Journal Summary

The story starts with my obsession with window shopping at IKEA and museum design stores. I always enjoy looking at smart little design inventions that change our way of living from different scales and aspects. My every trip there is always interwoven with countless “wow” and exclamation such as “this is such a smart design!” However, I’ve never carefully think about the inner implication of these great designs: what makes a design good and smart? After this semester’s following of the latest news of the design world, I think I’ve found one answer to this question: green and sustainable design is good design today.

My architecture journal this semester centered on posts from inhabitat.com and radiates to various other sources that have sustainability and green design news. Inhabitat.com is a weblog devoted to investigate emerging trends in product, interior and architectural design that are pushing architecture and design towards a smarter and more sustainable future. Its news has an extremely wide range of topics, including architecture and interior design, product design, art, technology, energy, transportation and fashion. This provides me a broad way of viewing green design. Start from the environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy’s nature art work and end at a new recycled material design of chandelier made with hangers, the stories I’ve covered during this semester may seem irrelevant at first glance, but inherently they all conveys the same message of today’s design trend, that is: design innovations today are becoming more and more eco-friendly, efficient, sustainable and energy-saving. This trend is so widespread that the applications of its design philosophy range from the microcosm — small objects for everyday use, through to the macrocosm — buildings, cities, and the earth's physical surface.

After taking this semester’s modern architecture class, I feel it is also interesting to look at our current green design revolution in a larger historical context. As mentioned in the mission of Inhabitat.com, the idea of green design is essentially the belief that design should balance substance with style, or more broadly put, that form and function should be intertwined, and form should follows function. The idea of “form follows function” was first mentioned by Louis Sullivan in his writing, The tall office building artistically considered. It also became the central concept of modernism architecture. After all, if we were to abandon the shape of the building from the old pattern book of medieval, ancient Greek and ancient Rome, something must arise to determine the form of our new age. It was not going to be religion, social hierarchy, nor the lavish and somewhat superfluous intention of decoration itself, rather, it was going to be the function of the building. I think what determines the form of the green design today is a further exploration in function, a function that seeks to create a more efficient, sustainable and energy-saving life style. This function is definitely extremely valuable because our world is more and more endangered by pollution, energy-shortage, global warming and other environmental issues.

However, we cannot ignore that currently there is still a gap between green design and designs that are actually marketable and can be widely accept by the general public. To solve this problem, we need a tight cooperation among architects, designers, engineer and environmental scientists. This cooperative nature makes the green design revolution so comprehensive, extensive and deeply associated to every aspect of our life. With green design’s central goal of creating something that is based on thoughtful consideration of the user, the social, economical context and the impact of an object on the surrounding environment, I am confident that we can eventually reach a best solution that solves all of these concerns, and the green design revolution is going to be the next great architecture and design movement recorded in history.