Environmental architecture is currently more widely referred to as ‘sustainable architecture’, and was formerly more widely referred to as ‘green architecture’. The vagueness and ambiguity of the word ‘sustainable’ makes the term ‘sustainable architecture’ equally vague and ambiguous. There are, after all, many forms of sustainability – economic, political and social, as well as environmental – and what is ‘sustainable’ for one group is not necessarily sustainable for another. ‘Social sustainability’, for example, could apply equally to societal organization that permits the continuation of a status quo, or to the universal provision of the necessities of life which would disrupt the status quo. ‘Economic sustainability’, within the context of architecture, could refer to a client’s profit margin or to a regulation of property speculation. 

 

    The term ‘sustainable’ is, therefore, unstable, largely because of the instability of point of view. The car, as currently powered, is economically sustainable, but environmentally, and often socially, unsustainable. To qualify as thoroughly ‘sustainable’, the car would have to be environmentally and socially, as well as economically, sustainable. In fact, environmental sustainability, that is, our treating the environment in such a way as to perpetuate its health and consequently our own, is often portrayed by its opponents as a threat to economic and social sustainability, in that it criticizes many existing environmentally harmful industries, and therefore threatens jobs. 

 

    When applied to architecture, the term ‘sustainable’ currently refers to environmental sustainability. Swept up in the concern for the environment, however, is an accompanying concern for social sustainability, as this implies public health and a fairer distribution of physical resources and physical risks. Economic sustainability, in the sense of value for money or return on investment, is also implicit within environmental sustainability, and increasingly easy to demonstrate with built examples. Unpacking some of the meanings in the first half of the term ‘sustainable architecture’ does not render it transparent, however, as it refers not to one, but to a spectrum of architectures, from the traditional vernacular (which tends to be environmentally sustainable by default), to existing-architectures-made-more-sustainable, to environmental determinism, to those few architects who are pushing environmental design into reflexivity, that is, into self-conscious expression of its more symbiotic relation with the natural environment. Though all these architectures are party to a new contract between nature and architecture, only those at the reflexive end of the spectrum are concerned with representing, as well as enacting this.