Sustainability

Definition

Sustainability is the normative demand that present development meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs — an ethic of intergenerational responsibility that has become a central requirement of contemporary architectural practice. In this wiki, sustainability is philosophically grounded in Kant's cosmopolitics: the recognition of the Earth "as a sphere with limited land mass and natural resources" entails that humans "act as mutually dependent and responsible subjects in an interconnected, dynamic world" (Morgan). Benjamin supplies the historical-anthropological dimension through his "concern for intergenerational justice," which Elliott finds "timely for sustainable architecture." Sustainability thus connects planetary ecology to the ethics of what one generation owes another.

Key Thinkers

• Immanuel Kant — the cosmopolitical grounding of sustainability; limited resources, mutual responsibility.
• Walter Benjamin — intergenerational justice as timely for sustainable architecture.
• Bruno Latour — the climatic regime that makes sustainability urgent.

Related Concepts

• Ecology — the scientific-normative ground of sustainability.
• Cosmopolitics — the political frame for sustainable, planetary responsibility.
• Ethics — sustainability as an emergent moral demand on architecture.
• Junkspace — the built residue of modernization; the saturated object-world from which sustainable practice must salvage.
• Readymade — the artistic tactic for sustainability: discovering "alternate and poetic meanings" in the object destined for the landfill rather than dismissing it.
• Obsolescence — the temporal counter-pressure: spaces and objects "likely to end up in landfills" against spaces that "will resist obsolescence."
• Prefab Interior — the production-side strategy: off-site building's "reduced material waste and labor costs," and the interchangeability of "modular, transportable, or interchangeable elements" that "allows for adaptability and reuse, increasing the life of all the elements" — element-scale durability as a design decision.
• Aneignung — the craft register: appropriation's slow, addition-bearing remaking of the existing stock — "remaking its usability, resilience, and sustainability" (Berger).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Kant for Architects — sustainability grounded in Kant's cosmopolitics.
• Benjamin for Architects — intergenerational justice and sustainable architecture.
• Spatial therapies (Qureshi 2018) — the practical register: "sustainable adaptive reuse" as interior architecture's first design tactic, enabling "economical, sustainable, and historically contiguous environments for potential futures" — sustainability via the retention of embodied building stock rather than new construction.
• Inside Looking In: The Prospect of the Aspect (McClure & McClure 2018) — the persistence register: the built environment's sustainability measured as contribution to "the physical environs across shifting social, cultural, and stylistic norms" — against the Walmart's seventeen-year estimated useful life and the demolished Folk Art Museum, whose architects called the demolition's stakes "civic, cultural, and sustainable." Spaces with the prospect of the aspect "will resist obsolescence; they will not be destroyed when their current program or style becomes outdated" — durability designed through inclusivity rather than through materials alone. See obsolescence, prospect-of-the-aspect.
• Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — the garbage/waste register: "the world is saturated with objects; most of them are likely to end up in landfills. Rather than dismissing (throwing away) those things, the challenge is how to discover alternate and poetic meanings in them" — sustainability through reconsideration of "the value of ordinary, disposable, and conventional objects" (Kienholz's "the self-concept of our society can be inferred from its garbage" paired with Venturi's "use convention unconventionally"); reusing and recycling existing objects, elements, and buildings as the path to "more sustainable, suggestive, and poetic" interior environments. See readymade, adaptive-reuse.
• Inside the prefab house (Schneiderman 2018) — the production register: prefabrication "receives continued attention… for reasons of efficiency and affordability of construction coupled with a current shift toward, or return to, sustainable technologies, designs, and environments"; "building off-site has demonstrated reduced material waste and labor costs, while the fabrication of modular, transportable, or interchangeable elements allows for adaptability and reuse, increasing the life of all the elements"; and the programmatic close — "Further investigations into prefabrication of such interior elements by interior architects in a purposefully sustainable manner will continue to advance the significant territory of prefabricated interior architecture." Sustainability here is not reuse of salvaged objects (Meninato) but of designed elements: durability manufactured into the part. See prefab-interior, adaptive-reuse, obsolescence.
• On technological limits (Olsen 2018) — the materials register: sustainability pursued by hacking the machine's material limits — Emerging Objects (Rael San Fratello's "MAKE-tank") developed "techniques and formulas to print materials such as salt, sand, and sawdust," the "salty glue" of "salt harvested from the San Francisco Bay and glue" being "strong, waterproof, lightweight, translucent, and inexpensive"; "By mining sustainable materials, and sometimes by-products of other manufacturing processes, Emerging Objects innovates building modules that are highly intricate, eco-conscious, and much more affordable than standard rapid prototyping materials." The chapter's caveat doubles as a sustainability question: "one might associate salt with impermanence" — durability must be engineered into the unusual feedstock ("the more durable, the more costly" was the standard-materials cost wall the hack circumvents). See 3d-printing, technological-limits.- "Living" rooms (Brownell 2018) — the fabrication register: sustainability pursued by replacing industrial fabrication with natural process — "Since the Industrial Revolution, material fabrication has generally been carried out in a highly resource-intensive, inefficient, and polluting manner. By contrast, natural processes use resources effectively and generate byproducts that may be reutilized… even natural waste is a resource for another process" — plus passive performance ("surfaces that naturally shade and ventilate interior spaces without the need for mechanical equipment, air purification, and oxygenation systems composed of pollution-neutralizing plants") and "environmental surfing" (Loftness) of natural systems' resource logic. The register's self-audit is explicit: hypernatural design "remains in an early stage of experimentation; a comprehensive accounting of environmental, social, and economic effects has yet to be conducted." See hypernaturalization, ecology.
• Death of the architect (Berger 2018) — the retrofit-market register: the reuse economy as sustainability's demographic base — "most of the construction industry in the United States is focused on the reuse of existing buildings, and the market for green buildings is exploding; the lion's share of the opportunity exists in retrofits, not new buildings" (note 3: 77.9+ billion square feet of US commercial space, a small percentage new each year; the retrofit market projected at $10–15 billion by 2014) — and appropriation as a design process that "gives expression to existing spaces, remaking its usability, resilience, and sustainability." Sustainability here is the by-product of the appropriation discipline: the retained building stock as the field of remaking rather than a materials problem. See adaptive-reuse, appropriation.
• Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the density-norm audit: density "enjoys much love in urbanist circles… often seen as a necessary precondition for sustainability and even resilience. It has become a rarely questioned normative objective" — densification and intensification "the mantra of central city-based urban environmental policies" (p. 583). The register's caveats are sustainability's own: Cohen's carbon caveat — "When the people clustered are prosperous professionals, the carbon benefits of density can be cancelled out by the emissions their consumption causes. The smokestacks, of course, are elsewhere" (p. 586) — the wealthy's "multiple and bigger cars," vacation homes and air travel making residential density "no difference for the planet"; the "barbecue effect" (suburbanites staying put evenings and weekends while urban dwellers drive to nature, Munafo, cited p. 586) as open empirical question; and the settlement caveat — "Sixty-one percent of all Americans now live in single unit detached housing on about an acre of land… That is a real problem in so much as… those living arrangements are supported by the most unsustainable economy in the world," though "the same kind of densities may not be quite as disastrous in an economy that is set up in more modest terms" (p. 586). Sustainability's suburban problem is thus not density or sprawl but the regulation regime that makes either sustainable or disastrous. See post-suburban-densification, hyperdensity, urban-sprawl.
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the market-adoption register: sustainability as priced by its payback — two goals distinguished (occupancy consumption vs construction impact), and the consumer finding that "consumers are in favor of protecting the environment through green building practices when they would only incur minimal additional costs" (p. 228); the program ladder in production terms (IECC code baseline → Energy Star's 15% code-beating requirement and HERS indexing → LEED for Homes/LEED-ND → Passive House's ~90% reduction → ZERH, pp. 231–238); the location clause won in the ratings ("a 1500 sq. ft house on a quarter acre lot near public transportation… is going to be greener, in terms of lifecycle impact, than a 5000 sq. ft house in a remote, large lot location," p. 234); the size heresy ("By simply cutting down on interior square footage, many of the goals of building sustainable communities can be achieved" — 1950's <1,000 sq ft/3.37 persons vs 2010's 2,392 sq ft/2.59, p. 242); and the settlement adjudication — walk-up density matching urban fabric, urban cost ~3× suburban, NYC "the greenest" yet "the most unequal" (pp. 243–245). Where Keil audits the density norm, Wentling shows which sustainability measures the market actually buys — utility savings, not virtue (see housing, real-existing-suburbia, missing-middle-housing).
• source-notes/cochrane-colenutt-field-2015-living-on-the-edge
• source-notes/lawrence-2006-social-spatial-temporal-factors
• source-notes/oner-pasin-2015-emerging-towers-bayrakli-sustainability
• source-notes/vanucci-2018-inside-out-outside-in