Correalism and Equipoise: Kiesler and Giedion on the sustainable
- Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (United States). Dept. of Architecture
This paper inquires about standards for the sustainable that are not strictly bound to the principles of conservation or scarcity. In particular, two earlier contributions to this discussion offer alternate views of sustainability: the architect Frederick Kiesler and the critic-historian Siegfried Giedion both explored the human and social consequences of technological constructions. Their work participates in the long, nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourse about mechanization, that examined the many consequences of industrialization. In a sequence of published and unpublished works in the 1930`s Kieler evolved a theory about the relationship between buildings and nature that he called Correalism. While at the end Mechanization Takes Command of 1948, Giedion examined the loss of public and regenerative bathing habits and the rise of the private, forms of cleansing still largely practiced today. He concluded that work with a plea for a dynamic balance that he called Equipoise. Both works develop from ideas of interconnection that he now associates with systems theory and which are properly integral to modern ecology. Their critical questions revolve around the social dimensions of everyday constructions like buildings and bathtubs. The distinction between instrumental criteria and social ones is everywhere present in modern environmentalism, which can be traced to fundamental concerns about either resource use or about health. These two issues are wholly intertwined in most environmental practices, but the assumptions on which they rest are themselves historically changeable. The complex interaction between measurable environmental features and human concerns or desires is the subject of Kiesler`s Correalism.
- OSTI ID:
- 361864
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-970441-; ISBN 0-89553-212-3; TRN: IM9933%%246
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: SOLAR `97: national solar energy conference, Washington, DC (United States), 25-30 Apr 1997; Other Information: PBD: 1997; Related Information: Is Part Of Proceedings of the 22. national passive solar conference: Volume 22; Campbell-Howe, R.; Wilkins-Crowder, B. [eds.]; PB: 392 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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