On the construction of the aesthetics of sustainable architecture
New dissertation in Art History by Elin Andersson.
Graphic design: Per Nilsson
The title is Nature Revisited: On the construction of the aesthetics of sustainable architecture in early twenty-first century architectural discourse.
During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the pursuit of environmental sustainability brought about a new landscape for architectural discourse to navigate, and new topics for architectural theory to grapple with. In the early 2010s, the question of whether there could be an aesthetics of sustainable architecture, and if so, what it should be like, rose to the fore as an issue demanding attention. Combining in-depth discourse analyses of three texts from the time with an ideational examination of a wider range of contemporary and historical discursive material, Nature Revisited explores how the aesthetics of sustainable architecture takes shape as an object of discourse in architectural theory from the early 2010s.
With a focus on the roles played by the notions of nature and the natural in this coming into being, Nature Revisited situates three specific instances of early twenty-first century architectural discourse within a longer tradition of Western architectural theory, which has paid more or less regular visits to nature. In the end, the exploration of how nature is revisited at this specific moment in time turns out to be an exploration of how the very notion of aesthetics is renegotiated when giving shape to the aesthetics of sustainable architecture.
