Invisible Austerity

“Articulating all these things, also those which are apparently contradictory, and being able to move us, is one of the things that has concerned architects for a long time. And despite energy, economics, utilization, social need and laws, a building needs to thrill like this one."

This is a quote concerning the Philharmonic Hall in Szczecin, Poland, which won the EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture – the Mies van der Rohe Award – in May 2015. I bring it up here in this discussion of sustainability because of something that was said in class on Thursday; that sustainable architecture should “look humble”, a statement that I respectfully disagree with.

Climate change is something that I absolutely acknowledge, and I believe that it should be a major consideration in architectural design; that part should not be a debate. And while Jeremy Till’s ideas of restraint make perfect sense, Bjarke Ingel’s approach of hedonistic sustainability is also appealing. But there is a vast gap between hedonism and austerity. I understand and agree with the argument that creating more things to deal with the problem of climate change seems to be aggravating the problem, not solving it. However, I do not believe that a return to completely vernacular, “humble” architecture is the best solution. If that were the case, if we continue to digress to our humble architectural origins, what then is the point of architecture? We could all just go back to living in caves and mud huts and reverse the climate problems facing us. That’s an extreme statement, I know. But there is no going back; we can’t erase the problems that have been created by simply erasing the iconic nature of architecture. You can have a building be considered “critically regional” that also thrill the users; we spent a lot of time talking about Peter Zumthor last week, and I believe his work fits that description.

I think the same goes for sustainable architecture; you can have a building that counteracts the climate problems, that acknowledges the region it is located in and utilizes the means most appropriate for its region, while still being a work of architecture. I think we can have truly sustainable architecture without a visible show of austerity.