At last, a piece worth reading about sustainability.
Gillian Darley’s redefinition of the term as “durability” (Opinion February 22) opens up a far more interesting forum than the myopic focus on carbon reduction that has smothered the industry.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for building efficiency, but the idea that low-carbon housing is in itself an architectural ideology scares me witless. The Passivhaus debate is relevant here: super-sealed buildings don’t sit well with flexibility (think of Stewart Brand’s “shearing layers” in How Buildings Learn).
But, more importantly, why are they so often located in suburban contexts, reliant on the car? Do their owners eat beef, own mobile phones and fly abroad on holiday? And why are the buildings always so ugly? Sustainability in architecture asks all these questions, but we are answering none of them.
Sadly, I fear Darley’s definition of sustainability will be ignored. Carbon reduction is a convenient area of sustainability as a marketing tool for products.
Sustainability cannot exist in isolation: there is quite simply no such thing as a sustainable product, building or city — only a more or less sustainable society.
Roland Karthaus
Tutor, MA course in Architecture Sustainability
& Design, UEL
Postscript
email letters to buildingdesign@ubm.com including your postal address. We reserve the right to edit all correspondence
No comments yet