ABSTRACT
The earliest beginnings in the greening of architecture were created out of necessity for survival for water, food, fuel, defense and shelter with direct and pragmatic architectural responses to regional climatic conditions. Survival and architecture were simultaneously considered. In the 20th century, design responses to the environment were explored by a few of the inuential architects, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Hassan Fathy to name a few, as they inspired and established an important linage for the formative phases of the Green Movement in architecture. In the 1960s the powerful desire for attainment of the American Dream served to accommodate the housing of a growing middle class and provided modern environments for expanding commerce and industrial manufacturing. While the majority of building occurred in pursuit of this dream, a number of visionary and countercultural architectural and planning projects emerged while mainstream modernist architecture evolved without concern for environmental issues. However, the main thrust of the greening process did not emerge until after the negative impacts of modern life upon the environment were initially exposed and made public.
