EcoRedux: Design Remedies for an Ailing Planet (Architectural Design)

This issue of AD explores the remarkable resurgence of ecological strategies in architectural imagination. As a symptom of a new sociopolitical reality inundated with environmental catastrophes, sudden climatic changes, garbage-packed metropolises and para-economies of non-recyclable e-waste, environmental consciousness and the image of the earth re-emerges, after the 1960s, as an inevitable cultural armature for architects; now faced with the urgency to heal an ill-managed planet that is headed towards evolutionary bankruptcy. At present though, in a world that has suffered severe loss of resources, the new wave of ecological architecture is not solely directed to the ethics of the world's salvation, yet rather upraises as a psycho-spatial or mental position, fuelling a reality of change, motion and action. Coined as ‘EcoRedux', this position differs from utopia in that it does not explicitly seek to be right; it recognises pollution and waste as generative potentials for design. In this sense, projects that may appear at first sight as science-fictional are not part of a foreign sphere, unassociated with the real, but an extrusion of our own realms and operations.

• Contributors include: Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner (HWKN), Fabiola López-Durán and Nikki Moore, Anthony Vidler and Mark Wigley.
• Featured architects: Anna Pla Catalá, Jonathan Enns, Eva Franch-Gilabert. Mitchell Joachim (Terreform One), François Roche (R&Sie(n)), Rafi Segal, Alexandros Tsamis and Eric Vergne.