The Promise(s) of Sustainability

The discourse on sustainability, today in the spotlight of architectural debate and practice, is grounded on the promise of a sustainable relationship between humans and nature through architecture. In this sense, sustainability is the latest expression of architecture’s attempt to articulate the human/nature divide. The continuity between current debate on sustainability and previous ecological discourses on the human/nature relationship is not frictionless. Yet, despite historical ruptures, there is something that keeps these different discourses together—they are all promises. Against the background of the New European Bauhaus’s promise of sustainability, we will read literary works of Western architects Walter Gropius, Richard Buckminster Fuller and Richard Rogers, in order to expose both the ruptures between their different promises regarding the human/ nature relationship and the continuity represented by the promise itself in language. This is of course not specific to the language of architecture alone; as philosopher Jacques Derrida noted: “Each time I open my mouth, each time I speak or write, I promise”. Yet, architectural language reveals the intimate connection between language and promise, because of how it introduces the reader to the specific temporality of a time to come and its future realization through the project. Since all language is promise, there can be no architectural language free of promises. Starting from this claim, this contribution aims at critically addressing the limits of the promise-as-project through which architecture has, and is, addressing the relationship between humans and nature, as well as—given the urgency of rethinking this divide—suggesting the possibility of a different form of promise. We set out to think of the promise not as a project directed towards a specific future but one that promises here and now. A promise that is valid in itself and not in its future realization.