Laboratories for a Planet-Wide Scale Ecological Design

Abstract

Architecture has always fulfilled a central place in the communitarian world. As a primary mode of expression, it allows the full embodiment of a social project. The first religious communities that left Europe to settle on American soil were inspired by biblical texts to build their housing and shared spaces (Hayden, 1976). Back-to-the-land communities of the 1960s to 1980s introduced architectures of protest symbolizing both their desire to break with the bourgeois order and awareness of ecological issues (Castillo, 2015). Since the early 2000s, ecovillages have returned to vernacular practices associated to increasingly ecological constructions better integrated into territories (Amar, 2020). Why formal evolutions of the communitarian movements’ architectures are of interest today? They highlight strong continuities between successive waves: on the one hand, a belong to the same alternative history in which architectural utopias meet environmental and social struggles, and on the other hand, experimental operating processes allowing them to qualify as laboratories of ecotopic architectures.

This paper proposes to recall the architectural evolutions mentioned from 1965 to the present day and to highlight the constructive methodologies specific to ecovillages. Approaching ecovillages through the field of architecture also opens up the relevance for the future of an alternative trend, an Ecological Design on a planet-wide scale.