10. Aesthetic Experience and Agency of Environmental Architecture – Could Beauty Save the World?

Maiju Suomi

In her design work and research Maiju Suomi examines how architecture can contribute to dismantling the dichotomy between nature and culture. Suomi is pursuing an artistic PhD on the topic in the Empirica research group in the Department of Design at Aalto University, Helsinki. In her work as a teacher at the Department of Architecture at Aalto, she endeavors to foster the perception of architecture as a medium of societal debate and change.

Living as a member of the human community in the 2020s amidst a complex environmental crisis requires continuous ethical consideration. Each day we receive more information on the devastating impact our species has on the life-sustaining processes of our planet. The climate crisis, loss of biodiversity, and deforestation cut to the core of our existence and simultaneously threaten the necessities of life for millions of other species. We must rethink our position as part of a living Earth. Research on biology and ecology draws a picture of how entwined our existence is to living organisms and inorganic things. Our well-being is directly reliant on the balance of our planet’s ecosystems. Are we missing the link between knowledge, ethical consideration, and the practice of ethical behavior?

In this text, I examine the potential architecture has to take part in the environmental discussion through its aesthetic expression. In architecture, environmental questions have mainly been dealt with pragmatically, concerning quantifiable aspects of buildings. The focus has been on the consumption of materials and energy. Mediating new thoughts and meanings through spatial experiences has been left aside. As we search for a sustainable way of life on our planet, societal change must reach a deeper level than that of making our current processes more efficient. We must re-evaluate our priorities and world views. Architecture as a form of cultural expression provides a medium for this endeavor.

As art forms go, architecture is in a unique position, as it is simultaneously a concrete element in the environment of our daily lives, as well as a meaning-laden cultural structure. We inhabit architecture. It shelters us from the forces of nature and molds our environment to suit our needs. It also characterizes our connection to the surrounding reality - and therein lies its transformative power. The built environment shapes our relationship with the world. Architecture can consolidate dominant values or bring forth a new perception of our place in the living organism that is our planet.

Professor of Architecture Susannah Hagan (1), among other critical voices, has argued for a more integrated approach to environmental architecture operating both in the realms of technology and art. We need technical research and practical applications which allow us to minimize the environmental impacts of building in practice. This alone is not enough, however. To have societal influence, architecture must be capable of communicating on a cultural level through its aesthetics. Environmental architecture must simultaneously be an environmental act as well as its symbolic representation.

The relationship between ecological objectives and beauty, as the multisensory spatial experiences and narrative qualities of the built environment, has been complicated. Aesthetics have been seen as a separate layer to be added on top of the hard core of sustainable, resource-conscious architecture. Sensorial qualities are a luxury, something we cannot afford amidst the struggle for survival. But is it not beauty that can disarm us, and help convey new thoughts in ways that simple facts cannot? Aesthetic experiences can speak to us on an emotional level, leaving a trace and inviting us to re-evaluate that which we previously knew for certain.

Political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett (2) builds a bridge between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. She emphasizes the relevance of human emotional states for ethical re-evaluation. She specifically refers to a state of enchantment, an openness to the unusual, a mix between delight and disturbance. Bennett argues that the animating force of an emotional experience may lead the way for ethical thinking to turn into ethical action. Architecture has the power to lead us into surprising new experiences in the middle of our everyday environment. What if we utilized this potential to create new ways to experience the relationship between nature and our culture? Knowledge alone cannot make us question our way of life. We need new cultural tools with which to examine our relationship with the environment. Narratives, images, and spaces can move us to change the world. 

Searching for the form of environmental architecture

What can we base the aesthetic expression of environmental architecture on? Here I will examine different principles of identification and design, which can help us approach form-giving in environmentally conscious architecture.

Architecture alone cannot create societal change, but it can foster change by making it visible in our shared environment. Susannah Hagan (3) calls for architecture which operates both on the level of the quantitative and the experiential. Environmental architecture needs to express aesthetically its operational goals to improve the state of natural environments. This does not lead to a specific style but rather to an attitude which can take countless physical forms.

Architecture is always born in relation to place and its natural and cultural characteristics. Contextual design is one of the main principles of environmental architecture according to both Hagan (4) and architect Lance Hosey (5). A thorough understanding of a projects’ context creates a basis for design choices that both conserve energy and materials, and allow for a site-specific identity to emerge. Through adapting to its environments, architecture creates cultural diversity. Experientially attaching a building to its context roots it in place and its perpetual state of change. We are not separate; our dwellings are born in connection to their surroundings.

A reciprocal relationship with nature also acts as a basis for the functions of a building. Hagan (6) notes that the function of architecture must be based on symbiosis with natural processes. A building forms a dynamic structural and functional system which in turn is related to other systems also in flux. Design must seek to nurture these relationships, not harm them.

In the principles of ecologically sustainable design Hosey (7) highlights conservation of resources and energy. How do we utilize natural resources as efficiently as possible to meet our spatial needs? Our societies must learn to create welfare for all with ever fewer resources. As designers, we must rethink both spatial needs and ways to meet them. Our material consumption needs to recognize scarcity and rely on reuse and recycling. If, after careful consideration, we decide to build something new, the building must serve its users for several lifetimes.

How can we ascertain the longevity of a building? We often look at this through material and functional durability, forgetting the cultural aspects. What keeps a building in use over generations? Lance Hosey points out the connection between pleasure and caretaking. We only care for that which we love. Our built environment should thus produce well-being and feel meaningful across generations. But what kind of places bring joy to human beings? I wonder if many of the environments we build today increase well-being. Is it even very high on the list of values guiding contemporary design? Both Hosey and architectural critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen (8) examine perspectives psychology and neuroscience provide for environmental design. The form, light, colors, sounds, and textures of our spaces deeply affect our worldly experiences. Our multisensory, partly unconscious experience of our environment colors our mental state and thinking more than we have understood. In a world of dwindling resources, it is natural to think that each building should promote well-being, for humans but also for other species. While environmental architectural discourse already extends to the aesthetics, the sensory experiences, and their power for cultural expression, it is still very human-centered.

The theme of environmentally conscious architecture is not new as such. The relationship to place and the natural forces which define space, as well as conserving resources, bear the imprints of vernacular architecture and the ways indigenous peoples inhabit their environment. Western architecture and the ontology it is based on have just forgotten these principles and been fooled into regarding themselves as separate from nature. Now we can reconnect. 

Binding together culture and nature

Western culture has dealt with humans’ relationship to nature as a dualism. We perceive ourselves outside of, or rather above nature. The late environmental philosopher and ecofeminist Val Plumwood (9) bases the ecological crisis on the divide between humans and nature dominating Western thinking. Dualism as a defining principle justifies both masculine control and control over nature. Rationality separates man from animal, knowledge from emotion, mind from body. The latter is always subordinate and instrumental to the first. To reach the core drivers behind the environmental crisis, we must weave our existence back into connection with nature. I will now examine theoretical deconstructions of this dualism and reflect what it implies for our view of architecture.

Multispecies feminist theorist, Donna Haraway (10) explores the naturecultures of multiple species, where cultural and natural domains are intrinsically entwined. We are shaped by other species. Our existence is part of a shared complex web of living and dying. Haraway bids us to “stay with the problem” and find ways to inhabit a wounded Earth together with nonhuman things. We cannot grasp easy solutions like reliance on fast technological advancement or divine intervention. We must instead accept our dependency on our planet’s welfare and take responsibility for our actions as part of global systems. Staying with the trouble can happen through storytelling, play, and working towards building new possible futures. Haraway invites us to create new forms of culture to examine the collaborative shaping of our existence.

In “Vibrant Matter”, Jane Bennett (11) presents principles for new materialism and the concept of vital materiality. We are accustomed to thinking of material as immobile, passive, an instrument to be used by living creatures, but Bennet introduces the mutability and active agency of matter. Living matter connects humans and other species, organic and inorganic creatures, and leads to entwined existence, where things have agency regardless of their humanity. This equalizes our relation to nonhuman matter and helps us transcend human-centered thinking. Nature and caring for it is no longer separate from us, outside, around us - we become part of a whole.

Science and technology scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (12) connects feminist critical thinking on care with more than human ontologies and ecological practices such as permaculture. She explores the ethical ramifications of broadening our conception of care as something that only humans do into a living web of care in which all of the natural world takes part. Caring enfolds everything we do to sustain life and its diversity in connection with the more than human world. How does the world care for us? We would not have homes or nourishment if other species did not in countless ways help to sustain our life. Can we take responsibility for our role in this system?

Western dualism, our imagined separation from nature, manifests in our relationship to architecture in many ways. We are accustomed to thinking of the line drawn by architecture between humans and nature as clear and impassable. We control internal conditions and shut out otherness. We build ourselves safe and comfortable spaces that the threatening unfamiliarity of nature cannot touch. What kind of shapes would architecture take if we made space for nature, matter, our body, emotion, the animals in us, and others? Posthumanism and new materialism provide a theoretic background for architecture that entwines instead of ripping apart.

The thought of separation keeps us distant from a community that transcends humanity. It enables resource thinking - nature as raw material, the conception, use, and discarding of which has no consequence. If we heed the call to reframe the narrative of our relation to other species, matter, and life-sustaining processes, what kind of realities do we create? Control founded on dualism shifts and becomes reciprocal, requiring the redefinition of how we see ourselves and others. How can we represent this paradigm shift through the medium of architecture?

Finally

There is space for beauty. Beauty is a downright necessity. Why fight with one arm bound, if we could speak to people through aesthetic experiences? Environmentally conscious architecture cannot afford to ignore its power of cultural expression as part of societal discourse. 

What form that expression takes depends on individual perspectives and priorities. We need a multitude of voices to find a way to speak of the environmental crisis through architecture. We must face the challenge of building alternate realities. They will communicate to others that change is possible.

references

1 Hagan, S. 2001. Taking Shape: A New Contract between Architecture and Nature. Architectural Press. ja Hagan, S. 2008. Five Reasons to Adopt Environmental Design. In: Saunders, W. (ed.), Landscape and Building for Sustainability: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader. University of Minneapolis Press.

2 Bennett, J. 2001. The Enchantment of modern world. Princeton University Press.

3 Hagan, S. 2001. Taking Shape: A New Contract between Architecture and Nature. Architectural Press.

4 ibid.

5 Hosey, L. 2012. The Shape of Green: aesthetics, ecology, and design. Island Press.

6 Hagan, S. 2001. Taking Shape: A New Contract between Architecture and Nature. Architectural Press.

7 Hosey, L. 2012. The Shape of Green: aesthetics, ecology, and design. Island Press.

8 Goldhagen, S. 2017. Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives. Harper Collins Publishers.

9 Plumwood, V. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge.

10 Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chtulucene. Duke University Press.

11 Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

12 Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2017. Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.