The Environmental Paradigms of Architecture

A Critical Approach

Abstract

Far from constituting a specialization, and far from being reduced to the principles of simple 'sustainability', the environmental approach to architecture has a long history that can be traced back to Vitruvius and has passed through various treatises until reaching modernity. Architecture manipulates form, matter and energy to shape environments with a certain cultural imprint—it is both matter and environment as well as form and symbol—and this definition not only enlarges the heart of the discipline, but also enriches it with its own values but also with its own contradictions. These values and contradictions must be taken into account when understanding the complexity of the architecture of the last hundred years, determined by the succession, conjunction and mixture of a series of environmental paradigms that are still largely in force: the hygienic, technocratic, bioclimatic, thermodynamic and sustainable paradigms.