Nature Revisited : On the construction of the aesthetics of sustainable architecture in early twenty-first century architectural discourse

Looking back on the setting twentieth and dawning twenty-first centuries, the pursuit of environmental sustainability brought about a new landscape for architectural discourse to navigate, and new topics for architectural theory to grapple with. In the early 2010s, the question whether there could be an aesthetics of sustainable architecture, and if so, what it should be like, rose to the fore as an issue demanding attention. In attempting to settle a tension or conflict between the notions of aesthetics and sustainability, some instances of architectural theory turned to the notions of nature and the natural, thus joining a long tradition of Western architectural discourse. This dissertation explores the aesthetics of sustainable architecture as it takes shape as an object of discourse within some instances of architectural theory at this time, more specifically the roles played by the notions of nature and/or the natural in this process. Using a discourse theoretical approach combined with an understanding of nature/society dualism as a way of discursively representing the world, the dissertation combines deeper, text oriented analyses of three enunciations of the discourse on the aesthetics of sustainable architecture from the early 2010s with an ideational exploration of a more comprehensive mass of extended material. The latter forms the basis of the first part of the study, which argues that insofar as the issue of the aesthetics of sustainable architecture falls back upon a conflict between the notions of aesthetics and sustainability in archietctural discourse, this conflict can be understood as a reiteration of a longstanding tension within architectural theory, dating back to the breakthrough of Kantian aesthetics and the idea of disinterestedness. Through closer analysis of three specific texts from the early 2010s, the second part of the study shows how the aesthetics of sustainable architecture taking shape in these texts are both made possible and restrained by what is conceptualised as a dualist discourse on (un)sustainability. Within such a discourse, sustainable architecture is constructed as an architecture involved in a harmonious relation to nature or the natural. The dissertation further shows that the aesthetics of sustainable architecture in question are cast as integral to the establishment and maintenance of such a harmonious relation, while at the same time operating as solutions to the longstanding tension informing the issue of the aesthetics of sustainable architecture. Disintegration and imitation are identified as two possible flexions of a dualist discourse on (un)sustainability, or as two possible means by which to represent architecture and its aesthetics as sustainable. A key argument of the dissertation is that as they play out in the three texts submitted to closer analysis, both imitation and disintegration involve a discursive naturalisation of sustainable architecture through its aesthetics, which goes hand in hand with a renegotiation of the notion of aesthetics as such. This renegotiation involves a decoupling of the notion of aesthetics from the idea of individual authorship, a recasting of the object of aesthetic experience as something other than a visually construed object-thing, and a construction of this object as partly natural.