Taking Shape

Abstract

Neither half of this book’s title is self-explanatory, not ‘Taking Shape’ and not the reference to a ‘new contract’. ‘Taking Shape’ emphasizes the still emergent state of an architecture that is engaging in a new contract of co-operation between built and natural environments, socalled ‘sustainable’ or ‘environmental’ architecture. At present, environmental architecture is split between an arcadian minority intent on returning building to a pre-industrial, ideally pre-urban state, and a rationalist majority interested in developing the techniques and technologies of contemporary environmental design, some of which are pre-industrial, most of which are not. The two approaches co-exist within the same ethical framework, share a certain optimism about the possibility of change, and are bolstered intellectually by a heavy reliance on phenomenology as it has been interpreted by architectural theorists. Both use environmentalism as a new meta-narrative that restores the human subject to the centre of moral discourse and a realm of effective action it has not inhabited since the collapse of architectural modernism. From the arcadian minority has come a revival of craft traditions and vernacular techniques for mediating between inside and outside, but it is the rationalist majority who now dominate the field. One has only to look at the proceedings of any conference on environmental architecture in the last twenty years to see the overwhelming emphasis on the scientific and quantitative dimensions of the discipline: thermal conductivity of materials, photovoltaic technology, computer simulations, life cycle analysis, and so on. This science drives much of environmental design, as it both answers a now proven need to operate in the world less destructively, and enables the existing distribution of economic power to remain in place. A proportion of this rationalist camp holds to a utilitarianism that considers any concern with architecture as art to be irrelevant at best, and criminally irresponsible at worst. Another proportion of the rationalists’ work looks no different from the neo-modernist architecture it claims to supplant. Between these kinds of practice is a growing number of architects who take what they require from both arcadian and rationalist positions, but subscribe exclusively neither to low nor advanced technologies, ‘natural’ or synthetic materials, passive or active environmental design strategies, expression or operation. They discuss form in the same breath as they discuss energy efficiency. The result is not an architecture generated from a technology, as in principle happened with