A conversation between an architect and his client, first in their youth and later in old age, sets up Carl Stein’s argument for Greening Modernism, a book just released by W. W. Norton.  While drinking wine and playing chess, the young client says to the architect, “We may not have a lot of money but we know how to live well.” Later, when both men have grown successful in wealth and circumstances, they sit and drink wine at the same table, again. This time the client says, “We may have a lot of money, but we [still] know how to live well.” Stein believes in a quality of life — and architecture — that’s dependent on a thoughtful, frugal consumption of natural resources.

He also believes that the quality of architecture was lost when Modernism got de-railed and forgot its original philosophy. Walter Gropius or Le Corbusier, he writes, would be “appalled at the notion that their work was connected by style rather than philosophy.” Modernism, after all, originally revolved around such ideas a Corbusier’s claim that a house should be a machine for living in — like an airplane, free of extraneous materials or parts. Stein believes that if Modernism had stayed with its philosophical tenets through the years, it would have landed firmly in sustainable, ecologically-aware design. Read more…