The AIA recently decided to no longer give sustainability special status in its continuing education. Of course classes will still be offered, but there is no longer the need to get a certain amount of credit specifically in sustainability each year. In doing so, the AIA has stated that "sustainable design practices have become a mainstream design intention in the architectural community."
I saw some evidence of this yesterday, when I attended a local AIA chapter meeting regarding code changes for the building envelope. It was clear that code had changed quite a bit over the last 100 years and that the conditions of building have therefore also changed dramatically. Indeed when we touch an older structure, for an addition or renovation, we are now often required to do quite a bit of additional work just to bring it up to code.
Unfortunately the fact that the AIA feels that sustainability has been "mainstreamed", and that it is now largely a matter of code or LEED accreditation or our design DNA, is indicative of a branding problem. Within the architecture community, sustainability received a lot of attention. Yet it never received an equal amount of love.
Sustainability as a hook, as something that could be turned into a style, never really caught on. We have lots of different responses, but we don't have the makings of an overall architecture style that I can see, at least yet. Modern Architecture as a style was a response to the conditions of modernity. But we never reached the same point with sustainability, we never arrived at something as clear as Le Corbusier's five points. Instead, we have commissions and checklists, which are hardly the stuff to get someone fired up.
It could be that a proper sustainable response always needed to be local or regional and therefore idiosyncratic, and this is why there is no coherent overall stylistic vision. I think, however, sustainability was always a tough sell because it has no hope at its core. We all know we need to do it, and we respect that, but it is like taking your medicine. It is more of something to keep in mind while trying to find something else to get excited about or wishing for the days when we didn't even have to worry about it at all.
With Modernism, there was the belief that the world was changing dramatically and rapidly, and that something new was being invented that would help address that condition. This kind of motivation is vital. In contrast, reactionary movements, like Post-Modernism is to Modernism, are just that — reactions. They peter out.
Sustainable architecture is not a reactionary movement, it is a response to a condition and should therefore be closer to Modernism. The problem in this case is the response is not one of hope. Sustainability isn't trying to improve the world, it just hopes to forestall the damage we are doing to it. In addition, there is such an enormity to the task that we all fear our efforts may be insufficient when taken in total, and all approaches seem to remain compromises with our existing way of life.
Another issue is that sustainability is a negation. It doesn't really say who we are. It instead highlights what our forebears did wrong and what we continue to do wrong and aims to fix it, with the hope that the world will be made whole again for our children. I am not saying this is not important — it is vitally important — but there is nothing in that message to hang your hat on, to really get excited about, to say this is us. It instead feels like tidying up for past mistakes. And this, I think, is a problem sustainability has in keeping our attention.