The Green Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture

by Victor Papanek

Overview

A fresh edition of the sustainable design pioneer Victor Papanek’s classic and ever-relevant book examining the important role of design in combating climate change.

Whether it’s horror at the plastic littering the world’s beaches or despair at the melting polar ice caps, the world is gradually waking up to the impending climate disaster. In The Green Imperative, Papanek argues for design that addresses these issues head-on. This means using materials that can be recycled and reused, no more pointless packaging, thinking about how products make us feel and engage all our senses, putting nature at the heart of design, working at a smaller scale, rejecting aesthetics for their own sake, and thinking before we buy.

First published at the end of the twentieth century, this book offered a plethora of honest advice, clear examples, and withering critiques, laying out the flaws of and opportunities for the design world at that time. A quarter of a century on, Papanek’s lucid prose has lost none of its verve, and the problems he highlights have only become more urgent, giving today’s reader both a fascinating historical perspective on the issues at hand and a blueprint for how they might be solved.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780500296196
Publisher:	Thames & Hudson
Publication date:	02/01/2022
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	1,085,707
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Victor Papanek was a distinguished designer, educator, and writer, widely praised for his visionary and strongly expressed ideas on design theory. Born in Vienna and educated in England before emigrating to the United States in the 1930s, he also spent time living with and learning from Navajo, Inuit, and Balinese peoples over the course of his career. He was the J. L. Constant Distinguished Professor at the School of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Kansas at the time of his death in 1998.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Power of Design vii

Publisher's Note xviii

1 Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? 1

Our damaged planet

The historical view

The acceleration of disaster

Healing on a human scale

Is time on our side?

2 Designing for a Safer Future 14

Production and pollution

Product assessment

Packaging and shrouding

The problem with plastics

Millions of tyres

Green Design

Profit and politics

Design in the 21st century

3 Toward the Spiritual in Design 40

The function of beauty

The designer's intent

Design for Disassembly

Exploiting every scrap

People Participation

Designer as entrepreneur

Evaluating new technologies

Design ethics

Transforming the assignment

4 Sensing a Dwelling 76

Mood and environment

The dimension of light

Footfalls

Feeling the fabric

The sense of smell

Responses to space

Sounds and rhythms

Organic geometry

The collective unconscious

Benign architecture

5 The Biotechnology of Communities 109

Finding the centre once more

People not traffic

The aesthetics of site

The sense of location

Nature's magic numbers

Ideal community size

6 The Lessons of Vernacular Architecture 120

Too humble for history

Six fallacies about vernacular architecture

Process not product

Six explanations

The dynamic web

7 Form Follows Fun 149

Designing for the moment

The fun object

Fashions in form

'Anti-design'

Toy or tool?

The meaning of objects

8 Is Convenience the Enemy? 170

Longing and dissatisfaction

Ten 'convenience' traps

Design as signifier

The chair as design gesture

Fashion and cuteness

9 Sharing Not Buying 202

Getting and spending

The consumer triangle

The quality of life

Ten questions before buying

Three further questions

Possible answers

10 Generations to Come 229

Drawing from different disciplines

The search for good form

Design education for all

World information network

The quality of learning

Creative problem-solving

11 The Best Designers in the World? 256

The edge of survival

Inuit design skills

Space concepts

Thinking in three dimensions

Art is life

Learning from the Inuit

12 The New Aesthetic: Making the Future Work 272

Notes 287

Select Bibliography 299

Sources of Illustrations 308

Acknowledgments 310

Index 313

Editorial Reviews

"Groundbreaking . . . Papanek introduced the idea of an ethics of design. Now . . . he reiterates his plea for ecologically sound design of everything from food packaging to buildings."

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