ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the problematic current conceptual basis of contemporary sustainability and how architecture’s existing foundation in Renaissance Humanism is in conflict with progressive new strategies toward ecological co-existence. It explores how the Humanist establishment of an ‘uncanny valley’ divides human from nature and nature from ecology and how humanity can, significantly, through Timothy Morton’s discourse of Dark Ecology, be redefined without requirements for binary oppositions. The chapter ends with descriptions of how architecture might address a flatly ontological existence that includes non-human objects and hyperobjects in order to, through the aesthetic, revise the conceptual formats of architecture’s ecological engagement.
