Going Green

Each of the readings seems to address ways in which the commodification and moralization of nature and its simultaneous psychological detachment from the city and culture can problematize "sustainability" as a goal or effect of architecture and planning. As it increasingly enters the public conscience, the possibilities of sustainable practice are often reduced to sets of superficial criteria and laundry lists of small, universally applicable techniques. While noble in intent and realistic in scope, such reductions lead to an understanding of "green" design as a thin veneer of gadgetry and responsibly produced surface materials.

As Hough argues, the potential for a more holistic, scaleable, and complex organization of ecological measures in the city is nearly impossible when such technology is never considered or implemented beyond the scope of a single building. Unsurprisingly, Peter Eisenmann likes to deride (or avoid) the question of sustainability entirely, likening the architect's application of green building practice to the application of green dots to a city plan: the emphasis is not on the local conditions and the connections among sites and to the larger city, but on the branding -- often in the marketing sense -- of a small piece of it. The expertise of such practice resides with technical consultants and bean counters, not with designers.

While I continue to think about program for my site, and how a parking structure for shopping carts might be paired with a set of flexible activities in a mutually beneficial way, I am also thinking of the ecological footprint of the site and how the proposal might begin to acknowledge natural process and systems, either through rainwater management, reduction of impermeable surfaces, or development as a habitat for particular species of plants and animals (hopefully not rats).