Weak sustainability

A few thoughts about sustainability

By Marco Frascari
Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The question of sustainability is related to value. Unfortunately there are too many kinds
of value on the market: historic values, cost values –traditionally considered
unnecessary in schools since there is the bizarre belief that designing within a budget
hampers architectural creativity– intrinsic values, instrumental values and the most
important of the values: ethical values.

Traditional utilitarianism is the negation of sustainability, but most of the present thinking
on sustainability is developed within the tenets of utilitarianism, where morality is about
producing good consequences but not having good intentions, and architectural
sustainability becomes a way of producing the greatest overall amount of good in the
world. The emphasis is clearly on consequences, not intentions. Utilitarianism often
demands that we put aside our own moral convictions.

A good model to tackle the question of sustainability is the one worked out by Igiazi
Sola-Morales—the idea of Weak Architecture--and schools should work out the
opposition: Strong Sustainability versus Weak Sustainability.

Our Western culture aspires to power and domination and this pursuit describes
architecture as well architectural sustainability, and consequently the preponderance of
architects seeks to produce buildings with a powerful image and impact (i.e. Starchitects
for sustainability!). Referring to a way of philosophizing that does not aspire to totalize
the multitude of human discourses into a single system, the Italian philosopher Gianni
Vattimo introduced the notions of Weak Ontology. In accordance with Vattimoʼs notions,
Solas-Morales speaks of a weak architecture, and we should speak of a weak
sustainability.

The idea of weak sustainability in architecture should be related to the concept of weak
force, a force that governs decay as well as the weak processes of nature, whereas
strong sustainability uses excessive physical aggression in its technological processes.

The concept of weak sustainability in architecture should deal with the nature of hybrid
technologies. Hybrid technologies are various, polymorphous (solar, wind, water),
compounded (adaptive reuse) and multifaceted (architecture of spoils) in which it is
acceptable to cut sectional courses that run not only from top to substructure, from start
to end, but also, crosswise, obliquely and transversely.

The appropriate way to tackle this concept of week sustainable architecture and
greening the curricula is to teach a course of architectural ethics based on real or
oblique crossing of poetics and pathos in a cosmopoiesis, i.e. the ethics of world-
making that give rise to the synesthetic and haptic townscapes of intimacy and
participation as in the weak urbanism proposed by Simon Hubacker in 1999.