= green porn

how are you defining nihilism?

the zoo project you've posted has a fairly radical nature to it, so 'nihilism' as 'rejection of convention', maybe.

'nihilism' as 'absolute destructiveness' or 'erasure of what's come before', not so much.

...and as 'annihilation of the self', i.e., death of the author, also not so much, as this is a pretty willful authorial statement.

it's neither indicative of skepticism about existence/importance of things nor does it seem to communicate that all values are baseless. it appears to establish value and hierarchy and, in fact, give a pedestal to certain recognized nature-archetypes.

overall, as an example of a 'doctrine of negation' ('nothing at all' as described by the one credited with first using the word, fh jacobi), this project doesn't really fit.

there are elements of green/environmental thinking that begin to seem nihilistic (along the lines of vado's frequent population-control solution: kill yourself now). but this project seems to me to be inherently optimistic.

the first images? you got me. i don't know what to make of them.

a zoo is the antithesis of green.

i love nature...as long as it stays in the zoo where it belongs.

nihilism as in green porn that there is no intrinsic meaning to things nor order. a false believe by works presented has any values/goodness to humanity.

first image= u took an animal/plant book, then u cut and paste with lots of green/nature view to be presented as some earthly environmentally friendly works without any thought of logic in things.

or thoughtless architecture to be concise.

another example,



- practically everywhere

the link took me to a construction barriers concept on inhabitat. i thought it was kind of fun. not realistic, exactly. but, again, optimistic and responsive to the conditions for which it was envisioned.

i think it would be more nihilistic to say that this kind of fun in design projects is a misguided indulgence and should be curtailed. does everything have to be serious, meaningful, tied to solutions? (not that this wall design isn't. it was probably all three.) what would that do to experimentation?

fun & play are part of learning process, there are serous fun that elicit wild concept such as archigram and many subsequent followers


or this
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/missing-buildings-of-cockatoo-island.html


n there are fun that are plain silly portending to give solution or to save the planet just to get published as earlier examples^^

i guess i'll just have to disagree then. any project that goes after an idea and answers the idea with a suitable, non-destructive, and maybe-even-clever response is ok by me.

maybe we don't need construction walls with growies on them, or zoos as waterfalls, but the thinking that's gone into them isn't lost. by the fact that they've been published, in fact, some of that thinking could rub off on others. the fact that those projects are 'out there' means that they may be the seed of something really good that comes next.

why say no to anything? especially things that are really only projects, having consumed no construction resources yet?

i don't think the authors of these projects are pretending to give solutions - they've done a good amount of work to actually show proposals. and i doubt it was 'just to get published', since that's not something that happens naturally, as an extension of doing the work, but happens because someone else thinks it's of value.

why so grumpy?

nihilist it's not. We recognise that many of those projects have little value in way of sustainability and in that i will agree, but those parts if anything were the decoration part of the showmanship of the new green architecture

oh god, the people who designed this do no know physics 101.

You cannot gain any net energy from this. And I can't imagine the size of the pumps it would take to move that much water.

whichever side of the argument one is on, those images are total photoshop porn, which is actually all you need to get published on the interweb.
they go on my wall next to the obama-joker and the ipod-abu ghraib posters, right by my hang in there kitty poster but leaving room for the not-yet existent ewok-Khalid Sheikh Mohammed poster.

while i like the images, i think aspect's point is solid. the do-good program grants immunity from everything - that and the owl looking into my soul.

inhabitat is a site that gives the whole green thing a feel good yuppie orgasm, meaning a fake one.

Either this project is tongue-in-cheak or incredibly misguided - I don't think it's nihilist, though...

I guess i'll just have to disagree then. any project that goes after an idea and answers the idea with a suitable, non-destructive, and maybe-even-clever response is ok by me.

so - are misguided ideas valid explorations? in the serious research world people would laugh at you if you presented a proposal where the underlying assumptions were obviously incorrect. Scientists are much less forgiving than we are, apparently.

I do agree that there are some interesting things going on with the project, but there are so many major problems with the main "sustainability" aspects of this proposal that it's hard to get past them. If they hadn't presented this as "green" then I think it wouldn't be as disturbing.