SEMINARS 2007
DEFINING SUSTAINABILITY seminar
Theoharis David
Sustainability is today a current and popular misunderstood term for what has already existed for thousands of years. It has always been a natural instinct for humans in the past to achieve a sustainable environment, albeit unfettered by the materialistic demands of today’s affluent and consumption-obsessed societies. Traditional living practices and methodologies – which can now be characterized as ‘sustainable’ - have in the past continuously allowed the survival and development of many and most diverse societies worldwide.
What we now call ‘sustainable growth’ was then born out of a necessity for humans to enter into a symbiotic and balanced relationship with their indigenous environment, in order to sustain themselves within it. It never had a name, it was natural and logic, and it is only today that we can recognize what it was.
Presently in the contemporary world, it is our own alienation from the environment surrounding us that has compelled us to re-create and re-import this term into design and development consciousness.
It is precisely the diminishing of that very environment and its effects on our everyday lives, which has caused us to apply sophisticated technologies, all developed and manufactured at tremendous cost to the very environment they are supposedly meant to protect and preserve. This is nothing more than an often-desperate response to our own instinct for survival, based on industrialism-inspired thinking.The power of contemporary architecture.
GEO-POLITICAL BUFFER ZONE AS A FIELD OF OPERATIONS FOR AN ACT OF ARCHITECTURE
Theoharis David Seminar
