I would like to give thanks for the opportunity I have had
to go back to school and devote my time to study. True, this has been made possible due to
student loans, and a scrapping together of research funds, but I recognize that
it is a privilege to even be able to return to school as an adult. I am fortunate to live in a part of the world
where this is possible.
So today, as I get closer to the final defense of my
dissertation, I want to share some of my findings. My reason for going back to school was to
identify the conditions and constraints to increased depth and breadth of sustainability
in the built environment. Just meeting
the commercial terms of time/ cost/ and quality is not enough anymore, nor is
the “do no further harm” approach to sustainability. That window of opportunity is closed, and now
we need to design “regenerative” buildings, which contribute in a positive way
to the eco-system, the social system, and the economy.
What I found is that the biggest obstacles are not codes,
nor lack of innovation, nor cost. It is
the ability to envision the future in order to make it a reality. That may seem like a very bold or very
simplistic statement. It is both, and
comes after 3 years of school and more than a decade of experience of trying to
“fix” the problem via codes, materials, distribution of innovation, and so
forth. But the ability to see the future
is, in fact, very challenging.
I had the opportunity to work with a very progressive design
team, which had full participation of the owner, contractor, designer, and
engineer in a highly integrated process.
They were amazing in their ability to deliver on project
specifications. At first, I thought
there was no more room for improvement, they were so exemplary. But there was an Achilles heel, and that was
the ability to collectively see and design a future state which transcended the
limitations of current assumptions.
They were their own obstacle.
As part of my research, I developed a workshop for the team to
help them break past the existing mental barriers of discipline-centric
thinking, explore the whole systems concepts of sustainable
prosperity, and engage in design thinking to imagine a scenario of ecological
balance between man and nature. While
the workshop design was quite innovative, what was most impressive was the potential
brainpower which was generated in this constraint-free forum. Even in the short half day seminar, this
group came up with some very insightful ideas.
The greatest opportunity in the construction industry is
sitting right in front of us: harnessing
the knowledge and abilities of the professionals in the industry. It may sound simple, but it is a radical
departure from the status quo. It requires a change in the way we organize our
design and construction process, it redistributes accountability and triggers a
call for new skills. It is a change from
a design approach of breaking everything down into parts, and replacing it with
a systems approach, looking at relationships and impacts internal and external
to the building. This would be a shift
from a human-centric view of the world to one of shared responsibility for each
other, and our planet. I have seen a
group of tough contractors “get it.” Now it is our turn.
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1 comment:
You touched on something incredibly important--how do we create the conditions for thinking beyond current awareness, beyond the familiar, beyond appearance?
Since no one as far as I know is doing public polling relative to how much freethinking, imaginative, status quo -overcoming capacity there is out there, you have to rely on anecdotes like yours. A few I've found:
a) "When I teach this class on utopian thought I ask students...design your own utopia, or what should utopia include. And generally I'm amazed at the poverty of imagination--how limited people can think." From an interview with UCLA Professor Russell Jacoby on the Changesurfer Radio podcast: 'The Decline of Utopianism and the Public Intellectuals', from June 6, 2010. Is it fair to assume that Jacoby's observation is true of the huge majority?
b) Even among those who should be better practiced at exercising their imaginations relative to alternative futures, things might not be much better: "My own experience, reported elsewhere, in conducting 250 people at a World Future Society meeting through a three-hour exercise on the next thousand-year future, was disappointing. People were asked as a wrap-up to create a picture or an image of some tiny piece of life in the world 3000. The responses could have been drawn from situations found in the previous six months of the New York Times." From Joseph Coates in Viable Utopian Ideas (2003) p. 31.
c) Or, take an observation made by Reinhold Martin regarding his book Utopia's Ghost: "The systematic, almost technical training of the imagination away from such thought was and remains a travesty that is surely the most enduring and deleterious legacy of postmodernism." "Much of the impetus for writing the book came from sitting on design juries and teaching studios in which it was clear, time and again, that students were simply unable to think structural change in the present. ‘‘Architecture or revolution?’’ had ceased to be a question. Not universally, but predominantly." http://www.scribd.com/doc/93395957/Interview-With-Reinhold-Martin-Utopia-s-Ghost-2010-Architectural-Theory-Review p. 325
The roots of this problem--however we define it--are deep. We don't teach futures thinking, systems thinking, or cultivate creativity as an explicit and desirable outcome in our educational systems anywhere. Education largely serve to reinforce received opinion--hardly a new observation, I know. Maybe architectural pedagogy will do something about this in the future, maybe a future building standard will--imagine a future LEED standard that requires evidence of creative engagement or course credits in futures studies.
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