Oh, the article that started it all!

"Ecotopias Aren't Just for Hippies Anymore - and They're Sprouting Up Worldwide"
By Frank Bures

01.18.08 (Wired)

"In the 1970s, environmental idealists had a vision of Ecotopia: Everyone recycled, there was no pollution, and we all worshipped trees and co-ops. Today's eco-communities are less crunchy and a lot more high tech. In addition to using renewable energy sources, these projects aim to limit their impact on surrounding ecosystems by building with green materials, promoting earth-friendly transportation, and recycling water and waste. The race for the first carbon-neutral, zero-emissions community is on."

I read this and thought, wow, the new Utopias. Communities based on an ecological ideal, instead of a philosophical one. Since utopia as a concept is certainly complex, questionable, and flawed, I felt like I was on to a good film topic.

Here's one of the projects, in China - the Guangtang Chuangye Park:
































"Nature, whose status as a norm of beauty or as an ideal form waned, has since returned as a condition for the sustainability of all built environment. As such, nature plays a role in the twenty-first century that is as central as it ever was in the past. The challenges are enormous and the markets and demands seem boundless."
(Sverker Sörlin in "Nature" from Crucial Words: Conditions for Contemporary Architecture)

Sea Ranch - California, of course

New York Times
December 14, 2008




















"The wind still holds sway at this once-idealistic second-home community, where man and nature are engaged in an intricate dance. Sea Ranch has achieved a sort of a cult status among architecture mavens, who house-gawk rather than bird-watch, bearing a glossy tome by Mr. Lyndon, a spiritual dean of Sea Ranch, as a guide. They come to see a style forged by A-list architects (shed roofs to deflect the wind, windows punched through redwood boards) but perhaps more than that, to pay tribute to a big idea: the then-radical notion, influenced by Mr. Halprin’s experience on a kibbutz, of open land held in common and houses designed in deference to nature."

Principal Architect: Charles Willard Moore
Moore preferred conspicuous design features, including loud color combinations, supergraphics, stylistic collisions, the re-use of esoteric historical-design solutions, and the use of non-traditional materals such as plastic, (aluminized) PET film, platinum tiles, and neon signs, As a result, his work provokes arousal, demands attention, and sometimes tips over into kitsch.

Principal Landscape Designer: Lawrence Halprin
"The work of Mr. Halprin is one of the most celebrated among environmental designers. His projects range from designs for rapid transit systems to university campuses, from new cities to civic redevelopment, from large-scale land developments and inner-city parks to small private gardens. Among them are Sea Ranch on California's central coast, representing the application of town planning principles to an exquisite rural landscape designed with extraordinary sensitivity to the natural environment." (National Parks bio)

Past = Future

I've been reading Jules Verne books to get in the science fiction mood. The Mysterious Island was first, and now Journey to the Center of the Earth. They're both great, although that guy sure had some strange ideas about social structure, which I won't go into here.

While reading "Journey" I was constantly curious whether or not Professor Lidenbrock was right in his theories about the formation of the Earth. So, I started reading a bit about our planet<.

The contemplation of the past looks a lot like contemplation of the future. Palin argues in a vice presidential debate that there's no need to look back, we just have to leap forward and solve these environmental problems and not worry about where they came from - and we all laugh because that is so obviously not true.

To take it a step further, art/fiction about the future resembles in many ways art/fiction about the past.

Verne's work actually goes in both directions. There are a lot of predictions in his work, particularly in The Mysterious Island. Some of which have turned out to be catastropically wrong. Namely he has a theory that coral reefs will be the big push in the creation of new land mass on the planet and that at some time in the remote future, the original continents will have disappeared, with coral reef continents in their place. Right now, we're looking at the possibility of having no more coral reefs or any of the life that relies on them in about 50 years.

So, obviously human beings have this urge to speculate on the past and future nature of this ball of granite, oceans and volcanic upheavals that we live on. I think this ties in to Kim's work a fair amount. Do art and science compete for a better understanding of what's actually happened and going to happen. Do the abstractions of art take us closer or further away to the truth of the matter?


I was trying to find illustrations from "Journey", the book (and not the movie with Brendan Fraser, which overwhelmed Google). Eventually did come across a lot of stuff about Verne's main illustrator Édouard Riou. You can see a lot of his illustrations here, and specifically from "Voyage au Centre de la Terre" here.