ABSTRACT
There is no reason why environmental design’s science-based enquiry and architecture’s traditional concern with form should not co-exist; indeed, why architectural form should not be enriched by an environmental agenda, as long as that agenda is not prescriptive. The utilitarian ethos that characterizes much of the environmental movement does not sit easily with formal exploration, however. Cast in ethical terms, the debate pitches puritans against aesthetes, the first group asking the second: should ‘the formal concerns highly specific to the architectural community...themselves be informed by other concerns specific to a larger community’ (Bess, 1996: 379)? This is putting it too mildly for many environmentalists, who would maintain that architecture’s ‘formal concerns’ should be not merely ‘informed by’, but entirely subordinate to the community’s larger concerns.
