Utopia and Apocalypse: 7 Theses on the Aesthetics of Sustainability

It is a common misconception that sustainability is a brand-new topic. Since the beginning, since the construction of the first house, sustainability has been a central component of the architectural concept. With industrial production and mass production, however, modernity has excluded the concept of sustainability from the consciousness of architecture. In the context of post-industrial society, the climate, resource, and migration issues, sustainability is now returning at a new conceptual level. In practice, however, materialistic, technical, and instrumental reasons prevail. What is missing, however, is a critical theory of sustainability that conceives of sustainability organically, from within architecture. The essay sketches out the foundations for such a critical theory of architecture, which focuses on the unity of human and non-human authors or, in other words, of humans, materials, and the system of earth.