Dean’s Message

D. MICHELLE ADDINGTON

When Associate Professor Matt Fajkus and Center for American Architecture and Design Managing Director Leora Visotzky first approached me about their intention for this issue of Platform as a series of essays posing dichotomies in sustainability, I must honestly say that I was unsure. After climate change and sustainability entered the culture wars with politically polarizing viewpoints, I witnessed too much focus on the arguments and declarations, particularly in the fields of the built environment where the demonstrative and the didactic began to supplant the deep and difficult research we needed to do. It was as if winning the argument mattered more than producing meaningful change, or perhaps, more accurately, it was as if we assumed that we had the right answers; we only need to convince the “other” side to get on board. I have witnessed five decades of sustainable initiatives for the built environment that yielded no substantive reduction in energy or environmental impacts even insofar as many countries and institutions proudly trumpet their sustainable bona fides. Branding, rhetoric, and self-congratulation have not changed our world for the better as we continue to barrel toward rapidly increasing global temperatures.

I came to The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture four years ago because I believed it was uniquely suited to address difficult and complex questions, most especially surrounding climate change. I also knew that real change is messy, and that any tangible move forward would have to face hard questions about the mounting inequities borne by so many. So many of the solutions that our fields were putting forward as sustainable best practices were intended to preserve the lifestyle of the “haves” while drowning the “have-nots” with the consequences and the costs. In Matt Fajkus’ introduction to this issue, he reminds us of the original definition of sustainable development as put forward by the Brundtland Commission nearly thirtyfive years ago, in which the environment and human developmental needs were positioned as competing, not complementary, needs. There has historically been no track out of poverty for our world’s most disadvantaged societies other than through a path built upon energy and environmental exploitation. As we are beginning to reckon with the impending consequences of the unprecedented building boom occurring across developing countries and economies in transition, we don’t get to circle our wagons to protect our lifestyle while pointing a finger at those who are striving to have a tiny piece of what we take for granted. Brundtland’s commission understood this, and left us with the messy, intractable problem of making difficult choices in what is ultimately a zero-sum situation. There are no easy, win-win solutions.

As I read through the essays of this volume, I realized that rather than posing arguments pitting opposing points of view, they manifest ideas raised by Brundtland. Each essay wrestles with how the needs of human development must be worked into what has been for too long a one-sided approach. Each one wrestles with conflict — the conflict in how we balance and weigh choices, the conflict in what we choose to address and what we must forego, and the conflict between who we serve as a client and who we serve as a society. The processes of those who design the built environment are messy, even if the resultant products may not appear to be. For all those in the lay public who are quick to describe architecture as poetic praxis or as frozen music, those within the fields know that it is a process of decision after decision among a stunningly vast territory of competing needs and requirements. The dichotomies posed in this magazine lift the veil on this process.

The School of Architecture may seem like a small player in this critical problem facing the world, but we are in a unique position to lead the way forward. With disciplines spanning the full range of the built environment, from interior design to architecture to landscape architecture, all the way to urban design and community and regional planning, we know what it takes to step out of our domain of purview and fold in knowledge from far afield. There is no other set of professions that navigates such broad territory. Rather than taking sides in what has become a polemical distraction, our remarkable faculty are foregrounding the questions we must ask, the constituents we must include, and the actions we must take. Most importantly, they are building that capacity in our students, our community, and our youth. They aren’t just operating in the middle ground, they are building bridges that interconnect diverse issues and multiple impacts.

Fifteen years ago, I invited Gro Harlem Brundtland to speak at a symposium I had organized on sustainability. After being peppered with questions from the audience asking her to declare an unequivocal solution to slow climate change — Nuclear power! Geoengineering the upper atmosphere! Electric cars! LEED buildings! — she explained that sustainability was not a problem to be solved with a heroic solution or a mandate, but rather a constant questioning and requestioning as we work through difficult, intractable problems with the hope that with each question, we learn something new, and in so doing, cause less harm. At the School of Architecture, we are here to do that difficult work.