New Directions in Sustainable Design

Adrian Parr, Michael Zaretsky, Adrian Parr, Michael Zaretsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136909993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

Recently there has been a plethora of work published on the topic of sustainability, much of which is purely theoretical or technical in its approach. More often than not these books fail to introduce readers to the larger challenge of what thinking sustainably might entail.

Combining a series of well know authors in contemporary philosophy with established practitioners of sustainable design, this book develops a coherent theoretical framework for how theories of sustainability might engage with the growing practice of design. This book:

• brings together new and emerging perspectives on sustainability
• provides cohesive and jargon-free reading
• articulates the specificity of both theory and practice, to develop a symbiotic relationship which allows the reader to understand what thinking sustainably entails

This volume describes a variety of new ways to approach sustainable design and it equips the next generation of designers with necessary conceptual tools for thinking sustainably.

Part I
Principles

Chapter 1
Letter to the Profession of Architecture

Teddy Cruz

During my participation at the last Venice Architecture Biennale, in the fall of 2008, as I walked through the main exhibition inside the Arsenale, I thought of the huge divide between the architectures of excess that were displayed there and the economic precariousness of the world outside. It was unsettling to witness some of the most “cutting-edge” architectural practices present themselves as silent props for free market economic and political systems that were so wildly floundering that September. In my mind, this contrast magnified the powerlessness of our profession against the context of the world’s most pressing socio-political and economic realities. Yet as this fatalistic idea invaded my thoughts, what resonated most with me as I left the exhibition was how this unprecedented moment of crisis could actually become an opportunity to anticipate and rethink the institution of architecture, practice, and research.

A sense of pessimistic optimism drives this period as we confront the double meaning of the crisis: on one hand, the need to expose the unprecedented conflict inscribed across the economy, the environment, and the social and political value systems of a globalized world; and on the other, how to make this very conflict the operational device to redefine our normative idea of the institution of architecture, inspiring expanded models of practice and research.

Making Different Arrangements?

There is an overwhelming perception around us that this moment calls for fundamental change; but what does this really mean? Climate change, for example, tends to be seen solely as an environmental crisis, when in reality we must confront it as a cultural crisis. Across all these crises, the need for institutions of urban development to redefine themselves while generating a different type of interface with the public must generate new ways of thinking and acting beyond ideological polarities and reductive problem-solving.

It is saddening to see how even the progressive agenda of the Obama Administration has so far been defined by conventional thinking when referring to issues of urbanization, that the main idea behind producing new jobs is simply to buy more cars, or that “investing” in public and transportation infrastructure manifests itself solely as fixing bridges or building more roads.

I recently attended a presentation by James Kunstler, the author of Geography of Nowhere.¹ He recounted his travels across the U.S. describing how, in unprecedented ways, different audiences across the country were clamoring for solutions. He then suggested that he approached this sense of urgency with skepticism, feeling that the solutions being sought were only to maintain a status quo and did not fundamentally rethink (everyday) practices.

Foresight Across Divided Agendas

But as I dwell on these questions in the context of the frustrating status quo even in this era of “change,” I cannot avoid thinking about how the debate continues to be polarized between the politics of the Right and the Left. I would like to speculate on three current and problematic foresights across the following divided agendas in the architectural spectrum:

1. A project of apolitical formalism, made of hyper-aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics, continues to press the notion of the avant-garde as an autonomous project, “needing” a critical distance from the institutions to operate critically in the research of experimental form (instead, I would argue that it is a project of radical proximity that can produce new aesthetic categories, problematizing the relationship of the social, the political, and the formal).

2. The cheap politics of architectural identity, packaged as a stylistic neo-conservatism, sponsored by New Urbanism’s aspiration for a homogeneous middle class protected by picket fences and Victorian porches. The Truman Show/Homeland Security of urbanism continues to hijack the debate away from the real concrete issues that plague urbanization efforts: the de-funding of social and public infrastructure and the economic gap dividing enclaves of the mega-wealthy from the poverty surrounding them (I would argue that what is needed here is a committed reinvestment in research, a creative triangulation across new interpretations of density, social, and environmental networks; and an urban pedagogy that will allow us to rethink the meaning of infrastructure and “ownership”).

3. A project of social justice in architecture, as expressed in the most benign efforts such as Architecture for Humanity, which continues to polarize the meaning of aesthetics and design, and ultimately contributes to the widening gap between social and formal systems. In this context, emergency relief efforts are always biased toward fixing short-term problems, not communities in the long term (again I would argue that a reversal of thinking must introduce the idea that architects, besides being designers of buildings, can be designers of political processes, economic models, and collaborations across institutions and jurisdictions. Ultimately this kind of social justice implies a politics of aesthetics).

I am not trying to argue here for a foresight that searches for the middle ground across these divided agendas. Rather I advance a need for a critical re-contextualizing of our different approaches and procedures. Ultimately, it does not matter whether urban development is wrapped by the latest morphogenetic skin, pseudo neoclassical prop, or LEED-certified photovoltaic panels, if all these approaches continue to camouflage the most pressing problems of urbanization today. Without altering the exclusionary policies constructing the socio-economic and political ground of our society, our profession will continue to be subordinated to the visionless environments defined by the bottom-line urbanism of the developer’s spreadsheet and the neo-conservative politics and economics of a hyper-individualistic society premised upon a principle of ownership. No advances in urban planning can be made without redefining what we mean by infrastructure, density, mixed use, and affordability. No meaningful advances in housing design can be made without advances in housing policy and economy. As architects, we can be responsible for imagining counter-spatial procedures, political, and economic structures that can produce new modes of sociability and public culture.

Note

1 James Kunstler, Geography of Nowhere (New York: The Free Press, 1994).

Chapter 2
Art, Politics, and Climate Change

Adrian Parr

As the people roared and the delegates of prosperous nations unflinchingly dragged their heels upon reaching a binding agreement at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009, leaders of low-income countries garnered together in solidarity to protest the self-interested opportunism threatening to turn the results of the talks into lukewarm tokenistic gestures. The stark divide between the developed and developing world was also exposed as outdated and simplistic, especially as many began pointing the finger at the Chinese for weakening the final accord. What will it take to produce lasting change? How many more hurricanes, droughts, melting ice-caps, species extinction, greenhouse gas emissions, rises in sea level, and so on does it take for a global commons to start acting as one?

The earth’s climate would have to be one of the longest standing examples of the public commons we have left in a world that has become increasingly fine-tuned to the sound of neoliberal privatization, competition, individualism, and the mythic belief in the freedom of choice. And if neoliberalism is the melody, the beat accompanying this is the paranoid throb of extensive security and surveillance mechanisms that work hard to keep the rowdy multitude in check. As the Danish prepared to host leaders from all around the world, they were also spending approximately $122 million on securing the nation’s capital. Reassigning forces from across the country, Copenhagen had a provisional force of 6,500 police poised and eager to protect the city and the delegates from demonstrators. In the Valby District, three dozen cages that could hold up to 350 anticipated troublemakers were erected in an abandoned beer warehouse. In addition, steel fences on concrete barricades closed off the center from the rest of the city and the general public. Delegates, officials, and other pre-approved individuals were maneuvered through a series of security checkpoints before they eventually entered the center where negotiations would take place. It is important to get a good, clear picture of the competing principles emerging from this scene: freedom and constraint, diplomacy and anxiety, and independence and interdependency. And as I will discuss momentarily, art is particularly well positioned to affectively bring these differences into relation with one another in ways that can change how we position ourselves within the larger social field that characterizes the growing discourse around environmental degradation and the concomitant problem of sustainable living.

Changes in climate are symptomatic of an absence of political clarity over the way in which the public commons clashes with privatization. While in the lead-up to the climate talks in Copenhagen the political stage was set for constructive dialogue over how to halt global warming, there still remained a fundamental unquestioned presumption that would prove to be one of the most difficult hurdles the talks would encounter. Given that climate change will provide a direct threat to the human species, in the lead-up to the talks it was assumed that the urgency of this situation would be enough to bring into existence a global commons. The belief was that when the human species is existentially threatened it will act in its own best self-interest and this would motivate the world’s leaders to exercise their practical intelligence and skills at diplomacy to achieve a meaningful consensus. Obviously the presumption was wrong. Self-interest does not seamlessly translate into the collective good. Furthermore, this logic is predicated upon a neoliberal viewpoint; it is no different to the view that believes social services ought to be left up to the market to solve. So in light of this, no matter how much money prosperous nations might have ended up throwing in the direction of poorer nations to offset the disproportionately negative effects they would experience as a result of climate change, without a system in place that can verify a nation’s emissions or a legally binding agreement that holds countries accountable to their agreed emissions targets, the $3.6 billion from the U.S. or the $10.6 billion from the European Union (to name a few examples) in climate funds for the poor are no better than the remuneration packages being handed out to workers worldwide during the current global economic downturn. Both continue to pander to the self-interests of protectionist economic policies and the greed of corporate risk-taking. To put it differently, for the people of the Maldives to receive cl...