Sweet Affects? Political and Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture

In the performance-dominated field of sustainable architecture, aesthetics has been neglected as a field of study. While sustainable designers propose finding new ways to live, few scrutinize the discourse of aesthetics. Or examine what this might mean to explore life through the field of sensory aesthetics – in particular in terms of affect, sweet affect. In this paper I will examine: firstly, how the conversation in sustainable design diverts attention away from aesthetics, especially in the field of architecture; then secondly, I will investigate, how an ecological aesthetic might be understood – examining some different contemporay approaches in the work of Jacques Rancere, Gernot Bohme and Luce Irigaray ; and in the third section, I will suggest sustainable design as mode of aesthetic inquiry. The intention, in all these sections, is to think, in part, outside traditional understandings of sustainable design, and of aesthetics. The question I ask: What sort of understandig of sensory aesthetics could allow us to better make, create, build, preserve, care for, or maintain, sustainable environments?

Volume Editors
Jasmine Benyamin, Kyle Reynolds, Mo Zell, Nikole Bouchard & Whitney Moon

ISBN
978-1-944214-28-9