Abstract
This chapter is structured in three parts that use different entry points to approach sustainable architecture as a condition of a material assemblage that combines concepts, buildings, structures, educational and professional practices, political and financial conditions, global technologies, local techniques, friendships, alliances, weather conditions and apparatuses of capture. Part 1 provides a thinking device for discussing architecture’s lively matter beyond the straitjacket of sustainability guidelines and questions the Siamese birth that ties sustainability to development. In Part 2, Waterbanks—PITCHAfrica case study—unfolds the complex assemblage of sustainable architecture operations in Africa. In Part 3, both authors reflect on the architecture knowledge assemblage within which their alternative professional and educational practice emerged. Can their experimentations with ATOPIA and SARCHA be understood as ‘sustainable’ architecture practices? To formulate differently the chapter’s main question: Can ‘sustainable’ architecture be produced only within a different mindset that generates another type of practice and education?
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Notes
- 1.
“We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace…”.
- 2.
‘…problema can signify projection or protection that which one poses or throws in front of oneself, either as the projection of a project, of a task to accomplish, or as the protection created by a substitute, a prosthesis that we put forth in order to represent, replace, shelter, or dissimulate ourselves, or so as to hide something unavowable –like a shield (problema also means shield, clothing as barrier or guard-barrier) behind which one guards oneself in secret or in shelter in case of danger’ (Derrida 1993, pp. 11–12).
- 3.
ATOPIA founding members are David Turnbull and Jane Harrison www.pitch-africa.org.
- 4.
School of Architecture for All (SARCHA) non-profit was initiated by Maria Theodorou and Larry Cool in 2006 www.sarcha.gr.
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Theodorou, M., Turnbull, D. (2016). Sustainable Architecture Assemblages. In: Dastbaz, M., Strange, I., Selkowitz, S. (eds) Building Sustainable Futures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19348-9_12
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