Creating Tomorrow - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 465

27
Creating T omorrow
Vernon D. Swaback
CONTENTS
27.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 467
27.1.1 The Desert Culture ................................................................................................ 469
27.1.2 Indigenous Design ................................................................................................. 470
27.1.3 Regional Open Space ............................................................................................. 473
27.1.4 Complexity and Integration ................................................................................. 475
27.1.5 Effective Transportation ....................................................................................... 477
27.1.6 Technology, Awareness, and Behavior ............................................................... 478
27.1.7 Heroic Design and Commitment ........................................................................ 480
27.2 Summary ............................................................................................................................. 482
References ..................................................................................................................................... 484
27.1 Introduction
The spirit of architecture and planning cries out for authentic commitment and design.
For the latter part of the nineteenth and all of the twentieth century, this meant breaking
beyond imitating the past into expressions of our own time. Some saw this as an abusive
forgetting of our heritage. Others like Frank Lloyd Wright advocated for our youthful
democracy to have an architecture of its own. In the early 1970s, what the architectural
profession celebrated as “Post Modernism” 1 was more a literary invention than anything
to do with the significance of architecture. The result was too-often nothing but an awk-
ward grafting of iconic remnants of the past onto box-like buildings of the present, with
neither adding meaning to the other. The architectural profession's celebration was short-
lived. Within two decades after Mario Botta had become one of the most highly regarded
postmodern practitioners, he repudiated the movement, saying that he found it to be a
disgusting paving-the-way for anything goes. He went on to describe postmodernist ideas
as being the products of the barbarian architecture, justifying buildings that resulted in a
colossal waste of energy. 2 To this, I would add that the movement was also a literary justi-
fication for the imitation of the worst kind.
By the end of the twentieth century, the search for architectural freedom pushed the lim-
its of whatever engineering would permit, resulting in buildings of complex and unusual
shapes. At its best, this exploration was accompanied by a dialogue that focused not only
on form but also on space and place. This led to a merging between urban design, archi-
tecture, and landscape architecture, with the emphasis remaining on inventive forms and
favoring whatever lent itself to dramatic imagery. In the more extreme cases, building
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