Planet: What’s in a Name

Sustainability is more than ‘design-speak.’

“If you ask a designer to name the most important issues facing design today,” wrote Alice Rawsthorn in The New York Times earlier this year, “one is bound to be sustainability, which is design-speak for helping the rest of us to live responsibly, ethically and environmentally.” Design-speak? “I wasn’t implying that designers and architects invented the term,” Rawsthorn tells me. “They didn’t. They simply appropriated it.” “Appropriate” means “to take exclusive possession of.” So we didn’t invent it—we just stole it.

“Our profession’s word of choice is ‘sustainable,’” Doug Steidl, past president of the AIA and new dean of architecture at Kent State University, wrote in 2005. “If ever there were a word more calculated to evoke misgivings … or, at best, a yawn, it has to be ‘sustainable.’” The term suggests sacrifice, Steidl complained, and architects should champion growth. “We cannot … be boxed in by our own language.”

we will all be judged by our triple bottom line accounting for all the systems we specify