Designing a sustainable future means looking beyond our backyards at the very systems that keep us going. This issue presents three pioneers of sustainable design whose vision, foresight, and fame extend well past the front door. In expanding our scope of sustainability to include bridges, museums, breweries, even a temporary structure for the Pope, we hope to show that concentric circles of architecture radiate out from the home to include nearly everything about how we live, and how we ought to.
We examine the career of an architect who has always seemed to be somewhere in the future. Richard Rogers's 1971-1977 collaboration with Renzo Piano on the Centre Pompidou in Paris still feels like a gift 30 years ahead of its time. Concerned largely with grander projects since his first brush with fame, Rogers imagines sustainable cities, urban hubs reorganized to meet the needs of the next millennium.
And few understand better than Rogers that any imagined future rests entirely on choices made now. Instead of couching his progressiveness in terms of healing Mother Earth, he instead prefers to think of radical efficiency as a moral imperative.
New architect's ongoing series of green houses lacks nothing in terms of contemporary aesthetics, yet they have been constructed to be entirely recyclable. That producing less waste permits us to tread more lightly on the planet is merely a happy side effect of working as efficiently as possible. Finally some young new architects, apparently strange to the notion of "sustainability" (a term that, in its ecological sense, has been around only since 1980).
Nonetheless, those young new architects work is an environmentalist's dream, filtering the preoccupations of the International Style through the rather more bracing forms and materials of our collective Neolithic past. So allow us to step momentarily outside of our houses and neighborhoods, explore the surrounding context, and examine three luminaries who possess vastly divergent aesthetics-even different worldviews, but who remain united around one common global concern.
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