Share Economy and Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century

Introduction: Sustainability and the Architectural Profession

One of the most pressing challenges facing architects in the 21st century is the issue of sustainability. Not only is there no consensus on how to approach sustainability in academic circles, but there is also no formula for integrating it into architectural curricula (Wright, 2003). This deficiency underscores an even deeper problem: as Edwards and Hyett (2010) note, "the techniques and technologies of green design are now generally understood — what is still lacking is an architecture profession which gives priority to ecological issues" (p. 5). In other words, there is no meaningful connection between the myriad academic approaches and professional architectural practice. Wheeler (2015) asserts that this disconnect is due to an inadequate definition of sustainable architecture. In the capitalistic, consumerist global environment of the 20th century, the concept of preservation and connectivity to nature was largely overshadowed by corporate demand and higher profit margins.

Yet the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century has witnessed a revolution in thinking about community-based standards, thanks in large part to the impact of the Internet and its ability to connect individuals around the world and share information at essentially no cost. This sharing and connectivity has given rise to today's share economy and the concept of collaborative consumption, seen in enterprises from AirBnB to ZipCar. These new enterprises correspond to Wheeler's (2015) assertion that what is needed is "a philosophical reconsideration of relationality" in terms of generating a "sustainable built environment." Relationality is understood as the way in which two or more persons or things interact and relate. Understanding the gap between what is theorized about sustainable architecture and what is practicable in the dynamic and changing world of the 21st century is therefore essential to overcoming the challenges of depleted resources, shrinking economies, and failing community infrastructures (Escobar, 2014).

American architect Louis Sullivan wrote in 1896 that "form ever follows function" (p. 403). Sullivan noted that this was "the law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman" — in short, that "life is recognizable in its expression." This architectural manifesto gave birth to America's first real burst of architectural creativity and design.

Sustainability, Form, and Function: Historical Trends in Theory

The 20th century gave way, however, to Marcel Breuer's Brutalism, which can be viewed in one sense as a result of the loss of a sense of function. Tenement dwellings were not conceived as housing people of inexpressible worth and value, but rather as serving a bureaucratic purpose — packing as many bodies into as many meters as possible in a city block and then forgetting all about it. Surfaceless, oblique, anti-aesthetic, cold, and unattractive, these dwellings became the soul of modern architecture as various architects attempted to utilize this conceit and twist it or add to it their own peculiar sensibilities. The results ranged in expression from the Guggenheim Museum to the Whitney Museum of Art (Johnson, 2003). In the absence of function, form fell apart, and minimalism and abstraction filled the void.

In the 21st century, function is again becoming important. This shift has come about as a result of a new socio-cultural trend rooted in both economics and environmental studies. Sustainability is now a growing concern among developers and designers: how to create a building that is efficient and sustainable, leaves as small an environmental footprint as possible, yet maintains a diversity of life. This was not an issue for the Brutalists of the 20th century. For Sullivan at the end of the 19th century, the issue centered more on how to create an aesthetically pleasing skyscraper that did not crush the human spirit (Morrison, 2001). Having lost sight of this manifesto over the course of a century, architects can now return to it with renewed focus as they seek to solve the problem of sustainability while addressing both the needs of the environment and the people who will use their structures.

In collaboration with the economic ideas of "collaborative consumption," sustainability in architecture can be viewed in terms of resource efficiency. Imagine an architectural system that can accommodate various functions and programs regardless of the day, time, year, or season — then ask: what resources will need to be consumed in order to sustain this system efficiently? Consuming less and utilizing more — in terms of space, energy, and other finite resources — is essentially at the heart of the unique problem facing architects in the 21st century, whether they are "green," eco-friendly, constrained by urban limitations, or simply energy-conscious. The function is the same: preserve the natural as much as possible and make maximum use of what is built. The dynamic is admittedly less concerned with aesthetics than Sullivan was in 1896, but the essence of the problem is more nature-driven, in terms of respect for the environment, than the architecture of the 20th century.

The notions of share economy and collaborative consumption serve as the foundation for this study in sustainability in architecture. From AirBnB to ZipCar, the share economy is revolutionizing the way in which the modern world comes to terms with the changing needs of society. The concept of utilizing more while requiring fewer resources is what this notion is all about. A share economy framework is relevant to this thesis because, like HBNY (Parenthetical Space) and co-housing projects, there is an architectural basis for addressing this need. The architectural design proposition of this study is that a share economy sensibility can be and should be incorporated into architecture in order to advance the aims of the 21st century in terms of preserving energy, space, time, and utility, while maximizing function, potential, affordability, and scale.

The central question this study poses is: How can the notion of share economy be facilitated architecturally?

Problems of Consumerism and Capitalism

The consumer culture that exists as a result of our current global economic system has resulted in environmental destruction on a substantial scale. As Calvo and Mendoza (2000) note, the crisis in developed and developing worlds is coming to a head, with economic collapse a real possibility. One of the economic reasons for this collapse — at least in the West — is that the means of extracting and processing fuels needed by industry have become too expensive relative to profit margins (Hadley and Rennell, 2015, p. 29). Other corporate entities are destroying the environment by attempting to "modify" nature's organisms, such as wheat, which as a GMO has been shown to be toxic to both people and land (Engdahl, 2007). Meanwhile, the consumerist culture that for so long kept industry intact is now shrinking as the financial world continues its unchecked global pillage and the purchasing power of the middle class continues to decline (Lewis, 2011). That the demise of the middle class is coinciding with the demise of the environment is only ironic given that it is primarily the excessive waste and materialism of the former that has brought about the latter (Kasser, 2002). As Calvo and Mendoza (2000) suggest, the factors of modern collapse have been forming for decades.

Share economy is thus an important aspect of the 21st century and is relevant to the field of architecture because architects are the ones who will be providing the space for the people of tomorrow — the projects, businesses, and dwelling places of tomorrow. In a share economy, such as has arisen in recent decades, architects should understand the implications of their designs and how they both impact and are impacted by the environment in which they create.

Any number of examples illustrate the point that global-scale consumerism leads to environmental devastation. The demand for oil and for ever-greater profits has led to the implementation of environmentally harmful methods of extracting energy from the earth — namely, fracking and off-shore drilling, both of which are only profitable when the cost of oil per barrel is high (Hadley and Rennell, 2015, p. 29). With the recent decline in oil prices as part of the energy conflicts being waged in the Middle East (Escobar, 2014), more and more extraction facilities are shutting down. Ironically, the consumerist culture that spawned the fracking industry is now responsible for its collapse: consumer demand does not match the oversupply of oil, and with the impending global economic pressures foreseen by many analysts, it is a further sign that consumerism (Kasser, 2002) — which led to an overexpansion of extraction facilities (Hadley and Rennell, 2015) — will be the same force that ultimately kills the industry, but not before that industry helps to damage the planet.

Another example lies in the demand for automobiles. Rather than favoring carpooling or public transportation, individuals feel compelled to own a personal vehicle as soon as they obtain a driving license. This is not only impractical in the long run, as the current surplus of cars on lots indicates, but also wasteful in terms of fuel consumption and harmful in terms of emissions. The consumer culture, however, can only last as long as there is a significant middle class willing to spend. When that class shrinks or disposable income constricts, the consumer culture comes to an end.

One reason that consumers have been slow to wake up to this reality is that they have divorced themselves from the natural world. Industry has created artificial environments where air conditioning and electricity keep everyone comfortable. This is what the tenets of agrarianism suggest: the root cause of human alienation from nature is urban life and the rise of industry, as seen in the mass migrations of citizens from the land to the cities during the Industrial Revolution. The technological advances of the past 200 years have dehumanized people, removed them from their natural surroundings, placed them in ever more sterile and unnatural environments, and depleted their sense of community. People have become increasingly dependent on materialism, as though all of human fulfillment could be satisfied by the accumulation of physical goods. What is lost is an idea of the soul, of mental health, spiritual well-being, and an appreciation of the environment (Kasser, 2002; Lewis, 2011). Americans in particular must feel disconnected from their past and heritage, as their own country "began as a nation of farmers" (Hagenstein, 2011, p. 9). What followed the war for Independence was a communal shift away from an agrarian way of life toward a new way that would secure a "commercial economy" (Hagenstein, 2011, p. 11). Having its own independent government brought new pressures, and the people of America adopted a "Hamiltonian worldview," putting profit and capital gains ahead of spiritual and natural nourishment (Hagenstein, 2011, p. 14). The Hamiltonian worldview was essentially a capitalistic, materialistic one in which all power was centralized and profits privatized — not shared. It was the antithesis of today's share economy, and it fueled a malnourished system that came crashing down in the first decade of the 21st century with the onset of the global economic recession.

This lack of nourishment is evident in the architectural designs of the 20th century, which moved away from Sullivan's "form ever follows function" manifesto and adopted a substanceless, functionless attitude that served only the capitalistic, consumerist empires — which are now in recession and outright decay (Escobar, 2014).

Share Economy and Architectural Design: Literature Review

Moreover, what is significant about these decorative, single-function buildings is that they represent an amalgamation of influences — social, political, economic, and historical — yet rarely do they reflect environmental concerns or serve a multi-purpose social function beyond the generation of revenue for owners. Hotels, for instance, may sit with significant vacancy for whole segments of the year while locals struggle to find shelter. Green-conscious architects are only lately coming into fashion alongside the rise of share economy (Thorpe, 2012), and this is one influence that 20th-century architects did not experience.

Prior to the explosion of green consciousness, architects fostered a spirit of showmanship, endeavoring to demonstrate how they could follow the style of the Bauhaus, the Brutalists, or the Classicists. Understanding these architects and their works can help shed light on the urgency and necessity for 21st-century architects to ask: is this necessary? More to the point, these studies can draw attention to the pressing need for conservation in an architectural sense and allow a more robust response to the question of how share economy can facilitate architectural design today.

One may take the work of architect Villanueva as an example. Lejeune (2003) notes that for this Venezuelan architect, a number of influences shaped his architectural design. These are worth noting because they reveal an awareness of culture and style on the architect's part — but no sense of shared responsibility or share economy — mainly because these works predate the modern notion by half a century. All the same, they are indicative of the mindset that has steered societies toward overconsumption. For Villanueva, the political scene in Caracas had an impact on his work in Venezuela, as did the history of the nation and European influences: "the synthesis of formal rationalism and Baroque plasticity" (Lejeune, 2003, p. 86). Born in London and having moved to Venezuela later in life, Villanueva's particular tendency in constructing housing was to use "space" and "color" to make his houses stand out from the "demon city" that encased them and which he sought to escape through architecture (Lejeune, 2003, p. 86). His main objective was therefore not to make space more functional or multi-functional but rather to use it aesthetically and decoratively. One sees this tendency in his houses "El Paraíso" (1952–1954), "23 January" (1955), and "El Silencio" — all using color and space to set the homes apart from their surroundings and to transcend the civic and public turmoil in which they were situated. This was escapist architecture. One finds traditional European Baroque sentiments infused with Bauhaus styles — flats, horizontals, and a dynamic hybrid of old world and new world architecture — but it has no social significance or purpose able to address the needs of a world overburdened by poverty, pollution, waste, and diminishing resources.

How and what these "old school" architects decided to design with was based on their influences, as Lejeune (2003) has noted. Villanueva had studied at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, which left a lasting mark; in the 1950s and 1960s, the global style of architecture was dominated by the Bauhaus movement. Thus, his residential houses were at times decorative and at other times stripped of ornament, after the Brutalist fashion of Breuer and others. In his Caracas homes, Villanueva displayed a gigantic façade of shells used to alleviate the sense of space by playing off one another within the composition. But in terms of creating space or expanding the purpose of rooms, they accomplished nothing. He played with balances of height within his space and gave distinction and variance to the surroundings rather than blending in uniformly — but these designs had only aesthetic value; again, it was form without function.

Like Villanueva, Vilamajo prioritized his materials based on the aesthetic appeal of the current architectural movement. The Vilamajo House (now a Museum), built in 1930 in Montevideo, has a style that is very Frank Lloyd Wright in character and even Bauhaus. Its flats and horizontals are offset by a lively, joyous exterior façade that is surprisingly varied, with a dotted surface and windows of various sizes. But like Villanueva, Vilamajo's designs respond to the 20th-century corporatism that Sullivan decried — the rise of the skyscraper with its soul-deadening lifelessness, which Sullivan had at least attempted to ornament with style and beauty. Even Sullivan's skyscrapers had multi-purpose functions, which is more than can be said of the single-function designs of mid-20th-century architects, who promoted style over substance. Both Villanueva and Vilamajo were dealing with the infusion of corporatism in Latin America in a way meant to elevate the spirit or give the onlooker a transcendent experience. That was the primary aim of the design — whereas today the aim of architecture in a collaborative consumption sense is to provide a multitude of variant possibilities within a single structure; transcendence is not a primary focus.

Indeed, the ornamentation — the hieroglyphics, the "intricate patterns in an all-over coating" — all of it speaks of an articulation of soul, of a heart and mind that the new towers of "functionalism" would lack (Korom, 2008, p. 209). Implicit in Villanueva's architecture was the sense that form should never lose its soul or cease reflecting the transcendent quality of the human spirit. This idea was also apparent in the Vilamajo House, which sits like an extraordinary gift to a city steeped in homogenous works. Vilamajo might as well have been channeling Wright with his use of flats, horizontals, and simple materials, because it was Wright who identified this style of architecture as "the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods and men, to put man into possession of his own earth" (Pfeiffer, 1988, p. 48).

This issue of defining what is important to the architect in the time in which he lives brings the focus back to the question raised by Wheeler (2015) — namely, that sustainable architecture must be clearly defined. For the South American architects, their sense of sustainable architecture (if it may be called that) was completely opposite to what scholars and architects might define it as today.

Still, in their personal designs, both Latin American architects embraced the Bauhaus influence on art, which encouraged a movement away from preconceived or old-world methods of illustrating the spiritual, just as in design it encouraged a movement away from old-world modes of production. In terms of design and architecture, Bauhaus encouraged industrial design — the mass-produced technique utilizing new metals and new materials, and absolving nations of national characteristics. Villanueva decried this yet utilized it in El Silencio, and the Vilamajo House reflects the urbanization of the Wright style, which is a kind of prairie–post-industrial style in its own right. In this sense, these architects did advance the movement of design theory toward the modern state in which it has now developed.

Such poetic hybrids were certainly not new and had existed in the old world. Greek architecture favored an organic feel and strove "to put a bit of life into buildings to make them breathe [and] flex their sensuality," as Johnson (2003, p. 69) has stated. The Greeks employed any of five different tactics to convince the eye of depth, line, and curve — each requiring more labor and cost, so not every temple employed them all. The same is true of Villanueva and Vilamajo, whose houses feel organic as though sprung up out of the earth — Villanueva with his shell façade offsetting his home from surrounding buildings, Vilamajo with his insistence upon parallel and perpendicular designs and flat surfaces conveying the simple spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright in a Latin American context, situated beneath the urban landscape's own depressing, corporatized character. These concrete constructs justify their existence by being something other than what ordinary buildings in their neighborhoods are, even if the materials used are not fundamentally different.

King's (2004) assessment of Villanueva's houses also focuses on the materials used, which replicate the corporatist shift in the architect's mentality. In the 1950s, Villanueva used the "reinforced concrete" of the age to "create curves, arches and undulating canopies" — as in the "giant, curving external ribs of several of the University City buildings in Caracas" (p. 230). Yet in his houses, a more personal appeal comes through in the style and overrides the materials. In Latin America, as King notes, "concrete is more than just a means to an end" and carries an aesthetic appeal. Unfortunately, that appeal does little to confront the mounting issues of modern urban cities struggling to overcome the problems of space, time, resources, and feasibility that now plague them.

Existing literature on share economy, collaborative consumption, and doing more with less in architectural design encompasses a number of approaches. Minke (2012) discusses the possibility of using earth as a building material depending on the climate region, finding that "an increasing tendency to build with loam in cooler climate zones" is facilitating a "do more with less" approach to architectural design that supports "environmental awareness as well as the desire to live in a balanced and healthy indoor environment" (p. 7). Earthenware architectural design can achieve significant strides in conservative material usage. Minke's (2012) focus is therefore helpful in highlighting the important role that earthenware projects can play for communities, especially in a global climate more aware than ever before of the footprint mankind is leaving on nature.

Gorbis (2013) examines the concept of Free-Range Architecture as a method of socially structured education that allows everyone to contribute to an understanding of architecture. It takes "expertise" out of the hands of the academic instructor and places it in the hands of everyone: all those with knowledge are allowed to contribute and work together, just as the parts of an arm work with the body to be functional (Gorbis, 2013). This applies the concept of share economy directly to the field of architecture by encouraging shared learning through smartphone apps like ArchGenius, which allows users to learn about architectural works by pointing a phone at them and to upload information that may be missing. This is a shared information system that takes the study of architecture out of the classroom. The concept is far from perfect, however, as it does not address practical issues of building — such as obtaining permits, assembling crews, finalizing designs, and completing construction — none of which is possible simply through an app or shared learning. But it can be viewed as a stepping stone toward the merger of the architectural field and the science of share economy.

Schwarz and Krabbendam (2013) define sustainist as the ability to sustain life independently, thereby avoiding the definitional pitfall Wheeler (2015) warns against. Their study allows them to assert that sustainist design "forges a fundamental connection between design for sustainability and design for social impact" (p. 25). This connection allows the architect to create a structure that has social importance and social value in terms of collaborative consumption. Every aspect of such a structure — from its use of energy (which is shared) to its use of space (which is also shared) — is conceived and implemented not on the basis of aesthetic value but of social value in a share economy sense. Their study is helpful in exploring the ideas and range of possibilities for how architectural design and share economy can go together in the 21st century.

Botsman (2010) notes that "the sustainability movement has pressed designers to stop focusing on 'thingification' and address the ecological impact of the products they design" (p. 187). This means that architects are now facing the challenge of considering the impact of their design not only on the economy and society but also on the natural world. Botsman's study shows that 21st-century architects need to rethink the tools in their belt and apply the mechanics important to individuals in the Digital Age to the field of architecture. All three aspects — economic, social, and environmental — must be considered, because the emphasis on values and preservation has shifted to incorporate them in much of the developed world. And just as form ever follows function, "design drives the raw materials required" (Botsman, 2010, p. 187). Thus, in architectural design it is necessary to consider from the outset what materials will be used to construct.

Conclusion: Toward a Share Economy Architecture

Louisville thus serves as an example of what is needed for the 21st-century architect: on the one hand, there is the co-housing project at St. James Court where various families, owners, and renters live together within a community and share the common spaces. It is utility and multi-functionality — with access to parks, aesthetic value, rooms for recreation, museums, shelter, and hosting events. On the other hand, the area surrounding the racetrack is designed to serve only one purpose: the track. How can share economy better facilitate architectural design here?