By Bill Reed, AIA

Everything we design engages with the living system that it’s a part of, whether that engagement is unplanned or intentional. It is by expanding our concept of design to include designing that engagement that we find the potential not only to sustain but also to regenerate — to develop something that contributes to the health and wealth of its place. Photo courtesy of Ayrie Cunliffe, architect and planner, and Loreto Bay

Sustainability is not simply about efficient technologies and techniques. It is about life — a process by which living things such as forests, neighborhoods, people, businesses, mushrooms and polar bears ensure their viability over the long haul. It is a process of reciprocal relationship, a process by which living things support and are supported by a larger whole. That means a building can’t simply be high performance and considered sustainable. Imagining a high-performance building is like imagining a high-performance liver. Buildings can be designed as autonomous, but they only become meaningful and beneficial when understood as part of the living fabric of place.

When we speak of restoration (of a woodland, a riparian system, a wetland), it is important to make a distinction: Because life evolves and is not static, we can never restore something to its “original condition.” We are speaking of restoring a system’s capability to continuously self-organize and evolve — to regenerate. Regeneration is about framing restoration as a whole, engaging the earth systems, the biotic systems and the people of each unique place in a continuous dialogue of restoration and evolutionary development. It is a healing or “wholeing.”

Sustained life and energy can happen only in a whole system. This fact is not some nuanced, intellectual nicety; developing relationships between living things is what is required to achieve a sustainable condition. It is necessary to be working in both regions of the diagram shown to the left — or the whole system.
That is, we must focus on both a conservation, or high performance, approach focused on reducing our impacts and a living-system understanding focused on learning how to engage nature as a coequal partner.

The word development, in its true sense, supports this perspective: “To bring out the capabilities or potential of; to bring to a more advanced or effective state; to generate or evolve; to reveal or de-veil.” “Develop” does not mean “to occupy.” To achieve true sustainability we need to focus on developing our awareness, our capabilities and the potential for life in the places we build.