John Manoochehri

OPEN Lecture: Visiting Speaker
Country: Sweden

John Manoochehri is a radical environmentalist hiding inside a designer. He runs a design studio, Resource Vision, that integrates new, rigorous, sustainability solutions into architecture, urbanism and lifestyles, working through lectures, consulting and design collaborations. He has worked with and for the best practices in Scandinavia, inluding BIG, White, Rosenbergs, NOD, KSARK, BSK, and more, and lectures internationally at various design forums and schools.

He also runs two courses, in sustainable architecture and sustainable urbanism, at the architecture school in Stockholm, where is also a Guest Researcher - developing a systematic approach to sustainable built design called Resource Transformation Analysis - at the Environmental Strategies Group at the Royal Institute of Technology. Previously, he wrote the policy of the UN Environment Programme on sustainable lifestyles, ‘Consumption Opportunities’, produced the first and only ever complete rewrite of the philsophical basis of the UK Green Party. He also has a degree from Oxford University in Sanskrit and Buddhology/Indology.

In general, that sustainability requires a complete re-orientation of modern material culture. As such, he believes that sustainability is not happening - only some vague environmental things. Most environmental design is either boring or bad, and sustainable design education is non-existent. This, though, turns out to be a great opportunity. He believes that truly sustainable design is equivalent to great design, and as such can be developed systematically; and, motivated by this, that designers of all disciplines should be much more epochally provocative and re-constructive - more heroic, if you like - than they are. Few others have the same capacity to change so much, while just doing their job well.