In his introduction to Design Education for a Sustainable Future, published recently by Routledge/earthscan, Rob Fleming says his premise “is remarkably simple. It is based on a series of straightforward questions that seek to uncover the context, values, and behaviors necessary for effective twenty-first century design education. Is society moving towards a new sustainable or integral worldview, a new set of cultural values that are reshaping the very fabric of human existence? If so, how are such profound shifts in consciousness impacting the design and construction industries? And how can design educators better reflect the zeitgeist of the new century by moving from well-intentioned but lightweight ‘greening’ to the deeper and more impactful ideals of sustainability and resilience?

“The process of answering these questions begins with the requisite historical narrative which explores cultural evolution not as a slow and gradual rise to new levels of complexity but rather through a series of hyper-accelerated jumps in human consciousness. The jump from dispersed Hunter Gatherer cultures to centralized agrarian societies and then to industrialized nations correlates well to the convergence of new energy sources and the invention of new communication technologies.” What follows is Fleming’s opening salvo to a much talked about, much-overdue shift that needs to take place in design education:

Jeremy Rifkin argues in his book The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis that “The convergence of energy and communications revolutions not only reconfigures society and social roles and relationships but also human consciousness itself.”¹ The early twenty-first century, as characterized by unprecedented sharing of information via wireless networks and by the emergence of renewable energy technologies, demarcates a threshold from one world view to another, a jump from an industrialized conception of nature as immutable and infinite to a Gaia inspired view of nature as alive, intelligent and, most of all, fragile in the hands of man.

The principles of sustainability, which emphasize ecological regeneration and co-creative processes, comprise a new and powerful ideal that is reshaping technologically driven initiatives, especially those associated with the design and construction of the built environment. Societal conceptions of money and profit, consumerism, design and technology are radically shifting to address the superficial but useful demands of “greening,” and are leading to finding deeper and more impactful processes to meet the much higher bar of sustainability. Read more…

When we secured an interview with Supreme Court justice Stephen G. Breyer, we decided to take full advantage of it. So, in September, in addition to dragging along our photographer, Webb Chappell, to the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse in Boston, Susan Szenasy and I also brought a  videographer to film it. We weren’t entirely sure how we would use the resulting footage, but it seemed like an opportunity too good to pass up.

Metropolis Interviews: Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer from Metropolis magazine on Vimeo.

We were in Boston for two reasons. Breyer has an office at the Moakley Courthouse and is usually there when the Supreme Court is not in session. Prior to being nominated to the high court, he served as an appeals judge in Boston and played a leading role in the architect selection process for the courthouse (the eventual winner, Pei Cobb Freed).

As it turns out, Breyer was an incredibly gracious host, greeting us downstairs in the rotunda, even buying the assembled crew coffee from the cafeteria. We spoke for an hour in his office, and then Breyer invited his former colleague, Judge Douglas P. Woodlocke, to accompany us on a tour of the building. Our intrepid videographer, Ken Richardson, shot as much of the courthouse as our limited schedule allowed, and then our editor, Julie Rossman, did a wonderful job of taking those images and weaving them into a compelling whole. Justice Breyer’s passion for the Constitution, for the importance of architecture in the public realm, and for good design, is palpable.

Attention New York metropolitan area designers and architects: If you didn’t make it to Greenbuild, held this year in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, you may want to catch up on what the 25,000+ (final figures not yet released) attendees saw and heard there. Even if you were there, in that heated caldron of green activity, you like everyone in attendance, were able to see on a small part of the educational sessions and product offerings at the conference and trade show.

We’re here to help. Back by popular demand, Greenbuild Show Snapshots, Metropolis’s collaboration with Davis & Warshow for the fifth year in a row, will present an overview and some topics that caught our attention this year. In the meantime, check out footage of the fun from last year’s Greenbuild Show Snapshots cocktail event, followed by a panel discussion lead by our editor-in-chief, Susan S. Szenasy with HOK’s director of design, Kenneth Drucker and Turner Construction’s chief sustainability officer, Michael Deane. Over 100 members of the A&D community came to mix, mingle, munch on local, sustainable, seasonal, and delicious hors d’oeuvres and get an inside look at the top projects and innovations from the show and share their own experience.

Greenbuild Show Snapshots Cocktail Hour from Metropolis magazine on Vimeo.

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I read fiction whenever I can carve out a quiet hour or two, which I must admit ruefully, is very hard to find in my frenetic metropolitan life. But when I come across a narrative that provides a richly grained context of place, time, connectivity with human foibles and a linkage to well-defined segments of humanity’s accumulated body of knowledge, I claim my right to slow down. Most recently Peter Matthiessen Wheelwright’s first novel, As It Is On Earth, gave me this gift of sitting back and reading for hours on end. The story of two brothers, haunted by the colorful past while thoroughly engaged in the painful now, rambles the earth from New England to Mexico. Wheelwright is an architect and associate professor at the School of Constructed Environments Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. His brave foray into the fictive environment from the built environment evoked my curiosity about shifting focus, exploring new terrain, and mustering enough courage to make it all happen. With the book’s release scheduled for next month, I took the opportunity to ask Peter about my favorite topics of architecture, creativity, and breaking into new worlds.

Susan S. Szenasy: As It Is On Earth is your first novel. When were you able to find the concentration and time to wedge this complex and detailed story into your schedule of teaching and practicing architecture?

Peter M. Wheelwright: In 2007 I resigned as the chair of the Department of Architecture, Interior Design and Lighting (now, The School of Constructed Environments) at Parsons The New School for Design and took a year long sabbatical. My practice was also winding down, and I simply decided to write in the morning, and think about architecture in the afternoons. Of course, it didn’t work out exactly as planned, but pretty close. Unlike Taylor Thatcher, the narrator and protagonist in the book, I was quite disciplined.

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We talk, endlessly, it seems, about the impact of technology on our lives, our relationships, our work, and workspaces and we worry about what it’s doing to our physiologies. Now the inimitable writer, Diane Ackerman offers, in her blog in The New York Times, a characteristically elegant and pointed commentary on this topic; it’s been on my mind ever since I read it. (The volume of comments from readers suggests that others found resonance there, too.)

Diane Ackerman is a poet and naturalist, and author of many books, including A Natural History of the Senses, one of her best known works, and One Hundred Names for Love, her most recent (and a Pulitzer finalist). In her essay last week, she asked: “Are we living in sensory overload or sensory poverty?” While bemoaning the “myopic daze” in which so many people seem to wander around these days is not new, she takes a hard look (in the spirit of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature) at what it might be costing us. Here’s an excerpt—

As a species, we’ve somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we’ll survive our own ingenuity. At first glance, it seems as if we may be living in sensory overload. The new technology, for all its boons, also bedevils us with alluring distractors, cyberbullies, thought-nabbers, calm-frayers, and a spiky wad of miscellaneous news. Some days it feels like we’re drowning in a twittering bog of information.

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Recently at the Living Future event in Portland, Oregon, I had an opportunity to explore “lives of green” with eight other women working in the sustainable design space, as it is often called. We followed the Pecha Kucha format (my first time with the 20-seconds-for-each-of-20 slides).

Barbra Batshalom, a Boston-based “recovering architect” talked about her path toward transforming organizations, to transform practice, collaborate more deeply, and inspire change in the sustainable design world. “Our research has shown that most organizations, even those known for good green goals, are not making wholesale change. More likely, they are experiencing what we sometimes call ‘random acts of sustainability’.” This prompted the founder of Green Roundtable to launch the Sustainable Performance Institute, a certification program for organizations.

This was one of several recurring themes in this session (which, as our moderator Lance Hosey noted, mirrored the themes that turned up in Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design, the book that he and I wrote together a few years ago): Find ways to think bigger—much beyond single buildings. And if your current career path isn’t allowing that, change course. Almost every single presenter described a non-linear career, what author and anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson might call “lives of improvisation,” theme she explored deeply in her book, Composing a Life.

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