Let's talk about Sustainability...

“The phenomenon has been accompanied by growing social, political and media interest in sustainability which is transforming architectural practice, design techniques, which up until now had focused on the tectonic aspect…”

Sustainability. We throw this word around a lot in architecture. Sustainable in terms of active systems, passive systems, and form. We’re all guilty of it in our studio projects, but it doesn’t end there. The profession has run off with idea of sustainability as a marketing ploy with LEED and Green Building. Inaki Abalos describes the nature of sustainability as “Architecture of Good Intentions. So let’s just admit it…most of the time as architects we have no idea what we’re doing! We have an idea and more times than not I like to think we have good intentions integrating both innovative high tech and low tech solutions, but are we really sure about the calculations or science behind it? Probably not. I believe the first step is admitting you have a problem… so while us architects know a whole lot about a lot of different things, it’s probably not a bad thing that these environmental experts they’re talking about should be “accompanying the former solo voice of the architect” because let’s just face the fact that we can’t know everything about everything. I think this admission of [very slight] defeat is what will allow us the opportunity to learn more about these new practices from actual experts in the field, and allow that to transform the thought behind sustainability in architecture.