ABSTRACT
Architectural practice is an epic performance of organizational skill in confguring systems and delivering projects into the world. Emerging issues and changing societal expectations join the ensemble continually. Corresponding to a hierarchy theory of ecosystems, an ecological narrative for architectural design equivocates by keeping in suspension multiple perspectives in relation to a project's role within dynamic systems. Architectures of inventive adaptation in the service of life follow precisely from dialog with those who speak the world by opening to it: ecologists, landscape architects, artists, environmental historians, philosophers, and others. Lack of historical depth, an insuffcient grasp of vicissitudes of the past, including the dynamics of environmental change and the infuence of the built environment, limit the imaginary. In commanding the architect's full attention, empowering technologies for simulating and predicting state-of-the-art high-performance buildings leave unexamined deep ecological uncertainties. Collaborative narrative-building in shaping the ecological potential of architecture is instantiated through inventive, concerned description of the kind of world.
