Maria Bottero Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy 301
losophy of famous men like William Morris, (who, quoting Pevsner, is a pioneer, father
of the architectural Modern Movement), and Petr Kropotkin, the Russian geographer,
escaped from Russia to London where he observed and criticized the the structure
of English economy and the big scale of its industry - theorizing the necessity of
descaling industry and integrating it with agriculture.
This line of thinking, which implies the choice of small scale instead of large
scale institutions, is also present in XX century authors like Simone Weil and espe-
cially in many scientists debating the environmental question around the ’60, such
as the biologist Barry Commoner, the (already cited) bioeconomist Jeremy Rifkin,
the supporters of renewable fonts of energy like the physicists Amory Lovins, David
and Marcia Pimentel, Peter Chapman and, last but not least, the economist Ernst
Schumacher, famous above all for his studies on tecnological help to poor countries
of the third and fourth world and his theory about the necessity of descaling the
rich western technologies while inventing an “intermediate technology” suited to
the local users.
Almost all the XX century discussions about environment, industrial production and
technological scale, are, like in Morris and Kropotkin, linked to a negative evaluation
about the opportunity of opposing strong people concentration in big towns against
a deserted land where the “monoculture” agricultural production proves to be – again
- a big scale, high energy cost and low employment technology.
C. Energy, resources, environmental pollution
The energy crisis of the ’70 gave way to a large debate on traditional fossil fuels power
plants, criticized because of their big scale, lose of energy along the transmission
cables and consumption of a non renewable resource like oil. All the already cited
energetists, especially Barry Commoner with his “Poverty of Power” and Peter Chap-
man with his “Fuels Paradise” maintened that an energy saving policy in agriculture,
in manifacture industries and in buildings was to be started immediately, while the
energy production technology of big power plants was to be abandoned, in favour
of small decentralized plants, eventually using renewable forms of energy (hydro,
wind, solar).
And while the “Zero Growth” MIT report was predicting the near ending of non
renewable resources, “The Closing Circle” by Commoner was the first denounce of the
biosphere generalized pollution, in air, land, water.
Building and environment
Energy saving in buildings has been intended, up to now, as:
A. The use of better insulated walls and roofs
B. Different systems of thermal conditioning through active and passive solar gain
technologies
The use of solar panels or solar walls in buildings is quite complicated, for it implies
a careful analysis of climate in that specific geographic area.
Even simplifying and following Victor Olgyay’s rules about the four main typical
climates on the planet (cold, temperate, hot arid and hot humid), the constraints of