Today is a special day for Veit Kugel of the Boston office of Kennedy & Violich Architecture Ltd. On this Monday, the Climate Change Conference will open in Nairobi. That means: once more the cameras, microphones and bad conscience of the world will descend on the city to bring greenhouse gas emissions, reduction technologies and sustainability studies to the public conscience. And even if it's all taking place in far off Nairobi, when "eco", "climate" and "energy" get high television ratings, it's also good for business.


















Give Back Curtain. Image courtesy Kennedy & Violich

Kugel's business could be described as "green-alternative". One of the things Kennedy & Violich produces is "Give Back Curtains." These are photo-luminescent curtains that store sunlight in the daytime and give off light at night. In fact they are not curtains, they are architecture and design. But above all, they're eco. Electroluminescence and photoluminescene are key technologies for the dark future when electricity will no longer come from the wall socket. Kugel, a young man in a well-cut suit, is an eco-designer. You could describe his attitude as an attempt to do justice to the world climate through a resource-friendly life – without coming across like a cantankerous nettle-tea drinker in a batik T-shirt.

"Green Glamour" is the name of this phenomenon, which has led to a remarkable run of products in urban development, architecture, design and even fashion. The paradox: a movement that initially saw itself as the negation of formal fashion appearances – naive enough – is now having a mass-impact for the first time. And this is happening in fashion, of all industries, which through appropriation and transformation is in a position to make many eco-products out of a mere handful. Eco sells.

People who look like they publish Hedonism Quarterly magazine are turning up with increasing frequency at architecture congresses, design shows and car exhibitions. But what they are really interested in is energy-efficient houses, energy-saving household appliances, hybrid-engine cars and the Kyoto Protocol. This new eco-trend wants nothing to do with clay brick buildings under slapdash solar roofs, with the difficult to sell Lupo 3L or fashion that looks like bread dough. As cynical as it sounds, the hot summers and hurricanes help push up sales of an eco-aesthetic that wants not only to save the world, but to make it prettier into the bargain.

Criticism has been quick in coming, even if what's really at stake is market positioning. In flyers sent out by the firm Manufactum, for example, the current design show in Essen "Entry: how will we live tomorrow?" is criticised for its ecological superficiality and naive faith in the future. But that comes as no surprise. Manufactum thrives from the misunderstanding that sustainable, ecologically-correct products always have to look as if you'd found them out in the shed. A futuristic-looking ecological trend pulls the hand-scrubbed parquet floor out from under firms like that.








"Seoul Commune 2026 by Minsuk Cho and Kisu Park. Courtesy Entry 2006

The same goes for the urban planning utopia "Seoul Commune 2026", by Korean architects Minsuk Cho and Kisu Park, which can be viewed at "Entry". The architects have designed an ecological city district in which apartment buildings shoot like strangely beautiful cactuses out of the densely populated, energy-efficiently terrain. The architecture is sustainable – also in a spatial, social sense. Private living space is limited to the small units in the core of the buildings. The high-rises also offer a wide spectrum of semi-private and public spaces which are open to every resident. The division of the buildings into modular units allows living areas to be adapted according to need, easing inter-generational cohabitation.

The idea of "inter-generational" and changeable residential buildings is not new. What is new is the knowledge that such dynamic spaces don't have to look like Tyrolean-style open-space seniors' cafeterias. After the era of self-righteous living machines, urban planners have clearly rediscovered the old Utopia of life in harmony with nature and society. And fortunately, projects like the "Seoul Commune 2026" don't look like Smurf villages with no sense of reality.

















House R123. © Roland Halbe, courtesy Werner Sobek Ingenieure International

The same goes for architecture, even that of for outspokenly glamorous villas. Take for example "House R128," which is as legendary as it is controversial. Built by architect Werner Sobek several years ago in Stuttgart, R 128 consists of a steel skeleton that can be screwed together in just four days. The triple-glazed windows of the facade have a metallic coating that reduces the penetration of sun rays. They're also filled with a noble gas that increases their insulation capacity. It's an ultra energy-saving house that still manages to look like it's in the mood for an extravagant party.

It would be no surprise to find a Citroën C-Métisse in the garage of a house like this. This concept car was recently shown at the Mondial de l'Automobile in Paris. "Métisse" means half-breed. The muscular sport coupe with gullwing doors is driven by a combination diesel and electric motor, and looks as if it has escaped from the futuristic manifesto. It goes from zero to 100 km/h in 6.2 seconds – and consumes only 6.5 litres of petrol for 100 km. For a car of this class that's a sensation.

George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio attract much attention driving around Hollywood in their hybrid cars. Star surfer Kelly Slater had an ecologically sound house built in Hawaii. Fashion designers like Stella McCartney and Dov Charney are making a mint from "eco fashion," and venture capitalists have discovered the "new eco-nomy." However all of this is doing little to halt climate change. Not even Veit Kugel's curtains can hide this. But when really hot parties start taking place at the world conference for climate change, it's got to help the world in some way. Aesthetically charged and reproducible pop symbols can make ecological principles, thus far a preserve of elites, effective at the level of the masses.

In the film "The Devil wears Prada," there's a scene in which the fashion boss can't decide between two belts in Vogue magazine. Her assistant grins in contempt, considering fashion to be the most superficial thing in the world. At which point the fashion boss turns to her in her loose-fitting blue sweater and says: "You pull that matted blue sweater out of the cupboard because you want to show the world that you don't think it's important to pay too much attention to clothing. What you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue. Oscar de la Renta used that colour in his collection. Later, it surfaced in other collections and then in the department stores and then at some point it landed in the sell-out bin that you fished it out of. You are wearing that sweater because we have decided you would."

The ecological principle may work in the same way. It may take the most superfluous mechanisms of the dumbest lists of what's in and what's out for this worthy idea to find a place in the eternal sell-out bins of this world. It doesn't hurt for this environmental consciousness to be disseminated through the brilliance of its appearance and hipness. In the the long run, nothing goes deeper than the surface.

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The article originally appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on November 6, 2006.

Gerhard Matzig is a freelance journalist specialising in architecture. He is co-author of "Paris. Architektur der Gegenwart" (Paris. Contemporary Architecture), published by Prestel Verlag.

Translation: jab, nb.