CCA Events
John E. Fernández / Lampietti-Fernández Architects LLP
Architecture Lecture Series
Monday, November 12, 2007, 7 pm
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Info: 415.703.9562 or architecture@cca.edu
Democracy and Resources: Financial and Natural Capital in the Built Environment
The relationship between democracy and capitalism is intimate. While many aspects of this partnership are passionately contested, some have been resolved; it is now clear, for example, that representational democracy is not necessary for capitalism to thrive, while capitalism is essentially a requirement of representational democracy.
Our built environment is increasingly a product of capitalist mechanisms brought about in conditions lacking any reasonable sense of modern democracy. And while it is easy to identify these conditions in developing areas of the world, it is in the United States and the developed West that the latest and most powerful engines of antidemocratic structural change have been developed.
What does this entail for a world concerned about the exploitation of its dwindling resources and the ramifications of global climate change? Do we have any definition of the common good that can be implemented in our materials-intensive buildings and infrastructure?
As a researcher engaged with the materials of architecture and the emerging field of urban metabolism, Fernández will be discussing the relationship among resources, the environment, and the "arranged marriage" of capitalism and democracy.
Fernández is an architect in private practice and a tenured associate professor of design and building technologies in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is author of Material Architecture: Emergent Materials for Innovative Buildings and Ecological Construction (Oxford Architectural Press, 2005).
Currently he is involved in the emerging field of urban metabolism, which involves the development of tools for tracking city resource flows, documenting building lifetimes, formulating strategies for dematerialization, and offering alternative ways in which design and engineering can contribute to a more efficient use of physical resources.
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