Has the world become unsustainable? A crisis takes hold of us due to the increasing complexity of the artificial ingredients that define our living environment; a crisis according to which there is no conceivable way of progress other than growth at any price, the increase of supply and the constant change that exceeds all forecasts, dragging the natural ingredients from the same environment to a global redefinition that originates in a great many, apparently insignificant local actions. This clash between millions of individual acts and the construction of a new complete nature that we no longer understand is the essence of the environmental issue today and the reason for its disturbing current. Such correspondence between the small and the global comes to show that we inhabit a forlorn planet that can maintain its balance only through significant readaptations of its own processes.

Unfortunately, the possibilities for success of a severe correction program are few and not only because this “inconvenient truth” has become a concern of world politics inserted in the framework of conflicts of interests and relinquishments that pervade everything nowadays, but rather because what we denominate ‘recovery’ is impossible because nature, when turned global, becomes something else, and can only be at the same time a different nature, perhaps more balanced and calm, more egalitarian and in harmony with its inhabitants, but fuelled by yet unknown processes, species and laws. We find ourselves thus before a complex crossroads: the awareness that we inhabit an unsustainable environment (unable to generate the necessary resources to maintain itself without using up its reserves) that has transcended every local condition and thereby cannot be undertaken with the resources of each site. And it so happens that the geography is a different one, and the phenomenon of the systems that have exceeded every known idea of order, scale and balance and their impossibility of recovery, understood as a return to their apt original configuration, affects everything and leaves us systematically resource less.

Architecture has decided to take action assuming the agenda of sustainability with a mixture of responsibility and ingenuity, imposing demands on the consumption of resources, the use of energy, the control of emissions, the recyclability of its elements and so on, which has understandably divided the panorama between devouts and sceptics. Despite their differences, both attitudes share the need to accept that the work pending does not involve the quest for a model rendered useless, if not unfeasible, but rather a radical change of paradigms. Building a new world is something that cannot be done by repeating ‘in a better way’ what we already know, making it more ecological, participating in an obsolete model of comfort and efficiency, dwelling on the nostalgia for the lost arcadia, but rather by a radical rethinking of the equations, by a critical redescription of what we want and need, of what helps us live better, of what we will consider luxury or wealth in every sense, of what stimulates our emotions and gives us pleasure. This is the time to propose a sort of utopia (from the Greek: place that does not exist) and work for its construction. This conclusion in the form of global task – designing a new world – must give up any heroic content to welcome as many agents as possible and make their participation useful and necessary, thus going beyond the local sphere to inscribe itself in one project – cultural, technical, economical, aesthetic... – of a greater scale and from there contribute to the construction of a desirable future, one that elucidates the true contribution of architecture to the life of people and that shows the true usefulness of our discipline. H june 2008