SOUPERgreen!: Souped-up Green Architecture

SOUPERgreen!–Souped Up Green Architecture features projects and essays that offer a critique of the prevailing approach to “green” architecture by interrogating the architectural discipline’s fairly narrow expectations for “environmental performance,” which are predominantly evaluated through scientific calculation and quantifiable measurement. In contrast, SOUPERgreen! re-examines the very nature of the environment as a human construct rather than a given condition–as a manifestation of philosophy’s long-recognized epistemological gap between reality and its appearance. The book therefore addresses the manner in which the constructed nature of the environment both problematizes the assumption of humanity’s ability to objectively calculate and measure it, and also leads to habits and behaviors that are detrimental to the environment. It also argues that aesthetic “performances” are necessary to reveal new forms of environmental engagement, and that architecture’s unique aesthetic and spatial expertise might therefore be leveraged for valuable types of environmental performances that profoundly alter, enhance, and transform the public’s understanding of and actions toward the environment.

The work in SOUPERgreen! stands in sharp contrast to contemporary examples of “green” or “sustainable” architecture that rely primarily on the invisible agency of unremarkable technologies and materials to reduce resource consumption, but which do so without producing a necessary shift in the public’s perception of the environment or behavior towards it. Instead, by leveraging the inherently aesthetic and expressive nature of technology in order to dramatize the constantly negotiated relationship between humanity and the natural world, the “souped up” green architecture featured in SOUPERgreen! transforms “greenness” from a calculation of environmental fitness into a dramatic performance of new environmental realities–ones that reveal ways of engaging and understanding the world that are inherently more ecological.