A MATTER OF DEGREES: The Art of Jeff Schofield by Steve Panton THE EARTH IS FALLING APART. To a certain extent,
this is natural. Wind and water cause erosion; they always have and, at least on any timescale meaningful to humans, always will. But over recent years, geologists have come to another, mind-blowing, conclusion—that human activity is now responsible for moving over ten times more earth than all of the natural erosion processes combined.1 This is, if we needed it, yet another reminder that we are entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene—the age where human activity has become the dominant influence on the world's environment. The artist Jeff Schofield has seen a fair bit of earth moved in his life. In his previous career as an architect, he amassed an extensive portfolio of
Capital Gate Sustainable architecture and urban design Photo by Gerry O’Leary
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major projects, including Capital Gate (2011), a 35 story tower in Abu Dhabi that features innovative structural design and a world record-setting 18 degree lean.2 He's also thought a lot about how to make buildings more environmentally sustainable. Among the design features that make Capital Gate more energy-efficient are optimized structural steelwork, a low surface area in comparison to its volume, shields that protect the tower from the sun, and an innovative way to recirculate cooled air around the shell of the building. In the modern era of computational modeling, the impact of these energy-saving measures is easy to predict. Recirculating the cooled air in Capital Gate saves ten percent of the energy required to air-condition the hotel guest floors, for example.3 But the problem is that taken together, all the technical solutions in the world aren't sufficient to reverse the self-destructive path that humanity is on. The cause-and-effect between cultural production and sustainability is altogether harder to predict. The one thing that can be said with certainty is that achieving a sustainable balance between humankind's material needs and the planet's environmental health will require an epoch-defining cultural shift. This relationship between culture and sustainability is the issue that Schofield, like many other contemporary artists, is exploring in his art.
