From Bauhaus to Ecohouse

From Bauhaus to Eco-House explores key moments of inspiration and exchange between designers and ecologists, covering Bauhaus projects of the interwar period to the eco-arks of the late 1980s. The book discusses in detail how former faculty members of the Bauhaus school, such as Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Herbert Bayer engaged with ecologists during their "London period" and in the United States. The subsequent generation of students and admirers of the Bauhaus, such as Richard Buckminster Fuller and Ian McHarg, would pick up their program of trying to unite art and science. Fuller's turn to ecology came in 1932 when he proclaimed that architecture was the science of putting buildings in an ecological order as in his Dymaxion dwelling machines, domes, writings about Spaceship Earth, and famous World Game. From the 1960s designs of colonies in outer space were of significant importance to ecological methodology, engineering, and design practice. Space ecology inspired leading landscape designers of the 1970s who used the imagined life of astronauts as a model for how humans should live in harmony with nature. The engineering of closed ecosystems in outer space also became the basic principle in architectural ideas for how to construct autonomous buildings that would not harm the environment in which they were placed, as with the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona.