The antagonism between ecology and high tech is abolished. A new avant-garde aesthetic emerges: The future hasn’t looked this good in a long time.
By Niklas Maak

In 1979, when Frank Asbeck, then barely twenty years old, was among the founders of the Green Party in North Rhine-Westphalia, the frontlines were clear: there was, on the one side, a technological avant-garde that dreamed of high-speed trains, fast breeder reactors, naphtha steam-cracking, and semi-synthetic polymers – and, on the other side, a militant ecological movement entrenched in an idyll of premodern handicrafts whose main counter-offer to the world of high tech were grim tracts on asceticism: heavy-duty bikes instead of cars, farms instead of high-rises. The rediscovery of slowness. Deceleration. Slow food. The green movement clung stubbornly to the slow lane – until people like Frank Asbeck freed environmental consciousness from the muesli bowl and conceived the fusion of what had been thinkable only as opposites: ecology, the technological avant-garde, and economic growth. When Asbeck left politics and started his own business, it appeared to some as an elopement to the wrong side; now, on this side, he is producing better environmental policies. His company, Solarworld, is today one of the three largest solar energy enterprises. Last year’s sales were around €300 million, and two years ago, Solarworld’s was Germany’s most successful stock, gaining 500 percent.

In a time of globalization, the production of ecologically problematic mass-market commodities inevitably moves to low-wage countries; what’s left to Europe is the field of avant-garde technology. It is here that something is emerging that one would have to call the “New Economy,” and one of its heroes is Asbeck, the green multimillionaire, who believes that by 2020 it will be possible to meet one third of the electricity demand using regenerative energy sources: “Right now, for the Chancellor’s energy summit, we’re constructing physical proof of the possibility of a combination power plant integrating all regenerative energies. A power plant that’s immune to the reproach that it satisfies only the base load or the medium load or the maximum load; it precisely follows consumption profile.”

Goodbye, Cinder-blocks

In the past, such eco-technological revolutions have tended to happen behind closed doors. The first truly striking piece of public solar-energy construction is the solar sail, measuring 112 x 50 meters (122 x 55 yards) and composed of 2700 monocrystal solar modules, which the German company Phönix SonnenStrom AG erected for Barcelona’s Universal Forum of Cultures. But in residential construction, too, something is now emerging that is more than just the “zero energy building”, whose very name sounds like an ascetic’s depression, and whose inhabitants, one imagines, are anemic and yellow like low-chlorophyll indoor plants. “I don’t dig houses where you have to fart to heat the living-room,” as Asbeck puts it with his characteristic bluntness – and engineers like Werner Sobek, a professor in Stuttgart, are working on houses such as Projekt R129, whose self-supporting exterior skin is made of a new recyclable glass-synthetics composite inlaid with solar cells that is to offer better heat insulation than conventional walls. “R129 is a system of development,” says Sobek, “a house that looks like a building that can flexibly react to its environment – and to the housing wishes of its inhabitants.” By impressing a low voltage to the glass skin, he promises, the glass palace can be switched from transparent to milky, turning the interior into something like a habitable shell. “For this, a transparent plastic is applied to the windowpane, into which Place Change Materials are embedded. Another way to begin consists of inserting a layer of liquid crystal between two panes of glass. The coatings on the glass are not perceptible to the viewer. One coating serves as an electrically conductive layer, and the other as a polarizer. By the creation of electrical tension in the order of magnitude of just a few volts, liquid crystals align on an axis, and the pane becomes dark. If the liquid crystals are diffusely distributed, without applied tension, the glass lets through a maximum of light.”

But the house is above all a risk; so far only a basic glass dome of 20 meters in diameter has been built. “At my institute we can now already reach adhesive glass domes with spans of up to twelve meters without any problems,” says Sobek. The glass of these domes is doubly curved, and Sobek promises adequate energy balance: “In the case of R129 – regulated in its intensity by the adjustable glazing – cold circulating water takes in the sun exposure. The energy gained thereby is stored in a heat accumulator found beneath the frame. Incidentally, the house is conceived in such a way that it no longer needs foundations, and can thus rest on only a small dimple of earth or sand.”

This is reminiscent of the buildingutopias of Buckminster Fuller – though, says Sobek, “The form of R129 is not a development of these great plans of the sixties, but results directly from flowdynamic principles and the concerns of energy technology. The floor of R129 is heated, the ascending warmth meets the glass hull, through which it is cooled down and dispersed outward. The cooled-down air is sucked through a heat exchange passage, reheated, and then again recycled through the floor.”

And which materials otherwise occupy the eco-tech utopian Sobek? “Glass and textiles. Besides that we we‘re working intensively on the theory of foams, on the use of foam-like structures as design features. Foam, a three-dimensional and highly complex material, fascinates the design engineer part of me. Because could it be that one can live in large porous foams? Foams, produced from the creation of air from liquid, that is, from gasses – one only has to solidify the foam, and then one could have a dwelling, a habitat in these cells.” And as for whether or not that’s just some futuristic daydream, Sobek answers with a decided no. “Foam,” he says, “is basically regarded as a three-dimensional, interlocked construction, which is not yet sufficiently plumbed.” Nevertheless, if we think about the ephemeral, about energy reduction, we move very quickly away from orthogonal structures. One can certainly live on horizontal ground without following orthogonal parameters. The essential conditioning elements for the geometry or forms, with which we build today, is the style once known as industrial manufacturing that–also for storage concerns–caused a geometrical standardization. That remains what essentially determines our entire architecture.” And in general, Sobek says, it’s only the cinder-block lobby that is obstructing technological and ecological, and thus aesthetic and emotional, progress.

The extent to which not only the shape of things but also public consciousness is changing is manifest in the automobile. No one invests as much money into psychological warfare as the automobile industry does; virtually no sector is a more sensitive indicator of social change. Only five years ago, car design was at the forefront of a general socio-cultural backlash: people ate meat again (despite mad cow disease, avian flu, and spoiled-meat scandals), thought that feminism was so over (although not even ten percent of key positions in society are occupied by women), flew low-budget (although only the term “forest blight”, not the problem itself, had disappeared), and drove martial SUVs that steamrolled over every single ecological ambition since the days of the oil shocks. But these are things of the past. America’s farewell to the sport utility vehicle is surely more than an important event in automobile history; it is a massive socio-cultural shift. No wonder the family tank’s triumphant success began in the late eighties, at the end of a decade that saw the final demise of the sixties’ promises of liberation: there was AIDS, a catastrophic nuclear accident, and nuclear missiles; there was, in the cities, social conflict between Latinos, Blacks, and the White middle class; there was Reaganomics and, already in 1989, mad cow disease, and if eating burgers didn’t make you mad, it made you a very, very fat heart attack candidate. Everything that guaranteed the well-being of the masses – sex, energy, and big steaks – was suddenly said to be potentially lethal, and it is understandable that, in such a socio-psychologically traumatic situation, people traded in their open-top convertibles for armored all-terrain vehicles that promised protection and a retreat to the safety of the rural idyll.

Rethinking Autopia

By now, the insight is apparently widespread that, as a consequence of climate change, the new America might in fact soon be one of steppes and mud-flooded regions – and one won’t get far there without four-wheel traction. In other words, the huge numbers of gigantic and ecologically unfriendly trucks might at some point bring their own raison d’être into being. The SUV’s image has suddenly changed, and since the TV images from Baghdad began to show bombed and burnt-out Hummers day after day, these cars have become a symbol of defeat. America’s intoxication with the SUV is revealed as a collective act of auto-aggression: the aesthetic of invulnerability bears no small share of the blame for the United States’ enormous fuel demand and its ecological and military ruin.

Celebrities like George Clooney have long switched to environmentally acceptable hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius, Brad Pitt is equipping his villas with solar plants, and England’s conservative politician, billionaire heir, and anti-nuclear activist Zac Goldsmith embodies an as yet unseen form of eco-glamour. These public personalities drive an unambiguous political message from the world of glamour home to the people: we are the members of a post-heroic, eco-futurist class of people who know that SUVs and their monstrous mileages are to blame not only for our president’s worries over the oil supply and thus for the Iraq war, but also for global warming and thus for hurricane Katrina. The hybrid car is perhaps to the present decade what the hippie look was to the late sixties: the shibboleth of a movement and a call for political change.

Of course, the booming celebrity ownership of electric cars is also a fashion phenomenon, and the question of where the requisite electricity is to come from remains unanswered – conventional power plants would only shift the environmental problem somewhere else, and the fact that some of ecology’s new prophets aim to rehabilitate nuclear power as green energy, despite the problems of final storage and security it poses, is a different matter.

What makes the new ecological movement interesting is primarily that it unpegs ecology from asceticism for the first time. And statistics from car dealerships, where hybrid cars sell like hot cakes, show that the stars’ love for hybrid cars and eco-technology is not just the most recent distinguishing mark of a social elite, but rather the tip of a fundamental change of consciousness. Like any trend, ecological high-tech trickles down from an elite of opinion makers into broader social strata, and the cultural pessimists’ complaints about the supposed “cheaper the better” mentality among these masses are proven to be unfounded by the sales of organic products at discount retailers such as Aldi – as long as organic products are offered at prices that are not absurdly exaggerated, consumers are glad to buy them.

So as in architecture, a technological revolution is also afoot in automotive engineering. And for those who find Cameron Diaz’s eco-car, which looks vaguely like a codfish, in the end too Protestant, Citroën’s C-Métisse has a hybrid power train consisting of a diesel engine and two electric hub motors in the rear wheels. This concept car accelerates from zero to 100 kph in 6.2 seconds and yet uses only 6.5 liters per 100km (36 mpg), less than a conventional compact car. And if it ever advances into mass production, it might become what the legendary DS was to the fifties: an object that distills the technological achievements and the needs of its time into a completely new form. No wonder the advertising photographs for the Métisse were shot in front of Barcelona’s giant solar-panel, which has obviously already become the incunabula of the post-fossil age.

Finally, a New Aesthetic

The aesthetic of asceticism was perhaps the greatest drawback of previous ecocars; driving is, after all, something irrational, not to be tackled with cars that look like penitential robes on wheels. Making ecology aesthetically racy and desirable may in the end be a vital project, for it will be hard to convince the millions upon millions of new drivers in China and India that they should please buzz to work not in our big cars but on electric scooters because the air will otherwise very quickly become very thin around the entire planet. They may at best be seduced into using ecologically correct but fun vehicles. Among the latter might also be the Honda FCX, due out in two years, a car with fuel-cell technology that creates electricity from hydrogen. These cars, whose technology requires a whole new automotive layout, will look completely different, just like new houses – and this may well be an opportunity to exit the infinite loop of aesthetic retrogressions: design and urbanism have suffered lately as the developments of the present have too frequently been supplanted with Panton-colorful plastic curves from the future as imagined in the sixties, or entirely abandoned for neat nineteenth-century masonry sheeting.

Yet just as reinforced concrete changed architecture after 1900, the technology of ecology could indeed alter the appearances of houses, cars, and cities: Barcelona’s solar roof is a first attempt to show what the architectural landmarks and greater perspectives of a city in the solar age might look like. “What would Germany look like if it were to switch all its energy use to renewable energies?” asked German politician Hermann Scheer in 032c’s issue 10. “It would look more beautiful.”

The broad change in consciousness in connection with technological progress, for which both the entrepreneur Asbeck and the engineer Sobek stand, will soon lead to a new thinking. Already, German firms such as Dortmund’s Gerber Architects are coming up with projects that propagate a totally new eco-tech aesthetic. Gerber’s aggressively multi-colored Burj-al-Taqua, which translates into “Energy Tower”, is perhaps a little dubious aesthetically, but nevertheless points in the right direction. The tower is a zero primary energy multistoried building that uses traditional Arab wind tower air conditioning techniques. Around the building, rotary solar plaques provide additional energy. The building is 100 percent energy self-sufficient, producing a turbine flow of wind-force energy. All this certainly sounds like the futuristic visions of the sixties – except then, it was only an aesthetic awakening, whereas now the technology actually works. The retro wave of the past few years, in which furniture and cars – from the Jaguar S-Type through the Alfa 156 and to the new Mini – looked like extractions of old drafts of the sixties, a longing for the aesthetics of revolution. This re-boiled revolution remained little more than a melancholic gesture; the “future” had become a nostalgic style term. Now an ecological and technological awakening is here, one that not only produces new forms, but also gives global resource distribution and responsibility a positive turn. And should these new forms become manifest, the crippling rhetoric of the notoriously sulky and whiny anti-modernists might well come to an end, withdrawing into an evocation of early modern civic ideals and the long thrown overboard notion of an emancipatory avant-garde. So as we push ahead, one can already look forward to speeding by exciting eco-sports cars, past solar parks and tidal power stations, and into the new cities of the solar age.

This article originally appeared in 032c #13 as “The Inception of the Post-Fossil Age.”