Redefining the limits of architectural judgment
Introduction
In this chapter we argue that architectural judgment is best understood and practiced as a public conversation through which we shape our material, social, and ecological conditions. We also hold that the qualitative and quantitative assessment tools of conventional architectural judgment have generally failed to stimulate the public conversations required to cultivate the collective knowledge, capacity, and will of stakeholders to create conditions that sustain life. We define “life” liberally, evoking the concept of “living systems,” which includes every living organism, every part of those living organisms, and communities of living organisms that include humans and non-humans (Capra 2005). Because both qualitative and quantitative assessment methods may provide reliable feedback about the health of living systems, and are essential for sustainable management of the built environment, we raise concerns about dominant modes of assessment. First, traditional qualitative assessment is too often limited to elite modes of judgment, or the exercise of “taste” (Bourdieu 1984), where architecture is understood as either private sentient experience or public representation of social values. Second, quantitative assessment is too often limited to professional modes of judgment, where architecture is understood primarily in the economic terms of efficiency. Although these modes of judgment retain some value, by limiting the capacity to judge the built environment to social elites on the one hand, or professional elites on the other, the act of judging architecture never becomes relevant to the 96% of the population who inhabit and commission it. Without such a highly relevant and highly public conversation, we can never construct a sustainable “building culture,” or “the coordinated system of knowledge, rules, and procedures that … sustain life” (Davis 2006; see also Baus and Schramm’s discussion of “Baukultur” in Chapter 10 of this volume and their emphasis on the importance of incorporating the knowledge of experts and laypersons inhabiting buildings in architectural judgment).
Given these observations about the limits of conventional public conversation about the built environment, we maintain that architectural judgment has a responsibility to advance regenerative design – broadly defined as design that goes beyond simply reducing negative ecological and social impacts by actually generating benefits and creating material, social, and ecological conditions in which life can flourish (see Figure 24.1). If architects are to meet this challenge, they will need to participate in, and lead public conversations to catalyze, regenerative places. These public conversations will necessarily integrate more inclusive forms of qualitative and quantitative assessment into a regenerative dialogue where stakeholders can make sense of the rich complexity of particular places, imagine a life-enhancing future, and enact systemic change. In what follows we outline four characteristics of public conversation essential to the success of regenerative design and identify capacities required of facilitators and participants in these conversations. We then demonstrate that such regenerative dialogue is, indeed, possible, drawing from research in various social sciences and examples from regenerative design practice.
FIGURE 24.1 The Interrelated Concepts of Regenerative Design. From Beyond LEED, exhibition at the University of Texas at Austin, Fall 2012.
Source: Elizabeth Walsh, designer, produced through http://www.wordle.net
Precepts
We are not the first to claim that architectural judgment should be an inclusive public conversation about how the design of our built environment might better address the world’s most pressing problems. Aaron Davis and Thomas Fisher make similar arguments in Chapters 2 and 7, and provide examples from history. Nor are we the first to take note of the destructive effects that dominant practices of urban design and development have had on the natural environment and many social communities. While scholars and activists have been documenting these environmental and equity concerns since at least the rise of the industrial city, Lewis Mumford brought them to the center of architectural criticism starting in the 1930s. In his 1938 The Culture of Cities, Mumford offered a powerful call to action:
We must alter the parasitic and predatory modes of life that now play so large a part, and we must create region by region, continent by continent, an effective symbiosis or a co-operative living together. The problem is to coordinate, on the basis of more essential human values than the will-to-power and the will-to-profits, a host of social functions and processes that we have hitherto misused in the building of cities and polities, or of which we have never rationally taken advantage.
The challenge is as salient in 2014 as it was in 1938. In a world mired by escalating climate change, dwelling disparities, and public health threats related to the built environment, it is more important than ever to develop forms of architectural judgment that can help harness a collective will capable of catalyzing such a “symbiosis” of diverse social and ecological systems. In this chapter, we also offer propositions from the emerging scholarship and practice of regenerative design as partial answers to these core challenges for architectural judgment, drawing primarily from three recent inquiries:
1 The Beyond LEED symposium, which convened 13 recognized sustainable design leaders for a dialogue on the future of architectural judgment at the University of Texas in January 2012 (Moore and Walsh 2012).
2 “Regenerative Design and Development,” a special issue of Building Research & Information including nine articles by leaders in the emerging regenerative design movement (Cole 2012a).
3 Questioning Architectural Judgment: The Problem of Codes in the United States, which subverts the apparent conflict between art and technology in architectural judgment by observing that both sets of criteria are socially constructed and therefore mutable (Moore and Wilson 2013).
We see promise for the future of regenerative design in architectural judgment, yet we also observe significant challenges.
Where we are: the crisis of architectural judgment
Our research identifies two primary obstacles to achieving regenerative design within conventional architectural discourse: it is both too exclusive, and too narrow. We will examine each claim in order.
First, we hold that the discourse of architectural judgment is far too exclusive. We live in a world where professional architects design only about 5 percent of the built environment (Box 2007), with the rest largely dictated by market forces moderated by mandated public policies (e.g. building and land use codes) and voluntary standards (e.g. most green building rating systems), a concern also emphasized by Baus and Schramm in Chapter 10. If we want our built environment to achieve sustainable outcomes, architects will need to use the power of public conversation to catalyze social learning and social movements that shift consumer preferences, establish public codes, and generate new practices that reflect core human values, such as the will to protect life in its full diversity (Moore and Wilson 2013).
Second, we hold that the discourse of architectural judgment is too narrow. It too frequently fails to consider the related concepts of place, consequence, and complexity. Similarly, it errs in viewing building users as passive consumers of the built environment instead of influential inhabitants (Cole 2012c). Far from being a static, isolated artifact that can be judged “good” or “bad” in the eye of its beholder, a building is a complex aesthetic, social, ecological, and technological system that changes over the course of time with its inhabitants and context (Moore and Walsh 2012). Buildings are not simply isolated works of art, they are built to perform, and to assist their inhabitants in achieving particular goals. It is not enough to judge a building in the design phase, nor immediately following the construction phase because significant consequences of the building happen only after the building is inhabited. By drawing from the literature and methods of the natural and social sciences, design teams, including architects, might learn to judge not only the visual consequences of their work, but also the environmental and social consequences. (See also Nussaume’s argument in Chapter 9 of this volume that architectural judgment should include social science methods and consideration of social and ecological contexts.)
The bad news is that these limitations of architectural judgment are deeply entrenched. Moore and Wilson observe that when Vitruvius recorded and codified the elements of ancient architecture, about 15 BCE, he was concerned with the practices of an entire building culture (Moore and Wilson 2013). However, with the rise of the Renaissance some sixteen centuries later, Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture shifted the emphasis of judgment from whole building cultures to the singular works of individual architects. For the first time in history, excellence in building style and practice became associated with the genius of single individuals, rather than that of a people (Habraken and Teicher 2005). “Excellent” design succeeded in distinguishing elite commissioners rather than benefiting the public. The modern standard of design excellence, derived from Palladio onward, has been abstract and universal, too often devoid of local context and the nuances of place (Moore and Wilson 2013). The all-too-obvious problem with employing such narrow and exclusive criteria for judgment, as constructed in the Renaissance, is that the social and ecological conditions in which we build today have radically changed.
Where we can go: toward regenerative design
The good news appears to be that the high stakes of the current crisis of architectural judgment create an opportunity to transform previously entrenched patterns and practices. We support a growing number of leaders in the sustainable design discourse in calling for a new conversation focused on regenerative design, defined as “a collaborative, inclusive, place-based conversation and call to action for stakeholders in the built environment to create a built environment that supports the flourishing of life” (Moore and Walsh 2012). As envisioned in Figure 24.2, regenerative design views the co-evolution of social, technological, and ecological systems as an active and intentional process; humans consciously shape our social, technological, and ecological environments through conversation and have responsibility to do so in a way that supports (human and non-human) life (Cole 2012a).
FIGURE 24.2 Public conversation as a driver of changing social, ecological, and material conditions
Source: authors.
Regenerative design offers a powerful call for a new kind of architectural judgment grounded in four integrated public conversations:
• an ethical and aesthetic conversation to imagine a world where life flourishes;
• an inclusive conversation that engages diverse stakeholders and builds collective will;
• a place-based conversation that builds on strengths and considers consequences;
• a conversation that builds capacity for relational systems thinking.
Although modern aesthetics and science often appear to be at odds with each other, regenerative design holds that “things judged truly beautiful will in time be regarded as those that raised the human spirit without compromising human dignity or ecological functions elsewhere” or at another time (Orr 2006). This aesthetic implies an ethical imperative to protect and engage vulnerable human populations who are rarely included in public conversations about their home environments, and are disproportionately burdened by the economic and aesthetic pursuits of those with power and resources (Bullard et al. 2007; Moody 2012).
Inclusion of diverse stakeholders is also a strategic imperative in that it helps build (1) deeper collective knowledge of the whole system, and (2) the collective will among stakeholders required for sustained high performance of the building landscape, or region (Holden 2008; Innes and Booher 2010). When we fully acknowledge that buildings are co-evolving social, ecological, and technical systems, it becomes important to engage the people who inhabit and influence these systems now and in the future.
To engage diverse building inhabitants in a regenerative dialogue, it is important to build on the strengths of the particular place, as observed by Bob Berkebile (2012):
As more and more people struggle with the oppressive process of measuring or mitigating the incremental destruction of life that is typical in sustainable design practice, regenerative design turns this perspective on its ear and focuses instead on measuring the vitality and quality of life that is emerging in a place as it evolves to support life. Regenerative design allows people to see their role in creating or maintaining the conditions that are conducive to life.
This place-based regenerative dialogue enables inhabitants to see their own power in the existing systems and to embrace it by making new choices and enacting new commitments appropriate to their particular place. By focusing first on what people already love and are willing to protect, regenerative designers have been more successful in garnering sustained collective action than through problem-based approaches (Hoxie et al. 2012; Mang and Reed 2012). These strengths-based approaches draw on the literatures and practices of “asset-based community development” (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993), “appreciative inquiry” (Cooperrider and Whitney 2005), and “positive psychology” (Grant 2012).
A strong place-based conversation also considers the consequences of design choices for surrounding communities at multiple scales. Danielle Pieranunzi, Director of the Sustainable SITES Initiative, emphasized that “[i]t is essential that architecture not be judged in isolation without regard to how the site and community are impacted and how ecosystem services are protected or improved” (2012). While the LEED rating system has been criticized for failing to adequately consider performance of buildings post-occupancy (Miller 2012; Turner and Frankel 2008), regenerative design underscores the importance of multi-disciplinary post-occupancy performance evaluation at multiple scales (Moore and Walsh 2012).