sustainable architecture must be
open source
and sustainability requires a paradigm shift
Sustainability requires a shift towards a new environmental paradigm (Milbrath), a new way of thinking: much of contemporary architecture and building practices today are too often the result of high cost consumerism, productivism and scientism that keep us trapped in what is typically done.
For this reason, and many others, these resources are free.
Alternative ideas and methods exist to design and build effective, artistic, low cost and low or zero energy use houses, landscapes and cities.
These can be both prophetic and poetic and represent a silent anarchy. Those architects committed to the new environmental paradigm have in many cases elected to sidestep the established rules and create a technically and culturally separate architecture to that of the mainstream.
why the emphasis on data?
As futurist Kevin Kelly (2016, The Inevitable, New York: Penguin Books, p. 291) writes:
This convergence will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet up until this time. Braiding nerves out of glass, copper, and airy radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all people, all artifacts, all sensors, all facts and notions into a grand network of hitherto unimagined complexity.
The convergence Kelly speaks about is the internet and its tools, which we feel have largely bypassed architects.
To get sustainable architecture right—really right—we believe we need better tools and that those tools need more data inputs than simply the client and architect.
VSS contributors
Robert Hotten is a licensed Architect and Landscape Architect. He was a Teaching Fellow at the University of Auckland, a guest Professeur Associe in Paris, and studied in the prestigious Joint Program in Urban Design Masters at the University of California, Berkeley. Robert developed sustainable alternatives at his eco-living community project in Hawaii, founded in 1992, and has practiced in California, Nevada, and New Zealand.
Dr Peter Diprose became a Registered Architect in New Zealand in 1997 and has since devoted his energy and enthusiasm to architectural practice PDA Architects and Landscape, and more specifically to the integrated and sympathetic design of landscapes and architecture. He also taught design at the University of Auckland and landscape architecture at Unitec. Peter was chairperson of the New Zealand Institute of Architects Environment Task Group and involved in writing and reviewing the NZIA Environmental Policy.
Dr Robert Riddell (MA Camb. PhD Newcastle (UK), DipTP(NZ), ARICS), following a working life of mixed academic and practical endeavour, has retired to Helensville, a small town in New Zealand. He has enjoyed the pleasure of working with esteemed colleagues on prestigious projects throughout his career, working as a Lecturer, Town and Country Planning, University of Newcastle on Tyne, Assistant Director, Development Studies at Cambridge University, and Professor of Planning at University of Auckland (retired emeritus).
Kate Hotten is finishing her MLArch at University College Dublin. She sits on the board of Natural Capital Ireland and previously ran a global function for hyper-growth payments company Stripe. Kate helps to maintain VSS.
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