Return to Earth
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Lydia Kallipoliti, Return to Earth: Feedback Houses in The Cornell Journal of Architecture, Issue 8: RE (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2011).
Cornell’s Issue 8: RE has invited me to respond in writing with this inquiry:
Dear Lydia,
In Log 13/14 “Feedback Man,” you described the recirculatory systems in NASA’s 1960 Living Pod, and the effect of this and similar programs on architec¬ture, stating that while the “Vitruvian Man and the Modular indicate a passage from the cosmos to modernist abstract space … Feedback Man speaks of an insular, closed, techno-world that requires more information than form and geometry to be envisioned.” These relationships address feedback systems in the space of outer space, yet some of the side effects of the space program led to studies of earth-bound feedback systems, which themselves affected the course of architecture.
We invite you to elaborate on these earth-bound space programs and their architectural consequences.
—Eds.Caroline O’Donnel
My response is surmised in the following article:
In the four snapshots, we see how the concept of total circular resource regeneration migrates from one context to the other: from military research and the experiments of NASA’s space program, to the housing industry, to a counter-cultural practice for autonomous living in the city, and finally to the nostalgia of the homesteading movement and the perception of housing communities as self-reliant ecosystems. What remains constant, however, is the emergence of a new environ¬mental consensus in the form of a synthetic naturalism, where the laws of nature and metabolism are displaced from the domain of the wilderness to the domain of cities and buildings. Previous concepts of nature’s immaculate preservation and conservation separate from the urban milieu gave rise to a novel naturalism of “artificial ecology,” where the functions of operations in nature were copied as precise analogies in man-made systems. Distinctly different from the first environmental era, which rallied for the fresh spirit of the wilderness and the preservation of unindustrialized lands, the rise of modern environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s called for the replication of natural ecosystems anew in synthetic environments…
