Green Architecture and the Concept of Sustainability in the Capitalocene

Not long after its introduction, the term Anthropocene faced academic criticism, and Capitalocene was proposed as a more suitable alternative. Rather than the notion that humans, as a biological species, have a decisive impact on nature, a far more precise proposition is that such phenomena are inherently produced by capitalism – with its modes of production of commodities and space, exploitation of resources, and growth fetish – in which the human species is “trapped”. Contrary to the widespread illusion that capitalism is the only possible and acceptable socioeconomic system, the importance of critical theory lies in demonstrating that it is essentially a system of limitless destruction of the human environment. In view of the fact that even environmental protection has now been turned into a huge market driven by ethical manipulations misrepresenting the environmental performance of products, the socalled green or sustainable architecture has become a source of massive and lucrative investments, transforming spatial production into a detached and self-satisfied activity disconnected from biophysical reality and the metabolism between the human species and nature. This paper challenges and offers an ideological analysis of the manipulation mechanisms associated with the concept of sustainability in contemporary architecture on two levels: (1) the financialization of architecture via the real estate market, and (2) the dogma of environmentalism and the so-called greenwashing of architecture as the lever of green capitalism.