donderdag 30 april 2015

PhD progress. first step intellectual framework

I just googled on scholar and green architecture. I got almost three million results. A year ago I did the same, I just had a bit more than a million results then. Within a year the amount of results on this vague, multifold term for academic standards, has tripled. Fortunately I have demarcated my research between 1810 and 2010.

My question is: How come some people think there is no green, meaning grasses, mosses, plants, bushes and trees, enough in the city?

Their thoughts are so strong, that they are even willing to provoke conflicts over it.

The amount of results on Google scholar for green architecture between the period of 1810-2010 are 2.380. I read a lot of the articles, filtering on not academic writings like egodocuments, technical green, footprint research, all the energie green and economical related articles. All the writings on vegetation, the political and on the spatial I saved for later. These writing are my leaves and branches of the to be developed tree of knowledge. I couldn't distinguish any historical writings on green architecture. Finally, only one book remained, containing theoretical writings, knowing: Taking shape. A new contract between architecture and nature, by Susannah Hagan, published in 2001. Actually, the subtitel is very odd. As far as I know only people make contracts. Anyway, it attracted my attention, it is very contemporary, twentyfirst century, so to speak. Especially chapter four ' Ethics and environmental design' contains a most interesting text to read. Choice number One.

Here follows a first selection of the theory by S. Hagan:
Environmental architecture,.., has resurrecties an ethical agenda, one derived from the moral framework of environmentalism.  p.65

It is not possible to encapsulate environmental thinking. There is a deep division in attitudes to nature and humankind within it that producers very different analyses of our present condition. p.65

Hagan distinguishes an ecologist approach and a socialist approach. The disagreement over the position of human society in relation to nature has obscured the common ground between the two groups. p.66

For both socialists and ecologists, then, human damage is of profound concern, regardless of whether the human is viewed as more or less important than the rest if the biosphere. Fir both, a desure to reduce this damage requires a connection to be made between unacceptable environmental conditions and the social structuren that bring them about, whether those structures are present capitalist or former communist ones. p.66

The idea of environmental rights is one thatvis vinding growing support. These rights are an interesting amalgam of ecological naturalism and social humanism, in that they ground their demands for a life worth living. p.66

The refusal to think globally is a refusal to be bound by the universality of environmental ethics, to take responsability for one's material production and consumption. Other priorities are paraded as ethical commitments in defence of this refusal, for example a commitment to preserving exiting jobs. p.68

Those who do not choose the good, and they are the majority, have it chosen for them. Sceptics object that no individual or group can know the good better than another, let alone dictate its observance, but the empirical evidence of environmental science makes environmentalism's call to moral responsibility more compelling than those of its Platonics predecessors, and their referral to some undemostrable transcendence. p.69

The widespread lack of environmental awareness within the building industry presents the architectural profession with the possibility if providing leadership, andcrecovering some if the moral authority lost during the past thirty years. p.71

For the first time since the niet-encyclopedisch century and the storm over the moraliteit of cast iron and plate glass in architecture, materials have returned to a position  of the greater social and culturele importance. p.76.


In november 2014 I had twelve titles for my intellectual framework. Nobody took me seriously anymore. I had to make choices. Very hard for me at the moment, being in my midlifecrises.  According to me I have fifty more years to go, according to my promotor I only have three more years. It took me seven months to come this far. Reading, thinking, weighing, coming up with arguments, re- reading etcetera. Questioning what is the first thing to do?

Two more to go.



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