Sustainability Bin Wang

Human being is contradictory.
We are living in a world which “an exercise machine assembled in the United States may contain rubber belts form Malaysia, chemicals from Korea, motors from China, adhesives from Taiwan, and wood from Brazil”, while we cherish the memory of “the traditional city buildings in which studios sit over family homes, which sit over offices, which sit over shops, bring life to the street”. At the same time we are trying to find a way living on Mars someday. We know “to make people better off requires no new theories, and needs only common sense”, but things are far more complicated than that so more and more theories are being produced.


Developing and Conquering are our instincts. From last week’s readings we know that all media are extension of human body. We are too eager to extend. Rogers’s planning for Lu Zia Sui sounds so good for the city of Shanghai, but “whether Shanghai will pursue any of these sustainable strategies is open to question.” In front of the economics and technology accelerating, people always neglect the long-term benefit, that is how Houston has been built. We produce, consume, and waste. To realize “there is very little that you actually consume” is important, but which more important is to execute the sustainable strategy. The good thing is that after developing to a certain degree, people will aware the importance of sustainability, which is happening in western countries right now.

The position of design is ambiguous. On one hand, designers are asked to design all kind of production used to be consumed, for contemporary use, and will be “away” as we know. On the other hand, people argue design should be sustainable and decrease the waste. In the cowboy developer economy designing a building is just because it is cheaper and simpler than to maintain an old one. It is sad for an architect to aware that “City…are nothing less than over grown prisons that shut out the world and all its beauties.” We thought architects are beauty creators. Since things have already happened, unavoidable, it is time for architects to put sustainability on the top of the design list.