The Pluralist

brook muller begins his contribution to the Coss Dialogues by contesting and at least partially deconstructing Le Corbusier’s aphorism “a house is a machine for living.” He then trades upon an ambiguity that masks the difference between watersheds that mark an important transition from one phase to another and those that are defined by the drainage area associated with a body of water (lecture reprinted in this issue; see Muller). The 2015 Coss Dialogues took place in the watershed of the Grand River, which extends from its southeast limit near Jackson, Michigan, through my home in Lansing before emptying into Lake Michigan near Grand Haven, some 40 miles to the west of Grand Rapids. The main point that I take from Muller is that we have arrived at a transitional moment when architecture must expand its horizons. This watershed is marked less by the classically aesthetic interface between philosophy and architecture than by a more flat-footed and prosaic focus on physicality—on water and where or how it moves through a built environment.

Muller mentioned sustainability rather little in the version of his paper that was presented in Grand Rapids. Sustainability was listed rather casually among a number of tropes that have vied for the attention of architectural and cultural critics over the last several decades. This may have not been an intentional omission on Muller’s part, but it is worth noting, nonetheless. Just at the moment that the SAAP has gotten around to having a meeting themed on sustainability, many others in the academy are giving up on it. In a recent article, Melinda Benson and Robin Craig declare “The End of Sustainability,” arguing that it is time to abandon the conceit that we can ever manage complex, natural, let alone social, systems. Instead, they urge us to move on to a focus on resilience (Benson and Craig). Andrew Zolli’s book Resilience also sounds this theme, arguing that “sustainability” has grown long [End Page 110] in the tooth, and that consideration of the various disciplines for resilience thinking is the new new thing (Zolli 21). Even David Orr has come out with an essay suggesting that the idea of sustainability may have become so diluted of content that it is time to adopt a new rhetoric (Orr).

At the risk of failing to engage Muller’s substantive remarks on the future of architecture as directly as I might, I want to probe the connections between his remarks and the 2015 meeting theme a bit more deeply. The word “sustainability” began to appear in environmental circles with some frequency by the early 1980s. It exploded across the discourse universe of environmental scientists and many social activists after the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) coined the still most frequently cited definition: meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs (WCED). Specialists trained in the natural sciences who attempted to engage environmental and social activists experienced many unproductive episodes in the attempt to reach a more precise consensus on the meaning of sustainability. The common wisdom that one could move forward so long as one did not try to reach agreement on the meaning of sustainability was firmly in place by the mid-1990s. Various schematic diagrams with three circles or pillars representing the domains of economy, society, and environment were substituted for more extensive attempts to articulate the meaning of sustainability. At the same time, the National Academy of Science created a sustainability section in its prestigious journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), and many universities instituted programs, departments, and even schools of sustainability. By 2005, there were plenty of indications that sustainability was indeed a watershed idea—something that would mark a cultural transformation in the way post-industrial societies would organize themselves and conduct their business (Thompson, Agrarian Vision).

There are many reasons why the concept of sustainability has failed to deliver what many of its early advocates had hoped. As Aidan Davison argues in his book Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability...