Next Generation Tourism
John Spence, Henry Squire, Patrick Bellew, Timothy Newton; Edited by Nina Rappaport and Rukshan Vathupola
Yale School of Architecture, June 2021
Paperback | 8 x 10 inches | 136 pages | English | ISBN: 9781948765930 | $35.00
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
The book features current sustainability and material research and design for innovative strategies centered around ecology, sustainability, and the rise of future tourism models on the resort island of Gili Meno, Indonesia. It focuses on sustainability of materials, climate issues, and development in fragile island areas where exploitation of resources are being monitored for future development.
It is said that our actions impact the environment seven generations into the future. In fact the growing concern about the global impact of tourism and the associated waste produced by leisure industries is outdated. This Yale graduate advanced architecture studio analyzed the current ecological conditions, indigenous architecture styles, and resort culture of Gili Meno, a tiny remote island off the coast of Lombok, Indonesia, to generate next-generation models of tourism.
"We've also seen a huge rise in awareness of sustainability in terms of holidaying patterns and resort developments. I wouldn't say that 30 years ago people were blind to these issues, but there's certainly much more education and consciousness now about global warming and other issues. So whether a developer sincerely believes it needs to incorporate sustainability or sees a commercial advantage in being sustainable, there's no discrepancy. A commercial advantage validates the need to be sustainable because there's nothing less sustainable than a failed resort." -- John Spence
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
One of the side effects of the coronavirus pandemic is how clearly it conveyed the massive contribution of tourism toward climate change. Most vacations rely on commercial jets, but in spring 2020, when the number of flights dropped dramatically, there were almost immediately cleaner skies around the world. Yet now, as the United States and other parts of the world are fully reopening with majority vaccinated populations, the trend of flying around the world to see this place or go to that event is ramping up, and in time will probably reach pre-pandemic levels. With that resurgence will be an offsetting of any gains made last year in terms of carbon outputs. Setting aside the carbon pollution of airplanes, a lot of the tourist industry is far from sustainable, especially in terms of waste and water usage. It behooves the hospitality industry to make itself greener, particularly in places that are ecologically sensitive, places that are ironically more and more desirable as their futures are imperiled.
The latest in Yale School of Architecture's series of books documenting the Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Architecture Fellowship takes sustainable tourism as its subject. Established in 2004, the Bass Fellowships bring developers to Yale to teach design studios anchored in "real-world" development processes. For the fall 2019 advanced design studio, Next Generation Tourism—Touching the Ground Lightly, the developer was John Spence, the self-described "socially conscious entrepreneur" who leads the successful Karma Group. The hospitality company has thirty resorts across six brands, with eleven of the resorts in Bali and Indonesia. For the studio led by Spence with architect Henry Squire, engineer Patrick Bellew, and Yale's Timothy Newton, the students designed a resort located on Gili Meno, one of the three pearl-like Gili Islands near Lombok, Indonesia.
Not surprisingly, the eleven student projects take up the majority of the book, following documentation of the studio's research on the far-flung site and the brief they were given. These contents are bookended by two interviews: one with Squire at the beginning of the book and one with Spence at the end; the latter most directly touches upon the impact of COVID-19 and climate change, also mentioning the noticeable improvement in the atmosphere due to limited travel. It's also not surprising that most students explored ecological architecture in their projects; after all, they were asked to "design a new resort typology as a prototype for the future of global sustainable tourism" — no small feat. One of those projects is illustrated below, but other students of architecture interested in the subject of this ambitious studio will no doubt want to pick up this book to see them all.
IMAGES (Solar Songket by Justin Tsang):
