > 1 1 The Bauhaus of Nature > 9 2 Planning the Economy of Nature > 24 3 The New American Bauhaus of Nature > 37 4 The Graphic Environment of Herbert Bayer > 54 5 Buckminster Fuller as Captain of Spaceship Earth > 68 6 The Ecological Colonization of Space > 83 7 Taking Ground Control of Spaceship Earth > 96 8 The Closed World of Ecological Architecture > 113 Conclusion: The Unification of Art and Science > 126 Cast of characters > 133 Notes > 139 Index > 177 Illustrations follow p. 82 CONTENTS contents Acknowledgments > vii Introduction > 1 1 The Bauhaus of Nature > 9 2 Planning the Economy of Nature > 24 3 The New American Bauhaus of Nature > 37 4 The Graphic Environment of Herbert Bayer > 54 5 Buckminster Fuller as Captain of Spaceship Earth > 68 6 The Ecological Colonization of Space > 83 7 Taking Ground Control of Spaceship Earth > 96 8 The Closed World of Ecological Architecture > 113 Conclusion: The Unification of Art and Science > 126 Cast of characters > 133 Notes > 139 Index > 177 Illustrations follow p. 82 v acknowledgments This book originates from various guest appearances in Hashim Sar- kis’s Green Modern course at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Students in the Ecology and the Human Condition seminar and in History of Ecology and Environmentalism, which I cotaught with Everett Mendelsohn in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard, were also exposed to the material. I am deeply grateful to Sarkis, Mendelsohn, and all the students who endured the process of turning research into a book. I also extend my gratitude to the generous students of the Science, Culture and Sustainability course at the Center for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, and to all the graduate students at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Over the years I have had the opportunity to discuss different aspects of this book with Patricia Berman, Robert Brain, Graham Bur- nett, Jimena Canales, Mark Cioc, Winifred Newman, Antoine Picon, Adam Rome, Tarjei Rønnow, and Lars Svendsen. My wife, Nina Ed- wards Anker, an architect and the founder of nea studio, has been a key source of inspiration, along with my father, the architect Erik Anker, who has stimulated this project in numerous ways. No words can ex- press my gratitude for their generosity. My colleagues at the Forum for University History, University of Oslo, offered their time for intellectual discussions. I am particularly grateful to John Peter Collett and Robert Marc Friedman for their pa- tience and support. I am grateful as well to previous colleagues at the vii viii > Acknowledgments Center for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. I have also benefited from discussing the entire manuscript with generous students and faculty members in New York University’s Environ- mental Studies Program and the Gallatin School. At the University of Oslo I had the chance to lure a series of schol- ars to our Science Studies seminar and other intellectual events. I used the opportunity to engage them in my own interests, which resulted in invaluable discussions with Janet Browne, Peter Galison, Daniel Greenberg, William Clark, Angela Creager, Michael Gordin, Sheila Ja- sanoff, Matthew Jones, Dan Kevles, Gregg Mitman, Robert Kohler, James Lovelock, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Simon Schaffer, James Scott, Steven Shapin, and Sverker Sörlin. Different, more abbreviated versions of portions of the text have been published as “Buckminster Fuller as Captain of Spaceship Earth,” Minerva 45 (2007): 417–34; “Graphic Language: Herbert Bayer’s Envi- ronmental Design,” Environmental History 12 (2007): 254–79, published by the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society, Durham, NC; “The Closed World of Ecological Archi- tecture,” Journal of Architecture 10 (2005): 527–52; “The Bauhaus of Nature,” Modernism/Modernity 12 (2005): 229–51; and “The Ecological Colonization of Space,” Environmental History 10 (2005): 239–68, published by the American Society for Environmental History and the For- est History Society, Durham, NC. I thank the editors for permission to use the material that appears here. My thanks also goes to Joseph B. Powell, my excellent editor at Louisiana State University Press, and to two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. I am also grateful to my first-rate copyeditor, Joanne Allen, and to my assistant, Frøydis Brekken Elvik, who checked all the quotations. Most of the research for this book was done at Columbia Univer- sity’s outstanding Avery Library. I am indebted to its excellent staff, including Claudia Funke, and to the generosity of the Norwegian Re- search Council for making the visit possible through grant 148068/ V20. My gratitude also goes to the Patrick Geddes Legacy in Oslo and to the Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers and Translators Association for funding. From Bauhaus to Ecohouse INTRODUCTION Global warming has brought ecological design to the forefront of re- cent architectural journalism and academic debate. Despite claims to novelty, much of this discussion reflects back on earlier ideas. These largely forgotten antecedents deserve notice among practitioners and students of design as sources of inspiration. Some aspects of the history of ecological design, on the other hand, are perhaps not worth emulating. This book describes both. My guiding principle has been to follow the historical relationship of design and the ecological sciences, a relationship that has received little attention until now. How did ecologists and designers engage each other, and what kind of projects did they support? Starting with attempts to unify design and ecology among modernists in the 1930s, this study clarifies ecological design’s mixed history up to the end of the cold war in the late 1980s. It is a history that starts with attempts to relaunch the Bauhaus school among environmen- tally concerned Britons in London and ends in visions about ecological world management on the part of equally concerned Americans in the United States. The key to this diverse history of both designers and ecologists is their shared attempt to unify art and science in order to find practical solutions to environmental problems. All historians come to history with their own personal biases and perspectives, and I am no exception. A believer in Freudian theories may find comfort in learning that my father was an eminent architect 1 2 > From bauhaus to ecohouse and that my wife too is a well-known practitioner in the field. Yet for all their influence on me, it was my experience with a particular build- ing that started me wondering about the relationship between ecology and design. Many years ago my parents flew me and my sister from Oslo, where we grew up, to Orlando, Florida, to visit Disney’s new Ep- cot Center. It was very much a family event, and quite exotic for us, coming all the way from Norway. After passing through the gates, we went straight for the line leading into a huge globe named Spaceship Earth, which my father told me had been inspired by the famous architect Richard Buckminster Fuller. Inside we were placed in a visitors’ trolley that took us on a ride that featured historic panoramas leading up to futuristic displays of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). According to Disney, the future held a world in environmental harmony, with a fully mechanized agriculture and peo- ple communicating mostly through machines. To me, Spaceship Earth looked more like the science-fiction spaceships I had seen on film than the Earth I knew. I remember thinking that it surely did not belong to my future. As will be shown in chapters 5 and 6, Disney’s visions for the future emerged in lieu of research into ecological engineering and architecture. This book is an attempt to come to terms with this ecological line of reasoning, and it proceeds according to my own trajec- tory from Europe to the United States. In 1937 the famous designer László Moholy-Nagy moved from Lon- don to Chicago. His work may serve as an introduction to the kind of relationships between ecological architecture and science that I in- vestigate here. Late in life Moholy-Nagy complained that the original meaning of Louis Sullivan’s celebrated motto “Form follows function” had been “blurred” to a “cheap commercial slogan,” so that its original meaning was lost. According to Moholy-Nagy, the motto should be understood in view of “phenomena occurring in nature,” where ev- ery form emerges from its proper function.1 As professor of the metal workshop and responsible for teaching the preliminary design course at the Bauhaus, Weimar, Moholy-Nagy is a key figure in the history of modernist design. In what way was he inspired by science? As will be argued in chapter 1, he was one of many avant-garde modernists who turned their attention to biological sciences to determine functionality and thereby human environmental well-being.

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