The Return of Nature: Sustaining Architecture in the Face of Sustainability

摘要

Historian Antoine Picon begins his contribution to The Return of Nature with the following statement: "The past decades have been marked by a profound shift in our understanding of the relations between nature, infrastructures, and cities." The question is: who is the "we" that the word "our" refers to? Picon seems to be using an epochal "we," evoking all citizens of the world in the twenty-first century. Elsewhere in the collection, however, "we" refers to a specific group: architects, historians, and theorists closely associated with the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University. The Return of Nature will be useful for teaching, precisely because it makes a link between history/theory and the swarm of recent books on sustainability that relay technical information about optimizing energy efficiency in buildings and resiliency in cities. The success or failure of the book, however, lies not only in the debates it sets out, but in the degree to which that narrow group represents Picon's broader constituency.