vernacular is employed much more literally; inothers, a preoccupation - PDF document

vernacular is employed much more literally; inothers, a preoccupation with new technologies andmaterials predominates. As will become apparent,within the new materialist remit of environmentalethics, those who tend to be dismissed architec-turally – the architects following tradition mostclosely – are held by some within environmentaldesign to be the most ethical, while those pushingthe technology envelope are condemned as theleast ethical.In noting the introduction of empirical scienceinto the ethics of environmental design, I mean notso much that the science involved is containedwithin an ethical framework, though this is so, butthat the framework itself is in part constituted bythis empirical science. That is, ethical behaviourwithin architecture has a newly acquired material,as well as moral, basis; or rather, this moral basiscan now be supported quantitatively as well asqualitatively. This is not to say that quantity doesnot enter into conventional ethical judgement. Ourconcept of justice derives quantities of guilt fromthe quantity of intention judged to have beeninvolved. This is expressed in ‘degrees’ of murder:‘Žrst degree murder’, because entirely intentional,receives a quantitatively greater punishment than‘second degree murder’, or manslaughter.The same correspondence between the ethicaland the quantitative holds true in environmentaldesign, but the relationship goes further: there arenot only measurable degrees of pollution, there are also measurable proofs of degrees of pollution.These measurements are the result of an analysisof what is called embodied energyin buildings.Embodied energy is that contained within thematerials constituting a building. It is a measure-ment of the energy used for the extraction and preparation – or manufacture – of buildingmaterials. If this energy were clean, say, solar, itwould be unproblematic. But, for the most part, it is fossil fuel energy – oil, coal – which is gener-ally agreed to be overheating and polluting theatmosphere. Wood, for example, has the leastembodied energy, requiring 639 kilowatt-hours per tonne to bring it into being. Obviously, woodis created by solar, not fossil energy, but it isexpressed in equivalent terms to serve as a yard-stick against which to measure building materialsthat are produced with fossil fuels. For example,brick requires four times the amount of energy toproduce as wood does. Glass requires 14 times theamount, steel 24 times, and aluminium a stag-gering 125 times the amount.Embodied energy is one part of a larger, muchmore complex appraisal of the materiality of build-ings called Life Cycle Analysis(LCA), which takesinto account not only the energy embodied inmaterials, but that expended in bringing thematerials to site, usually by truck, assembling theminto a building, and, at the end of the building’slife, recycling or dumping the unwanted materials.One moves, therefore, from the relatively moreprecise but generalised quantities of embodiedenergy to very imprecise juggling acts between onevariable and another involved in LCA. For example,steel requires relatively large amounts of fossil fuelfor its manufacture relative to concrete. But thesteel foundry may be 10 minutes away from thesite, and the concrete may require a much higherexpenditure of fossil fuel to transport it there. The108The good, the bad and the juggledSusannah Hagan and Žlth are the outward and visible signs of aninward and invisible state of grace or its lack.Within the environmental hermeneutic, they arethe outward and visible signs of a considerationfor the community, or its lack. Ethical work prac-tices in the factory or on the building site may bebeyond the reach of the architect, but ethical spec-iŽcation of building materials is not. Is it ethical,therefore, to put the high performance of, say,aluminium, before its quantiŽably demonstrabledamage to the environment, and thus to thecommunity’s health? It is only the scientiŽc analysisof building materials from this particular quantita-tive perspective that has enabled such a questionto be asked, and such an ethical position to betaken or refused. This conclusion raises two largerissues. The Žrst is the seemingly automatic equa-tion of the ethical with the environmentallyconcerned, and the second is the revaluation ofthe materiality of architecture through the re-minted ethical signiŽcance of that materiality.To take the Žrst question Žrst: who awarded thisbadge of ethics to environmentalism? Did environ-mentalists claim the moral high ground unilaterally,or does environmentalism conform to the require-ments of the ‘moral science’ so strictly that suchan award is inevitable? If we take as a very basicdeŽnition of the ethical that position whichconsiders entities as things-in-themselves ratherthan as means to ends – if, in other words, to be ethical is to repudiate instrumentality – thenenvironmentalism certainly qualiŽes as ‘ethical’:‘nature’ is no longer to be seen as ‘a storehouseof matter’ (Francis Bacon) for our exploitation. Thedisagreements come in deŽning these ‘entities’within the context of environmentalism. Are theyexclusively human? Are they all living things? Orare they all living things before the human (thewhole before the most presumptuous part), whichis the position of ‘deep ecologists’? This clash ofdeŽnitions points to a not infrequent clash betweenenvironmental sustainability and social sustain-ability. Which position, for example, is more ethical:concern for the lives of trees, or concern for thelivelihoods of the loggers felling those trees? Onecould argue that concern for the trees is a concernfor both, as loggers, like the rest of us, need tobreathe. Despite such conicts of interpretation,however, I think one can say with some justiŽca-tion that environmentalism as a whole is ethical,in that it seeks a cooperative, rather than exploit-ative, relation between humans and the biosphere,which often involves establishing similar unex-ploitative relations between groups of humans.There are, then, within environmental design,‘categorical imperatives’, to use Kant’s terminology,‘thou shalts’ and ‘thou shalt nots’, but the contentof these imperatives is under constant debate.Nevertheless, a large element of utilitarian ‘greatestgood for the greatest number’ informs environ-mental judgements, and with the exception of thedeep ecologists, this is usually taken to mean the greatest number of human beings. The ‘good’in this case is universal physical health and well-being, and a fairer distribution of natural resourcesand their beneŽts, but not at the cost of the health and well-being of either the planet, or offuture generations of human beings.The second issue raised by this area of empiricalethics is the revaluing of materiality, not only in110The good, the bad and the juggledSusannah Hagan ‘In architecture there are two necessary ways of being true. It must be true according to theprogramme and true according to the methods ofconstruction. To be true according to the pro-gramme is to fulŽl, exactly and simply, the condi-tions imposed by need; to be true according to the methods of construction is to employ thematerials according to their qualities and proper-ties ... ‘4This begs various questions. Are there only ‘two necessary ways of being true’ – that is, virtuous? Is architecture-as-representation any less true than architecture-as-programme-and-structure? Aremeanings other than tectonic ones any less true?The nineteenth-century debate, on one level, wasabout metaphor. Is it moral to express a truth Žgu-ratively – that is, ‘untruthfully’ – with wood paintedas marble, or joints developed in one medium, saywood, reproduced in another, say stone? Is a Žgura-tive truth (a metaphor) then a lie? What if the mes-sage is about the irrelevance of Ruskinian ‘virtue’?The threat that the moralists perceived in the sepa-ration of representation and material constitutionimplies that one can draw a clear line between them.However, the closer materiality and representationget to each other – that is, the nearer the mediumcomes to being the message, or rather amessage –the more this line is blurred.This is certainly true within sustainable architec-tures, in which the ‘thingness’ of building materialskeeps spilling over into the domain of the symbolic.The use, for example, of locally available materialsin sustainable architectures certainly addresses thebuilding-as-physical object, in that it is attemptingto keep the use of fossil energy to a minimum, butat the same time the choice of those materials isculturally as well as environmentally signiŽcant, in that it employs the palette of the surroundingtraditional context. And, of course, environmentalsigniŽcance is itself culturally signiŽcant, and cultur-ally constructed. In fact, one could argue that it iseasier to pursue the building-as-sign and dismissits materiality – assuming it can stand up and keepout the rain – than it is to pursue the building-as-thing and dismiss its representational role, as itsvery thingness, its materiality, can’t avoid bearingmeanings.In sum, the introduction of morality into nine-teenth-century architectural debates was largelymisdirected. The ethical problem lay in the meansof production, not the means of expression. It wasthrough the new mass production of materials thatthe community – of workers, citizens and nature– was endangered, as Ruskin warned again andagain. This was not the direction the argumenttook, however. Architects, understandably enough,were more interested in that over which they hadsome control, and they had more control overarchitectural expression than over industrial produc-tion.Later twentieth-century arguments about mate-riality have carried the same emphasis on expres-sion rather than constitution. Semperians werereplaced by semiologists, and materialists by phe-nomenologists, though the latter were as eager toavoid the dead hand of modernist functionalism asthey were to wrest architecture back from thosewho had so successfully dematerialised it into asystem of signs. The Heideggerian phenomenology112The good, the bad and the juggledSusannah Hagan are not included as things-in-themselves, but as lostreferents.The architect Raphael Moneo is also concernedwith loss:‘I think that perhaps we are so concerned withmaterials because we feel that their importanceescapes our world somehow. It may be that wehave lost contact with their meaning. This proce-dure involves, perhaps, a certain nostalgia for anarchitecture in which materials would play a moreimportant role.’9Part of this lost meaning concerns the loss of‘natural materials’, which had clearly perceivable‘natures’. New compounds and polymers maketheir physical properties much more difŽcult toascertain, and their ‘meanings’, in the sense ofstone–load-bearing/glass–light, much more difŽ-cult to derive. But there is now the possibility ofother meanings inherent in materials – ethicalmeanings. The new concept of embodied energyin building materials has enabled expression to belinked directly to means of material production, andthus to real, as opposed to imaginary, ethicaldilemmas; that is, ones that directly affect the well-being of the community in a way that the ‘honest’expression of materials or their masking does not.The new ‘truth to materials’ is not that of ‘tellingthe truth’ about them, as in ‘what you see is whatyou get’, but of weighing up the effect of theirproduction on the well-being of the community.Being able to read clearly what a building is madeof, and how it is made, is irrelevant within this newdispensation. What is important is the fact of amaterial’s presence, not its readability. Wood maybe painted to look like aluminium, but the decep-tion is harmless. What would be genuinely harmful,under certain circumstances, and thus unethical, isthe use of real aluminium. A nostalgia, then, for alost meaning in materials is unnecessary. Looked atdifferently, in architecture and design, there is aworld of meaning in them, meanings that have thepotential, if those on either side of the environ-mental divide recognised the value of the other’sinterests, of joining the ontological and the repre-sentational, of reconciling the ‘nature’ of materialswith the culture of meanings, and ‘truth tomaterials’ with the widest possible aesthetic expres-sion of that truth, expression that could wellinclude the ‘evils’ of imitation and ornament.Notes and references1.Scott Gartner quoted in Kenneth Frampton,Studies in Tectonic Culture(Cambridge, MA,MIT Press, 1995), pp. 10–11.2.Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den Technischenand Tektonischen Kunsten, vol.1 (Mittenwald,1977), p. 231.3.John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture(New York, Dover Publications Inc., 1989), p. 48.4.Viollet-le-Duc, Entretiens sur l’architecture, vol.1, trans. Benjamin Bucknall (London, GeorgeAllen & Unwin Ltd, 1959), p. 382.5.Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci(London,Academy Editions, 1980), p. 15.6.Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phen-omenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloom-ington, Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 197.114The good, the bad and the juggledSusannah Hagan