The architect is principally an invention of the Italian Renaissance. Reasserting classical antiquity, the Renaissance associated the immaterial with timeless geometry and the material with temporal decay. Agreeing that space does not have an independent existence, Moholy-Nagy describes it as this material and writes that the phrase 'material is energy' have significance for architecture by emphasizing relation, instead of mass. The rhetoric of sustainability tends to reduce architecture to a technical issue and the architect to a technocrat, employing a debased empiricism devoid of the poetic and practical implications of Evelyn's environmental research. Countering the Platonist and Cartesian traditions in which knowledge is acquired by the mind alone, empiricism concluded that personality and morality develop through a dialogue between the environment, senses and mind, drawing attention to the conditions that inform knowledge and self-understanding, notably the weather. The term 'coproduction' explains nature-culture relations and the cities, landscapes and weathers inhabited.