Sustaining Sustenance through Everyday Building

Accepted for presentation at the Western Regional Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, October 2004

I’m photographing dumpsters at construction sites. I find full bricks and concrete blocks, sheets of plywood, timber and steel framing stock, insulation, duct work, cardboard tubes, conduit, bags of cement, ceiling systems, timber pallets, walls, kitchen sinks, doors, windows, carpeting. According to Environmental Building News: 44,000 US commercial buildings and 245,000 housing units are demolished annually; 10-30% of the US annual landfill waste stream is associated with remodeling and making buildings; and construction and demolition in the US account for 136,000,000 tons of waste a year.

Alongside architecture students and other collaborators, I build with construction waste. We make and inhabit dwellings, sleeping platforms, and pavilions where studio reviews are held, using scavenged building materials, hand tools, and our imaginations.

Shading this work are the living and building conditions of the world’s urban poor, understood through travels and work in south Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the US. Oppressed by highly organized forces, many millions of people build ‘illegal’ houses with leftovers they find or purchase from organized scavengers.

Influenced by these experiences and the writing of de Certeau, I am critical of the ‘strategic’ approaches that dominate the sustainability monologue, with its reliance on organizations (AIA Committee on the Environment, USGBC), formulas (LEEDS, best practices), star power (McDonough, Orr, Swett, Wackernagel), and trophy buildings (the Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College). These institutions exist in ways quite isolated from, and at odds with, other ‘environments.’ They have proper and highly rationalized relationships with each other, their clienteles, and the objects of their research, and are concerned first and foremost with centralizing and maintaining power among themselves.

When he writes of ‘everyday practices,’ de Certeau foregrounds the individual as ‘tactician’ working in the other’s place, manipulating events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities,’ developing intelligence inseparable from everyday struggles and pleasures, living a human and humane life.

The featured projects seek to reclaim and recast sustainability from a tactician’s perspective. In one, an award-winning arbor in the US, a galvanized steel frame supports found objects, from cut saplings to steel mesh skin, vines, moon flowers, hammock, and artifacts belonging to the author’s recently deceased parents. In another, timber and mud pavilions in Sri Lanka were made by sixty US and Sri Lankan students of architecture in ten days using demolition waste – disassembled packing crates and timber pallets, sawn tree trunks, broken bricks and solid concrete blocks -- found alongside the road leading to the construction site. In the third, a practitioner entry in the ‘precarious habitat’ category of the 2003 UIA ‘Celebration of Cities’ competition, architects propose to revisit a growing informal settlement in Argentina to work with local residents and architects on a series of one-day no-cost constructions for persons identified by locals as being most in need of assistance.

To sustain sustenance -- to provide something that gives support, endurance, or strength to others and to one’s self; to earn a livelihood; and to occupy ‘other shades of green’ – such are the deeper murmurings coursing through these built works.