SUSTAINABILITY IN ARCHITECTURE

[Adam Russell [DRAW]]

'The best way to reduce the ecological and carbon footprint of a
building is not to build it in the first place.'
Using this statement as a point of departure, how can / should
architects approach the sustainability agenda within a world of
rapidly increasing urbanisation and consumption?

[Adam Russell [DRAW]]

From: http://www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/journal.html

editorial: design philosophy papers 1 / 2009

1// “In architecture, one response to the Energy Crisis claim has been
the paradigm of conservation. In this paradigm, the aim of the good is
to do less bad. While conservation is well intended, it is a
thermodynamically pessimistic paradigm and ultimately a futile
pursuit. By focusing on reduction rather than production, conservation
conditions architects to work on the wrong problem. It diverts
architects from a more optimistic approach grounded in the surplus and
excess described by Bataille. In contrast to the conservation
paradigm, the aim for architects should shift from using less energy
toward the means of capturing, channelling, and producing energy
available in the milieu of a project.”
Keil Moe ‘Compelling yet Unreliable Theories of Sustainability’
Journal of Architectural Education Vol.60 No.4, 2007

2// “A future, renewable energy society – one based on the glorious
expenditure of unrefinable energy and not its obsessive and impossible
conservation – means a muscle-based, human-powered, but literally
postmodern (and not premodern) understanding of energy as infinite
force and profoundly limited available resource. Thus we consider an
ecological future not of Man or God but of the body and recalcitrant
energy – not quantifiable, not refinable or concentrated in ways that
allow for maximal inefficiency in the consumption of resources.
Instead we posit an energy that traverses the body in ritual, in
sacrifice, in its human-powered and unpredictable movement through the
city.
Allan Stoekl Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion and Postsustainability
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

3// In response to a thread on the Fostering Sustainable Behavior
discussion list concerning the comparative ecological impact of
different ways of mowing lawns, which had become quite thoroughly
quantitative, Neil Chura proposed:
“Buy a push-mower you can afford; pick a warm afternoon and cut as
much lawn as you can mow, or reasonably want to mow; then, plan to
remove all the lawn that did not get cut and replace it with
appropriate perennials or edibles.” [Feb 18, 2008]
Cameron Tonkinwise - April 2009