Technology and Place: Sustainable Architecture and the Blueprint Farm

Front Cover
University of Texas Press, Jul 15, 2001 - Technology & Engineering - 260 pages

Developing "sustainable" architectural and agricultural technologies was the intent behind Blueprint Farm, an experimental agricultural project designed to benefit farm workers displaced by the industrialization of agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Yet, despite its promise, the very institutions that created Blueprint Farm terminated the project after just four years (1987-1991).

In this book, Steven Moore demonstrates how the various stakeholders' competing definitions of "sustainability," "technology," and "place" ultimately doomed Blueprint Farm. He reconstructs the conflicting interests and goals of the founders, including Jim Hightower and the Texas Department of Agriculture, Laredo Junior College, and the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, and shows how, ironically, they unwittingly suppressed the self-determination of the very farm workers the project sought to benefit. From the instructive failure of Blueprint Farm, Moore extracts eight principles for a regenerative architecture, which he calls his "nonmodern manifesto."

From inside the book

Contents

CHAPTER ONE A QUESTION OF CATEGORIES
1
CHAPTER TWO A RECONSTRUCTION FROM THE FILE
29
CHAPTER THREE THE LOCAL HISTORY OF SPACE
45
Copyright

10 other sections not shown

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2001)

Steven A. Moore is Bartlett Cocke Regents Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

Bibliographic information