For the Ecology of architectural form: Manifesto for a new organic Architecture

Abstract

This article is drawn up further to the paper presented at the previous event organised by AEAULP – A sustainable utopia (Lisbon, April 2010). In this paper – The unbearable lightness... of utopias: ideologies in architecture (ABREU, 2010) – it was defended that the principle of Sustainability in architecture must also be applied to shape. Considering that one of the most determining values of contemporary production in architecture is formal novelty and if the results of a response to this call for novelty are ephemeral aesthetic shapes, with a short life, even if the materials and sys- tems of the work built are sustainable, the work itself will not be so: it will be enjoyed like a clothing item, which possesses an aesthetic value for one season and then becomes out-of-fashion and “cannot” be used any longer. In the wake of this awareness, the present article will focus on the conditions which may preside over an architectural aesthetic production that will also be sustainable. In summary, the possibility that will be defended here is that a durable aesthetic work, which will consequently be sustainable and ecological, derives from taking into account, when designing its shape, the dialectics between Nature and Culture, which is what we may designate as the aesthetics of belonging or corresponding to the place. The propositional character of the viewpoints defended herein, which do not claim to have reached an apodictic description of the characteristics of a sustainable architectural shape, justifies the drawing-up of this text as a manifesto.