| Scarcity and Excess: Biology, Ecology, and Design An evening symposium: March 31, 2005 |
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| A well known environmental architect relates a parable about a flowering fruit tree in which he observes how excessive and inefficient it seems to produce so many blossoms. He uses this observation to chastise other environmental designers for their obsession with efficiency (and sustainability), and urges them to adopt the more nuanced measure of "eco-effectiveness." It is a powerful parable, but it also points at many more difficult questions about sex, waste, complexity, and mortality, questions which lurk behind any attempt to make general analogies between nature and design. | ||
| In response to such questions, the Department of Architecture is convening an evening symposium to explore contemporary ideas about biology, ecology, and design. Faculty from many disciplines will discuss different approaches to the issue, from direct study of biological examples to generative design techniques that simulate ecological complexity and variety. | ||
| The opposition between scarcity and excess, or between efficiency and luxury, is common to debates about sustainability, which have largely been framed in moral terms and lead to the condemnation of waste and the lauding of frugality. However the title of the symposium was inspired by the provocative work of George Bataille who argued that while individuals and their economies are necessarily governed by scarcity (and efficiency), that "living matter in general" is governed by the steady and luxurious flow of energy from the sun, which must be expended either in growth or in some form of "luxury". With the term luxury Bataille meant expenditure without return, a condition that occurs whenever growth has reached some limit and begins to unfold in novel ways. The process of luxurious unfolding exists in dynamic systems of all kinds-natural, social, and technological-and suggests that efficiency and luxury may coexist at different scales, frequencies, or intensities of expenditure. | ||
| Beauty, innovation, resilience, and complexity are virtues that have long been admired in organic systems, and will form the subject of the symposium. | ||
Participants William W. Braham Laura Briggs James Corner Leif Finkel Ali Malkawi Jean-Michel Rabate Detlef Mertins David Ruy Catherine Veikos |