Summary

Reinterpreting Sustainable Architecture: The Place of Technology by Simon Guy and Graham Farmer addresses problems with prevalent debates about the definition of sustainable architecture. Initially Guy and Farmer raise questions about the common misinterpretation that sustainable architecture is one broad subject with a singular view. In this article they argue that “green” design cannot be viewed as a simple concept due to the fact that interpretations and views of how to solve the planet’s problems differ vastly. 

The main problem, according to Guy and Farmer, is that because environmental protection is a social issue, there are so many conflicting views that lumping buildings together in the category of “sustainable” creates tension between competing environmental strategies and sparks debate over the definition of sustainability. They argue that the “search for a true or incontestable definition of sustainable buildings” must be left behind and traded for an understanding of “strategic diversity.” 

Once this is established, they go on to analyze six competing philosophies of sustainability in architecture. The six philosophies of sustainability are eco-technic, eco-centric, eco-aesthetic, eco- cultural, eco-medical, and eco-social.  Each line of thought focuses on a different aspect of environmental change and, therefore, the problems they address and the solutions they come up with vary. For instance, while the eco-medical logic concentrates on creating a “passive nontoxic” and natural environment that promotes healthy living for individuals, eco-centric logic works to create a harmony with nature and reduce the ecological footprint.  Both issues are something worth addressing, but because they approach problems so differently, they should not be lumped together into the same category. According to Guy and Farmer, sustainability shouldn’t even have a label, it should just be labeled architecture. It’s an “attitude” not a “prescription.” The tension between the different approaches is created by the rest of the world’s perception that not all buildings make an attempt at being sustainable. In reality, its just that the way one building is sustainable may contradict what one of the other philosophies argues is really the problem. While one tries to create a harmony with nature, another might try to create a unity for humans at the expense of some natural resource. The fact, stated by Guy and Farmer, is that both have valid reason to sustain what they aim to sustain and there will never be a definition that perfectly encompasses what it means to be sustainable by all the ideas of the six different philosophies. Instead, the idea of sustainability should be a flexible indefinite one. Sustainability is not just one idea, it is many. It is a lifestyle and way of thinking. Generally in architecture, all modern buildings sustain something. Therefore, the word sustainability loses its meaning and its power as a label. This is something Guy and Farmer believe to be good because without a label to lump the different logics together, the tension eases.

The authors of the article urge educators to incite student to challenge the definition of sustainability. This, they argue, encourages future architects to become moral citizens who are open to “process of negotiation, criticism and debate.” The importance of these processes makes itself clear in the building that are designed and built and the effect the have on this world and their immediate environment. They also conclude that power is in ideas and when the ideas of the world and especially designers are more capable of compromise, architecture can become more “humane and multivocal.”

CEO

FDI (Finerty Designs International) is an innovative landscape architecture firm that designs outdoor spaces for any purpose. 

To: FDI Employees 

From: Sophie Finerty, CEO

Subject: SAE 

Date: January 29, 2014

Dear Employees,

I am pleased to inform you that we will be joining with SAE to take on the exciting task of creating this year’s baja course for the Iowa State Racing Team. SAE is lead by Ali Daly, a mechanical engineer with a passion for designing cars for the team. She will be providing the information about requirements for the course and it is our job to bring her ideas to life. We have some creative license here, but ultimately, she will be making all executive decisions. Be brief and direct in your written communication with her and make sure all needs are met.

Sophie Finerty

Cheif Executive Officer

Writing in My Field

How would I find out how writing works in my field? Well for starters we have the internet, which I'm sure is overflowing with answers to that question, such as articles or statements written by architects. And aside from all that knowledge I could look up on my own, I have an entire building full of architects and designers that love to talk about their field and their work. The design building has an open studio policy that allows any student in any discipline to look at other students work and ask questions.

Rosenburg Thought Piece

Too often, I find myself having to reread entire paragraphs after my mind has wandered off to a place where scholarly writing does not exist and all that matters is what I am going to have for dinner. Academic reading has never been one of my strengths and after reading Rosenburg’s Reading Games, I have come to realize one of my biggest mistakes is treating academic articles like a novel and reading them start to finish, as if there is some big plot twist I am saving until the very end. Rosenburg’s strategy of taking apart the piece and finding the main point is so brilliant that it seems it should be obvious. 

I was especially enthralled with the idea of reading the conclusion before diving  into the rest of the article in order to better understand the introduction and the main point of the writing. It seems so simple and smart that I don’t know how I have gone my whole life without ever trying that. It seems that teachers generally try to help students out and teach them the best way to understand something, so it baffles me that I have never been taught any type of academic reading strategy like that. 

While I have yet to actually apply these strategies, I feel comforted just knowing that I now have a plan to dissect academic writing that always seems so daunting.  Rosenburg’s formula makes an incredibly difficult task a simple, step-by-step process. It makes academic writing less of a monster and more like a math problem; tricky at first, but fathomable when broken down into a series of smaller tasks. 

The outcome of reading academic writing has always seemed somewhat abstract to me. At the end you will come out with some sort of new knowledge, but there is no concrete level of understanding you must reach. Nothing is set in stone. Without a measurable goal, I always found it difficult to know when I was done reading or whether or not I had done what the teacher asked. Rosenburg’s strategies gave me a better understanding of the point of academic reading and an idea of what the outcome of my reading should be.

Portrait of a Writer

Writing is not perfect. I am not a perfect writer. I will never try to be a perfect writer because, to me, that is dishonest and I am a big fan of honesty. I like messy writing. I like scribbled-in notebooks and bad handwriting, which is good because my handwriting is barely legible, as many a classmate will attest to.  

I think that my personality as a writer matches my messy room and my disorganized mind. I realize that I have started a lot of my sentences with the letter “I,” which according to almost all of my past english teachers is a HUGE no-no. And there’s a reason for that. But sometimes following that rule ruins the honesty of a piece of writing. What I love about writing is that, in essence, it is just a really long train of thought cemented in reality by little black letters on a page. Sometimes those thoughts don’t even make any sense together, but as long as they have been written down on paper, you can refine and shape them into something that makes sense to the rest of the world, something that might be worth reading.

In my mind, the only writing not worth reading is writing assigned to students in order to practice following a set of rules, not to use their perfectly functional, thought forming brains to speak their mind and add to the collective mind of society. Specifically, five paragraph essays and formulas for what each sentence should contain. Of course, structure and rules are necessary to some extent to be able to eloquently express an opinion or explore an idea, but the way those rules were taught to me as a student was completely devoid of imagination and free thought. 

Exploration of essay structure was never an option until my senior year AP Literature teacher told me I was not allowed to follow a formula to write my essays. Only then did I learn that the content of the essay did not have to follow a formula either. I was pushed to choose my own questions to answer and write for the love of thinking, rather than for a grade. 

Reading this essay, you may be thinking that my writing is scattered, or that I did not fully understand the prompt because I have not specifically answered the questions. And to that I say, your opinion is not why I’m writing this. Of course I am writing this because I want credit for it, but I also write to organize my thoughts. I learned how to write to get a perfect score according to a rubric and for a very long time I hate writing because I thought that that was how all writing had to be. No new thoughts. None of my own ideas. No passion. 

While I try to follow what my teacher ask of me in an essay, I make sure I only write things I truly believe. As a reader, I don’t like to be tricked into agreeing with the writer with clever persuasion techniques. I appreciate reading someone else’s honest thoughts, so I try to be as honest as I can when I am writing. Honesty can be risky, though, because when writing for a grade, your audience matters a bit more than when writing just to make a point. For instance, with most teachers, I would never include my pre-essay paragraph because it is generally offensive and deemed inappropriate for academic writing. However, since the point of this essay is to explore my perception of myself as a writer, I feel it is necessary to share that I like to get my creative juices flowing by starting off my paper with a paragraph of my unedited thoughts at the moment. My thoughts upon starting this essay are as follows;

“Listen up fuckers. What you’re about to read is not going to be a pretty essay. Im about to fill this bitch up with a whole lot of  random crap that spews out my brain and im only gonna have one draft of this paper because I dont have time to do more because i am a big ol procrastinator and i suck at time management. alright. Now that you know the truth Im about to get down to business and use proper language and shit. Right after i go to class.”

This exercise helps my to get more comfortable with the topic at hand, and also starts me off in the habit of being perfectly honest.  I used to sit at my computer for an obscene amount of time trying to come up with a riveting “attention grabber” that my teacher would not find boring or overused.  Needless to say, I had to come up with a new strategy and that’s when the “honesty paragraph” was born. 

Each time I write I start to understand a little more about what writing is about and why there are so many people who love to write. I do not consider myself a great writer by any standards, but neither am I insecure about writing. I am in an ongoing process of discovering my own voice and refining my writing technique, and I accept that I have plenty room for improvement. At the same time, I can look back at my writing in the past and see how far I have come, not only as a writer, but as an individual with opinions. 

I don’t think I will ever be perfect, or even as good as I could be, but isn’t that what it is to be human? To always be growing and learning? There has never been a human being who knew everything there was to know and I doubt there ever will be. 

Like Socrates once said, “The only real wisdom is knowing you know nothing.” Of course he didn’t say it in English, but you know what I mean. The biggest step I have taken so far in discovering who I am as a writer is admitting that I am really nothing special and not being upset by that. Everyone wants to be the best, but if that is the only reason we continue to do something, we will never be content, because obviously, we can’t all be the best.

I guess what I am really trying to say is that who I am as a writer is honest, and that’s about it. I am who I am, but not who I have been in the past or will be in the future. 

Goodman Thought Piece

In order to understand my thoughts and reactions to Goodman’s article, “Calming the Inner Critic and Getting to Work,” I feel that I must share a bit about my background as a writer.  My imagination has spent the past two years in all-out war with my inner critic. 

My junior and senior year of high school I took two advanced placement english classes, one focused on language and the other on literature, respectively. My teachers for those classes are two of the most brilliant people I have ever known, but vastly different.  My junior year teacher is the most one of the most strong willed, intelligent and argumentative women I have met. She spent the year drilling us on arguing a point and analyzing writing to its death. I learned about rhetoric and how to read deeply into things and then use that to demolish someone else’s argument. 

So naturally, I spent that year with my inner critic on full blast, picking out every little mistake I made in my writing and hating it. This made the next year a bit of a shock when my teacher demanded that I shut it off and read literature just for the love of literature and write what I truly thought and felt about it. He treated each piece of writing as if it were a mystery to be solved, not something to be argued with. 

That year I learned to understand writing better than I ever had before and so reading Goodman’s article reminded me that at the core, writing isn’t about doing something that’s never been done before or making something that others will marvel at long after you’re dead. It’s about organizing all the jumbled thoughts in your head, creating new characters and stories out of the parts of life you are trying to understand. Goodman talks about when a writer loses herself in her writing and forgets about the world and, though I may not be a world class writer, some of my best personal growth and best writing has come from when I forgot the world and the audience and just wrote in a desperate rush to put my racing thoughts on paper.

 There’s just something about not caring about the outcome and only focusing on the process that makes writing into something beautiful, instead of something forced and academic.