This issue of AD explores the remarkable resurgence of ecological strategies
in architectural imagination. As a symptom of a new sociopolitical reality
inundated with environmental catastrophes, sudden climatic changes, garbage-
packed metropolises and para-economies of non-recyclable e-waste, environmental
consciousness and the image of the earth re-emerges, after the 1960s, as an
inevitable cultural armature for architects; now faced with the urgency to heal
an ill-managed planet that is headed towards evolutionary bankruptcy. At present
though, in a world that has suffered severe loss of resources, the new wave of
ecological architecture is not solely directed to the ethics of the world's
salvation, yet rather upraises as a psycho-spatial or mental position, fuelling
a reality of change, motion and action. Coined as .EcoRedux', this position
differs from utopia in that it does not explicitly seek to be right;
it recognises pollution and waste as generative potentials for design. In this
sense, projects that may appear at first sight as science-fictional are not part
of a foreign sphere, unassociated with the real, but an extrusion of our own
realms and operations.

* Contributors include: Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner (HWKN), Fabiola
Lopez-Duran and Nikki Moore, Anthony Vidler and Mark Wigley.
* Featured architects: Anna Pla Catala, Jonathan Enns, Eva Franch-Gilabert.
Mitchell Joachim (Terreform One), Francois Roche (R&Sie(n)), Rafi Segal,
Alexandros Tsamis and Eric Vergne.

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