So the weekend was spent in Lembah Bujang. Had a 3D2N studio trip away from USM Campus (Man Thank God I really needed that) More PICS HERE. I had some free spare time reading a book from Chris Abel, Architecture and Identity, Responses to cultural and technological Change. I really enjoy his writing which displays an international perspective of the “how things work” in the Architectural field, which often slides off professional Architects mind, well I guess that’s what Professors do eh? So in this book, the chapter of “Towards a Global Eco-Culture” displays a new movement of architecture in this century. What about it?
Ecodevelopment, appropriate Technology, and regional architecture all represent significant movements toward cultural emancipation and social devolution,
we slowly could realize that this movement is encouraging regional architecture to remove away from western domination, or towards relative autonomous regional culture.
This new thing, Eco-Culture groups of the emergent alternative forms of development, in contrast to the consumer culture represented by western dominated, corporate run society. It will be seen that homogeneity is a defining characteristics mainly of both the first and third cultural types, though it may also exist at a local level for the last type. However, the internal homogeneity characteristic of traditional cultures, which may vary greatly, represents a vastly different form of integration from the global homogeneity characteristics of consumer culture.
There are many interesting findings and its all displayed in the table Chris Abel summarized, needless for me to say, but this new eco-culture movement is exciting me for its overcoming consumer culture’s corporate and patriarchic dominated by short term goals intentions. Also the decentralized and flexible manufacturing systems can lessen the carbon footprint and this culture which is customized for the place , purpose and climate will provide its identity unlike consumer culture of ambiguous forms independent of climate. Many more comparisons as illustrated =)
