Ecological Scarcity and Biological Abundance

Archi­tec­ture will for­ever be linked to humans; it is part of our cul­ti­va­tion of the earth.   And when we cul­ti­vate that earth we are dri­ven by mar­ket forces, main­stream notions of sus­tain­able archi­tec­ture and hous­ing are mostly focused on energy effi­cient mea­sures, as in, ‘in addi­tion to” what an architect/builder con­ven­tion­ally does, not on how peo­ple live.  In Rein­ter­pret­ing Sus­tain­able Archi­tec­ture: The Place of Tech­nol­ogy, Guy and Farmer write, “typ­i­cal are sug­ges­tions that if we are to achieve sus­tain­able build­ings then architec­ture should become more ‘objec­tive,’ and ‘until a con­sen­sus is attained, the abil­ity of the archi­tec­tural com­mu­nity to adopt a coher­ent envi­ron­men­tal strat­egy, across all build­ing types and styles of devel­op­ment, will remain elu­sive.” ⁴

   Attain­ing a con­sen­sus will take time, but I reckon that an over­all envi­ron­men­tal strat­egy will come from the need to increase the earth’s abil­ity to process our pol­lu­tion and impact rather than only con­serv­ing resources (energy effi­ciency).  It will also require humans to be stew­ards of the earth, prop­a­gat­ing nature rather than only being con­sumers.  The choices in the way we live will carry heavy weight in the health of our bios­phere, the ecosys­tems in it, and the well being of humans and non-humans.

The choice of greater eco­log­i­cal health ver­sus her­met­i­cally sealed boxes, seems like a sim­ple choice. Make build­ings more green, with nature not mar­ket­ing.  More and more of our built envi­ron­ments are becom­ing her­met­i­cally sealed boxes rather than inte­grat­ing con­nec­tions between peo­ple and the nat­ural envi­ron­ment.  Most of these choices are guided by stan­dards to avoid sick build­ing syn­drome and cre­ate boxes that are energy effi­cient, due to a mind­set of resource scarcity.

Ken­neth Fram­ton agrees on such reduc­tion­ism on our non-place cities/suburbs, where we make spaces and not places, “out­side the ‘mass’ engi­neered som­nam­bu­lism of the tele­vi­sion, we still indulge in the pro­lif­er­a­tion of road­side kitsch—in the fab­ri­cated mirage of ‘some­where’ made out of bill­board facades and token the­atri­cal para­pher­na­lia the fan­tas­mago­ria of an escape clause from the land­scape of alienation…with ‘newspeak’ over­tones, they tes­tify to a fun­da­men­tal break in our rap­port with nature (includ­ing our own), they speak of a lay­ing waste that can only find its ulti­mate end in our­selves.” ⁵

4. Simon Guy and Gra­ham Farmer, “Re-Interpreting Sus­tain­able Architecture:

The Place of Tech­nol­ogy,” in Jour­nal of Ar­chitectural Edu­ca­tion 54:3, p 140–148.

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