Eikongraphia

Iconography

1. Yulianti 08.25.08 / 6am

   “At his office, Neutelings Riedijk Architects, pencils and paper have been reintroduced to the workplace. A preliminary design is drafted by hand. Again.”

   I am not against hand-drawing, but I believe if Ecology is our common concern, pencils and paper are no longer ecological friendly for the earth.
   WWF for these last few years, as I recall, has been campaigning to use pen instead of pencils, to reduce trees cutting.

   but despite this pencil-paper issue, thanks for sharing the link. it’s interesting!
2. Michiel van Raaij 09.11.08 / 7pm

   Thanks Yulianti.

   In the newspapers I read that Greenpeace has lowered concrete blocks in the North Sea, in order to stop the fishing there. If a net of a fishing boat catches one of these blocks, there is a chance the boat will capsize.

   Fighting one thing, might result in hurting another thing. The same thing, I believe, goes up for the pencil-lobby by WWF. Instead of drafting by hand we might end up sketching on the computer… to find ourselfves printing every phase in the process to check the coloring. Because like a pencil, the computer has an ‘undo’ option.

   To add a little something to the text above. I believe the central theme here is ‘to preserve’:
   - to preserve our culture
   - to preserve our natural environment

   It is a conservatism that is at times mixed with nostalgia. To preserve then becomes to rebuild, to go back. I am putting it in extreme.

   What fascinates me is how this attitude differs from the progressive Modernism from the twentieth century. That wasn’t just about progress, it was about revolution. Changing the world. Not keeping it the way it was.

   Yesterday I read an interview with the French architect Dominique Perrault in which he questioned the mild response from architects towards the issue of sustainability. It is a paradigm we should engage with as architects, he said.

   Is sustainability the ‘new Modernism’, the new paradigm. Will William McDonough and Michael Braungart in fifty years be read as the grand heroes of the new movement that eventually could have escaped? Are there parallels to the expensive ’sustainable’ buildings and the, back then, expensive Modernist buildings? Or are we just at the point of overreacting?
3. just passing through 12.03.08 / 3pm

   Yulianti - This is going to sound rude no matter how I write this… Just cause you don’t see the waste, doesn’t mean it’s not there. Please consider just how much energy it took to run the computer that ran 3DS Max, AutoCAD, Vectorworks etc. for hours upon hours for your last design project. Even if you bought “green” credits there’s still the fact that you’ll buy new gadgets in the near future and that your old ones will be obsolete lying in a pile of non-recyclable plastic pen corpses for seeming eternity. Now go find the origin of everything before you knocking on ol’ paper and pencil.

© Michiel van Raaij 2006-2010

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