I could not miss the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s official entrance into the arena of green design when I received an invitation to the recent conference on “Ecological Urbanism.” Late to the conversation, the GSD was not about to tiptoe in through the backdoor, instead coining a new term and challenging cities to address sustainability at scale. To tee it off, Rem Koolhaas was scheduled to deliver a keynote address, ushering in what could be a new era with Mohsen Mustafavi as Dean.

When an architect is as famous as Rem Koolhaas, it’s not difficult to be controversial — people try to make a controversy out of everything you say, and Sanford Kwinter certainly did his best to create one from thin air as he moderated a discussion between Homi Bhabha and Rem. Credit goes to Koolhaas for sidestepping both that challenge and Bhabha’s seemingly boundless sentimentality for his home city of Mumbai, India. I have no idea why Bhabha was on the bill giving what he called a “key footnote,” or why Kwinter had any part in a conference bearing the word “ecological,” but I did appreciate Koolhaas’ genuine attempts to address what he accurately refers to as a “serious topic” and keep the conversation on point amidst much resistance. It would have been nice to hear more Koolhaas at the Koolhaas keynote.

Certainly it is difficult to find a genuinely ecological “starchitect” and Koolhaas is no exception. His humble opening remarks to this effect were to some degree countered by a skillful, if not inspiring, account of how we got to 2009. I for one much appreciated Rem reminding us all that we are on the cutting edge of 2500 year old technology — after all in the days before engineers and utility grids, architects had to design buildings that actually performed well using passive systems to interact with the environment — I know, this sounds extreme — there also was no AutoCADD and no internet research!

Starting with the early passive architecture of Vetruvious, Rem reflected on how the Enlightenment and Modernism movements have resulted in architecture based on form at the expense of ecological integration and the role of engineering rather than design to achieve building performance. He went on to discuss his early exposure to Tropical Architecture principles, admittedly not a big influence but apparently something that has relevance now that building sustainability is a mainstream topic. I’m not sure there was any big revelation there, but this simple history is itself a revolutionary topic of discussion at the GSD.

In a sense, Rem has done just what the Harvard GSD has done — entered into the conversation on green with a philosophical reference point that positions itself to be an innovator in an area it has turned it’s back on prior. I am not one to lament participation by anyone in this important movement, less so the leading edge of mainstream architecture! Nevertheless, the conference was contextually challenged by a focus on making cities “less bad” along with the sense of an institution grappling with its own historical disdain for the prioritization of an environmental agenda. It will be interesting to see if the GSD can make that turn fast enough to  be relevant to a rapidly advancing agenda for healthy ecological cities. 

Filed under: Uncategorized, ecological urbanism, Green Building, green city, harvard gsd, homi bhabha, mohsen mustafavi, rem koolhaas, sustainability