Literary Dose #27

"I think designers today are responding to several really significant shifts or pressures. There may be more, but the two that stand out are the redefinition or dissolution of what's public and private; that becomes very interesting for thinking through issues of program, spatial effects, and the tension between landscape and architecture. The other is ecology. We have an obligation to think through in novel ways as designers, not to be glib or presume that if you simply introduce recycled buildings into a building you will be more ecological.

What's really interesting about ecological concerns is that they demand thinking in terms of process and the interrelationship of different processes. That sense of process has entered into a lot of what we and our contemporaries are trying to reconcile spatially as designers -- how to think about ecological concerns inventively and freshly."

- Michael Manfredi in Surface/Subsurface by Marion Weiss & Michael Manfredi (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).