There Is No Wealth But Life: Architecture and Environmental Ethics from The Charter of Athens to The Charter of Elements (original) (raw)

The historic La Sarraz Declaration (1928) made numerous claims and aspirational assertions regarding architectural pedagogy, practice and policy – among those claims whose merits stand out 90 years later is that “the essence [of urbanization] is of a functional order…[whose] essential objects are : (a) the division of soil, (b) the organization of traffic, and (c) legislation”. While there are elements of continuity in those concerns expressed by the authors of La Sarraz Declaration and contemporary issues, perhaps the greatest apparent difference derives from the very different environmental inclinations that exist in the Anthropocene. The purpose of this essay is to focus on an issue that was not really on the minds of the La Sarraz authors. The issue is climate change mitigation. Historically, environmental ethics were predicated on a certain casual anthropocentrism – characterized by environmental historian Roger Kennedy as “the theology of dominance” – in which nature was regarded as “belonging of right to mankind”. Our contemporary ambitions are informed by the distinction made in a 1992 amendment to the Swiss Constitution stating that the purpose of the constitution is to “ensure the dignity of living beings”, and by the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology’s advocacy of this in their official 2008 report, 'The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants: Moral Consideration of Plants for their Own Sake'. Highlighting change and continuity in the architectural discourse, the essay relates CIAM’s La Sarraz Declaration (1928) and the Charter of Athens (1944) on one hand, and the proto-ecological architectural discourse from John Ruskin’s 'Unto This Last' (1860) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s 'The Living City' (1959) on the other, arriving at contemporary efforts to create “The Charter of Elements” – extending rights to soil, water, and air themselves.