Can We Still Have Aesthtics at All

My job has me thinking a lot about the groundswell of artists demanding their place in the new, collapsing, economy. There's this pull sheet floating around listing the economic impact of arts in the U.S. (a kind of GDP of the arts), that is supposed to be waved in front of your House Representative as they appropriate more loans from Beijing and Dubai for our economic future. It was obvious form the start that, at least this time around, there's going to be no piece of the pie for artists, when Congress can barely get a bill to answer to the front-falling boulders of the avalanche: unemployment, home foreclosures (which they haven't even done anything about yet), credit markets.

The timing of this crisis, either concomitant or merely coincidental, with the rising tide of environmental awakening forces parallel thoughts about what is necessity and what is excess. Here's where my question about building comes in. Make a crude comparison between, say, the typical shanty in the slums of New Delhi and a 5,000-square-foot luxury home in the U.S. If each houses the same size family, it's obvious which has the larger environmental impact. Without making any radical judgments about whether either human family can be sustained at all, given total population, we might ask how far beyond a kind of minimum structure for life they each occupy. Or, more charitably, we might find some generic structure either could live in that represents a humane level of comfort and not much more. Or, perhaps even more promising, we might extrapolate a kind of minimum impact from the minimum structure and allow one to design from that as a kind of limit.

Remember that the shanty is made of mostly reclaimed materials, constructed without electric powered tools, has no gas service, does not draw on municipal water supplies, does not draw from any nuclear, coal or natural gas power grid, etc. It's impact is almost zero. If we start adding incrementally to that structure amenities for temperature control, running water, perhaps some electricity, cooking and the like, we could surely still do a lot better than the U.S. luxury home. It would be fair to imagine this structure utilizing any of our current "Green" technologies, but not to dream up any we haven't yet realized. As there is no technological fix yet for unlimited expansion of human dominion on the earth, we shouldn't put one in our design concept at this stage.

Thinking of this structure, or any structure within the parameters of a minimum impact on the earth and minimum levels of comfort, my question is where or whether aesthetics can even enter into the thought experiment. To give an example, I helped install a 1,000 pound hearth stone for the gas-powered fireplace in the entertainment room of a luxury home in S.F. today. The stone was quarried by diesel heavy equipment, in Italy; trucked to the docks in a diesel rig; floated on a diesel container carrier to Oakland; trucked to Richmond by another diesel rig; trucked from Richmond to a slab cutter in Santa Rosa (leaving over 40% waste by the saw); trucked back to Richmond to be fabricated; loaded in Richmond for SF and installed by hand by 12 men. As a side note, this is the third time this fireplace has been remodeled, adding immensely to its overall environmental impact. The rub is, a 13-foot long hearth stone made of a single piece of 3"-thick Giallo Dorato limestone looks really fucking good. I wish I didn't like the way it looks, and that my environmentalist heart was so pure that I could visualize the crude oil stains on the stone (a bit of a pun if you know anything about the geology of limestone), but all I can see is the endless fascinating texture of this giant piece and the labor and planning it took to get it cut and laid in the hearth.

The total environmental impact of this one piece of stone, not to mention the other four it's going to take to finish the fireplace, could house several families in the New Delhi model, without question. In the confines of our thought experiment, about the only design elements that are justifiable are the firebox itself, whether it's gas or wood-burning or coffee-shell burning or whatever, the roof and the four walls. Given that this room is detached from the rest of the structure and thus the heat cannot be shared throughout, it really shouldn't have been built at all, within the constraints of our thought experiment.

I'm not saying it's impossible for there to be an aesthetics that emerges organically out of the minimum structure concept, that is in a way, what the natural building movement, as distinct from the Green building trade mark, is all about. But it's not aesthetics in the sense of this color or that, this texture or that, this material or that, this medium or that. It's got to be something so radically different that I don't believe, in any of the trades, forms or genres I deal with, I have the slightest clue what it is.