2023-09-05 16:36:37
At first glance, “low tech” can make you smile. Look for the term on the Internet, you will quickly come across tutorials on how to make a pedal washing machine. However, these soft technologies do not attract green engineers for nothing. Beyond designing everyday objects that are both accessible, durable and useful, they open up a broad reflection on the organization of our societies. The “low tech philosophy” is to ask why we use a high-tech tool when a simpler mechanical tool could do the same service to us, and broaden the reflection to society as a whole.
The approach is so serious that it now has a magazine in French, the Low-Tech journal, more than 3,000 subscribers on the counter. In its September-October issue, the magazine “sober technologies and resilient lifestyles” offers, for example, a dossier on compressed air, “a forgotten treasure”. A technology “robust, reliable, easy to maintain and ecological”, which, after having known its heyday at the beginning of the 19th century, was swept away by the electricity fairy. However, the research never stopped, and several prototypes of small compressed air cars were produced and even marketed. Without ever benefiting from the subsidies and the enthusiasm of car manufacturers, who have put all their marbles on electric…
A few pages later, we try to imagine what a “low-tech style” in architecture might look like. We draw an urban building, with a “modern cubic frame, but traditional cladding (wooden cladding, cob, vegetable concrete, etc.”), and its indispensable debited inner courtyard, a true island of freshness. Everything will have to be licked: ecology, for the contributors, cannot be envisaged without a serious reflection on the beauty of the world.
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