James Wines

-Are you able to design an ecologically inspired art of building in the Age of Ecology in your present studio?

The part of this article that stands out to me the most is when Wines talks about one of the issues with green architecture being “an overly righteous moral posturing and a failure to convert noble objectives into an equivalent artistic expression.” I agree that many styles of green architecture in this Age of Ecology do in fact focus too much on the statement and gesture the building is trying to make about itself being green, and forget about one of the most important underlying fundamental ideas of architecture; that architecture is still art. My current studio however focused more on the urban design aspect of our building and how it fits in to the urban context and contributes to the urban fabric of the surrounding neighborhood, while very much neglecting the ecological footprint our building could be leaving behind. I know this program is centered around an urban design focus and context, but I wish my studio had focused equally on sustainability issues.