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 Special Supplement to the October 2001 issue: A report on the proceedings of the Metropolis West Conference, February 7+8, 2001, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, "Finding the Thread of Sustainability." October 2001
Harrison Fraker: The marginalization of sustainable design dates back to the earliest green designs, in the 1960s. Their history is part of the problem. Many of these first buildings-in the process of rediscovering the ancient principals of passive solar heating, natural cooling, and daylighting-went too far. In an effort to understand the potential of these principles, some concepts were pushed to the limit and became thermal diagrams emphasizing solar, daylighting, or passive cooling systems at the expense of other important architectural concerns.
William McDonough: In 1992, before the Earth Summit, I gave a talk to foundry owners in Chattanooga, Tennessee, about the future of industry. This is a city that had had a civic heart attack. In 1969 they were declared to have the worst air quality in America; you had to have your headlights on at noon. I was explaining a new protocol we were developing with German chemist Michael Braungart, saying how it would affect industry. One of the industrialists asked, "How long is all this sustainability stuff going to take?" I said, "Forever." That's the point. Tim Duane: The sustainability debate had always been about how other people should live. Ricardo Legorreta: One day I was visiting my teacher, Luis Barragan, and I said, "You know, we will never have the opportunities that there are in the United States. Look at all the possibilities and support they have." And he said to me, "Ricardo, they don't have something that is very valuable, which is the imagination of the poor." In Mexico we discuss sustainability in a very different way, because we have the disadvantage of being a poor country and the advantage of being a poor country.
Harrison Fraker: Sustainability issues need to be part of our core activities and not allowed to be pulled out, branded, marginalized. That means integration. We have to challenge the culture we operate in at all levels: political, economic, professional, legal, social. Many of us have tried to make sustainability transparent. I think we need to make it both transparent and invisible, which is an interesting paradox. Tim Duane: Sustainability principles require us to confront conflicting conceptions of nature, society, and ourselves. Our own acts may make sense to us at an individual level. In fact, on one scale what we're doing may be an environmentally sensitive thing to do, but on a larger scale it may present a problem. An example would be large lot developments, where for the individual developer the site may make sense but aggregated across the entire region such developments may have a variety of effects on traffic, auto dependency, etc. |
