A History of Ecological Design

945 Words4 Pages
Peder Anker, in From Bauhaus to Ecohouse, continues his iconoclastic style of environmental and intellectual history.[1] In this book he shifts his focus from ecology to ecological design. Anker is quick to point out that despite ecological design’s recent popularity and its 1960s pedigree, its intellectual foundations stretch back to the 1920s and, in fact, began with that paragon of modernist design, the Bauhaus. The connections between modernist and ecological design may come as a surprise due to ecological design’s strong links with environmentalism, a movement that is often perceived as antithetical to the sterility of modernist architecture. Anker traces the intellectual and political connections between members of the Bauhaus, such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and influential members of the ecological design movement, including Ian McHarg. Focusing on their shared desire to unite art and science, Anker convincingly argues that ecological design is heir to the Bauhaus and is characterized by a high modernist focus on control and perfection.[2] Anker begins by carefully illustrating the role that nature played as a design inspiration for the members of the Bauhaus. Nature was an essential, but often overlooked, element of Bauhaus designs from its very beginning. According to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, its famous mantra, “form follows function,” was actually meant as a reference to how nature’s designs emerge from the creative pressures of evolution (2). This interest in using nature and science to improve architectural design grew exponentially during the little studied interlude of the Bauhaus in 1930s London. During this period, members of the Bauhaus, including Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius, and Herbert Bayer, began working closely with leading British ecologists, most notably Julian Huxley. Anker argues that their work with Huxley in his Political and Economic Planning
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