Beyond Sustainable

Architecture's Evolving Environments of Habitation

Ryan Ludwig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000284423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

Beyond Sustainable discusses the relationship between human-beings and the constructed environments of habitation we create living in the Anthropocene, an increasingly volatile and unpredictable landscape of certain change.

This volume accepts that human-beings have reached a moment beyond climatological and ecological crisis. It asks not how we resolve the crisis but, rather, how we can cope with, or adapt to, the irreversible changes in the earth-system by rethinking how we choose to inhabit the world-ecology. Through an examination of numerous historical and contemporary projects of architecture and art, as well as observations in philosophy, ecology, evolutionary biology, genetics, neurobiology and psychology, this book reimagines architecture capable of influencing and impacting who we are, how we live, what we feel and even how we evolve.

Beyond Sustainable provides students and academics with a single comprehensive overview of this architectural reconceptualization, which is grounded in an ecologically inclusive and co-productive understanding of architecture.

PART I
Technological Mediation

Technological systems, strategies and elements have been regularly utilized throughout human history for mediating and mitigating undesirable environmental conditions toward the production of more livable interior environments of habitation. Part I, “Technological Mediation,” charts out a history that supports the ideation of the architectural surround not simply as a technological device but aims to extend its definition further, understanding it more deeply as an adaptive technological mediator, profoundly effecting our ability “survive” and “live” in-the-world-ecology. As modern construction technologies rapidly developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, these changes directly impacted the potential for architecture to more radically mediate the external conditions, leading to the conception of an isolated interior environment of habitation, fully regulated through the advancement of air heating, cooling and conditioning mechanical systems. These developments, while dramatically increasing inhabitant expectations of comfortability, also separated human-beings from the external ecological world. Today, this level of isolation and sophistication in the technological mediation of the environment has moved beyond simply providing “covering” to help human-beings “survive-in-the-world,” as it’s done throughout our history, to instead become intentionally capable of amplifying or suppressing the “conditions for life.” This active approach articulates an explicit reconsideration of an interior atmosphere-environment construction intent on affecting inhabitants. Architecture conceived with this more holistic awareness requires a rethinking of parameters, moving beyond the visual modalities of geometry, composition, icon or style, to instead utilize various qualitative materials like temperature, light intensity, relative humidity, air composition, air pressure, auditory and olfactory stimuli. It maintains what the British architectural historian Reyner Banham, writing about Joseph Paxton’s mid-nineteenth-century greenhouse designs, has referred to as an “environmentalist” approach to architectural design.

1
IN PURSUIT OF COMFORT

From Campfire to Smart Home

The machinery of Society, profoundly out of gear, oscillates between amelioration, of historical importance, and a catastrophe.

The primordial instinct of every human being is to assure himself of a shelter. The various classes of workers in society to-day no longer have dwellings adapted to their needs; neither the artizan nor the intellectual.

It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of to-day: architecture or revolution.

(Le Corbusier 1986, 8 and 269)

If we do not alter our approach to living-in-the-world-ecology, the potential for violent transformation today, brought about by “a profound mutation in our relation to the world” (Latour 2017, 8), will no doubt express itself through social unrest as similarly warned against by Le Corbusier in his 1923 manifesto Vers Une Architecture (Towards a New Architecture), published in the aftermath of destruction brought by the first great war when access to a modern standard of living had yet to be achieved for the masses. He recites this passage both in the book’s introduction and again at the start of the final chapter titled: “Architecture or Revolution,” as if to remind the reader of the seriousness of the situation – there are real lives at stake, real consequences to inaction. Today there also exists a very real threat of violence and unrest arising from radical global climate instability. These potentials are a translation of the violence perpetrated by human-beings upon the earth-system,¹ upon the ecological world, fostering the need to recognize what the French social theorist Bruno Latour has called the New Climatic Regime, and in his book Down to Earth, he names as a new political actor the “Terrestrial.” This burgeoning reality, like Timothy Morton’s total collective “being-with,” requires a redistribution of agency to non-human and non-living beings, recognizing their ability to act, and most importantly react to human (in)actions. Latour posits that to mitigate the current and future potential for violence and social unrest caused by anthropogenic climate destabilization within the New Climatic Regime, human-beings must move away from both modernity’s project of globalization and the counter response of retracting into the local, to instead move toward the “Terrestrial.” “The attractor designated as Terrestrial – which is clearly distinct from ‘nature’ and which is not the entire planet but only the thin biofilm of the Critical Zone – brings together the opposing figures of the soil and the world” (Latour 2018, 92). It provides a vantage point “from up close, as internal to the collectivities and sensitive to human actions...” (Latour 2018, 67). Conceiving a “Terrestrial” approach to living-in-the-world-ecology demands that human-beings consider all “beings,” all “actors,” with which they inter-act as part of their “dwelling place” – an alternative to the limited idea of territory or even ecology.² Latour conceives of a terrestrial being’s “dwelling place” as “that which a terrestrial depends for its survival, while asking what other terrestrials also depend on it?” It reflects a list of what the terrestrial being “needs for its subsistence, and, consequently, what it is ready to defend, with its own life if need be” (Latour 2018, 95). Through this lens, the design and conception of the constructed environments we inhabit in the Anthropocene may be redefined as our architectural “dwelling places.” This describes the specific architectural elements, strategies, organizations, technologies and materials implemented by human-beings toward the mediation of the surrounding environment necessary for survival and to produce a more habitable interior condition(ing). However, in the current context beyond ecological-climatological “crisis”, a conceptualization of the architectural “dwelling-place” must also not be singularly specific to humans alone, but rather it must reflect a mutually conscious and mutually beneficial “being-with” the “Terrestrial” collective. This suggests an architecture borne out of mutual respect and collaboration with these beings, not as an endeavor external to them.

Beyond Sustainable aims to explore the concept and articulation of the architectural “dwelling place” more fully; in order to better understand how we’ve arrived at our current location so far removed from the ground, this first chapter focuses on a brief history of architecture as an adaptive technological mediator as described through numerous architectural origin stories put forth by a variety of architects throughout history. Sometimes mythical, anecdotal or polemical, architectural discourse has been punctuated with numerous stories describing its “origins” as an essential form of environmental mediation. Many of these origin narratives employ the ideation of a “primitive hut” as the source for all future architectural endeavors. The connotation of the word “primitive” in many of these stories was not necessarily intended as a pejorative; rather, the primitive’s vantage point, with his/her unconscious and innate responses to dealing with the world, was positively valued. In his 1964 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Architecture without Architects, Bernard Rudofsky critiqued the destruction of vernacular architecture by the advancement of twentieth-century development, aiming to elevate the “primitive” to a legitimate status in the eyes of architects, and in particular architectural historians, referring to the many examples included in the exhibition as “non-pedigreed architecture.” Ada Louise Huxtable in her New York Times review of the show noted that Rudofsky was not the first to invent the subject, referencing Sibyl Moholy Nagy’s 1957 publication Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture. However, her words were clear in her assessment of the exhibition’s “beauty and significance,” but also cutting in her view of its immaterial “romanticism.”

These are examples of indigenous, regional architecture before “progress” has brought the materials salesman and his plastic substitutes. This is the self-contained community as it was until the automobile cracked it open and desolated the tightly knit architectural entity of another era.

More than an exhibition, then, this is a protest – a pointed, bitter, desperate broadside from a cultivated, rebellious heart and mind against the sacrifice of the well-built landscape to the urgencies of the industrial, nuclear age.

And later on:

How valid is the exhibition’s thesis? There can be no argument, certainly, with the beauty and significance of the examples shown, nor with the satisfactory solutions of the unknown builders of the anonymous architectural world for their particular needs…

No one can fail to share the author’s despair over vandalism with which this century is treating its handsome vernacular heritage. The lesson, of course, is that radical and necessary changes in the contemporary environment are not being anticipated or planned for. Their force is permitted to be destructive beyond the bounds of sense or sensibility…

But add this extremely specialized visual appreciation to the love of primitive utopia peculiar to a highly sophisticated man (utopia may turn out to be complete with open sewers and the stench of pigs) and we have a romanticism that complex modern cultures can ill afford. There are few simple, picturesque solutions to contemporary problems.

(Huxtable 1964)

In the introductory essay to the exhibition, Rudofsky makes plain his genuine admiration for these “anonymous builders” who developed many “primitive” architectural solutions that “anticipate our cumbersome technology; that many a feature invented in recent years is old hat in vernacular architecture – prefabrication, standardization of building components, flexible and movable structures, and, more especially, floor-heating, air-conditioning, light control, even elevators” (Rudofsky 1964, para. 15). In Rudofsky’s view, the “non-pedigre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword by Joyce Hwang
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Architecture Living in the New World-Ecology
• Part I Technological Mediation
• Part II Environmental Identification
• Part III Bio-Physical Inter-Action
• Afterword
• Index