Ecological Form. Tenets for an Evolving Architecture

Abstract

This essay addresses the urgent question of sustainability through developing an approach to generating ecological form. Through concrete examples of contemporary and vernacular architecture, the basic tenets of this approach reorient the objectives of building design from the construction of freestanding objects and abstract formalism to shaping habitats for animals whose flourishing is interdependent with other forms of life. This approach insists that form is always situated and emerges from specific places in all of their varied and multidimensional complexity and that built responses interact and interdepend within a system of mutually reinforcing strategies. And further, that material and form cannot be separated from one another but mutually inform and constrain one another. Aesthetics and performance are not two separate domains but are fused in ecological form, which emerges out of their very constraints and limits.