How should we discuss the most pressing issue: saving our home world? Is it a matter of sustainable resilience or resilient sustainability? Consider circular sustainability. The terms are often used interchangeably, concurrently, or even as separate objectives.Footnote1 In 1987, the United Nations Brundtland Commission defined sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”Footnote2 Sustainability is often expressed through the measured impact on environmental, social, and economic systems. At the same time, resilience is the ability of a system to prepare for threats, absorb impacts, recover, and adapt following persistent stress or a disruptive event. Balancing resources and needs girds sustainability, resilience, and circularity, which realizes sustainability by eliminating waste, circulating products and materials, and regenerating nature.Footnote3
The material of architecture by design is historically balanced if you play the long game: from stone to temple pillar to dust and back again as concrete block or plaster. Inside the Baroque city, it is hard to tell what part of Rome’s buildings came from what part of Rome’s buildings. One façade borrows materials, architects, and orders from another. Ise Shrine in Japan is exemplary in this. Rebuilt every twenty years using Japanese Cypress and thatch sourced for this purpose, the Shrine always exists as two shrines: active and alive, the other dormant in the materials, labor, and shared history of the generations to be.Footnote4
Even more than Rome, the construction of Ise erodes the dialectic of ancient and new, original and copy. It is both/and. The forest, grasses, lumber, and laborers are in a constant cycle of decay and renewal at the service of the fixed formal reality of the ever-present but never-present temple. We as a species tend to like things fixed, even if we acknowledge that everything is in a state of becoming. The question of how and how long we invest our social identity in the built world may need adjusting. Of course, as an ideological construct, this varies in place and time. No two cultures are the same, and no single culture remains the same.
But here is the rub: sustainability, resilience, and circularity are our past, present, and future balance sheets. Ise’s lesson is ontological; A is both A and not-A.Footnote5 Sustainability and resilience must be part of a continuum of actions, not categorical conditions. Nature is nature and non-nature, built on the circumstances of the cyclical pull between living and what will cease living, the world we are building, and the one we will rebuild in the future.
Notes
1. D. Marchese, E. Reynolds, M.E. Bates, H. Morgan, S.S. Clark and I. Linkov, “Resilience and Sustainability: Similarities and Differences in Environmental Management Applications,” Science of The Total Environment, Volumes 613–614 (2018): 1275-1283, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.09.086.
2. “The Sustainable Development Agenda,” accessed June 21, 2023, https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda/y.
3. Circular Economy (CE) emerged from multiple sources. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation defines circularity as a decoupling of economic activity from the consumption of resources. See, “The Ellen MacArthur Foundation,” accessed June 21, 2023. https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/topics/circular-economy-introduction/overview.
4. Ise is a shrine complex composed of many Shinto shrines centered on two main shrines, Naikū and Gekū located in the Ise, Mie Prefecture of Japan. The present buildings dating from 2013 are the 62nd iteration scheduled for rebuilding in 2033. See K. Tange and N. Kawazoe, Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1965).
5. This violates the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction, which states that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense simultaneously. This principle is not affirmed in most Eastern philosophical constructs.