Sustain What?

Tonight at a lecture on sustainablity in architecture by Volker M. Welter of UCSB, your critic raised a very stimulating point: in terms of sustainability, what is is that is being sustained? In fact, although a good paper, I was surprised that this wasn't developed during the lecture, and was greatful that Janette brought it up.

Welter ran through a micro-history of sustainability, selecting 3 representative moments to converse about at the end of the lecture/seminar. I think what was obvious was that Janette's question was not, and often, in talk of sustainability, is not answered concretely. The problem, as I see it, is that architectural representation is impoverished in its ability to accurately state its level of sustainability. (How do we really know the embodied energy of the materials, if the atrium is actually acting as a chimney, how much energy it takes to climatize, etc.) Further, science is equally impoverished by its inability to agree upon standardized metrics for arguing the sustainability of an architecture.

As such, what I think becomes interesting, is the way in which architects doing architectural projects which manifest a desire to be considered sustainable choose to represent them. Further, which of these images/architectures then become invariably categorized as sustainable.

The proto-thesis is that, if architectural representation is inable to accurately say whether a building is actually sustainable, and science is unable to prove it one way or another, then we need to start looking precisely at the images, the representations of these buildings that have allowed them to become unquestioned in their placement in the territory of sustainable on the architectural map.

The bigger, and perhaps unanswerable question, is whether architecture mutates faster than understanding, and so produces the images which we (the 'public') then come to understand as sustainable, or whether we begin through other mediums to understand what sustainable might look like, then gravitate to those images which coincide with this. (ie. does architecture set the standard, or follow it?)

Why am I writing this? I think that if you are dealing with a project that aims to manifest, or translate, or relate scientific data, then you need to have a position on whether the most effective means of communication is to study the forms of representation happening in the world ('oustide' of architecture) and then try to fit your system within that, making it readily readible by the public, or whether you try to create a new system of communication/representation. And, if the latter, how do you define your audience, and how do you go about making an argument for how they see and understand. Do they read fiction or non-fiction?