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Are you interested in the aesthetics of sustainable architecture?

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Our summary today works with the article titled Aesthetics of sustainability and architecture: An overview from 2020 by Aurelija Daugelaite and Indre Grazuleviciute-Vileniske, published in the Urban Studies journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see whether the aesthetics of sustainable architecture is distinguishable. This article investigates the question of sustainability aesthetics and the ways that it is expressed in the field of architecture.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss.

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Current understanding of the often-interchangeable terms sustainability and sustainable development is usually linked to the Brundtland Commission Report of 1987 which says sustainable development is a development that meets the needs of the present-day societies without compromising the possibilities of the future societies to meet their needs. However, this created some confusion in the different understandings and new terms, like regenerative sustainability and restorative sustainability. Both the concept of sustainability as the development paradigm of contemporary society and its further developments inevitably affect our built environment and architectural design in particular, even though the concept of sustainability remains unclear in the built environment.

Many concepts have connected to sustainability in the built environment, like eco-friendly, high-performance, zero energy, etc. The sustainable building gained a new definition: a building is sustainable if it contributes to the sustainability through its metabolism and by doing this it favours a regenerative resilience of the built environment among all the domains of sustainability with some aesthetic improvements. However, the peculiarities of this aesthetics remain unclear. Thus this research aims to clarify the question of sustainability aesthetics and how it is expressed in the field of architecture.

The authors did a systematic literature review with specific keywords in specific data bases to find the most suited articles. The key word analysis reveals that architecture is a high-ranking concern in the field of environmental aesthetics compared to landscape and urbanism, even though the publication authors were from these areas as well. This shows the complexity and interdisciplinarity of sustainability aesthetics. The majority of the publications related to sustainable architecture and its expression deal with specific cases, although do not provide clear definition of sustainability aesthetics.

The authors connected to Kagan whose article we discussed in episode 125. According to Kagan, aesthetics of sustainability is a subset of aesthetics that is focused on relations and processes. It is based on a sensibility to patterns that connect at multiple levels and at the same time is attentive to complexity and highlighting the beauty of the complementary antagonisms. Variations, differentiations and multiplicities are important for sustainability aesthetics. Sustainability aesthetics needs ecological literacy and literacy of complexity. It needs to be sensible to emergence and networks and open to uncertainties and the generativity of chaos.

The role of aesthetics currently is more complex than the idea of beauty. Aesthetics supposes to sense and eternalise the identity of the historical period and the society. So, newer concepts of aesthetics combine beauty, harmony, grandeur, tragedy, heroism, irony, etc. Thus, the question can be raised what ideas or values are reflected in sustainable architecture expression.

The importance of aesthetics in contemporary architecture is emphasised by numerous researchers. The primary focus is on artistic expressions regardless of sustainability and there is a lack of understanding in the possibilities of sustainability in architecture. Even if aesthetics is considered as one of the features of sustainable architecture, it is often ignored and the attention is focused on the energy requirements, life-cycle of the building and so on. Which is useful, but nobody will want to keep a building if it looks awful however great it performs in these aspects. However, since the 20^th century, a lot has changed in architectural and urbanism practices.

The review has revealed the potential of architecture to embody the sustainability aesthetics, but not without challenges. The authors identified two trends:

1. Revealing the contemporary state of unsustainability of our world, demonstrating ecological threat and architecture’s role within it
2. Creating the seduction.

At the start of the ecological movement the environmentally friendly architecture had distinctive and sometimes radical expression, for example, the interpretations of organic forms of the 70s. Contemporary sustainable buildings that are certified and highly rated by sustainability certification systems often lack any distinctive architectural expression. Sustainability certification systems, like LEED or BREEAM or GreenStar, do not encourage any breakthrough in design just help maintaining the current. With these, iconic buildings can be designed and then adapted to sustainability principles instead of creating the design with sustainability in mind. However, in this way the link between sustainability performance and the artistic form of the buildings may be sufficiently explored.

Sustainable architecture has acquired a greater diversity of expression inspired by both technology and the experiments of the late 20^th and 21^st century architecture. There are several researchers that tried to classify sustainable architecture according to its expression. The distinguished expressions trends encompass such radical differences as eco-tech developments and vernacular place-based designs. The more recent classifications reflect the negative influence of abundant regulations, turning-back to nature inspired forms and integration with larger scale landscape and urban complexes. The overview of these trends reveals that they can successfully embody the characteristics of sustainability aesthetics.

Many recent publications cover technological aspects of sustainable architecture, but there is still lack of research approach that covers conceptual, philosophical and artistic perspective of the field. It is important to investigate how important are social, psychological and especially, aesthetic aspects of the sustainability architecture. According to the review, it is possible to create architecture as an attractive carbon free product which can literally be an advertisement for the alternative lifestyles and show that reduction in consumption does not necessarily mean a reduction in quality.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, as the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. It is important to investigate how important are social, psychological and especially, aesthetic aspects of the sustainability architecture.
2. Aesthetics is supposed to sense and eternalise the identity of the historical period and the society and newer concepts of aesthetics combine beauty, harmony, grandeur, tragedy, heroism, irony, etc.
3. It is possible to create architecture as an attractive carbon free product which can literally be an advertisement for the alternative lifestyles and show that reduction in consumption does not necessarily mean a reduction in quality.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. What does aesthetics mean to you?
2. How do you experience aesthetics in your built environment?
3. Do you think there is a standard for aesthetics? Why?
4. What would you change in your built environment to make it more aesthetic? What do you think how that would affect you?

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