Two new books offer a non-apocalyptic approach to sustainability.
Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order
Thomas Princen
MIT Press, $22.95
Rematerial: From Waste to Architecture
Alejandro Bahamón and Camila Sanjinés
Wiley, $49.95
Thomas Princen, who teaches social and ecological sustainability at the University of Michigan, has authored several sustainability-oriented books, and his latest goes to the heart of the matter. Treading Softly acknowledges the dichotomy of environmental preservation and human development in urbanism as well as economics, but doesn’t browbeat readers. Princen argues that while we as a society must inevitably face dire ecological circumstances, our fate depends on how people view their place in the world and how they choose to live.
Princen declares his book is for “those who know the problem is in the grounding.” While this may sound like preaching to the choir, his arguments and examples provide inspiration for those who know but haven’t acted. However, more facts and figures, rather than citations, would have provided more grounding. Instead, he fills the book with stories, metaphoric examples, and academic prose.
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Rematerial: From Waste to Architecture presents several projects that repurpose waste materials. The authors, architect Alejandro Bahamón and artist Maria Camila Sanjinés, both based in Barcelona, introduce each building or installation with overview information, the material strategy, and detail images, all in succinct and easy-to-survey spreads. Each project concludes with a diagram of its rematerial process, which, while easy to grasp, glosses over the technical aspects of a resourceful guide.
Divided into six sections, each tackles a different theme, from overarching initiatives to landscaping to interiors, in addition to institutional and housing building types. Various authors introduce each section with an essay that grounds the strategies of the projects that follow. Anneke Bokern tells the story of how Freddy Heineken, the magnate of the ubiquitous Dutch libation, upon seeing his green bottles strewn about Caribbean beaches in the early 1960s initiated a campaign to redesign his beer bottles into a form that could be used to build homes. John Habraken, the then-young architect in charge of the design, relays the process that yielded the WOBO, or World Bottle, a glass block–like bottle successfully used in a housing prototype, as well as the marketing politics that ultimately killed their mass production. READ MORE >>
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