‘Sustainability’ is a dangerous mirage

In front of me is a little black pamphlet. It’s a brochure advertising The Opus, an office block designed by Zaha Hadid Architects for Omniyat Properties, Dubai, and it’s cut in the shape of the building, an office block that curves around a void. It’s not too pat to use this void to symbolise the emptiness of the last decade.

ZHA might be the specific culprits here, but it need not have been — this brochure could have been for practically anyone. It makes sobering reading, an object adrift from a time when, inexplicably, politicians, businessmen and their architects seemed to think the boom would go on forever, as if the most banal form of capitalist expansion was impregnable to collapse.

Looking through the brochure, and the developer’s website, it’s amusing to see the building’s “sustainability” bandied around. “It is our objective to minimise the ‘ecological footprint’, improve energy efficiency, water conservation and long-term value of our projects and create environments, which improve people’s well-being and behaviour.” To combine greenwash, social engineering and piety in one sentence is impressive. Not because I doubt that these things were true, that energy may have been conserved, that natural light would pour in from the void into the floors air-conditioned against the desert temperatures. The tragicomedy is in the idea that this notion of “sustainability” had any meaning whatsoever.

Let me clarify. I fail to see why scepticism on climate change is of much more worth than Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth are on the collapse of the World Trade Centre. It’s the very term “sustainability”, which has enabled even Dubai to present itself as if it is touching lightly upon the earth, that is at fault. What exactly is it that we want to “sustain”? Humanity? Nature? Capitalism? As a slogan it’s as awful as “save the planet”. The planet is safe, it’s we who are in danger.

The problem with the rhetoric of sustainability is that, as a buzzword, it serves to fill the ethical void in the apocalyptic capitalism of the last 30 years. So, we get sustainable supermarkets, green-roofed car parks, carbon neutral desert cities, all of which are a kind of architectural offsetting as moronic as its economic equivalent. A hundred new industrial towns can have the mirage of Dongtan projected onto them. The recent demise of the British “eco-towns” is the pettier version of the same failure.

The sustainable building reassures us about the chaos around it, and helps us to pretend the system is rational. Each eco-car-park or insulated gated community is an exemplar of the refusal to think about totality, infrastructure, or economic rather than aesthetic change. It flatters architects, tells them that they can make a difference, and the architects return the flattery by making their spectacularly destructive clients look like paragons of eco-virtue. This loop of indulgence needs to be broken first if we are to come up with serious ideas for a less depressing future. As Archigram used to like to point out, the solution to the problem may not — in fact, certainly will not — be a building.