12. Sustainable Architecture Assemblages

This chapter is structured in three parts that use different entry points to approach sustainable architecture as a condition of a material assemblage that combines concepts, buildings, structures, educational and professional practices, political and financial conditions, global technologies, local techniques, friendships, alliances, weather conditions and apparatuses of capture. Part 1 provides a thinking device for discussing architecture’s lively matter beyond the straitjacket of sustainability guidelines and questions the Siamese birth that ties sustainability to development. In Part 2, Waterbanks—PITCHAfrica case study—unfolds the complex assemblage of sustainable architecture operations in Africa. In Part 3, both authors reflect on the architecture knowledge assemblage within which their alternative professional and educational practice emerged. Can their experimentations with ATOPIA and SARCHA be understood as ‘sustainable’ architecture practices? To formulate differently the chapter’s main question: Can ‘sustainable’ architecture be produced only within a different mindset that generates another type of practice and education?