GAU:DI Sustainable Architecture Competition

Sustainable architecture

The notion of sustainable development is gaining momentum in Europe and is becoming popular across the continent among groups of architects who are patiently promoting sustainability as the basis of a new rationalism.
In Finland, Germany and Austria - but also in Flanders and Scotland - clients and architects are moving on from the post-modern, neo-modern and deconstructivist formalism of the 1990´s in order to readdress the fundamentals of a project; functionality, structure, materials and economics. Addressed with the theoretical tools and techniques of sustainable development, these new projects are creating a renewed model for urban development which, while part of an alternative economic cycle, is becoming an integral part of European architectural and urban culture.

A laboratory of modern European rationality

Approaches to sustainable architecture differ, meaning that this is not a movement which is producing a common architectural language. Rather it reflects the fact that each country is responding very differently to the changes – economic and social – which, before our very eyes, are creating a clean break with the twentieth century.

The Finnish situation perhaps best exemplifies this change, as a small country makes the impressive leap from a rural economy to a new-age “Nokia” economy, eased by an architectural tradition which, since Aalto, has known how to imbue modernism with a sense of nature and history.
In little Vorarlberg – which belongs to that area straddling the Rhine which is the most developed part of Europe – architects have made a radical architecture quite acceptable by first addressing and understanding the needs and aspirations of a post-industrial society and then proposing an aesthetic appropriate to this sense of progress.
In France, where sustainable development is still at a very early stage, those architects who are attempting to reject the widespread institutional scepticism are tending to do so by creating critical architecture rather than a comprehensive new approach. In Germany on the other hand – another country where change is slower - the alternative movement of the 1970´s has discovered the (naturally much more tangible) idea of large-scale industrial redevelopment.

In any case, the architects who are seeking these new approaches are attempting to resolve a crisis of rational thought which has been present since the end of the twentieth century.

One way of addressing this crisis is to understand that it encompasses the replacement of the industrial age by a post industrial “new economy”; a process which is rendering obsolete a whole set of rationalist assumptions. And while it is true that historians and theoreticians have for over thirty years been analysing the body of rationalist assumptions created between the 1920s and the 1960s, it is also true that they have consistently failed to stem this steady loss of substance. Indeed – we have even witnessed nostalgic revivals of formalist language, both in neo-modernist recreation of the rigorous modernism of the first industrial age or in “High-Tech”, the last aesthetic flowering of the abundant society of the 1970s.

Between these two poles, the waves of post-modernism, deconstructivism and neo-expressionism have substituted this loss of meaning with a series of signs, exploring the new possibilities presented by the profound changes underway (technological, urban and social.)

The European scene - trapped between the end of the great modernist narrative and the violence of an urbanisation which can sometimes seek to organise urban space and networks without recourse to architecture - has not escaped from this uncertainty.
But it has also seen the emergence of a movement of reflection with completely different goals and imaginative scope, inspired by the pioneers of sustainable industrial development and by the application of their ideas to the field of urban ecology. As part of a rich and progressive architectural and urban culture, several movements are emerging in Europe. Their aim: to free society from an obsolete and restrictive industrial model by associating architecture with the creation of a new collective project:
- through the integration of the symbols and rules of sustainable development into reflections about inhabited space
- through the integration of the practice of architecture into the new industrial economy - with all its technology, rationales and possibilities
- through a new reading of European architectural culture – both vernacular and classical

A tour of the projects at the forefront of such developments across Europe makes this whole movement – and in particular its search for a contemporary rationalism – very real. Clearly belonging to the post industrial society, its progressiveness is made clear by its search for an economics of land use and infrastructure which allows for development to be more equally shared out.

The creation of think-tanks for this new rationality: establishing the theme in schools of architecture

This emerging movement still remains little known – partly by choice: the European urban economy and construction industry remain largely oblivious to the need for change.

Europe’s citizens on the other hand are proving ever more interested in the notion of sustainability, but in terms of daily life this interest remains largely theoretical. Much is needed in the way of education – particularly of those in authority – if a more considered approach to development is really to bring results on the ground.
In other words, the responsibility remains to convince decision-makers that architecture can offer – as shown in those exemplary European regions mentioned above – the means of achieving this more considered development.

An examination of the Scandinavian, German and Austrian architectural scenes shows that open debate has made the public widely aware of the arguments for, ideas behind and aesthetic qualities of sustainable architecture. Many other European countries and regions have already created institutions to advance such ideas of sustainability in the economic, industrial and administrative fields.

Our good sense and concern for the future would suggest that Europe’s schools of architecture could create and support real think-tanks in this area. And indeed a number of European schools have already established post-graduate courses in sustainable architecture.

This is the context in which the members of the Gaudi network have developed the project for creating a place where ideas about sustainable development can be exchanged between old and new members of the European Union. Key elements of this are the biennial competition for sustainable architecture open to students of architecture and other, related disciplines (design, landscape architecture, etc.) and the resulting exhibition, directed at the general public which is both fun but also rendered powerful by the presence of large scale models.

First of all however, this process will be highly educational for the students – those who will transform the face of tomorrow’s cities and who must understand that sustainable development offers a new, rational framework for the development of a project.
It will also encourage an - appropriately - contemporary, decentralised and experimental form of debate between those at the forefront of this research and the general public.
And finally, the idea of an annual or biennial competition, organised at the European scale and by a network of partner schools, will create more time in which to develop:
- a subtle tool which transcends the boundaries between schools and permits students to understand sustainable development and the forces which control it
- a place for permanent experimentation, based on realising large-scale prototypes and bringing students in contact with real locations
- A means of developing and presenting to the public the best projects resulting out of this network approach

Marie-Hélène Contal
Assistant Director IFA, Paris

Jana Revedin
General Commissary sustainable student competition, Venice