MISSION
The studio aims to attract those architects, designers and other professionals who are unsettled by ‘the state of the world’ as seen in its environmental, geopolitical, socio-cultural and inequity problems. Such people are frustrated by the limits of their practice, and recognise the insufficiency of the ways that ‘sustainability’ – as theory and practice – is currently applied to the unsustainable human condition and to world-making, and who want to advance their knowledge, practice and transformative capability.
The ambition of the studio is to grow a cadre of interdisciplinary ‘designers’ and thinkers able to globally proliferate transformative inspirational ‘trigger’ projects that, over time, will advance cultures, economies and politics of ‘The Sustainment’ – understood as action beyond sustainability based on new thinking and practices that sustain those conditions upon which life depends, including all fundamental socio-political, cultural, psychological and economic modes of exchange. Effectively this means learning how to counter all those values and actions that sustain the unsustainable status quo by mobilising design to ontologically redirect modes of human being and habitation in their difference, towards future-making rather than future-negating. This learning is by its very nature interdisciplinary and necessarily intercultural.
The studio aims to attract those architects, designers and other professionals who are unsettled by ‘the state of the world’ as seen in its environmental, geopolitical, socio-cultural and inequity problems. Such people are frustrated by the limits of their practice, and recognise the insufficiency of the ways that ‘sustainability’ – as theory and practice – is currently applied to the unsustainable human condition and to world-making, and who want to advance their knowledge, practice and transformative capability.
The ambition of the studio is to grow a cadre of interdisciplinary ‘designers’ and thinkers able to globally proliferate transformative inspirational ‘trigger’ projects that, over time, will advance cultures, economies and politics of ‘The Sustainment’ – understood as action beyond sustainability based on new thinking and practices that sustain those conditions upon which life depends, including all fundamental socio-political, cultural, psychological and economic modes of exchange. Effectively this means learning how to counter all those values and actions that sustain the unsustainable status quo by mobilising design to ontologically redirect modes of human being and habitation in their difference, towards future-making rather than future-negating. This learning is by its very nature interdisciplinary and necessarily intercultural.
THE SUSTAINMENT
This is not ‘sustainability’ with its propensity to sustain the unsustainable, seek means to be able to continue ‘business as usual’ and posit the problems to overcome as ‘environmental’.
In contrast, the Sustainment is a vital intellectual and pragmatic project of discovery marking a turn of humanity that acknowledges that ‘to be sustained’ requires another kind of earthly habitation that understands: the indivisible relation between creation and destruction; that nothing will change unless our mode of being changes; and that which has to change extends to every dimension of human environmental, economic, social, cultural and psychological existence. To grasp this is to comprehend that human ‘development’ to date has been bonded to an ever-increasing condition of unsustainability whereby human ‘progress ‘ has negated all the related conditions of ‘our’ dependence.
The measure of the Sustainment is that it is project equal to ‘the Enlightenment’. As such it realises the need to understand that human beings are intrinsically anthropocentric but only have a future if this structural condition is constrained and means to take responsibility for this mode of being are created. The Sustainment is characterised by:
This is not ‘sustainability’ with its propensity to sustain the unsustainable, seek means to be able to continue ‘business as usual’ and posit the problems to overcome as ‘environmental’.
In contrast, the Sustainment is a vital intellectual and pragmatic project of discovery marking a turn of humanity that acknowledges that ‘to be sustained’ requires another kind of earthly habitation that understands: the indivisible relation between creation and destruction; that nothing will change unless our mode of being changes; and that which has to change extends to every dimension of human environmental, economic, social, cultural and psychological existence. To grasp this is to comprehend that human ‘development’ to date has been bonded to an ever-increasing condition of unsustainability whereby human ‘progress ‘ has negated all the related conditions of ‘our’ dependence.
The measure of the Sustainment is that it is project equal to ‘the Enlightenment’. As such it realises the need to understand that human beings are intrinsically anthropocentric but only have a future if this structural condition is constrained and means to take responsibility for this mode of being are created. The Sustainment is characterised by:
- Action based on the imperative to sustain over idealism, utopias or unrestrained, auto-destructive acquisitiveness
- The intercultural mind over the Eurocentric
- A comprehension that individual interest is not at odds with the common interest
- Acting in time in recognition of the incremental and the need for the modest over the grand.