Our All-Electric Future (collected short essays from 1990s)

The Aesthetic Paradigm Shift
(from an essay © Ian Ritchie, London, 2007)

We are at the beginning of new design paradigm – an important new movement in urbanism and architecture whose visual aesthetic will be multifarious – yet derived from a creative synthesis of science, ecology, ethics and design intelligence with regard to energy. This opposes recent architectural ’isms’, especially superficial and selfish architecture that gratifies itself on hyperbole to gain media self-aggrandisements.

Intelligent, social and selfless architectural expression capable of the most marvellous and spiritually uplifting engineered structures will challenge turn-of-the century stunt-making architectural gymnastics.
Windmills are an image of an energy harnessing dwelling. This is no longer possible in the urban area, but we should be thinking through ideas that will produce a paradigm shift in how we imagine and see future buildings.

It means that clients as well as architects and engineers will need to rethink aesthetics, and not just respond to the cultural, economic and social issues, and apply superficial sustainable thinking.

The era of ‘badging’ buildings with energy widgets and gadgets is past. This ‘greenwashing’ by many celebrated architects was the era of the child.

We are now in an adolescent phase, and in the next decade we will begin to see how designers, clients and users behave intelligently, and the applied thinking being measurable in terms of fabric and notably occupancy.

Slowly, this will change the way we build, how we conserve our best buildings and housing stock, and the architecture and urbanism of our cities.

Energy guru Amory Lovins calls efficiency gains “the rapid deployment energy resource”: It takes years to discover and develop a new oil field, but just months to chalk up enough efficiency savings to make it redundant before it even starts pumping.