Writing my thesis in 1,000 words or less proved to be a difficult task. Here it is in 1,248.
Our world is witnessing changes not seen since the dawn of the last ice age: biodiversity loss, climate shift, increasing intensity of storms and droughts, immense economic inequalities and social upheavals. These challenges are part and parcel of the new epoch of the Anthropocene and bring into question the status of humanity, and by default, our objects (built environment as indicator of progression of “human stain” represented by photos of Earth at night), on this planet. Therefore, the Anthropocene is fundamentally a conversation by us about us; and describes a time when we seek more than ever to understand our place on earth. The Anthropocene may describe a world of our own creation, but certainly not of our own design. A hostile and ever changing world, in which our own survival is anything but guaranteed.
When struggling to define our place on Earth we might instead ask “how are we to dwell, in the tempestuous world of the Anthropocene?” This is an important question if we understand Heidegger correctly in saying that “dwelling, ultimately, is the essential existential core of human being-in-the-world from which there is no escape.” Note that Heidegger propounds a notion of dwelling as a continuous process of discovery.
In his Gifford Lectures, Bruno Latour offer’s the idea of the earthbound; a type of person that feels existentially bound, connected to, or immersed in the earth and global systems. Which systems are important to feel connected to? And which connections are important to understand? The short answer is all of them. We mustn’t try to fit the world into sets of neat binaries, we should instead attempt to understand the world in all of its deep complexity and hybridity. The important thing is to feel connections, or as I will say, connectedness; connections between the individual and global systems (such as the carbon and water cycles) and the connections between systems themselves. When the individual revels in her understanding of these connections, she feels connectedness. Internalizing these connections reveals our dependence on such systems, and further confirms the impacts of our behaviors on these systems. The idea is if we feel/observe the changes in these systems and realize these changes result from our actions, and don’t appreciate these changes (i.e. it makes life worse), then we will change our behavior.
So how does one cultivate connectedness? By engaging with the world of the Anthropocene in all its overwhelming complexity, recognizing hybridity and addressing the failure of such binaries as nature/culture. And how can we begin to engage with such complexity and hybridity evident in the converging systems that we impact, and that in turn, impact our lives? And how to see these false binaries for what they are?
Architecture, by it’s very nature, engages with issues in their relevant complexity. In fact, “design” by most standards is the process of generating the most elegant and simple solutions possible to a given challenge. Architecture is no stranger to complexity, and building projects fundamentally engage with life on many levels: from politics to economics, from ecosystems to cultural/historical contexts, from immediate site-specific impacts to broad future complications. Not only are buildings themselves instances of converging complex systems, but I believe architecture has the ability to capture and reflect connectedness. That is, if we embark on the difficult task of thinking for dwelling (i.e. attempting to understand our “place” in the ever changing world of the Anthropocene) and building as thinking (i.e. acknowledging architecture as a transdisciplinary vehicle in which to engage with the myriad dimensions and complexities of life in the Anthropocene) then we might be able to design our environments in such a way that we live ever in awareness of our dynamic connectedness to/imbedded-ness in, global systems.
The best example I see of this type of thinking-for-dwelling and building-as-thinking (designing for connectedness) is in the Living Building Challenge. The fundamental premise of the LBC is that architect’s should conceptualize of buildings as flowers because flowers are: alive, consume (or at least don’t produce) CO2, subsist primarily on sunlight, use only as much water as they need, exist in a locale/i.e. ecological context/biotic community, are beautiful, and don’t care who sniffs them. What makes the LBC unique, beyond being considered the most rigorous sustainability standard for the built environment, is how architect’s are free to interpret each imperative.
I investigated two Living Buildings, each addressing LBC imperatives in innovative ways. What I found was promising. Often times the intellectual contribution to pragmatic, normative discourse comes in the form of valuable criticism substantiated by empirical data, followed by hollow endorsements of fantastic solutions. It seems my inquiry has lead me to take somewhat of the opposite approach; earnest endorsement of a way of building substantiated by first-hand research and rigorous analysis, tempered by legitimate intellectual concerns that can be addressed should they be paid any heed.
A principal concern of each building was to advance precisely the sort of awareness of connection between individual behavior and global systems that I discussed earlier. In each of these buildings (both schools) students were meaningfully included in the design process, providing an opportunity for them to learn about the host of challenges and converging systems involved in making a place (remember connection w/ dwelling). Furthermore, the resulting design reveals the building process (cut-aways expose the materials inside the walls and interior decoration is sparse revealing electrical conduits), and elements such as a stream running through a classroom and displays showing energy production (from photovoltaic cells) and consumption in realtime make visible the pathways energy and water take through the buildings. The exposed mechanisms allow users to understand and question their engagement with these resource systems and observe how their behavior impacts them. Furthermore, questions such as “is the wall-of-plants nature or culture?” don’t hold up in such contexts and betray the fragility of such dichotomies, for hybridity is clear.
In my mind, these living buildings succeed by moving beyond buildings as “sustainable” objects, and taking advantage of the individual’s experience in, and relationship to, the building as an immersive object-environment emphasized and supported by the field of architectural phenomenology. However, these projects are not without their imperfections.
First of all, I doubt the flexibility of these buildings to account for changing notions of sustainability. It seems as though these designs are firmly wedded to specific ideas of sustainability and environmental ethics that risk becoming antiquated in the near future. These buildings rely on specific pedagogical models to propound privileged notions of environmental ethics, and reinforce sustainability as a function of the virtue of efficiency. Both are problematic due to the fact that post-environmentalism challenges such notions through the application of such theories as the Jevon’s Paradox and ecological modernization, as well as perpetuating a privileged notion of sustainability that is consumption/production oriented and may not be sufficiently radical or normative outside of the Global North. These problems could be ameliorated by adopting a more transgressive approach to education centered on understanding and dismantling current structures of authority that generate and maintain inequality.
In conclusion, we need to continue to design the built environment (our world) with connectedness in mind, while also accounting for the fact that the Anthropocene is defined by unprecedented change. In the Anthropocene, as in past epochs, humankind must ever learn to dwell on this planet, thankfully we can use our buildings to help us live better, instead of seeing them as part of the problem.