The magpie in all of us cannot help but love shiny new green goods and gadgets. They appeal to our desire for, and faith in, technological innovation, and companies and popular media tout their ability to alleviate the various ills and crises besieging our world. The more complicated the technology, the more effective we often presume it to be. There are doubters among us, of course.
The provocateurs at Low-tech Magazine, a website which "refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution," argue that high tech has become the idol of our society.
Like many industries, in recent years, sustainable design and development has heartily embraced its inner techie.
Argon-filled windows, high-efficiency appliances and home energy-use monitors are among the many products being promoted through increasingly influential green building rating systems like LEED, municipal governments and federally funded grant programs.
Last year Paul Makovsky wrote in Metropolis magazine: "I don't know about you, but I've been a bit frustrated with a lot of 'green' architecture lately -- you know, the kinds of buildings that focus on the checklist approach, substituting technical wizardry for simpler, time-honoured principles."
All of this is not to say that technology does not have a place. High-tech products that use fewer resources and less energy in their production and consumption are important improvements over their less savvy counterparts. However, the problem arises when we headline and hype high-tech, but sideline less glamorous, lower tech ideas of equal or greater value. This issue becomes particularly critical when we consider that a majority of the world's population, including many people in industrialized nations, does not have access to (financially or otherwise) the high-tech products and services frequently used in high-performance construction.
In the October 2008 issue of Architectural Record, Josephine Minutillo writes: "While architecture magazines are saturated with images of soaring, wriggling towers and pristine, jewel-like structures, those buildings represent a small fraction of actual construction. For much of the world's population, the comforts of home -- not to mention work and recreational facilities -- are critically lacking."
While eco-TVs and energy-efficient PCs will continue to capture our imaginations, it is important for us not to forget that some of the best tools (albeit somewhat boring) are not outside the box but simply and squarely within them.
-- Canwest News Service
