#kamworkshops2011

Perhaps the key issue here is to be vigilantly aware that as a concept and as a practice sustainability is constantly running the danger of turning into a totalizing doctrine that subsumes critical thinking. […]

Maybe it is good that sustainability does not have a fixed or coherent definition. Maybe it should never had one! Because if the technical questions of energy efficiency or the technocratic questions of efficient recourse use or even the questions of socioeconomic management end up constituting the definition of sustainability in architecture, this will threaten to reduce design to a series of small decisions (on materials, energy or feasibility) that will ultimately have less to do with design and more management or with political correctness. […]

P. Pyla, “Counter-Histories of Sustainability”, Volume 18 (December 2008): 14-17. Publisher: Archis]

Download the article here

See also: 
The complex history of sustainability, by Volume
and the Map in Issuu