There has been an excellent deal of willful misreading and selective quoting of the arguments I’ve got tried to line forward recently in response to editorials and articles produced by New Urbanists, neo-traditionalists, and people who think that environmental concerns should dominate not just how buildings work, but how they seem. I believe that we’ve got to make buildings that use minimal natural resources. I don’t believe, however, that the trail to sustainable architecture necessarily runs through the mitigation use of scarce resources in either construction or occupation by using gadgets or expensive variations on standard building technology to, for example, store heat in walls.
I think that we rather, first, should ask the question all told cases: can we really want more buildings? The challenge to architects is to seek out ways within which they’ll use their skills and knowledge not just to provide buildings on demand, but to seek out ways within which they’ll contribute to a stronger (in a social sense, particularly else) environment by finding ways to reuse existing buildings and materials, or perhaps to search out solutions for companies, institutions, governments, or individuals that don’t involve the development of recent space. Sometimes you don’t need a brand new building, just a more robust conception of who or what you’re and the way you function. this can be the elemental dilemma architects must face: How to not simply build, but to create our environmental and social situation better—and still, get paid. If a brand new building is completely necessary, it should be good. It should work well and answer all codes, but that’s only the start point. It should offer spaces that don’t imprison and pigeonhole us. It should enhance its site. It should be beautiful.
What it means to be beautiful or to figure well are, of course, subjective questions. I don’t think there’s one style or one approach that has all the answers. I’m wary of what I feel are pseudo-scientific approaches to measuring such things, though I’m hospitable ways within which we will more clearly articulate and judge what’s good and what works. However, rather than taking solace in formulas or rote recitations of traditions, we should always ask the question what’s appropriate, what’s needed, what’s possible, and what are our dreams and aspirations. we must always build with what we all know, for a reality, but also towards a better—again in an exceedingly social, environmental, and aesthetic sense—reality. However, I don’t think we usually know what that “better” is. I don’t think we all know what “the people” or “the silent majority” or the other definition of all us together “want.” that’s exactly what we’ve to find through the method of architecture.
While we try this, we’ve to comprehend that it’s not “the people” who commission architecture. I don’t mean to applaud or condone this case, just to illustrate that false populism misses the point: people who have the means get to come to a decision about what, where, and the way buildings are made. To entail a populist architecture is to incorporate a social and economic revolution. If that’s an excessive amount of to wish for, then we’ve got to work out how we will find ways to use the architect’s means, knowledge, and opportunities to try and do what she or he, who has the facility to style the building, thinks, supported her or his experience, skills, research, and asking of questions, is right. Architects must work out the case they’re in, so must do the correct thing. It can make it better in a very social and environmental sense. It can create the stages on which we will act out the roles we feel are ours to play with those we recognize as our fellow actors. Architecture should be neither weird nor boring, neither alien nor alienating, neither wasteful nor wanting within the qualities that make us human. It should be good.