Gaining ground: The new contract between architecture and nature

Environmentalism presents not only architecture, but the entire building industry with a new contract of cooperation between built and natural environments. The dissertation examines this contrast as it affects architecture, because it is architecture that takes the cultural lead within the industry, and environmentalism is pushing it towards taking a moral lead. Cultural leadership is expressed, among other ways, through architectural form, and it is in this sense that the two leadership roles are seen as mutually exclusive both by many architects committed to bioclimatic design, and many pursuing architecture-as-art. Instead of enriching each other, the protagonists are reinforcing an oppositional relationship between (environmental) ethics and (architectural) aesthetics. The dissertation examines the reasons for this opposition and asks whether the two are irreconcilable, or whether, in fact, environmentally sustainable architecture is as much in need of formal exploration as formal exploration is in need of environmental design. This will no doubt incur the hostility of both rather than the support of either. Nevertheless an overt and conscious attempt at rapprochement is overdue, as the moral imperative of environmentalism as it is translated into legislation is harder and harder to ignore by the uncommitted, and the ideological power of reflexive form is more and more of a lack to the committed. Three criteria are therefore proposed for both the identification and generation of sustainable architectures: 'symbiosis', 'differentiation' and 'reflexion'. Each constitutes a different mode of engagement with the new contract between architecture and nature, and together have the potential to transform architecture's position within the politics of building.