ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The speculative essays and architectural case studies included in the book traverse a whole array of interpretive and creative answers to such questions and underscore how one of the defining themes of architecture today is not nature qua nature but, rather, its return. Precisely because sustainability introduces new, complex, and inexorable constraints, it becomes necessary to shift gears-this to prevent subsuming the social, political, and cultural dimensions of the built environment under nature's primary status. Thus projects such as MOS Architects' after party pavilion inverts outwards, externalizes the soft internal realities of architecture. And lastly, the book might speak of the formalism embedded in precipitous interventions: how, for instance, Steven Holl's Sliced Porosity Block, as it is presented in the book, investigates a different temporality of light, one that is decisive, instantaneous, dramatic, and incontrovertible.
