At the Crossroads of Sustainability: The Natural Recompositioning of Architecture

It is widely acknowledged that the mantra of sustainability has triggered a fundamental reversal in the core of design practice: If the original purpose of architecture was to protect humans from the destructive actions of nature,today it should protect nature from the damaging actions of humans. But sustainable design is far from being a coherent body of fully totalized ideas:it has a broad spectrum of disputing interpretations that oscillate between the deterministic models of energy control and technological efficiencies, and the moralistic and romantic approaches that attempt to see in nature and natural processes a fundamental way to de-escalate the global urban footprint and its associated patterns of consumption. However, mainstream green design has been evolving by progressively absorbing the narrative of deep ecology. Nature has been being integrated into architecture literally, by inserting vegetation onto buildings; digitally, by bringing environmental data into the design process (climate records, wind streams, sun rotation and air flows are computed, modelled and effectually shape architectures), and transcendentally, by claiming that sustainable architecture nurtures “the existing and evolving connections between spiritual and material consciousness.” The acknowledgement of the inexorable affiliation between architecture and the environment is, of course, not exactly new. What is distinctive today is the reification of the role of nature in architecture as an ideological stance, now totally intertwined with state-of-art data processing and the market-driven tools brought by Natural Capitalism. This paper will examine emblematic “green” buildings produced by leading architects such as Pelli Clarke Pelli, William McDonough, Stefano Boeri, Norman Foster and BIG in the light of Tim Morton’s, Slavoj Zizek and Bruno Latour’s critique of nature. It will illustrate how, despite being able to successfully forge new creative freedoms by exploring hybridizations between the domains of design and science, sustainability’s self-righteous “naturalistic” narrative is enabling a vision of the architect as an “expert manager” focused on producing projects of ecologic “beautification” while assumed to be “saving the world,” effectively depoliticizing the architectural practice. Nevertheless, these examples attest that there is a vast and fertile field of ideas to be explored and in this regard it is important to underline that we are still in the embryonic outset of the engagement of architecture with sustainability

Graduação em Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina,

Abstract: We offer here a set of evidence-based optimal practices for social housing, applicable in general situations. Varying examples are discussed in a Latin American context. Adaptive solutions work towards long-term sustainability and help to attach residents to their built environment. We draw upon new insights in complexity science, and in particular the work of Christopher Alexander on how to successfully evolve urban form. By applying the conceptual tools of “Pattern Languages ” and “Generative Codes”, these principles support previous solutions derived by others, which were never taken forward in a viable form. New methodologies presented here offer a promising alternative to the failures of the standard social housing typologies favored by governments around the world, which have proven to be dehumanizing and ultimately unsustainable. SECTIONS 1-4: BACKGROUND AND CRITICISM. 1. Introduction. This paper outlines promising new solutions for the future of social housing. It has been prepared as a comprehensive report by one of the authors (NAS) for Brazil, and is generally applicable to all of Latin America. One of us (AMD) is designing social housin

Habitação socialmente organizada, uma nova abordagem à estrutura urbana II: sugestões práticas para que os projetos funcionem Socially-organized housing, a new approach to urban structure II: practical suggestions for making project work

Desenvolvemos aqui nossa proposta para habitação social planejada e criada de acordo com as melhorespráticas baseadas em evidências. A partir de tradições locais e ferramentas urbanas inovadoras, o tecidourbano pode ser construído de forma a conectar-se positivamente ao usuário, ao invés de concordar comalgum traçado geométrico abstrato ideal. A falha em proceder com este modo esclarecido normalmenteleva a geometrias estéreis que não poderão nunca acomodar a vida social. Infelizmente, essa é a maneirapela qual a habitação social foi planejada por décadas, seguindo noções simplistas de ordem e eficiência.Essa abordagem não é apenas desatualizada, mas tem se mostrado como destruidora da sociedade. Temosconsiderado os múltiplos fatores que influenciam a reforma desse sistema, dando ênfase aos pontos em quemudanças drásticas se fazem necessárias (na filosofia e ideologia do urbanismo) e onde o sistema existente(nas práticas legais e construtivas) pode continuar funcionando apenas com pequenos ajustes. Felizmente,uma completa renovação de métodos construtivos urbanos podem ser implementados mantendo grandeparte da estrutura institucional existente

Urban nuclei and the geometry of streets : the 'emergent neighborhoods' model

A controversy remains among planners and urban designers about the proper location of the non-residential core (nucleus) of a neighborhood in relation to thoroughfares. One school of thought suggests that the nucleus should be located along the busiest thoroughfares; a second school holds that it must be some distance away from them - which, because of their disruptiveness, should form the edge of the neighborhood; and a third school proposes that it should be somewhere between the two as an 'eccentric nucleus'. The three schools may be overlooking the underlying variables that govern this problem under different conditions, and so we propose a model for establishing the best location and distribution of urban nuclei as these conditions vary. This requires firstly, a redefinition of the 'neighborhood' as distinguished from a 'pedestrian shed'. We argue that a 'neighborhood' can either emerge within a 'sanctuary area' between thoroughfares, or span across both 'sanctuary areas' and thoroughfares, if the latter are properly designed; a 'pedestrian shed', by contrast, can overlap with neighborhoods and with other pedestrian sheds. We propose a '400 meter rule', a surprisingly small maximum spacing of main thoroughfares that empirical observation shows that traditional, pedestrian-governed urban fabric has always tended to obey, for reasons that are likely to have to do with the self-organizing logic of pedestrian movement and social activity. In so doing, we advance a more fine-grained, permeable, potentially lower-carbon model and illustrate its advantages with several historic and modern examples