When ranking disasters, the failure of the Copenhagen climate change conference tops 9/11, asserted the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in his speech at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen: 'The 21st century starts with the debacle of 19th December 2009. Everything which pretends to be in charge is from now on an empty ‘Ancien Régime’.’
What Copenhagen shows is the professionalisation of politics. Almost everbody has some morals, especially in their private life and when it doesn’t come at a price. But in business, where professionalism rules, the only thing that counts is profit. Fair play is for amateurs – in professional football, for example, a tactical foul is accepted! It is not morality that leads the ones in charge, but professionalism.
Nearly ninety years ago, the design philosophy for the suburb of Knarrberg was one of production: produce your own food, produce your own compost (e.g., compost toilet), etc. Today, the inhabitants of Knarrberg are reduced to being consumers – consumers of food, of furniture, of housing, etc. The suburb is packed from cellar to ceiling with consumer goods. In the Summer School’s ‘Prosumer Class’, we started with a harvesting scheme for Knarrberg, exploring questions such as: What is there to harvest other than food – furniture, old books, old clothes…? What insights can we gain from studying the costs of consumer goods in the home? How much did Knarrberg’s inhabitants traditionally invest during their lifetimes in a mortgage, in furniture, in comfort? How many years did an inhabitant of Knarrberg have to work in order to pay for the installation of a sewage system or a hot water shower?
In the glory days of the Bauhaus, Gropius still believed in an honest industrialisation, in a social capitalism. Nowadays, we know better. Our faith in the fact that in a free market, capitalism will implement its own regulation – if products are no good, consumers don’t purchase them – appears less stable than previously assumed. During his interrogation following the credit crisis Alan Greenspan said, ‘those who trusted the market made a big mistake by assuming that the self-interest of organizations, including banks, was such that they were best able to protect their own shareholders and their own assets.’ The lack of confidence in the market shocked him, because for forty years he thought he had considerable evidence that it was working extremely well. But his world view, his ideology, did not work. In his book, De utopie van de vrije markt (The free market utopia), Hans Achterhuis sees neoliberalism in a utopian light. And even though global capitalism has brought more wealth than ever before, the price to pay is more poverty than ever. Today’s society has more than 200,000 slum areas, of which the five biggest house over 20 million people. Despite all the available technical resources, the trend does not seem point to the eradication of these atrocities.
The world is becoming dirtier: CO2 emissions are increasing, there are plastic fragments all over the planet, along with shrinking forests, shrinking fish populations and growing deserts. Today, a wide range of global problems can be found online in just a few seconds. The solutions are found in a few seconds more and the second and third opinions, which propose exactly the opposite, are found in the same time. This makes it very difficult to act. Awareness is no longer the issue; the problem is finding a direction to take among the overload of opinions. Since post-modernism, we know that there is no such thing as ‘truth’, but still we have to find out which direction to take. As Sloterdijk says, just to continue is criminal, only to abstain from everything naïve; the intelligent directions lie somewhere in between.
The Triadic Ballet shows us a very simple world based on this naive idea of industrialisation. Our class decided to produce an updated version of this ballet, Das Tragisches Ballet (The tragic ballet), uploaded with all the effects from Knarrberg. It shows what our IKEA-reality makes of the utopian Bauhaus industrialisation.

The production of an environmental goal
Since the Club of Rome and its report ‘The Limits to Growth’, ecological thinking has been about abstention, about reduction: the reduction of waste, of energy consumption, of traffic, of CO2 emissions. It is about a rigorous moral behaviour, which is objectionable, which is never enough, which is against our development behaviours and which, as we have proved over the last decade, is not working. Some subsequent attempts, such as the ‘earthship’ experiments of the Sixties to establish a self-sufficient small-scale society, no longer have any validity in the globalised world. Self-sufficiency doesn’t fit with global Internet knowledge, much as an archaic farmer who only provides food for his own family doesn’t bring the world any further. In contemporary living, farming is about food production and removing the responsibility for this from others so that they can concentrate on other activities (the first rule of city life).
The solution is not a new technical utopia, showing how it could be if we all start over, nor is it a nostalgic restart of an earlier version of society. The solution lies in a hypermodernistic research, which shows what elements of history are worth implementing in our contemporary society, to be mixed up with new technologies and new behaviours and redesigned to fit in our contemporary, globalised world. The first hypermodern goal, just because of our globalised knowledge and awareness, is to develop a refuge where people can live undisturbed and free of guilt in the tradition of the European slow rural lifestyle. To create a refuge where time, space and action are synchronised. This should provide the basic qualities of life. This doesn’t mean a nostalgic traditionalism or a return to the Sixties, but a hypermodern research, which explores what was good in the past and tries to re-use and adapt this in our contemporary world. The possible solutions are to be found in a regional authenticity based on local ecological basics. The programme can be intensified with free-range local markets, informal workers, CO2 forests, aquaponic fish and vegetable farming, solar energy plants, water recycling systems combining wellness area with car wash, drinking water production with hydro power, etc. etc. and, of course, fair trade consumption. As the German sociologist Nico Stehr states, consumer society is changing: consumers are becoming increasingly aware and are ready to make choices. As an example, he refers to the growing group of people living Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS). This is where we, as the ‘Prosumer Class’, connect with our Tragisches Ballet. Enough is Enough!

Addendum
An unlikely, impossible, yet desirable future

My graduate professor at TU Delft, Taeke de Jong, explained in his famous ‘Doom lectures’ of the late-1980s the improbable, impossible and desirable future, to be used as a goal in design education. Musil describes this as follows in his book The Man Without Qualities: ‘If there is a sense of reality, and nobody will doubt that it has a right to exist, then there must also be something you could call a sense of possibility. [...] In this way, a sense of possibility could be defined as the ability to think about what could possibly exist, without attaching greater importance to what actually exists over what doesn’t. It is clear that the consequences of such a creative disposition could be remarkable, yet unfortunately what people admire is often portrayed as wrong and what they disallow as permissible, or both sometimes as irrelevant. It is said that these possibility-people live in a finer web, in a web of deluded imagination, dreams and conjunctions; when children show these tendencies they are forcibly dealt with and they are told that such people are fantasisers, dreamers, weaklings and windbags or nit-pickers. If ever they are praised these fools are called idealists, but that apparently only includes the weak variety, the ones who really cannot grasp reality or weakly shy away from it, [...] A possible experience or a possible truth is not the same as a real experience or a real truth, disregarding the very fact of their ‘being real’, but they contain, at least in the eyes of their supporters, something very divine, a fire, an upward flight, a will to build and a conscious utopianism that does not shirk reality but rather regards it as an enterprise and a design.’