ABSTRACT
The Modern Movement and the environmental movement have at least one thing in common: an ethical agenda. This is framed in different ways, with the Modern Movement viewing the environmental by way of the social, if at all, and the environmental movement viewing the social largely by way of the environment. Architectural modernism, as it has survived the onslaughts of historicism and deconstruction, has largely divested itself of its ethical agenda, having failed to produce what it promised socially, and largely addressed itself to its own iconography and/or to advancing technology. The work of Jean Nouvel, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) or I. M. Pei, for example, referred to by Marc Augé (1995) as ‘Supermodernity’, is nothing more than another rehearsal of the concerns of modernism minus the ethical dimension. Environmental architecture, however, whether that descended from modernism or repudiations of it, has resurrected an ethical agenda, one derived from the moral framework of environmentalism.
