London, UK
Mission Title: Green is the new Black
Mission By: Christos Brewster, Maria Brewster
Mission Finished on Date: 24-06-2008
SCRIPT
- Ask the assembled architects and designers of SustainabItaly if they have real solutions or simply utopic visions, especially in relation to real sociopolitical problems?
- Be sure to challenge them on architecture and design’s relationship with social and political policy, especially in the light of recent spate of celebrity architects taking money from unsavory clients with history of oppression, environmental degradation, and ethnic aggression?
- Get footage of the conference using Luca Molinari Check
- In Architecture curator and organizer of this event as your guide.
- Be experimental and creative to your approach of the conference. Don’t forget about narrative, tell a story, and as you’re in England be sure to tell it in English.
TRAVEL BAG
Can buzzwords actually affect policy?
Green, sustainability, the Environment, quickly followed by Global. These words have been passed around so many times by so many unsavory characters that they’ve seemed to have totally lost their currency. Though sometimes the intentions behind their usage can be good, they need to be quickly followed up by thoughtful approaches and real solutions. More often than not oil companies have a “Green” campaign, trying to paint their oceans of tarry black oil a brilliant shade of bright verdant green.
The topic for this year inaugural London Festival of Architecture (an outgrowth of the London Architectural Biennialle, but Biennale’s are out of fashion), is “Fresh,” and at this massively shapeless affair, a gaggle of Italian architects and designers join up to chitchat about last season’s most fashionable topic, sustainability. The main obstacles against real sustainability aren’t in design or architecture but in the social and political spheres. For example: trash, stinking putrid piles of the stuff line the streets of the suburbs of Naples, while intellectuals bandy about the word “green,” the country is having a recall of the Sassi di Matera incident in the ‘50s, another chapter of “Italy’s shame.” What can architects do, if anything, to solve real environmental problems?
