The Ugliness of Unsustainability

CLIMATE EMERGENCY FUNDAMENTALS

Recorded by Sofie Pelsmakers, images by Essi Nisonen

KEY READINGS 

• Everything needs to Change: Architecture and the climate emergency. RIBA Design Studio Volume 1, Sofie Pelsmakers, Nick Newman. RIBA.

• Designing for the climate emergency, a Guide for Architecture Students, Pelsmakers, S., Donovan, E., Hoggard, A., Kozminska, U., RIBA

• Aesthetics and the Environment : The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture, Carlson, A., Routledge.

• The Suppression of the Social in Design Architecture as War in Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses and Social Practices, Ward, A., edited by Thomas A. Dutton, Lian Hurst Mann, University of Minnesota Press

INSPIRATIONAL BUILT EXAMPLES

• Anders Lendager, Resource Rows and Upcycle Studios, Denmark

• Inger and Johannes Exner Achitects, Kolding Hus, Denmark 

• Burckhardt & Partners, MFO park, Switzerland

THE UGLINESS OF UNSUSTAINABILITY

Here the ugliness of unsustainability is discussed and framed through the lens of a cognitive approach to beauty and how, in doing so, we cannot frame our architecture as beautiful when it is based on extractive and exploitative processes. After all, there is no life, no architecture, no ‘beauty’ in a 4C° world. Nothing less than a radical change of our values, culture and practices in architecture (and society) is required to avoid 4°C warming. It takes us outside our comfort zone because we need to change how we design spaces and places. But our architecture cannot be exploitative or permitted to transgress other’s rights (human and non-human). To do this, we as architects need new values and a new, restorative aesthetic that  ‘de-centres’ ourselves as architects and centres the planet, other people, other communities and non-humans in our design process and decision-making.