New York Times Magazine subscribers woke up on Sunday to find that their beloved magazine had done a full issue on green designers and thinkers. The magazine featured amongst other things interviews with Al Gore, William McDonough, and a slideshow on the most inventive green building ideas so far. Of particular interest to designers? Features on Shigeru Ban, Glenn Murcutt and a feature on the world’s greenest city, Curitiba in Brazil.
We can’t recommend the interview with Glenn Murcutt enough, where he explains his philosophy of design quite clearly: learn the site and design accordingly. His architecture, which can only be found in Australia, shows how you can achieve gorgeous buildings that, to borrow his own words, touch the earth lightly.
We’ve featured Shigeru Ban before here on Inhabitat, see Nomadic Museum, and this profile on the magazine makes me even more excited to see his future projects. His thoughts on the reclamation of materials for reuse strikes me as the next frontier in architecture and design.
And while the focus on individual designers is great, the real gem in my opinion is the focus on Curitiba. Most people don’t know that one of the greenest cities in the world is in Brazil. It happened thanks to good planning and the will of their public officials to stick to that plan. It is a very interesting article well worth the read.
I mean this more as a general comment than anything specific to NY Times mag, but one thing that concerns me is America’s capacity to take practically any content and turn it into a superficial trend. Take, for example, the glut of spirituality and religion books in recent years by people seeing there’s a market there to be cashed in on. Of course some of it is sincere and well done – Tolle, for example – but a lot isn’t.
When it comes to “going green” if goverment leadership around the globe doesn’t put more of substance than fluff into it, our children’s children are going to have one rough ride…