MBK Architect

On July 3, 2008, I was interviewed by Andra Miller, President of the New York Society for Ethical Culture. We explored the concept of an ethical relationship to our planet, green building, the role of consumption in our society and some ideas about how we can all be more sustainable. You can listen to this interview in its entirety (approximately one hour) here.

To say that the transformation we are undergoing in the way we think about our built environment is radical or unprecedented is in some ways an understatement. In a space of little more than ten years, the green building revolution has gone mainstream. One of the most significant factors propelling this movement forward is our collective worry about global warming. Never before has an environmental crisis been given a dimension that is as comprehensible, or as vividly imaginable to us, as the melting of our polar ice caps, the changing of our weather patterns and the recognition that we are responsible.

While I wholeheartedly endorse the green building movement in architecture and seek to fold green practices into my work wherever possible, I am not convinced that it does enough to tackle head on our current rates of consumption, which are not even close to sustainable. In my opinion, if we really want to be green, which is to say, live sustainably, we have got to come to grips with the consumer narrative that we are all deeply embedded in and begin to construct a new one.

This past weekend I gave a talk on this subject at the Ethical Culture Society of Westchester. A transcript of that talk can be found here.

In this talk I identify two movements, Voluntary Simplicity and Cohousing, as being examples of the kind of lifestyle change we need to be undertaking if we are to come to terms with our over consumptive life styles. Another that came to my attention as a result of giving the talk is the Small House movement. These are all relatively small movements, and I am not convinced that alone or collectively they are the answer. Yet they point us in a direction of conversation that I think can be useful.

I will be giving this talk again at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on April 20, 2008 at 11:30 A.M. I invite anyone in the vicinity to come and hear it. In the coming months I expect to be posting more on this topic and related issues, so stay tuned.

Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh

As the year draws to a close we would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to our clients and collaborators. We appreciate the faith you display in us when you choose to work with us and we believe we have repaid that faith with thoughtful diligence as we worked together to realize construction goals.

We want to reaffirm our commitment to providing an architectural service that encourages teamwork across all project disciplines. We firmly believe that all players have something valuable to contribute to the process and we want to help get the best out of each and every one.

Our commitment to environmentally responsible design and production grows constantly. We are proud that we are able to incorporate products and systems that are energy efficient, renewable and otherwise environmentally sound choices in all of our projects, sometimes without our clients knowing it. We are even more proud to take leadership within our own business structure. As pioneers in virtual office production we have built a production model that minimizes resource consumption. All of our team members work with us through the internet which eliminates the need to build and maintain separate office space. We employ state of the art web based collaboration tools to coordinate our work and we make these tools available to our clients and collaborators so that we can all be more efficient with our time and planetary resources.

We wish everyone a happy and healthy new year!

The Team at MBK Architect