bottle up/explode

we had a lecture/demonstration last week from a timber product supplier that's irritating me still, largely because of his use of 'sustainable' in reference to something that would be difficult to recycle or reuse, contained glues and dyes, and in some cases had travelled pretty far too. he dismissed concrete, steel, etc* too, for not being sustainable.

when i got to school originally, i had some very fixed ideas about what i wanted to do: modest ambition to change the world, kind of thing. and i'm somewhere between frustrated and pleased to find that it's much more complicated than that (and probably to get far more complicated yet). material by material, i got a bit depressed realising how dubious claims of sustainability are - construction isn't really sustainable, no more so than civilisation.

ggbs? nifty, aside from only existing as a by-product of toxic death. locally-grown timber from tenderly managed biodiverse forests? not the biggest yield ever. timber laminates instead of solid tropical hardwoods? there's the glue, and then the energy, and then the aftermath once that type of floor isn't trendy any more, or...

so, we replace 90% of the world's population with trees, have a post-apocalyptic whale of a time trying to figure out how to live around these gigantic monuments to industry, power and money we've built, and learn to live happily ever after without centralised power supplies. cool.

or, i burst into flames spelling out 'relative! relative!' every time someone talks about sustainability as if it's absolute. this seems a bit time-consuming, so instead, i'm getting excited about reuse more than recycling, throwing the ill-fitting-charity-shop-dress principle over every idea it will (ill-)fit. it kind of fits my old habits from book arts, and i like the idea of finding the frumpy cousin of hip, overtly-green design**.

(scraphouse isn't what i have in mind, but it would seem a pity not to link it here.)


* and everyone involved in construction other than architects, who are unqiue in being intelligent - i know we're not going to be giving him business any time soon, but fucking hell, is that supposed to be impressive?

** while i know this is all one in a series of NAIVE, i suspect any discernable reversal of global warming or clearfelling or pissing on the third world would require a lot of people to do a lot of unhip and personally inconvenient things all at the same time. i don't see it happening and sometimes i wonder if tiny, energy-ratings-and-green-oak steps are useful or largely pointless, but i would rather hold on to hope than go the way of the pillaging asshole, all the same.