Global Design New York University: Temple in a Bottle

Monday, February 28, 2011

Temple in a Bottle

Eco-friendly building practices have taken a spiritual turn. Buddhist monks from Thailand's Sisaket province created the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple ("Wat Lan Kuad") out of millions of recycled glass bottles. Supplied by donations from the surrounding community, the "Temple of Million Bottles" serves as an inspirational symbol of how we can conserve energy and resources by using everyday materials. Featured on ecoideasnet.

MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."