Rem Koolhaas Keynote lecture on two strands of thinking in sustainability

Particularly powerful:

Although I didn't take it entirely seriously, I was fascinated by its teachers, who taught us an incredible respect for the landscape. They taught us to look at other cities to see how they work, and to look at seemingly completely non-architectural environments. For them, no issue was too humble or lowly. Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry (10) made drawings of open sewers and ways to clean them. That kind of humility in architectural education has practically disappeared.
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EDIT: This lecture is definitely a must read. Personally, I'll have to take another few read-throughs to really digest it, but it really highlights problem areas in the way we deal with the climate crisis. Although, Koolhaas didn't really offer any concrete cultural (architectural, yes) solutions other than it's just a problem of politics and economics.
 
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Koolhaas, too me anyway, has always been better at theory than practice. He brings up a many good points about the need to return to a more ecological architecture and how global warming and all things associated with it will demand a return to what was the norm for hundreds of years.

Another good analysis of architecture today is by James Howard Kuntsler in his Kunstler-cast (which there is another thread about). In "Everyday Architecture" he touches on a lot of the reasons why cheap energy has altered architecture into such banality.

http://www.kunstlercast.com/shows/KunstlerCast_89_Everyday_Architecture.html
 
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