home.

For Joe.
Economic incentives and ecological imperatives.
Today, for joy, through Christ, today.

i am the wrath of god

if anyone wants to join me in being spoilt by london, here was another beautiful thing, old news perhaps to the more widely exposed cinema types this was my first time seeing aguirre, and that on a whim while I was at the over-priced, over-long but otherwise charming 'radical nature' at the barbican.


aguirre. heroic in its production, absorbing in its soundtrack and explicit in its portrayal of the madness of greed and the danger of Religion. there is something that much more visceral about the type of cinema shot like this that embodies the spirit of protest in which it was written, that seduces you by the risk taken in production. there is a beautiful moment once with a baby sloth and then later with a butterfly, these, along with the backdrop of nature in its vastness, provide stark contrast to the smallminded anti-heroes, that are we who hope to mine, exploit and proselytise. elsewhere celebrated as hypnotic and poetic, truly it was.

Rethinking Architectural Education

[I will try to re-post this with working links for footnotes.. a novelty for me. Any advice on how to do this?]

Right, here we are. As you will see, I footnote anecdotally, I have a lot to say and I say it convolutedly.. There is an essay to be written on the very notion that such an essay title “Rethinking Architectural Education” can meaningfully be set, setting it borders on the belief that any rethinking is good rethinking. My basic thesis is architectural education must be rethought in the light of our environmental situation, which will call into question all our present philosophical assumptions, and should end up with a community integrated model school, based on an idealised Rural Studio.

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Rethinking Architectural Education

“Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and, as long as the present anti-metaphysical temper persists, the disorder will grow worse. Education, far from ranking as [our] greatest resource, will then be an agent of destruction."[1]
E. F. Schumacher

To be moved to ‘Rethink Education’ is a question of value, and ultimately of morality. Any assessment of the value of education must chiefly be by its ends or effects, that is the resulting practitioners, and their buildings and lifestyles so formed by that education. To value these, and hence the education, this essay ventures the environmental, ecological and social impact of such practice as the most total and objective measure of success.

As such, this essay will suggest that imminent[2] environmental human catastrophes will judge[3] our profligate and uncritical schools of architecture whose self-interested courses have moulded superficial students pursuing ‘starchitect’ futures[4]; such schools, by whose dis-integrated establishment,[5] have served further to fracture the relational ecology of locality and industry[6] which hold intact a sustainable society. [7]

This is made emphatic given that the construction industry is substantially responsible for our misuse of energy and toxification of the environment.[8] Furthermore, the built environment is the stage on which consumer choices are played out; it is the nursery in which a nation’s aspirations are disseminated, and the chief point of reference for a society’s value judgements. The environmental problem is an architectural problem, change to which must start with architectural education.[9],[10] This essay will first consider the problems facing architecture as a practice, the roles that graduates of architectural education are taking, and the means by which they might address themselves to the problem, finally considering ways present education succeeds or fails to equip them for the task compared to possible alternatives.

The Egan Report on the problems and inefficiencies besetting the British construction industry, questions particularly the role designers play in adding value.[11] Its criticisms, while valid and pertinent, are predicated on no further imperative than of medium-short term economic gain,[12] being either indifferent to ecology, or presuming the capitalist hegemony to be one self-correcting and capable of addressing such a problem larger than its own internal wranglings and profits. Architecture finds itself caught as servant to these assumptions, complicit with its client and public in such indifference.

The beginning of a rethought architectural education will acknowledge such philosophy of the time and its own responsibility to moderate by demonstration of an alternative. The contemporary conception of architecture is affected by Schumacher’s ‘metaphysical disease’,[13] manifested, I will assert, in four key crises: of disembodiment or individualism; fragmentation of disciplines; the killing of history; and a preoccupation with spectacle. These in sum constitute a failure to submit to a wider biotic community[14]

The centrality of the individual within the architecture of Modernity has come at substantial cost to community and ecologies. Its illusion of the un-dependent self is maintained only by denial[15], aided by technology. Further, with the advent of hi-technology, the platonic dualism of body and mind, privileging the cerebral over the physical, has come home to roost. Individualism has ‘liberated’ citizens from their locale, has ‘disembodied’[16] them, collapsing a placed or narrative understanding of reality and undermining the loyalty an architect might otherwise have to society as a whole.

The fragmentation which Egan[17] and others[18] lament is broadly speaking a child of this Romantic Individualism.[19] It manifests the belief in a metanarrative of chaos; it is technological advance at the expense of community,[20] the self-interest which abstracts architecture from its purpose.

The third key principle informing the atmosphere of practice is a suspicion and contempt for history and its associated attempts at social engineering. With unprecedented clarity Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition[21] established the attitude of denial that was to define the relationship of planners and public to even recent folly, and it set them forever after to be wary, even fearful, of considering moral imperatives in architecture. Pointedly, Anthony Vidler finds a parallel between crises of confidence in the public realm and in education, having common roots in the disenchantment with post-war optimism[22]. These denials have the secondary, but not unintended, effect of dissociating design from consequence.

Fourthly, of significance, we live in an age of simulacra[23] and spectacle[24] which has emerged from the coinciding of a hyper-individualist value system and certain material conditions, notably abundant fossil fuel. This forum, where architects become but peddlers of shallow novelty, has been forged under the coercion of power-mongerers of the day[25], and through the confusion of truth,[26] and all along willed by a public who consider art a ‘game of distraction’.[27] And the victims of this addiction to novelty have been coherence of language, the value of tradition, and the well-being of the voiceless: ecology and the poor.

Into this context we introduce the role of ‘architect’ which the profession has carved for itself, a problematic intermediary role: simultaneously the impotent ‘sophist lapdog of commercial imperatives’[28] and antihero-artisan Howard Roark, “a man who does not exist for others” [29]

The continued egotistic and adversarial[30] self-definition of the architect practising an architecture ‘red in tooth and claw’[31] is alienating the profession at a time when every other report calls for collaboration and partnership across industries[32]. The profession is accused of protectionism[33], of using ‘introverted language’[34], and even of using ‘stylistic eclecticism as a joke at the client’s expense’[35]. These are traits which undermine the trust put in professionals, and hinder the potential for architects to effect positive change in building practice.

To achieve sustainable architecture there is a need for architects reconciled to the moral task to which they are commissioned. Only by this can we develop the trust of an ‘educated public’[36] and by this the requisite integration for sustainable building.

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“There is no lighthouse keeper. There is no lighthouse. There is no dry land. There are only people living on rafts made from their own imagination.”[37]
Dominic Crossan

We will consider now issues more acute to the university, tenets which undermine our task and which ill-equip graduates with the values, skills and knowledge for the task of practising sustainably in the face of the challenges outlined above.

The relative nature of truth,[38] the foremost issue, may have begun as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’[39] but is now to be considered as ‘the basis for a free society’[40] Not only is this often unspoken and bizarrely absolutist claim self-refuting but it requires a certain amnesia. Relativism’s damage is pervasive, making dialogue impossible,[41] cementing the premise that there can be ‘no clear good’[42] and ‘no core wisdom on which designers agree’[43] - exactly the quality of wisdom which Orr makes an ecological imperative[44], and ultimately it proliferates the lie of ‘amoral’ architecture which is a denial of the environmental consequences under which graduates will practise.

The second premise which is at odds with our task is the industrial and abstract nature of the university. Woods observes the defining influence of industry’s demands on the evolution of the architecture school[45], which Rowe extends commenting that ‘the university shaped itself to an industrial ideal—the knowledge factory.’ [46] This is a move to an abstraction[47], which it is argued powerfully by Berry, disintegrates community and accountability in our use of language and so undermines the integrity of an education[48]

If Berry’s leap from abstraction to language is wider than is justified here, some more immediate effects of so modelling the university may offer intermediate steps towards the principle. For example, Hauerwas argues that the university, by allying itself to the notion that knowledge begets earning power and marketing itself as a provider of such, enforces on itself a necessary ‘placelessness’[49] lest it suggest the earning potential is limited equally geographically. Or, from another direction, the university, via subsidies, is a tool of the state, a state which derives legitimation by ‘promising to save us from illness and death’ .[50] In this way risk-averse[51] short-termism[52] is conferred to the university as it is responsible to make good on these promises promptly, and so privileges science, particularly medicine, over the humanities.

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“I don't need sex - the school of architecture fucks me all the time”[53]
A 44,951 facebook member group

Further to these unsustainable tenets, various traditions curious to architecture schools are criticised in literature on the subject, chiefly these three: isolation of the school from community; the primacy of the individual versus collaboration; and irrelevant academicism of the curriculum.

The isolation spoken of is practical, geographic and conceptual. Schools typically operate at a distance from the public, industry and even the natural environment and so miss an opportunity to engage construction realities and issues of genuine human need.

The schools which are increasingly academic lose the realities of construction[54], aesthetics are disconnected from design realities[55], which results in a loss of attention to craft and making[56], further fracturing the industry. Spiller is a voice in favour of such ‘freedom’ of the academy[57], we must ask if such is possible only by architecture’s place as ‘capitalist service for hire’[58] and ‘handmaiden to the rich’,[59] and whether in the environmental future we will be able to justify such wanton luxury. It is their very isolation which insulates schools from such criticism, and the ignorance of genuine human needs which makes their education irrelevant. This loss of social concern was highlighted across the literature, profoundly by Dewar[60] and Lynch[61].

To create architecture with broad and deep sustainability the concern is more than charity. Education by its form and situation must challenge notions of entitlement held by students by confronting them with their human dependence[62] and common humanity with society’s poorest. Hauerwas points the contemporary university to Gregory of Nazianus’ work, ‘On Love for the Poor’ as a corrective to the politically motivated individualism of detached education. [63]

The second key complaint made of architectural education is its damaging lack of training in collaborative work born of the emphasis on the ‘primacy of the individual’[64]. The ‘tortured artist’[65] advocated in architecture school is modelled on the Romantics’ ‘Artist with a capital A’[66] and Kant’s autonomous individual - who becomes for Vidler an autonomous architect pursuing art for art’s sake, and running the risk of solipsism, detached from a foundation of any social or cultural vibrancy.[67]

Thirdly the academic hijacking of architecture school by faculty ‘more interested in words than buildings’[68] comes under fire from employers who complain graduates emerge with ‘too much theory and not enough reality’[69], considering ‘technical knowledge as secondary’[70] trained as ‘deconstructivist clones’[71]. The question of what an architect needs to know is not an easy one, nor will an answer be universal, but we can say that the problem has been exacerbated by dichotomising theoretical and practical knowledge. Alexander notes the embarrassment of students faced with parallel slides to concede goodness in vernacular architectures at variance from the postmodernism advocated in studio.[72] Cook notes the success of under-published architectural scenes, notably in Switzerland as a case in point against the glut of theory elsewhere.[73]


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“I tell my students, it’s got to be warm, dry and noble”[74]
Samuel Mockbee

There are successful alternatives for the content of architecture courses and for structures through which they are taught. This essay will conclude with some alternatives addressing the three key issues of individualism, the isolated department and the academicism, giving particular attention to Rural Studio and the successful ways it addresses the dilemma of the architect in postmodernity through an engagement with the real from the academy.

Arguing the counterintuitive virtue of collaboration as a means for nurturing appropriate individuality[75], Woods declares RIEA School, while it existed, was a demonstration of the potential of collaborative work.[76] Steel suggests more radical than mere group-work, we need to move away from an emphasis on ‘personal creativity’ … to ‘rigorous forms of collective understanding’,[77] ‘revers[ing] our present system of compartmentalisation of knowledge’[78] ‘to anticipate a wholly new kind of learning environment.’[79] The beginnings of such are described by Potts, in the ‘Portsmouth Model’, an experiment of vertical studio teaching, which saw autonomous studios combining a cross-section of students
from all five years, producing cross-fertilising fruitful relationships.[80] Most successful of all, Woods offers Rural Studio as a chief example of collaboration[81] …

Rural Studio is also cited frequently as a mode of addressing the isolation of the studio by blurring practice and education, to better socially inform and humanise student work. With no grander social goals than the dignity of the residents and on a meagre budget of $6000[82], projects such as Hay Bale House profitably engaged students in real-world social issues, and offers architectural practice a laboratory for ideas[83], and this encounter with the real is the heart of education. [84]

SCI-ARC’s ‘ever-renewable pedagogy’[85] and the AA’s ‘No tenure, no repetition, no hierarchy’[86], which succeed up to a point in making relevant their education, fall short of Rural Studio’s achievement in creating an environment for learning within a job, rather than simulating practice which strips the exchange of much of the subtlety, tacit knowledge and client feedback inherent in this practice more akin to apprenticeship.

To conclude, at a time when architecture is popularly conceived as an individualist’s, ahistorical spectacle, education has examples of alternatives to its academic isolation, if we are willing to learn humility from the unglamorous work displayed by Rural Studio.

[1] Schumacher, E. F. (1993 [1973], London:Vintage) Small is beautiful : a study of economics as if people mattered - p80
[2] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) - Synthesis Report
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf (retrieved 29th March 2009) - p46
[3] Hauerwas, Stanley (2007, Oxford, MA: Blackwell) The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God - p102
[4] Nicol, David and Pilling, Simon (eds) (2000, London: E&FN Spon) Changing Architectural Education: Towards a New Professionalism - p7
[5] Vesely, Dalibor (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p63
[6] Berry, Wendell (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000) Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition - p41-42
[7] ‘At the heart of the concern with environmentalism are the concepts of sustainability and place: architectural education needs to address these directly.’ Dewar, David (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p94
[8] Williamson, Terry. J. Radford, Anthony Bennetts, Helen (2003, London: Spon Press) Understanding Sustainable Architecture - p86-7
[9] ‘It is time to change the reality of architectural practice, and we should begin by changing architectural education.’ Woods, Lebbeus ‘Architecture School 301’ (2009)
http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/architecture-school-301/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[10] ‘Education is the profession’s lever over its own future’ - Milliner, Leonie (2000, London: E&FN Spon) Changing Architectural Education: Towards a New Professionalism - p227
[11] Egan, Sir John, (1998) Rethinking Construction: The Report of the Construction Task Force - p26
[12] Egan, Sir John, (1998) Rethinking Construction: The Report of the Construction Task Force (Citing of ‘profit’ as guiding incentive or measure of success) p4, p7, p10, p16
[13] ‘We are suffering from a metaphysical disease, and the cure must therefore be metaphysical’ Schumacher, EF (1993 [1973] London : Vintage) Small is beautiful : a study of economics as if people mattered - p80
[14] Orr, David (1992, E.F.Schumacher Society) Environmental Literacy: Education as if the Earth Mattered - http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/orr_92.html (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[15] Giussani, Luigi (2001, New York: Crossroad) The Risk of Education: Discovering out Ultimate Destiny - p69
[16] Taylor, Charles (2004, Durham: Duke University Press) Modern Social Imaginaries - p1
[17] Egan, Sir John, (1998) Rethinking Construction: The Report of the Construction Task Force - p8
[18] Hawley, Christine - p11 and Dalibor Vesely - p63-4 (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael)
[19] Vesely, Dalibor (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p63
[20] Berry, Wendell (1996, Washington, DC: Counterpoint) Another Turn of the Crank - p90
[21] ‘Modern Architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32pm (or thereabouts)’ Jencks, Charles (2002, Yale University Press) The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Postmodernism - p9
[22] Vidler, Anthony (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p15
[23] ‘Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation’ Baudrillard Jean (Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser) (1994 [1981] MI:The University of Michigan Press) Simulacra and Simulation - p12
[24] ‘In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.’ Debord, Guy (Trans. Ken Knabb) (2002 [1967] Paris) La Société du Spectacle
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle/ (retrieved 29 March 2009) - Thesis 1
[25] ‘abstraction and dehistorization conjoined to clear the way for a form of knowledge that could freely construct objects and their relationships’ Wolin, Sheldon (2001, Princeton, Princeton University Press) Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life - p21
[26] ‘In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.’ Debord, Guy (Trans. Ken Knabb) (2002 [1967] Paris) La Société du Spectacle
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle/ - Thesis 9
[27] Bacon, Francis (in an interview with Sylvester, David) Sunday Times Magazine (London, 14 July 1963) - p13
[28] Spiller, Neil (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p60
[29] Rand, Ayn (1943, New York: New American Library) The Fountainhead - p686
[30] Nicol, David and Pilling, Simon (eds) (2000, London: E&FN Spon) Changing Architectural Education: Towards a New Professionalism - p2
[31] Tennyson, Alfred Lord (1850) In Memoriam A. H. H. - Canto 56
[32] Egan, Sir John, (1998) Rethinking Construction: The Report of the Construction Task Force - p9
[33] Nicol, David and Pilling, Simon (eds) (2000, London: E&FN Spon) Changing Architectural Education: Towards a New Professionalism - p4
[34] Stansfield Smith Report (quoted in Nicol, David and Pilling, Simon (eds)) (2000, London: E&FN Spon) Changing Architectural Education: Towards a New Professionalism - p5
[35] Ostwald, Michael (1992) Architecture Bulletin, republished in Sydney Morning Herald, 28 April 1992 - p32 quoted in Windschuttle, Keith) (1996, San Francisco: Encounter Books) The Killing of History - p25
[36] Hauerwas, Stanley (2007, Oxford, MA: Blackwell) The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God - p89
[37] Crossan, Dominic The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (1975, Niles Argus) - p44
[38] ‘There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students' reaction: they will be uncomprehending.’ Bloom, Allan David (1988, London: Simon and Schuster) Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students - p25
[39] ‘Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.’ Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1979) Introduction:The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p xxiv-xxv
[40] ‘The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so [the students] see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society.’ Bloom, Allan (19xx) Closing of the American Mind - p25
[41] Giussani, Luigi, (New York: Crossroad, 2001) The Risk of Education: Discovering out Ultimate Destiny - p96
[42] Vidler, Anthony (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p14
[43] Wigley, Mark (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p17
[44] Orr, David (1992, E.F.Schumacher Society) Environmental Literacy: Education as if the Earth Mattered - http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/orr_92.html (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[45]Woods, Lebbeus (2009) Architecture School 202 http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/architecture-school-202/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[46] Rowe, Stan (NeWest Press, 2003 [1990]) Home Place: Essays on Ecology - quoted in Orr, David, (E. F. Schumacher Society: 1992) Environmental Literacy: Education as if the Earth Mattered - http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/orr_92.html (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[47] ‘Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found’ Berry, Wendell (New York: Pantheon Books 1992) Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community - p23
[48] ‘Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or ‘assessing’ what we now call ‘information’ - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.’ Berry, Wendell (2003, Durham: Duke University Press) ‘Thoughts in the Presence of Fear’ in Dissent from the Homeland - p41
[49] Hauerwas, Stanley (2007, Oxford, MA: Blackwell) The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God - p203
[50] Hauerwas, Stanley (2007, Oxford, MA: Blackwell) The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God - p199
[51] Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer Hursley, Timothy (2002 New York: Princeton Architectural Press) Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency - p13
[52] Orr, David, (E. F. Schumacher Society: 1992) Environmental Literacy: Education as if the Earth Mattered - http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/orr_92.html (retrieved 23rd March 2009)
[53] This breath-takingly cynical cri-de-coeur which titles a facebook group numbering a staggering 44,951members presents one transparent testament as much to the pervasive cynicism of this generation of students as much as it reflects failures specific to architectural education in creating architects of integrity - http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2211195089 (retrieved 23rd March 2009)
[54] ‘We begin to forget that there is a profound difference between imaginary and inhabited worlds, and that difficulty, labour, destruction and contingency are always involved in the act of building’ Lynch, Peter (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p55
[55] ‘[Mockbee and Ruth] lamented that architectural education had become more about academics and less about construction… The connection between esthetics and the realities underlying design was being lost’ Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer Hursley, Timothy (2002 New York: Princeton Architectural Press) Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency - p6
[56] ‘…detached from the reality of making, become contrived and bureaucratically driven where the processes of making, thinking and intellectualising have in some way been rendered a synthetic exercise. That, for me, is one of the main criticisms of present architectural education.’ Hawley, Christine (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p8
[57] ‘…the load of economic stringency can also weigh down the ideas stage of a project and impair its creative development. Further, student architects need to opportunity to ‘turn up all the dials’ on their creativity and vision to search for what is possible and not just for what is economically viable at any point in time.’ Spiller, Neil (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p61
[58] Ghirardo, Diane (1996, London: Thames and Hudson) Architecture After Modernism - p39
[59] Dewar, David (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p94
[60] Dewar, David (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p94
[61] Lynch, Peter (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p57
[62] Giussani, Luigi, (New York: Crossroad, 2001) The Risk of Education: Discovering out Ultimate Destiny - p69
[63] Hauerwas, Stanley (2007, Oxford, MA: Blackwell) The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God - p198
[64] Cuff, Dana (1992, MIT Press) Architecture: The Story of Practice - p45
[65] Stanton, Jean (quoted in Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer Hursley, Timothy) (2002 New York: Princeton Architectural Press) Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency - p3
[66] Brand, Hilary Chaplin, Adrienne (2007, Illinois: IVP) Art and Soul - p18
[67] Vidler, Anthony (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p21
[68] Cook, Peter (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p6
[69] Vidler, Anthony (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p13
[70] Cuff, Dana (1992, MIT Press) Architecture: The Story of a Practice - p44
[71] Windschuttle, Keith (1996, San Francisco: Encounter Books) The Killing of History - p8
[72] Alexander Christopher (2002, Berkeley) The Nature of Order (Book 1) The Phenomenon of Life - p74
[73] Cook, Peter - (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p8
[74] Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer Hursley, Timothy (2002, New York: Princeton Architectural Press) Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency - p0
[75] ‘I am convinced that a more embracive and ultimately more effective way to nurture individuality is the establishment of design studios that operate, paradoxically, on the basis of collaboration.’ - Woods, Lebbeus (2009) Architecture School 301 http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/architecture-school-301/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[76] Woods, Lebbeus (2009) Architecture School 301 http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/architecture-school-301/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[77] Steel, brett - (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p68
[78] Fuller, Bucminster (quoted by Steel, Brett) (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p69
[79] Steel, Brett - (2004, Chichester: Wiley-Academy) Back to School: Architectural Education - The Information and the Argument (Guest-edited by Chadwick, Michael) - p71
[80] Potts, Wendy (2000, London: E&FN Spon) Changing Architectural Education: Towards a New Professionalism - p248
[81] - ‘The Rural Studio had (has?) the right spirit, but it was of an older type of collective work, in which individual work is subsumed in the common effort. I am speaking a ‘new’ kind of collective effort, where individual works remain legible.’ Woods, Lebbeus (2009) Architecture School 301 (Comments) - http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/architecture-school-301/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[82] Ghirardo, Diane (1996, London: Thames and Hudson) Architecture After Modernism - p39
[83] Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer Hursley, Timothy (2002, New York: Princeton Architectural Press) Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency - p12
[84] ‘To educate means to help the human soul enter into the totality of the real’ Giussani, Luigi (2001, New York: Crossroad) The Risk of Education: Discovering out Ultimate Destiny - p105
[85] Woods, Lebbeus (2009) Architecture School 301 - http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/architecture-school-301/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)
[86] Woods, Lebbeus (2009) Architecture School 301 - http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/architecture-school-301/ (retrieved 29 March 2009)

rachel: creation and hospitality?

(I'm not dead, and I've not left this blog to become a forgotten piece of cyberspace clutter. Hopefully I can spend some time at Christmas collecting my notes from the last 6 months into succinctly bullet pointed thoughts on architecture, theology and intentional community.. In the mean time, Molly and Marie-Frances, linked in my little del.icio.us box are blogging out this term. I'm here til Dec 15, and would love the company of any of my single-digit subscribers. Below are few thoughts on hospitality after a little discussion here at the Manor. Love. P. x)

http://creationrevelation.blogspot.com/2008/10/question.html

So Rachel, I asked the question. I should by now, after a term and a half of L'Abri have worked out lunch tables, how to play them and how to pose questions.. How regularly I fail at this. A question with the C word in it needs very careful chairing to steer it away from a creation/evolution debate.. but it was not an unproductive conversation, although a little fraught, and some people left more confused than they arrived, but it did clarify for me a few thoughts, so I shall try to condense the fruits of conversation and those that ensued that afternoon springing from the question, if indeed i understand your question correctly..

Lunch was at E's and she supposed early on that you had lifted this question from Making Room, I hadn't realised there was a creational or environmental slant offered in the book, which she returned there was and that your question pertained to the parallel drawn in the book to God as host in nature. Did it? Needless to say, having my question thus defined for me, it ran away with itself dissecting the metaphor of God as host, the 'goodness' of creation, abuses of 'ownership' because of not understanding the both/and tension of being a part of nature and apart from nature. To a point where A had to interject to stop people using dominion and domination synonymically, so the lunch table's confusion emerged out of largely semantic issues of word definitions, and an attempt to then define hospitality left people at a loss, was the good Samaritan showing hospitality on the road? Is hospitality just loving people? It was all quite amiable, for better or worse, as the hospitality question is one i feel strongly about and I would sooner the conversation had ended in tears and people had fought for something than that we bumble through in a cautious and removed manner. Following lunch the de-briefs in the nooks and crannies of the manor were more clarifying.

I would venture two interpretations of the question as you have put it, firstly, and the one I see less to be gained in, there is the take on the question that looks at nature, 'fallen' though some suppose it to be, and extrapolate models for hospitality. This was presented by one at the table, drawing on Jonah and the vine that grows up to shade him. Further though tenuously, one can read in nature the way nests, colonies and shelters are constructed, how space is shared in an ecosystem and how symbiotic relationships between animals are enacted.

But hospitality is a more complex issue, a moral, relational, economic, even symbolic concept. The first take offers healthy provocation, particularly to consider ourselves as dependent creatures within a finite system, and to acknowledge the debt of knowledge as well as resources we owe and all that we still have to gain from a healthy relationship with nature and its systems. More clear to me are the profound tertiary impacts of our emphasis - or lack of - on making a home a home, on the environment. Simplistically one can cite negative impacts, where the demise of a culture of hospitality creates a demand and opportunity for brutally more resource-heavy and crushingly less-human means of accommodating visiting bodies in foreign cities, simplistically too we could posit roots of this in a fear of strangers, demand for luxury, and oil-driven expediency. Where once, or where ideally, there may have been an attitude and lifestyle among people that made possible travelling between foreign cities, finding there large families networked broadly and deeply in life-giving relationships to their neighbours and their soil, who were sufficiently engaged in a casual gift economy to make possible, even in their relative poverty, sleeping and eating provision to anyone who had need and this for the simple joy of new people and new stories at the dinner table, we now have exchanged the glory of this for an image of five star luxury on the company account, a lonely 50th floor hotel room, with sheets cleaned daily by an anonymous, faceless underclass, a private bubble kept at its perfect temperature, perfect placeless luxury. Do I make a point too romantically?

The counter argument given for this, even if we are willing to forgive its romanticism, is that an 'hospitality imperative' is a burden too heavy to bear, a duty typically performed by an exhausted working mother, making beds in the guest room after her 9 to 5, hoovering the hallway with one hand, feeding her children with the other, and all this to present and image and to tick a check box of the good christian household. I will concede that all the lunchtime sermons I preach, expounding the saving nature of hospitality are liable to lead to legalism if so understood, and thereby make also these lunching labrinis twice the sons of hell that I am.

So, I have tried briefly and tentatively to sketch 'hospitality' as the by-product of appropriate dwelling in the world.

- I picture in my mind of the green and blue marble of earth spread across with a vast web of relational links and clusters, at the junction of each tie is a home, our crabshells in which we eat, sleep and have our being, protected from the elements. I see the best domestic architecture not as the industry journal cover images, but as the unseen and anonymous framed worn paths and junctions, platforms for conversations, enriched gradually out of the commitment by a family to the story of a place across a span time longer than the life of a man and his return on venture capital.

- To achieve such houses, such homes, there is a need to fix in our worldview two states of being, 'visiting', and not-visiting, that is to say 'belonging'. And these as two distinct modes of being in a place, to avoid a disastrous middle way of non-belonging, consuming aliens, being both anywhere and nowhere, refugees fleeing each the city of your youth from home to uni, uni to first job, flat to suburbs. The state of 'belonging' contracts you to the ground where you meaningfully can honour your parents in front of those who have known them and be held to that geography by its beauty which becomes a part of you and whose land, weather, fauna are the foundation for your language, art, music, diet, identity. So the geography and architecture of the home are much less uprootable than modernism would have us hope.

- Heidegger said something to the effect of “Only once you have learnt to dwell should you build.” I quoted him more exactly somewhere.. What if you knew the secret of dwelling, of enduring all things in a place, of bringing life in dead places, of doing the next right thing for a place, of practising resurrection of a place, how then would we build there, how would we decorate, how would we conduct our households? I don’t know how much I project onto Heidegger and how much is in the text, but to dwell, to rest and work without angst, to be at peace, is practical as much as cerebral. To know that living in the second best postcode is ok, fearing nothing of fighting in the streets, being confident to let the stranger into your home, and sweating blood for love are all facets of the dwelling in confidence which is the only sufficient basis to begin to build. So on this basis not all houses have the same level of home-ness, home-ness it is a product of the amount of human emotional energy invested, for example the Manor House. If we believe we are here for the long haul, we should build like we believe that. And so too in our existing housing stock, in our rented flats and trailers, it should be a christian task of primary importance to redeem, to embellish, to restructure and make beautiful these spaces in God’s world because they are the primary places where one’s relationships are conducted, marriages consummated, meals eaten, games played, parties held, children raised, homework done, so too out of the relationships in these places it is here that personal meanings are formed and grounded, hopes expressed and dreams dreamt. All of these actions are ultimately exercises dominion over creation. Home is an extension of the self, the modifying device though which the raw materials of nature pass, the lens through which ideas pass, the expression of a view of the world and a hope for the world.

- So, the home is less, as corbusier is credited as saying, “A machine for living in” but rather “An organism for conducting dominion through” or even “An interdependent cell in the organism of a community for the redeeming of the world” .. And perhaps this is a useful image, that of an organism, the body of the church as it were, but crucially, making it physical, that each soul inhabits the shell of a home and by that gifted practically in bricks and mortar to form healthier cities, where the interaction between cells is hospitality, an exchange of love, conviviality, story and vision.. People truly 'live' only in relationship to other people. Homes are only truly alive in relationship to other homes? Households to households. Is it idolatrous to set up a practical-ly independent home? What is the joy of hospitality? What is the purpose of a christian home? What is the opposite of hospitality? Everybody has a home, if I can define it loosely enough, everybody has a patch of ground they lay their head, a bench they eat at, a manner of having dominion over space. And hospitality is the orientation of your life in respect to that dominion over space, outward or inward, do you share your box or not. The home is a tool for loving people, home is a gift, a grace of God, given and undeserved, making hospitality is a primary transaction of the gift economy, indeed an obligation if we truly are to receive it as a gift. Home is the point on the earth you invest your creative energy, draw on that specific land for food and for inspiration and leave your mark - architecturally, emotionally, ecologically.

- Hospitality is effecting the lordship of Christ over home making. Hospitality is the organising principle for a home that is the perfect third way, being neither a commune nor a nuclear family home. Hospitality is born out of an an attitude of enjoying the company of others, all others. Hospitality operates out of that nodal point in the web on the blue green marble, and its effectiveness, richness and beauty are increased and increased as the roots of the node go deeper into the soil beneath and as the supporting limbs of relationships to neighbouring nodes, the farmers, carpenters, local artists, babysitters, half-a-cup-of-flour-lenders and so on..

- One may stay in one place for the sake of the kids, for the sake of the elderly - those who most benefit from the security of regularity - and in order to move around as much as we do, we have needed to play down our commitments to these relations. But further, that which benefits them, is good for all, home is intergenerational, story is intergenerational, above all wisdom and understanding are intergenerational. We should exist intimately in intergenerational community. Home is crucially dependent for the sustaining and quality on being pursued by many generations together. Without the old we forget where we have come from, and expend incalculable energy reinventing the wheel, parenthood, cooking, and fashion each generation; without the young we forget our vulnerability, we loose our suppleness and humour, and we are at liberty to forget that we are fleetingly temporary tenants holding the plot for the next round.

The demise of hospitality can trace its roots to:
- The speed at which we are able to - and therefore do - live at. The jump from could to should live at is not self evident, and it is linked to faith in technology as saviour, and abandoned responsibilities to others, to relationships.. not making, earning, doing to give it away; not caring for the least last and lost.
- Likewise the culture of long working hours and commuting, motivated by misaligned notions of happiness, progress and then also workoholism and related addictions.
- Image based notion of the home, professionalisation of home-making to remote, economically motivated developers, short-term tenancy, a conception of housing as a disposable lifestyle accessory.
- Individualism, etc and all those systemic vices that most every L'Abri lecture defines itself by standing in opposition. Sigh..

So the gospel empowers us through a freedom from every fear that held us back, and motivates us by an obligation to a gift-economy transaction to practice hospitality, to orientate our lives and households around loving, feeding and sheltering anyone who has need, and this culture of hospitality is the primary spiritual discipline or lifestyle corrective to moderate our use, interaction with and redeeming of creation. Ho hum, I tailed away towards the end, let me know how these convoluted thoughts strike you...

Image: Rachel Bush's :-)

sustainable design essay

This is an essay written last semester for Environmental Sustainability. Re-reading it, it concludes weakly with a tangential Noah's ark .. but its reflects the confusion, there is alot that design can do, but ultimatelythere needs to be a change in the way we live, in the comfort we expect, in the way we relate and in the way in which we have our being.. failing that, and one should not be pessimistic, but possibly noah's ark is advisable. This was a philosophical take on essentially a practical question, would it have been too much to bring the gospel in.. the role of design is to point to christ? meh..
(This is my first post with pictures in, if you subscribe reload if that possible, this is an editted repost of an earlier first trial with only one picture)

The essence of a sustainable home is one that is sustainable: environmentally, socially and economically and yet is also enjoyable to live in and improves quality of life. Discuss the role of design and thoughtfulness in the creation of sustainable homes.

If design is to effect true ‘sustainability’ it must conceive radical new expectations of human existence, the preconditions for which so fundamentally challenge present socio-cultural assumptions as to constitute a world-view change; at the heart of this change is a return to true community in place of contemporary individualism, in a move that would re-imagine the ‘home’ as an interdependent cell in the organism society; if design is to effect sustainable homes it must first, in its character of practice, become sustainable, it must explicitly challenge counter-sustainable cultural norms before then forging a positive framework of settlement to serve a new understanding of true ‘dwelling’.


There is a difficulty in any discussion of sustainability because its hackneyed terms have lost their meaning. When greenness became marketable the resulting emotive greenwash lead to a blurring of definitions in a field already fraught with uncertainty. The 1987 Brundtland Report has defined sustainable development as that which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This anthropocentric view of sustainability, that it is human life that is being qualitatively sustained, must be tempered by a humility that is informed by the complexity of and objective intrinsic value in nature that ‘deep positions’ on environmentalism revere. It is also assumed that the binary state of sustainability renders discussions of degrees of sustainability incoherent, but also that it is not a fixed state harmony nor end-product, but rather a process of change, just as life, that which ultimately is being sustained, is a process. ‘Sustainability’ is objective and ultimate, ‘quality of life’ is subjective, and beyond being kept alive, improvements to quality of life are concerned more with non-material things, it is crucial it be understood as this if are to avoid the misguided association of wealth with happiness.


To advocate a design solution on the credentials of its environmental sustainability to the exclusion of its economic or social sustainability is to set up a false dichotomy, a socially healthy society and a healthy natural environment are mutually dependent and it is this triple bottom line by which the viability of any design should be assessed. Nadarajah et al argue that it is culture that binds together economic, environmental and socio-cultural concerns and that culture should be viewed as a way of life and as a way of living together in dialogical coexistence, creatively adjusting to changes. This ‘culture’ engages our relationship with place, the nature of home and our very ontology and should be the pivotal point on which we interact with sustainability concerns.


Heidegger argues that “dwelling is the basic character of Being, in keeping with which mortals exist’” Dwelling as a mode of being in the world, is not only produced by, but also precedes building: “Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.” Others have commented that the ideal home is not just a house which offers shelter, it is an emotional space, even a state of mind, and ultimately home is a place where personal and social meaning are grounded. For a complete understanding of sustainability home must reflect this more emotional and socio-cultural understanding of home on the grounds that this ‘dwelling’ is saving where “[saving] really means to set something free into its own presencing ... saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoliation”.


Finally, sustainable ‘design’ must consider both the discipline and product of the discipline, the interaction between profession and public, and the performance of the designed product. ‘Design’ has become an exclusive term, for purpose of this essay it will be liberated to denote both process and product of construction: social and physical, professional and amateur.

Image 01 – The ‘Hole in the Ozone’ - http://www.eduspace.esa.int

Image 02 – CO2 concentration over time – An Inconvenient Truth - http://www.climatecrisis.net

Image 03 – Variation in global temperature with global CO2 – An Inconvenient Truth - http://www.climatecrisis.net

That we are currently living unsustainably, is primarily supposed from indicators in the natural environment with respect to its ability to sustain life: the depletion of ozone, natural resources and ancient forests and the degradation of soil, water and air quality through the polluting effects of chemical treatments and waste. Sustainability will not be achieved by considering these as problems to be medicated but by diagnosing the human actions which have generated these symptoms, the negligence that permitted them and most importantly the assumptions which motivated those actions. I will argue that these motivating factors constitute materialism, a distortion in the complex relationship between the self and the natural world.


At a social level also there are indicators that we are not living or building sustainably, Clammer observes key problems inherent in much contemporary urbanism including: “the extent, speed, and intensity of world urbanisation; … rural depopulation; … pollution; land use and values; crime; …and social patterns and family instability.” These all impinge on the quality of life sustained, but furthermore this problematic urbanism demands radically more energy than gradually changing and more socially stable societies, in the case of Pruitt Igoe and similar schemes vast natural resource, material and energy is wasted in their eventual destruction, but most insidiously these social problems and the design to compensate and medicate the issues has resulted in an “urban language of separation” which in a vicious cycle proliferates individualism and exacerbates materialism. Callenbach argues that this situation can be attributed to the “rules of a market driven society” And Schumacher argues that while previous civilisations may have exhausted the resources of their local environment, if now by this market-driven consumption “we squander the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten life itself”


Unless we understand the root of this unsustainability, we are can only expect design to make cosmetic changes to the problem. Schumacher argues that “We are suffering from a metaphysical disease, and the cure must therefore be metaphysical.” If metaphysical, the root of the problem may be less our understanding of the environment, as our understanding of the self and its place in ultimate reality. It could be argued that it is the outworking of an existential problem, manifested in the modernist project, the Cartesian dualism that sets humans apart from nature, and the individual self apart from ‘the other’ of everything beyond the self. The effect of this problem is exacerbated by contemporary design and technology which enables the literal division of the self from its supporting environment and from its consequences, this division again leads to a materialism, as the divided self seeks weight or identity in material possession, an approach which “contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.” The environmental implications of this are clear, and education and regulation should mitigate potential damage.


However, this Cartesian dualism goes much further, having set the self apart from the other, the world and the transcendent; it undermines the basis for objective morality and the basis for truths about the world to be known. Radical pluralism, deconstructivism and post-modernism have promoted a scepticism of metanarratives, including the environmental, they have sought to liberate the individual from responsibility and cast doubt on a scientific epistemology which informs climate concerns. It has been argued that the self has become narcissistic, this has implications directly in terms of increased energy use to fuel each isolated existence but more than that, if narcissism is a ‘loss of meaningful touch with objective reality’ the basis for building a sustainable future in a world that exists beyond the self is undermined.

Image 04 – Hermetically Sealed Suburban Living – Mark Gilbert – http://www.markgilbert.com

Image 05 – Suburban Sprawl, Phoenix, Arizona – Cities for a Small Planet – David Hurn, Magnum

The suburban house can be viewed as an outworking of this narcissistic worldview reflecting the individualistic worlds tailored to personal pleasure that are seen as the zenith of this age. These houses are unsustainable simply in their use of land and material, but further than that, they cement in place unsustainable social structures of separation, they speak a message that venerates consumption and they proliferate assumptions of mobile, commuting and placeless lifestyles. Nadarajah warns of the environmental implications of placelessness as “The Principle of Symbolic Universe …[which] involves recognition of the fact that we are from a physical location that is wrapped with meanings … being in a specific location, responding to the specific environmental context.” The alienation that comes in part from the dissolution of architectural language has led to apathy, distrust and footlooseness. Grounded community and concern for the specific has given way to short-term tenure and escapism.

These are the foundations of unsustainability; design, if it is to effect truly sustainable homes, must seek to address the cause, to subvert the paradigm of individualism and materialism. Design relates to the environment in its use of resources, and it directs practically its users’ interactions with their environment, but most importantly design has a voice and a public presence, it reflects, expresses and influences the worldview assumptions of its population. No house is simply an unsustainable house, but a force within a trajectory towards a more or less unsustainable future.

Image 06 –Cradle Mountain Wold Heritage Area, Australia – Simon Kenny – (Understanding Sustainable Architecture, p43)

No home exists in isolation; a house would be its most sustainable were it not built at all, a house being the bricks and mortar shell devoid of life. If the home is to play a part in sustainability, it first must be understood and engaged as a tool in and of itself, rather than endured as merely a burdensome physical form, requiring heating and cooling. The role of the home in a sustainable urban framework is a product of our understanding of the role of the family as an element in a sustainable social framework. The creation of sustainable homes will follow from sustainable dwelling, the saving home must operate at the point our conception of the family falls from sustainability. This is evidenced in the greater per person energy requirements of single person dwellings, themselves a product of less-than-sustainable social concepts of family. The creation of sustainable homes calls for an interdisciplinary effort to establish a sacred notion of family, and design must engage family and community in both the planning and constructing of home.

Image 07 – Hackney Homes Resident Consultation – http://www.hackneyhomes.org

The role of ‘design’: creative planning and conceptualising, constructing and finishing, self-evidently is central to producing homes that are sustainable. The role of the designer as external consultant however, and the relationship between process, product and community is more contentious. Vested interests of the building industry lie in maintaining such a divorced paradigm, which has resulted in the failure of estates like Pruitt Igoe, and less dramatically but more insidiously the speculatively developed urban sprawl of “socially homogenous, inward-looking and largely inactive dormitories.”

When speculative development fails to be sustainable it may be in part due to poor construction and lack of environmental consideration, but this would be secondary, were the developments made human from the stage of conception, were there true and accountable community, and were it to make efforts to address the self-other dualism at the heart of unsustainability. These notions have been visited by Ruskin’s in his social vision for a Primary Architecture ‘rooted in landscape and vernacular traditions, existing in perpetuity, reconciled to the accidents of its own material, and not offering to defy the fallen nature of the world and its inhabitants’ rather than an architecture ‘imported and propagandistic, superimposed by imperial requirements, pseudo-transcendentalist, merely imaginary aesthesis, existing in vacuo with a hypothesised population, undifferentiated or stereotyped’
Image 08 – Habitat for Humanity, Sweat Equity – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_for_Humanity_International

Image 09 – St Ann’s Allotments, Community and Participation – http://www.staa-allotments.org.uk/

It could be argued that the architect-developer led paradigm for speculative housing has propagated a concern for sustainability as product rather than process, and as image rather than effort, serving a market looking for an escapist comfort. Design must engage deeply with people and locality, design must be accountable beyond this generation, it must be more than people-friendly, it must be intrinsically human, held together by human relationships.
Architects, in this vision for the creation of sustainable homes, must no longer be ‘a profession without ethic’, and must first set their own house in order, make what sacrifice sustainability entails, and on this basis be the prophets to a new movement of environmental design.

Image 10 – Curitiba - Universidade Livre do Meio Ambiente

Image 11 – Curitiba - Universidade Livre do Meio Ambiente- http://www.greatbuildings.com

Image 12 - Curitiba - Public Transport - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curitiba

Image 13 – Curitiba – Recycling – http://picasaweb.google.com/dorriziai

Image 14 – Architecture Centre, London – http://www.newlondonarchitecture.org

Image 15 – Architecture Centre, London – http:// http://www.newlondonarchitecture.org/

Curitiba’s successful, clean and sustainable development is attributed to Lerner’s policy of citizen participation. The role played by design, is interdisciplinary and holistic as is reflected at Curitiba’s University of the Environment. To similar effect, in Cities for a Small Planet, Rogers proposes ‘Architecture Centres’, as venues for public debates and strategic plans, promoting participation and realising the untapped wealth of knowledge within the citizenry.33 This participation begins to decentralise design and obliges the design profession to cooperate, engage and serve the city beyond the client, and the world beyond the recouping of short-term investment. This way architecture is owned, place has a face and community might be united by a common purpose.

Sustainable architecture divorced of a human component, assumes the ‘role of design’ is to create a device that will remove the need for people and relies on the modernist notion of grand design as saviour which stifles community initiative. What is needed is a shift in design practice towards a bottom-up model, by design proclaiming a possible alternative value-system, and by example demonstrating that living with less is possible. The notion of education as saviour is misguided given the moral nature of the problem. We have, as a generation, unprecedented education and information at our disposal, and yet we live destructively. This is a question of morality and motivation, design that fails to demonstrate a framework that appeases the existential angst at the heart of unsustainability is mere indulgence.
If we can learn to dwell, and from there build, there are strategies and modes of emphasis that might be pursued; Susannah Hagan writes that the qualities of design proposals can typically be judged under three criteria “Symbiosis, the relationship between building and nature… Differentiation, the recognition of, and response to, the particularities of geographic and cultural place… Visibility, the symbolic and aesthetic emblems… that a building should visibly and overtly reflect its commitment to sustainability.”

Image 16 – Hollow Spruce, 1988, Richard Harris (Understanding Sustainable Architecture, p28)

Culture and design should draw us closer to nature, because a lifestyle lived in hermetically sealed spaces will beget an environmentally apathetic user, simply by virtue of ignorance as a result of the degrees of separation, but further more, architecture should draw us to nature, for its unpragmatic beauty.

Image 17 – Indigenous – Craft, Story Place - Arabic Arch (The Green Imperative, Papanek p124)

Image 18 – Indigenous – Craft, Story Place – Venetian Detailing (The Green Imperative, Papanek p124)

Image 19 – Indigenous – Craft, Story Place – North Africa Detailing (The Green Imperative, Papanek p125) Image 20 – Postmodern Pastiche – Houston Children’s Museum - http://houstonmuseumdistrict.contentactive.com/

If we must first dwell before we can build, there is a danger in advocating indigenous architecture as a function of design, pastiched, pseudo-local architecture is counterproductive in its message and construction. Design if it is to be put the service of dwelling must first meaningfully engage with the history of a place, with regard for establishing permanence, no longer planning obsolescence, no longer viewing design as disposable.

Image 21 – Temple tower at Wat Phra Si Maha Uma Devi, Bangkok - http://www.earthportals.com/

Image 22 – Church Ceiling, Madrid, http://www.pygment.com/

Image 23 – Stonehenge, http://www.windows.ucar.edu/

If our environmentalism assumes intrinsic value of nature, a philosophical question arises as to what system of values beyond us, endows nature with value. Architecture which points beyond itself to the spiritual, to a creator, contributes to a cultural discussion of the value of nature, points to a metaphysical answer to a metaphysical problem, and crucially it points beyond the self and its market-driven supposed needs.

Image 24 – Slums - http://www.spaceandculture.org/

Image 25 – Storefront home in Tijuana, Teddy Cruz, Adbusters #71, p23

Image 26 – Emerging Slum Architecture, Teddy Cruz, Adbusters #71, p23

At the micro scale of recycling bottles to the macro scale of wasteful urban arrangements, design should seek ways to parasite onto those projects dominated by human greed. The re-use and re-greening of brownfield-sites offer financial drawbacks, the role of design here must be to capitalise on existing structure literally and metaphorically, a new indigenous architecture of necessity is already being formed on the post-industrial and slum outskirts of major cities. Parasitism potentially illustrates and makes use of the systemic waste of society.

Image 27 – Venturi, Sketch Proposal for a Monument, German Ed, 1979 p184

Image 28 – World Development Movement Postcard, 2007

Image 29 – World Development Movement Postcard, 2007

Buildings speak messages, reflect worldviews, and convey values; however, in adopting an intentionally evangelistic approach to a design, there is a danger of inducing a green-fatigue. The emotional hyperbole that accompanies the fashionable eco-style, when proved shallow, will only serve to exacerbate the post-modern cynicism of this infotainment age and thereby deflect positive action. If design is to carry a message, now more than ever it must be honest and honest about the true cost. Such is a message spoken by a house which takes joy in the non-material, which wears its metaphysical assumptions on its sleeve, a house that is a home, that is permanent, that is reconciled to locality and materiality, a house that thinks and loves beyond its self.

Image 30 – Greenpeace Volunteers building a Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, May 2007, http://www.treehugger.com/

Image 31 – Greenpeace Volunteers building a Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, May 2007, http://weblog.greenpeace.org/

One might propose the sustainable home as one that fatalistically accepts the inevitable demise of environmental quality and so sets about constructing an ark, that they might sustain life beyond this. It is this root fear that begets this over-consumption, in a vicious cycle cynically exploited by marketers and politicians. Design must speak of hope; it must engage people practically in its process; and it must seek to develop a moral framework based on the objective value of life beyond the self.





Bibliography
Williamson, TJ; Radford, A; Bennetts, H (2003) Understanding Sustainable Architecture London : Spon Press

World Commission on Environment and Development (1987)‘Our Common Future (The Brundtland Report)’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Schumacher, EF (1993) [1973] Small is beautiful : a study of economics as if people mattered, London : Vintage

Rogers, R (1997) Cities for a Small Planet, London: Faber and Faber

Heidegger, M (1993) [1978] ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ in DF Krell (ed.) Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964) London: Routledge pp347-63

James, O (2007) Affluenza (,æflu'enza): how to be successful and stay sane, London : Vermilion

Blunt, Alison; Dowling, Robyn (2006) Home. London: Routledge

Papstergiadis, N (1996) Dialogues with the Diaspora: Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity. London: Rivers Oram Press

Rubenstein, R (2001) Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction. New York : Palgrave Macmillan

Bunkše, Edmund (2004) Geography and the Art of Life, Johns Hopkins University Press

Nadarajah, M; Yamamoto, Ann Tomoko (Eds) (2007) Urban crisis : culture and the sustainability of cities Tokyo : United Nations University Press.

Clammer, J (1996), Values and Development in South East Asia, Kelana Jaya, Malaysia: Pelanuh Publications

Callenbach, Ernest (1999) “Ecological rules of a sustainable society” Takashi Inuguchi, Edward Norman, Glen Paoletto (Eds) Cities and the Environment: New Approaches for Eco-Societies. Tokyo: United Nations University Press pp19-22

Smith, M; Whitelegg, J; Williams, N (1998) Greening the Built Environment, London : Earthscan