ATTITUDE OF SUSTAINABILITY: CULTIVATING SENSIBILITY AS A VALUE SYSTEM

Abstract

Nature is often seen as the principle category in sculpting architecture. Today, nature is approached as a resource that needs salvation, an outcome of damages inflicted by human activities. It is in this need to salvage nature for the survival of mankind that the concept of sustainability emerges. This mission calls for a unified social responsibility. Architecture has to take on that social responsibility in order to achieve a sustainable built environment as it is much influenced by the aspiration of its society. However, the attitude in the practice of sustainability today has placed little concern towards this mission of a unified social responsibility. Rather, it is hypothesised that the technocentric and optimistic attitude in sustainable practice has caused a 'worry-free' consumerist society. By extent, this practice has affected approaches of sustainability in architecture, where it has placed 'comfortability' of its users as its priority. Sustainable architecture has enabled users to excel in his well-being and productivity and yet at the same time play its part in reducing the damages to nature. Additionally, with such focus on technology as a fix to sustainability, architecture has become a display of sustainable technology, where architects compete in better 'aesthetical' integration of sustainable technology. If sustainability is about maintaining responsibility towards the environment and our society, why are we not addressing to its mission but rather dwell into such technocratic and optimistic approach? This paper recognises that if our attitude towards nature affects the way we practice sustainability, should we not seek for an alternate attitude in order to meet the mission of sustainability? This dissertation thus aims to seek an alternate attitude towards nature through Kate Soper's view on nature. Soper suggests that by approaching nature with some sort of sensibility, that is through fear and anxiety towards the loss of nature would we then view nature as more than just a resource. By extending these concerns into architecture, sustainable practice in architecture would be more than just a technological fix or a competition of aesthetics, rather architecture would extend the need for the awareness of nature among man. As architecture contributes to the development of our built environment, it is thus in such context that an alternate attitude in approaching sustainability would architecture better respond in a more sustainable built environment.