The first wave of green consciousness started in America with the youth movement of the 1960s. Young radicals started to drop out of mainstream society and establish communes like Drop City in Colorado. They lived in domes made from old cars that they bought from scrap yards. So this was the detritus of consumer culture, they took the waste products of our consumer society and recycled them. The form was influenced by the geodesic dome invented by Richard Buckminster Fuller.
Unfortunately, the cause became associated in the public's mind with the image of hippies living in isolated communes. The press called them "eco-freaks." The movement was interpreted by mainstream Americans as a threat to traditional lifestyles and as a call for personal sacrifices, which conservative citizens resented. So the green movement didn't gain much support in the beginning.
In 1961 the head of Heineken Breweries visited the Caribbean and became concerned by the lack of affordable building materials. At the same time he was looking for a way to dispose of the bottles being produced by the company. He commissioned the Dutch architect John Habraken to design a beer bottle that could be used as a brick once it had been used.
Habraken produced the WOrld BOttle, which was square and had a grooved surface so they could lock together. It was flat on two sides and had a recessed base so that the neck of another bottle would fit inside. In the normal recycling process the glass has to be melted down and remade, and that uses energy. This was a product designed with a secondary function.
It was meant to be used in the Third World. It was supposed to turn a disposable product into an empowering tool for DIY home building. Unfortunately, it wasn't really practical. What you see here is only a garden house on Alfred Heineken's estate in Holland.
Since then, the green movement has gathered momentum. A lot of theorists began looking at green issues. One of the first books to formulate the idea of green production was Ernst Schumacher's Small is Beautiful (1973), which celebrated the benefits of small-scale production. More significantly, Victor Papanek was a design theorist working in the 1960s. He was a pioneer of ethical design, which we'll look at later, but part of that is a concern for the environment. He wrote a book called The Green Imperative, which was very influential.
