Towards an Architectural Theory for Sustainability

Sustainability has become the horizon against which contemporary architecture measures itself, yet it too often collapses into technical standards, moral imperatives or rhetorical formulae. This volume asks what it would mean to reframe sustainability as a properly architectural question, one that compels the discipline to redefine its relation to form, materiality, technique, context, representation and political responsibility.Bringing together eighteen contributions across five sections, the book advances a coherent argument: that thinking architectural sustainability requires moving towards a political theory of context. Each section counters one of the reductions that impoverish current discourse, the technocratic, the idealistic, the universalistic, the functional and the moralistic, and reconstructs the historical, material, situated, representational and political conditions under which an architectural theory of sustainability becomes possible. Rather than proposing a doctrine, the volume produces the critical framework within which such a theory can be developed, tested through historical paradigms, material conditions, situated contexts, representational media and political visions.The book is addressed to scholars and advanced students of architectural theory, history and criticism, as well as to practitioners and researchers engaged with the intersections of sustainability, contemporary design culture and critical thought.