Sauerbruch Hutton

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When It Comes to Sustainable Design, Architects Still Don't Get It

In the face of global doomsday predictions, sustainability has become one of the most crucial aspects of the 21st century, now playing a huge role in everything from politics to the way you dispose of your trash. Fortunately, most architects understand sustainability implicitly, and have adopted it into their lives and work. Or have they? In this article, originally published on Common Edge as "Why Architects Don't Get It," green building expert Lance Hosey highlights the failures of the architecture community in reaching their stated sustainability goals, and argues for a new conception of architecture in which good design and sustainable design are integrated.

A few years ago, the American Institute of Architects, the self-declared “voice of the architecture profession,” announced that "AIA members will no longer need to complete the sustainable design requirement to fulfill their AIA continuing education." Why? Because “sustainable design practices have become a mainstream design intention.” Hooray! If sustainability is “mainstream” now, and knowledge about it is no longer necessary “to maintain competency” and “to advance and improve the profession”—the purpose of continuing education, according to the AIA—then the profession must have met its environmental goals, and there’s nothing left to improve. Mission accomplished.

If only.

Venice Biennale 2014: "M9" to Discuss the Links Between Cultural Institutions and Urban Regeneration

This year at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, the Collateral Event M9 / Transforming the City will unveil an influential urban regeneration project planned for the heart of Venezia Mestre. Envisioned by British-Berlin practice Sauerbruch Hutton, the competition-winning design will be a new “multifaceted and encyclopedic” cultural center of “international appeal” that showcases the “fundamental” 100 years that “revolutionized the world."

The exhibition will pair a complete architectural presentation of the project alongside the political motives behind it and an overview of the site's history as an attempt to spark a “theoretical digression on the links between cultural institutions and urban-regeneration projects.”

More about the project, after the break...

Kfw Westarkade / Sauerbruch Hutton

Kfw Westarkade / Sauerbruch Hutton - More Images+ 5

  • Architects: Sauerbruch Hutton
  • Area Area of this architecture project Area:  39000
  • Year Completion year of this architecture project Year:  2010