The Jargon ETC team is finally publishing our comprehensive post on sustainability. We hold the issue quite dearly here at the blog, but have never gotten to a public definition. Given that sustainability is currently the hottest issue in architectural circles thanks to recent inciting articles by Amanda Baillieu and the upcoming Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, we feel like now is the opportune time to address the issue.
In the articles below each of our contributors talk about sustainability 300 words. Each author addresses their opinion on its definition and the larger implications of sustainability.
Read it all and give feedback with comments.
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Mr. Cuellar
By "sustainable," I understand a productive ecological approach that has no degenerative impact on the earth's natural, chemical life-based cycles and finite resources. The conventional means for achieving sustainable architecture are strictly functional: the building must meet these requirements, expend this little water, contain so much recycled material, etc.
Defining our sustainability strategy as functional would be to ignore the scope and imaginative potential of the issue. Many aspects of building, food production, transportation, and our very societies are unsustainable, and recent waves of eco-paranoia only make this more clear. Sustainability concerns every aspect of our daily lives, therefore the solution to managing resource consumption should, too.
Socially, we are at once bombarded by energy-saving tips and accustomed to long, hot showers.
Psychologically, we face "eco-angst."
Morally, it's difficult to decide whether the perversion of nature is "wrong" or irrelevant, interesting and subject to further perversion.
Politically, we are encouraged to trade in our clunkers, but suburban homeowners' associations forbid street-facing PV panels.
Practically, how could we possibly know for sure whether organic produce from overseas is more sustainable than pesticide-coated local fruit?
The misstep of architects would be to assume that meeting energy and spatial standards alone can cure the germ of today's ecological problems, let alone address our complex habits of consumption.
I propose a temporal and geographical solution, a nomadism, part Johnny Appleseed, part wi-fi addict. Debord's notion that nomads endure a "content less freedom" is helpful to understand the proposal (The Society of the Spectacle, New York, Zone Books, 2006 edition). We can suppose sedentariness produces content (a content-full captivity), but this is obviously unsustainable today. We mustn't adopt new typologies, but radicalize our existing ones. There must be living rhythms and situations, beyond and behind our artificial gardens of Eden, that agitate normalization and make the earth's outside environment fertile and flexible again.
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Mr. Grey
There are two leading approaches to architectural sustainability. The first view of sustainability is as an architectural a priori, no different from structure, materials or occupancy. This is the approach which leads to critical solutions and an understanding of entropy. The other approach is that of continual accretion. This second option, used by an army of LEED certified practitioners and advocated by figures as prominent as President Obama, believes that the application of more solar, wind, insulation, and geothermal is the solution to make something sustainable. These answers are built on the myth of capital production as the solution to any obstacle. Despite its wide acceptance, sustainable people should be skeptical of the ‘more’ solution.
The ‘more’ argument has a long history in the West. Children are taught that the Soviet Union collapsed because of the weight of overwhelming amounts of capital production in the West. Likewise, mass production is credited with overcoming the ‘Wild West,’ defeating fascism in Europe, and birthing a semi-autonomous middle class.
Now, facing a climate crisis, the ‘more’ solution resumes its typecasting. Architects embrace the more ideology for its marketability. Large allocations for solar and plant covered buildings dominate current built form and school pedagogies. These can be sold to clients in Dubai or New York without ever thinking about the real differences between these places.
More solutions always parallel the exponential growth patterns of capitalism. There is nothing sustainable about exponential models. Natural entropy is part of any critical sustainable solution; this directly involves architecture, and harks to old precedents.
This architecture, considering the climate a priori, was noted by Vitruvius, shown in the primitive hut by Laugier in 1804 and again by Frank Lloyd Wright. This architecture stops building 'more' for the sake of reparation. It creates critical architecture that requires pursuit of material, form, psychology, and ideology to offer a critical approach to sustainability.
examples : + and -
(+) Laugier: Primitave Hut Wright: Taliesen West Zumthor: Thermal Baths Roche: Hybrid Muscle
(-) Piano: Vulcano Buono SOM: Pearl River Tower DWELL magazine: Normandy Chapel
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Mr. Langevin
Environment as Sustainability
The question of sustainability is a question of environment. “Environment” (or some form of the term) has long been part of the public consciousness, beginning in the 1960’s with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, continuing into the 1970’s with the conservation movement, and remaining relevant to current discussions about climate change and global warming. While the general understanding of “environment” has evolved during these decades, the exploration of the distinctly human type of environment has lagged behind, stymied by the practice of standardizing the atmospheres that our buildings provide. Going forward, attempts to redefine these unsustainable built environments will provide the basis for a real sustainable revolution.
The word “environment” describes a complex network of interdependent variables that change across time and space. Variability is crucial in establishing an environment’s capacity for diversity, flexibility, and adaptability, all of which are tenets of fundamentally sustainable systems. Earth’s natural environment acts as one such variant ecosystem on a large scale, transforming by day and season in a cyclical process that continues on indefinitely into the future.
Since the advent of air-conditioning, the human environment has been uniquely divorced from the notion of variability, striving instead for predictability through strict mechanisms of control. Standardization has neutralized the climatic context of buildings by defining an artificially tempered interior that can be implemented in any corner of the world, provided a big enough HVAC system and tight enough exterior envelope. In these spaces, the occupant is deterministically reduced to the passive recipient of prescribed target conditions.
A sustainable human environment cultivates lower human energy use, higher sensory engagement, and increased productivity by integrating with surrounding ecosystems and embracing internal variability. Drawing from the diurnal and seasonal transformations of the natural climate, the environment acts as its own smaller ecosystem that evolves over time in a similarly cyclical manner. Efforts to achieve this atmospheric dynamic within a building are rare and difficult to pursue, as the addiction to climate control runs deep and is firmly entrenched in prevailing codes and guidelines. Nevertheless, they provide an essential challenge to the human environments most responsible for mankind’s dissonance with the Earth, and in doing so access the heart of the answers to the sustainability question.
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Via Jargon, etc.
Personal comment:
"The word “environment” describes a complex network of interdependent variables that change across time and space. Variability is crucial in establishing an environment’s capacity for diversity, flexibility, and adaptability, all of which are tenets of fundamentally sustainable systems. Earth’s natural environment acts as one such variant ecosystem on a large scale, transforming by day and season in a cyclical process that continues on indefinitely into the future."
and further away:
"The word “environment” describes a complex network of interdependent variables that change across time and space. Variability is crucial in establishing an environment’s capacity for diversity, flexibility, and adaptability, all of which are tenets of fundamentally sustainable systems. Earth’s natural environment acts as one such variant ecosystem on a large scale, transforming by day and season in a cyclical process that continues on indefinitely into the future."
These are quotation from "Mr. Langevin" to which I quite agree and that make me think to what we tried to "pinpoint" (the airconditioning as a non variable functional and comfortable environment) in the project RealRoom(s). It also make me think of another research project about space variability we worked on: Variable environment, even if this one is not really focused on sustainability. It could be a side aspect of it, I think in particular of Rolling Microfunctions"