Today's Downturn: Resilience Promoting Nihilist Architecture as Sustainable

Read the article I commented on here.

My comment on Resilience.org:

I had great hopes to this article, and although it makes some sense, what is suggested as a solution is just the old typologies of modernism, just a little less twisted than in latter decades.

Curiously, after one century of unfettered design experiments, the Modernist form language evolves back to the traditional glass box

As seen in the image above, it's just about a cycle within modernism itself. The image is from Salingaros essay Why Green Often Isn't.

Unfortunately, the authors of this article are not able to see beyond, or past, the traditional modernist typologies.

F.ex. is the building in picture two and three (CH2 in Melbourne) nothing else than monotonous repetition and randomness.

The hospital in picture eight could have been designed by Le Corbusier himself, as it consists of strong emotionally negative and unhealthy forces of

[ anti-gravity-anxiety ]

, according to Corbu's saying "the plan is the generator".

Just to look at this hospital makes me ill

The building in picture nine is just a classical modernist steel and glass box.

This article is nothing but greenwashing of modernist typologies, and an attempt to destroy and twist the real meaning of biophilia, as Salingaros explains it in last issue of New English Review:

"Cunning members of the current “establishment” realize that a major new market is developing, and wish to “ride the wave” and establish yet again another monopoly (i.e. a continuation of the old modernist monopoly). Those individuals are beginning to embrace our vocabulary and ideas, but only to subvert them so as to bolster their own heroes and ideology. Others shamelessly appropriate our ideas as their own, and use them in self-promotion. Architectural academics lecture on mathematics and the new sciences applied to architecture; on algorithmic design, adaptivity and sustainability, nature and the human dimension, the sacred aspects of built form, etc. Such efforts are dishonest when judged by their concluding theme: they promote the same set of nihilistic architectural heroes. Appropriating the ideas of an intelligence-based design in order to twist them to opposite ends is simply an exercise in dishonesty and deception."

See: http://www.newenglishreview.or...

To see essays like this really makes me depressed, wanting to promote the most nihilistic and anti-nature architecture as sustainable, destroying the human soul.

F.ex. it's easy to see, for someone not brainwashed by modernist typologies, that the 15 properties of life, documented in the Nature of Order, are fully absent in these buildings here promoted as healthy: http://www.tkwa.com/fifteen-pr...

For the first property, Levels of Scale, the human scale is completely ignored, and with this the universal scaling law. Reference: The Three Laws of Architecture, found in Salingaros' book A Theory of Architecture. Someone who respected this law was Louis Sullivan.