The Green Braid

Towards an Architecture of Ecology, Economy and Equity

Kim Tanzer, Rafael Longoria

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134120574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

This volume presents the discipline's best thinking on sustainability in written, drawn, and built form, drawing on over fifteen years of peer-reviewed essays and national design awards published by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA).

Providing a primer on sustainability, useful to teachers and students alike, the selected essays address a broad range of issues. Combined with design projects that highlight issues holistically, they promote an understanding of the principles of sustainability and further the integration of sustainable methods into architectural projects.

Using essays that alternately revise and clarify twentieth century architectural thinking, The Green Braid places sustainability at the centre of excellent architectural design. No other volume addresses sustainability within the context of architectural history, theory, pedagogy and design, making this book an ideal source for architects in framing their practices, and therefore their architectural production, in a sustainable manner.

THE GREEN BRAID

INTRODUCTION Networked ways of knowing

KIM TANZER AND RAFAEL LONGORIA

I prefer ‘both-and’ to ‘either-or,’ black and white, and sometimes gray to black or white.¹

In selecting essays for this book we have embraced the concept of sustainability popularized through the 1987 UNESCO Report, Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report, after its primary author, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway.² The report asserts “sustainability is defined as meeting today’s needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” In the nearly twenty years since the report was issued, critics have challenged several of its key elements, specifically alleging it capitulates to continued human development and emphasizes human needs at the potential expense of nonhuman environmental needs.³ Nonetheless, the definition provides a minimal benchmark against which current human action can be measured. It also establishes, again, in a modest way, the principle that people have the responsibility to consider others’ needs—particularly future needs—in conjunction with their own needs. It suggests that a chain of responsible relationships replace the autonomous individual actor.

A second set of criteria, also following Brundtland, provided a further filter for the essays selected for this volume. Our Common Future asserted that three integrated behavioral trajectories are necessary to achieve a sustainable future—ecology, economy, and social equity.⁴ Often described as “the three Es” the concept is also identified as the “three Ps” Planet, People, Prosperity, or, using the term popularized by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, the “triple bottom line.”⁵ Whichever specific shorthand is used, the joining of environmental outcomes with economic decisions allows us to recognize the crucial role architects play in brokering material and financial choices. Similarly the regrettable results of social inequity, whereby the world’s wealthiest inhabitants consume a hugely disproportionate percentage of the world’s resources, leave the globe’s poorest citizens scrambling to meet daily needs in ecologically degraded and degrading circumstances.

Reinforcing this triumvirate—the green braid that infuses sustainable architectural design—has several other advantages, as well. Architects too often resist engagement with economic aspects of our projects, believing the field is too mercurial or too banal to engage. However, without the abstract leveler of economics our work can be perceived as naively extravagant or, worse, injurious to planetary health in the short and long term. Emphasizing

the role of social equity in creating a sustainable planet calls into play the many architects whose work has sought to level the playing field, particularly in heavily populated urban areas. Some of these architects, typically working without specific reference to environmental consequences, have been contributing inadvertently to long-term sustainability by enhancing living conditions, advocating for economic advantages, reinforcing relatively dense yet humane living patterns and honoring cultural sustainability which often holds keys to ecological sustainability. Finally, coemphasizing ecology, economy, and equity allows the architects who have, for more than a generation, worked hard to maximize energy efficiency and to modulate solar gain to share their efforts with colleagues whose goals are shared but who lack these well-developed, highly technical environmental means. In short, the use of the green braid metaphor, requiring three intertwined threads be woven into each sustainable project, allows us to reframe our own discipline’s exclusionary categorizing logic as a network of relations.

CLASSIFICATORY LOGIC AND THE PROBLEM OF PERSPECTIVE

Prominent discourses within the academy, especially the sciences, have come to rely on the persuasiveness of classificatory logic. This logic has allowed us to understand a specific idea or thing as a piece of a larger whole, and it has allowed scientists to pursue a rigorous and exhaustive mapping of all the world’s knowledge. This ambitious project was prefigured by the work of Raymond Lull and other proto-scientists in the early Renaissance who laid out a tiered, prioritized model of the world’s knowledge in the form of “memory theaters.”⁶ Once the system was established by the great scientific philosophers of the seventeenth century, new knowledge could be fit neatly within existing categories, while the categories themselves, many worked out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the development of progressively more specific disciplines, remained fixed. But an important component of the memory theater was lost in the process, and with it the ability for knowledge to relate across categories. Memory theaters were originally imagined as combinatory systems, allowing new relations to be considered through the fresh juxtapositions of ideas or things. A parallel or, some would say resultant, development to the hegemony of classificatory knowledge is the intellectual objectification of those things studied.⁷ In order to fully understand an idea or a thing, the argument goes, one must avoid feeling a sense of relation to it. Fairness and thorough scrutiny require that the scientist exhibit objectivity, not empathy, toward the thing being studied. In the current language of cultural studies, Western knowledge requires the acting subject (the scientist or “self”) separate him or herself from the object of investigation (the thing or “other”). Over centuries, the perceived scientific necessity to separate self from other, subject from object, has been generalized to a societal disconnect severing the individual from a larger network of relations.

Ironically, as members of human society reinforce such separation in many ways through daily action, scientists have changed course. In the early twentieth century, physicist Werner Heisenberg unveiled his uncertainty principle which stated that an elementary particle can be observed as either a particle or a wave, depending on the role of the observer. The concept that the observer is inextricably linked with the phenomenon observed is now well established among physicists, but other branches of science, other academic disciplines, and most of the human community have not yet adjusted their/our conception of the world to privilege relation over objectification.

The implications of this change of perspective are profound. While many writers, including some cited in this book, advocate for a knowledge of relations or networks, among the earliest modern authors to capture the spirit of the transformation now in progress was philosopher Martin Buber. In his famous 1923 book-poem he described the change from “I–it” thinking to “I–thou” thinking, which suggested a reverence for those things so often considered object, thing, or other. He wrote,

When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, there is no thing. Thou has no bounds. When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing; he has indeed nothing. But he takes his stand in relation.⁸

Underlying all the essays in this book is the conceptual foundation Buber described so beautifully. The authors, through their scholarly research and design proposals, demonstrate and indirectly advocate for I–thou relationships between our planet and all its citizens.

THINKING SYSTEMS

Over the past century, several disciplines have recognized the limitations of the metaphorical tree of knowledge on which smaller and smaller branches hold increasingly rarefied and disconnected facts. This metaphor for classification fails to recognize the impact that apparently disconnected phenomena have on one another. Brief examples from several disciplines, each of which has historically contributed to architecture’s disciplinary foundation, will serve as examples.

Albert Einstein famously complained “God doesn’t play dice” when confronted with theoretical anomalies that suggested the universe is constructed of interconnected probabilities rather than causal chains. While physicists over the past eighty years have worked to develop theories that incorporate the element of uncertainty, identified by Heisenberg, into what Prigogine describes as a new extended rationality, architects have generally felt more comfortable with the world as described by Einstein, if not Newton and Descartes.^{9, 10} Newtonian concepts of objectivity and temporality and

Cartesian spatial logics, and the mindsets they incorporate, still prevail within the discipline of architecture.

Meanwhile physicists have come to identify self-organizing non-linear systems and nonequilibrium processes that operate probabilistically. They imagine a world of multiple, fluctuating fields evolving asynchronously at the microscopic scale of dynamic systems and the macroscopic levels of biological and human activities.¹¹ Heisenberg said, “The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.”¹² While Peter Eisenman’s explorations of scale symmetry and chaos theory resulted in a series of compelling formal studies, quantum physicists are interested in participating in the convergence of different sciences that describe life.¹³ Pri...

Table of contents

• THE A.C.S.A. ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION SERIES
• CONTENTS
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• THE GREEN BRAID
• META-DISCOURSES IN PEDAGOGY AND PRACTICE
• PHENOMENA AND TECHNOLOGY
• BUILDING PRACTICES
• SETTLEMENT PATTERNS
• THE SHARED REALM
• INDEX