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dialogue |
participants (this page): Cassis, slow DJ Serge de Gheldere, futureproof/ed John Houshmand, organic furniture Lauren Mechling, Wall St. Journal Kyong Park, shrinkingcities.net Carolyn F. Strauss, slowLab
more dialogues: 09 Dec 03 (Bangalore, India) >
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> dialogue 18 November 2003 ... CS: We’re sitting around this table that John Houshmand designed. John has a farm in upstate New York and he began early this year to make furniture there. He apparently kept seeing trees that had been cut down around his area, lying on the side of the road, etc., and realized that there was this surplus of material, and therein some latent potential. What I love about this is that he has established a space for doing something new by living upstate, forming relationships and being part of a community there. Because he’s fostered relationships with local people, he has the right to knock on someone’s door and say, “Hey, would you like me to take that (cut down) tree out of your yard?” And when they say ‘Yes,’ he takes the piece and does something with it. Part of it as well is that we’re so used to seeing wood and other materials in perfect condition, and John is taking wood (in the form of trees) that nobody wants because they have imperfections—because they’re beginning to mold or are dead on one side—and he’s showing us the beauty of that. But he’s also showing us the tree! When you look at this furniture you know that you’re looking at a tree, and you don’t always have that recognition when you look at an object. In fact, we rarely have any outright visibility on where something’s come from… Now this table we’re sitting around is very special, because these [gestures to pieces that support the table] weren’t chopped down by people, they were chopped down by beavers… And these [gestures] are the tooth marks of the beavers themselves! As I was saying earlier about slow food in terms of the relationships one has the ability to foster, the relationships that John has forged upstate, including with the beavers, are valuable. It's slow in the way that it's engaging with local people and local industry while simultaneously bringing something bigger into consciousness. … CS: Kyong’s most recent project in East Germany is something quite different, but also quite slow, called ‘The Slide.’ It’s a tube that goes from the top of an empty high-rise building all the way to the bottom. It’s intended as a slide, with people sitting in a sled and riding through the building , traveling through the walls and ceilings and floors and even outside the building (!), creating this entirely new experience of architecture. Here’s a picture of it. SdG: Fantastic. CS: For me, even though you’re moving through the building at great speed and it’s actually blurring the lines between experience of architecture and a kind of theme-park like fiction… KP: For me it’s about experimenting with the structure of architecture and that you actually get to experience it. It’s really about moving through the walls and floors and ceiling and getting a huge kick out of it. CS: But I call it ‘slow’ because once you’ve been in this thing you will never look at a hi-rise building, or perhaps any building, the same way again… KP: I’ve begun working a lot in East Germany because the situation is quite similar to the one in Detroit. Detroit has lost one million people, and 80% of the population is African American. In relation to the diversity of the American population, that’s pretty extreme. The next worst I think is Atlanta, 64%. I lived in the center of downtown Detroit for about three years, where only 20% of structures in a two by two square mile area is standing, and half of that is empty or abandoned. So you have basically a countryside, a rural condition. East Germany has lost 1.2 million people since 2000. Most cities have lost 20% of their population, except Berlin and Liepzig which are getting people from other places. Dresden is also stable. This city (where the Slide is located) is Halle Neustadt, which is 30 km south of Liepzig and has 300,000 people. It now has 28 significant sized buildings officially approved for demolition. They’ve lost 30% of the population. This is one of the first towers that was completely empty. It was an international student dormitory. ‘The Slide’ is kind of a humorous way of dealing with this really major problem in East Germany and other places in the world. Another project I’m involved in is based in Berlin, it’s called ‘Project Shrinking Cities.’ We’re examining four different cities, Ivanovo in Russia, Manchester in the UK, Detroit and Halle Neustadt. We travel to those cities and have workshops with participants and curators. The most popular thing in Germany, and perhaps other places, among architects is either ‘shrinking cities’ or ‘informal cities.’ SdG: What was the other one you mentioned? Informal Cities? KP: ‘Informal Cities’ are cities with lower economies, South America, Africa, where people are building cities themselves. The two are actually really interesting to compare. I think there are really parallel directions in which they play to the future of the world. Which is basically that in Western culture, the battle is not about religion, it’s about the wealth and technology, and I think that it will have to balance itself out eventually. I think that Berlin and East Germany is a pretty good indicator. You’ve got 20-30 year old people selling newspapers at night in restaurants because they don’t have jobs. They are educated, they probably have college degrees. … SdG: But the metric is wrong to begin with. When you speak of growth, you look at domestic growth, and one of the most important metrics for that is the gross domestic product—which is not really useful anymore, because it includes all kinds of things that do not contribute to welfare like people having cancer and ecological catastrophes that need cleanup, stuff like that. All of these things make GDP go up. So when you look at the growth of a country you say, ‘Oh, okay, we’re not doing so bad, even with the recession, because we’re still growing 2%… ‘ So everybody’s in a ‘hooray’ mode, but the real welfare of people who live in cities like Detroit or in Germany goes down. People stand still in traffic jams and there is more asthma for the kids and there are all these tangible signals that tell you otherwise. JH: But isn’t the cure for all those malaises measured again further in businesses and costs that are part of the GDP. I mean it’s kind of ironic that if there are huge costs from environmental problems, then isn’t the money spent to repair those things calculated into the GDP? Sort of like this thing eating itself really… SdG: That’s a good point, except that a lot of them are not repaired yet. JH: Well, it also means that the metric is really wrong! SdG: And some of them are un-repairable. CS: You can measure GDP, but how do people feel in their daily lives? JH: Well what about growth as a measure of a culture’s viability? I mean, Earth is a closed system, but growth is a kind of open system… SdG: Yes, but we have constant input from the sun. So we’re a closed system with constant external energy input. So if you look at the bio-mimicry phenomenon, growth is a natural system. It equilibriates itself… if you are a tree or an ant colony… CJB: A tree actually produces extra. Like a cherry tree, for example. Another interesting fact is that the biomass of ants on the planet is equal to that of humans. They’ve been around for millions of years and haven’t destroyed their environment whatsoever. Which offers a lot of hope toward our situation. By design, we should be able to do this as well. SdG: Exactly. That completely changes the design paradigm. For example, much of the eco-design, from my point of view, is about reducing, and I think that scares people. And it scares businesses. People are afraid that we’re going to be living like 50 years ago if we get serious about sustainability. CS:
Which is what’s cool about what McDonough and Braungart are
saying. Because they’re saying, ‘You guys can have your
lifestyle. We’re just designing products and environments
that are biological nutrients, so when you throw them away, you’re
actually putting energy back into the system, maybe even more than
they took out.’ CS: This is a good segue for me to show the mascot of slowlab: the three-toed Sloth. Not only because sloths are the slowest moving mammal on earth (!), but because sloths are a prime example of living in closed-loop symbiosis with nature. They’re feeding habits are diverse, so that even a group of sloths living in one piece of forest would never deplete any single species of tree—they all live in different kinds of trees, and a sloth will live in the same tree its entire life. They are very slow moving and as a result their metabolism is extremely low, as a result of which they are one of the most energy-efficient mammals in the world. Once a week, the sloth will climb down to the base of the tree, dig a hole and defecate in it, then climb back into the tree. So they are putting their waste right back into the roots of the tree to nourish its growth. Now, the reason that the sloth in this picture has green fur is that actually the sloth’s fur is hollow, and there are micro-eco-systems of algae that live in the fur follicles. Actually, there are many different species of plant and animal life that life in the fur and on the body of the sloth, but none of them are parasitic—they are 100% mutualistic. In fact, apparently when the sloth does its weekly defecation ritual, several of the arthropods living in its fur jump off and lay eggs in the dung, then hop back on their host! So as the sloth is to the tree, they are to the sloth, and they contribute to the tree as well. For me, this is a great metaphor. And the other thing I love about the sloth is that they are all known to have this kind of permanent smile on their faces! When I first started thinking about the concept of ‘slow design,’ I looked around on the web and found a site called The Sloth Club (http://www.sloth.gr.jp). Which is a group of people who are not talking about design, but they are talking about sloths and what we can learn from them. CJB: If we lived our lives more like sloths, if we meditated more and moved slower we would probably be more satisfied with our lives and not constantly purchase things and tear things down… CS: As I constantly say, though, ‘slow’ is not necessarily a time-based thing… JH
and SdG: It’s quality-based. CS: Right, they wouldn’t be called ‘couch potatoes’ any more, they’d be sloth-like... CJ: You’d just have to work 2 hours a week and that’s it! Hey, if the world were more efficient we probably could have more time with our children and less time at work. CS: We had a dialogue here last Spring attended by the woman who runs Li Edelkoort’s organization in New York. They are amazing trend forecasters, really prophetic actually. I've mentioned this before, that Li talked at one point about people who, whether by choice or by economic imperative (i.e. losing their jobs), are choosing to work less. Even unemployed people are actually really enjoying not having to work. SdG: It’s the same in Belgium. They have a word for it in Dutch, its… KP: ‘Sloth-like’? SdG: … it means to de-hurry. CS: Kind of like ‘Debrancher’ in French? To ‘unplug.’ SdG: Of course we know that there is no end-line. There are no winners. People think that they will be happy when they reach that level in their job, but it’s not true. If you set aside a lot of other things for that, in the process you’re missing a lot. There’s a system where you can get a time credit which you can take whenever you want and then pick up your old job again without being fired. There are a lot of people that are using it. Also with your kids: for each child born you can take a four month break, but you can spread that out. When I first left Baxter I was the first person in my company to use that time, but now a lot of people are starting to do it. I think it’s very much a global kind of feeling that people are having. ... |