building ecologies yui + flynn

Environmental sustainability is currently regarded as a critical issue to be addressed in architectural practice. Whilst the issue of sustainability pertains to a wide field of areas ranging from the technical to socio-political, the prevalent approach – evidenced by the numerous energy assessment tools available – appears to define sustainability as a measurable entity, defined narrowly within the parameters of a building’s sustainable technologies. Whilst the understanding and development of these technologies is important in a move towards a sustainable built environment, it seems to overlook the inherent problem which exists today: the social inertia towards environmental sustainability. Furthermore, it may be argued that over-emphasis on a building’s sustainable technologies has the potential to cultivate a mentality that technology will ‘take care of it’, resulting in a loss of responsibility over our own actions.


The underlying problem in this approach seems to be the lack of acknowledgement that buildings would not exist without its inhabitants; where are the users in these definitions of sustainability? How can we incorporate the use of such technologies where appropriate, without undermining the intelligence, capability, and contribution of the users themselves? Rather than investing sustainability into measurable objects reliant on technology, can we inject
sustainability into the processes of a building’s wider ecology?

Perhaps the imperative is in the need to ask where the knowledge or value is invested. In sustainable building technologies and materials, the innovation and sustainable value is contained within the physical object. As such, the knowledge or value dies with the building, leaving behind no knowledge or value to be inherited by the users or future. If sustainability can extend beyond the physical building, its value can also be carried to further boundaries. It is about investing sustainability not into technologies, but into the people and processes, that will allow it to evolve and be passed on to future generations. Embodied through users and process, a building’s sustainability becomes more than an object or product, but an ecology. In achieving such social sustainability, sustainability can be embedded into our intuitive or routine actions, with the potential to be taken and evolved in future generations.

Below, we examine how interaction with a building’s greater ecology can be facilitated and manifested
by these processes