BioInspired! So What? Now What!

Carmela Cucuzzella is hosting a session track on Contradictions of Sustainable Design Practice.  See Call for Papers for contact information.

In the contemporary era of sustainability, the design discipline is being transformed in a variety of ways. The dichotomy between extensive performance measurements and the complexity of architectural design projects is becoming a disciplinary problematic, specifically with regards to the way buildings are conceptualized and judged today. Some of the main strategies for dealing with the degrading environmental and social conditions are (1) ecological-efficiency – producing more with less - less energy, less water, etc.; (2) substitutability of natural capital – recreating nature through biomimetics or genetic engineering; and (3) immateriality – adopting an economy of services.

All are approaches related to environmental performance improvements. Each of these has obvious benefits, but they are not without their flaws or paradoxes for design practice. This session is dedicated to the reflection, theorization and study of specific cases of these emerging contradictions related to design for sustainability. Specifically of interest, are the paradoxes related to the ways in which sustainability is reduced in design practice and how these conceptual reductions present contradictions, whether they may be in the environment, in society, in the drastically changing aesthetic of the built environment, or in any combinations of these. Are sustainability requirements re-enforcing the definition of architectural quality as a whole or are they rather distancing from and fragmenting this definition?