ABSTRACT
The lecture in which this equation appears is now online and translated into Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Spanish. Architects will, of course, continue to ornament their drawings with green grass and trees while working with the Romantic image of a happy and contented nature. ARUP's equation produces two natures. The first one is Nature as image and the second is Nature as Science. Positivism rendered matter as 'dead' so that it could be enlivened by the equations of physics and chemistry that govern the world from their magisterial heights. The result is an architectural discourse about Sustainability that from a cultural and theoretical point of view is tottering on irrelevancy. The fusion is Eco-Pop, a design strategy that embraces all at once the untenable cultural predicament of our current age, the vacuity of the idea of nature, and the fabulated ambition for a Sustainable future. More can be done to expose the transitory state of the cultural product.
