Postscript to 'The End of Architecture': Sustainability is Crowding Out Architecture

‘The End of Architecture’(1) focusses on the wholesale woke takeover of all discursive institutions that had constituted the infrastructure of architecture’s reflective self-steering towards innovation. However, the article does not call out the role the sustainability agenda plays in the self-dissolution of architecture. Although this is an omission, this makes sense because sustainability is indeed a valid, important concern with immediate practical implications for architecture, in contrast to the woke or politicising themes (social justice, global poverty, racism, sexism, neo-colonialism) alluded to in the article. This postscript on the role of sustainability is necessary to remedy the omission and complete the account of architecture’s self-inflicted demise.

THESIS: The overwhelming prominence of sustainability in architectural discourse contributes to the end of architecture and should be rolled back.

To avoid misunderstanding: The pursuit of sustainability is a worthy and important cause. The thesis put forward here in no way relies on climate change denial or scepticism. Further, the suggested rolling back of the discourse on sustainability in no way implies the reduction of the actual practical effort towards sustainability in the urban development arena.

The problem is that the sustainability agenda in professional architectural discourse is so overwhelmingly prominent that it crowds out all other aspects of architecture, some of which are not only equally worthy of attention and debate but (as we shall see below) should have priority over the sustainability agenda. Without having measured this, I believe that at least 90% of all professional architectural conferences either carry sustainability in their title or propose sustainability as a key focus of the conference. However, there is hardly that much original news about innovations at the sustainability front that would merit taking up so much of the attention space. Rather, these are mostly occasions for repeating familiar solutions, plus the reiteration of commitment to the good cause. Even if the new information coming from sustainability research is judged to be inexhaustible, the law of diminishing returns and rising opportunity costs suggests that the current monopolisation of attention would still have to be judged irrational.

Another problem for architecture is that the focus on sustainability within the architects’ discourse implies that questions of technical functionality that ultimately lie in the engineers’ domain of competency swamp questions of social functionality that constitute architecture’s genuine domain of competency. Architects are thereby reduced to amateur engineers. In the main article some genuinely architectural agendas - focussing on social rather than technical functionality – have been sketched out. Here a hint must suffice. In my theory of architecture, I categorize these agendas under four headings: spatiology (organisation), phenomenology (articulation), semiology (communication), and dramaturgy (interaction). This list of theory-led, genuinely architectural R&D agendas is meant to serve here to point more concretely to the discursive opportunity costs that come with allowing sustainability to usurp all the airtime.

To be fair, some aspects of sustainability are within the architects’ domain, namely those which have to do with the composition of the massing relative to sun exposure. It is also worthy to note that the paradigm of “tectonism” (2) I am promoting is utilizing engineering logics – including environmental engineering – as drivers for an enriched phenomenological and semiological articulation, i.e. the genuinely architectural agenda of articulation serving social functionality by enhancing the communicative capacity of architecture in the service of the built environment’s legibility. (However, this agenda of legibility – while using the telling, differentiated morphologies that emerge from environmental engineering – is in no way an automatic fall-out from the sustainability agenda but requires its own discourse.) After these caveats, I would like to return to the main argument that the sustainability agenda needs to be cut back to its proper size and positioned in its proper place within the overall architectural discourse.

My key point: The prioritising of sustainability is not only crowding out other, more important aspects of architecture, but it is putting the cart before the horse, by focussing on negative side-effects before focussing on positive goals. This point is decisive: Sustainability addresses only the cost side of a development. However, before we talk about minimising costs (in terms of carbon footprint) we should discuss the benefit side, i.e. we should, first of all, scrutinize and clarify the positive goals we are trying to achieve with the development. Only after we have ascertained the positive functions and social benefits we are aiming at, and only after we have selected one of many critically compared and appraised design proposals with respect to the social functionality performance criteria, can the cost question be meaningfully posed. Then the question can indeed be posed: How can the most beneficial design solution be realized in the most cost-effective way, with the lowest possible carbon footprint. To be sure: it can be objected that the cost aspect should be tracked alongside the exploration of benefits, rather than be left to a separate second step. However, it still makes heuristic sense to explore the maximisation of benefits initially independently of costs. In any event, the distinction of costs criteria and benefit criteria should be fundamental, and that the discussion of benefits must have logical priority over costs should be indisputable. Otherwise, the solution can only be: avoid building altogether. Therefore, if we set sustainability as top priority, abstaining altogether from development should be the conclusion, and it seems, some are indeed willing to draw this conclusion.

There is something seriously amiss and illogical in a discourse where the debate of how to minimize costs crowds out the logically prior debate of how to maximise benefits. This verdict of being illogical can only be avoided if the benefit side is seen to be trivial, given, ahistorical, fixed. If sustainability (minimizing environmental costs) takes up all the airtime in a discourse, then this discourse seems to assume that the goals and desires that motivate development are clear without requiring discussion. Further, this discourse must assume that the design solutions delivering the desired benefits are known and can be taken for granted. Such a discourse, by implication, is not expecting any scope for innovation on the benefit side of development.

How to lower the carbon footprint of a building does not tell us anything about how to shape the building with respect to end-user needs and societal needs. Those who think that there is nothing more important to be concerned about than sustainability, operate with the implicit assumption that the needs of individuals, groups and societies have long since been settled, leaving only the cost aspect as a live concern. This is a false assumption.

This attitude might work in other industries: If you want to produce steel, the positive goal is indeed trivial: you simply want to produce more steel, of this or that standard grade. Here predominant or even exclusive focus on costs makes sense. But architecture and urban development are not like this at all. Here the goals that might be pursued are complex, multi-facetted, and require much debate to be clarified and updated. The same applies to the exploration of the solution space, once the goals are broadly defined. These questions should be prioritized and deserve to absorb the bulk of the discursive space in our discipline and profession.

The problem is: to formulate the positive goals and positive criteria of success and ways of appraising ("measuring") this success is truly non-trivial, and to measurably innovate on the side of the benefits is even more demanding. There are many perspectives and myriads of parameters to be considered and a potentially vast search space to be explored. One might surmise that is why so many architects (and clients too) fall back on sustainability as easy criterion to set targets and to measure success, although this says NOTHING about the success in terms of the original purposes of the project that motivate the project in the first place.

I have seen this fallacy be committed by the most sophisticated clients. For instance: When Google was looking for an architect to design its new campus in Mountain View, they set their NetZero target as the primary criterion to select their architect for. (This was in an earlier round of solicitation, not the round where BIG/Heatherwick were chosen). An absurd neglect of the potential benefits a properly focussed design effort could deliver in terms of Google’s primary purpose: the productivity enhancement for the many thousands of creative workers who were to be gathered on the new premises to collaborate there. This swapping of priorities makes neither sense for Google, nor for the global common weal: a google R&D campus is not the right occasion to foreground the aggressive curbing of carbon emissions as primary goal. It patently irrational to hand over this precious occasion to craft an intricate platform for knowledge exchange and collaboration - a high productivity social machine - to a virtue signalling event. The contribution from the trivial amount of carbon emission reduction that can be achieved here stands in no meaningful relation to the foregone boost to world prosperity that an enhanced synergy process across thousands of smart knowledge workers can be expected to generate. Obviously, Google did not understand the difference architecture can make. This failure in Google’s understanding about where architectural innovation and optimisation might be possible with respect to their project was probably due to the way Google’s facility managers and inhouse architects were blinded by the way sustainability had (and continues to) dominate the architects’ discourse. To be sure: I would never object to bringing in sustainability criteria in the subordinated position they logically belong, after the social performance criteria have been allowed to select the best solution in line with the original purpose of the project.

The re-balancing of the priorities of architectural discourse is more urgent than ever, especially with AI capabilities boosting our power of creative exploration and testing. The time is ripe to attempt to re-vitalize, or rather to resuscitate. our discipline, a discipline that has been committing suicide by pushing woke, anti-capitalist social justice agendas in academia and a one-sided, illogically prioritized sustainability agenda within the profession, thereby crowding out all its innovation potential, and undoing all that had - since the Renaissance - elevated architecture above mere building.

(1) Schumacher, Patrik. The End of Architecture, Published in: KHOREIN – Journal for Architecture and Philosophy, Vol 2, No 2 (2025)

https://www.academia.edu/127571727/The_End_of_Architecture

(2) Schumacher, Patrik. Tectonism – Architecture for the Twenty-First Century

published by: Images Publishing – The Arts Bridge, Melbourne 2023