This is smart thinking, maybe even a paradigm shift, because like the work of Tony Fry, it steps back from what has become a low-level checklist approach to sustainable building and takes a broader view. The typical definition of sustainability in design – unfortunately rated like Visa cards in LEED™ Silver, Gold, Platinum and beyond – remains imprisoned within the cultural wasteland of “late 20th century capitalism,” where buildings are first and foremost commodities, vehicles of financial profit, like television sets or washing machines. To this end, the LEED™ checklist – though admirably promoting basic energy conservation – falsely implies a greater architectural value or cultural significance to buildings with higher LEED™ ratings.

Of course nothing could be further from the truth, and bringing the question of Cultural Sustainability to the table is an intelligent and important act, certainly more challenging and thought-provoking for students than choosing insulated panels out of a catalog and likely to produce more effective results in the game of saving the planet. Here, PSU shows how academics in architecture can perform serious research equivalent to that in the “hard” sciences—exploring real-world concerns ignored in the private sector for lack of immediate financial rewards.

To emphasize the point, stop and think for a moment: What is considered “Culturally Sustained,” and how could instances of Cultural Sustainability be identified and reinforced? It’s easy to take a crack at this in places like Sienna, Dubrovnik or Kyoto, but copying those forms is historicist and regressive. Here in the US, parts of the original 13 colonies and old rural farmsteads might qualify, but these are mostly empty shells for tourists, full-sized dioramas of previous cultures.

This phrase, Cultural Sustainability, simultaneously (and probably inadvertently) engages the big question that unceasingly haunts the modern architect: is “avant-garde” architecture, favoring as it does uncompromising abstraction and purity of form, able to simultaneously accommodate the disparate scales, comforts and traditions that collectively embody a local culture? As every architect knows, this has grown into a great beast of dissatisfaction rumbling underneath most modern work, a sweeping deficiency ignored by critics and the press, yet never appeased. It rapidly transformed Le Corbusier’s Pessac housing into cute cottage bungalows, fuelled passionate CIAM and Team X debates, inspired Louis Kahn’s search for “year zero,” Aalto’s fascination with Nordic vernacular and Jorn Utzon’s obsession with traditional Japanese and Mayan designs. This same malcontent was the force behind reactionary movements like Post-Modernism, The Pattern Language and the disingenuously named New Urbanism—all futile attempts to regain the care for the “Cultural Sustainability” that the heroic modern movement inadvertently tossed out.

Although Palleroni generally works with smaller buildings in out-of-the-way places, approaching them through the lens of Cultural Sustainability allows him to face this chronic disturbance of modernism head on and offer at least a forum for its resolution. Without question, the work – though modest – engages issues far greater than anything in a celebrity architect’s latest museum, high-rise or opulent villa.

Louis Kahn often expressed himself through the point of view of a child (he had a long-standing interest in children’s books), defining a city, for example, as “the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life.”* When applied to design, this perspective has the power to directly access archetypal human desires, unencumbered by profit and loss statements, political wrangling or fame; desires that modern architecture is typically unable or unwilling to address. Children have a different take on what is useful and what is not. Knowing that modern building is perhaps overly focused on being “useful,” Kahn, Aalto, and others utilized the child’s viewpoint to propose a solution to modernism’s cultural paucity; that sometimes the most important aspects in architecture are those labeled “useless.”

Growing up in a modest Midwestern city, I recall a large field at the end of my street—nothing out of the ordinary, a forgotten place of weeds, field mice, rabbits, Queen Anne’s lace and narrow footpaths made by no one, leading nowhere. Though architecturally insignificant, this was a place both useful and useless, a place of mystery and play, of wildlife, drainage and erosion control; a world unto itself. Within a few years, it was a parking lot for drug stores and fast food joints, and with this transformation, the field became “significant,” making money, providing goods and services, but these new cultural qualities entirely pre-empted its former local specificity. And here lies the rub: how could one propose keeping a field to the zoning board, the realtors, the developers and the city council? Not a park – nature subjugated and controlled – but just an empty field filled with the indigenous life of a place?

In the same vein, there are those urban places of great cultural significance that vanish due to lack of balance-sheet or suitably “historic” credibility (as in “George Washington slept here”). In Portland, two restaurants with deep cultural connections were replaced not long ago by generic buildings with national chain stores (both by the same architect, as it happens). Each gathering place had a generation or more of popular local history behind it, and each contributed to the city’s character as much as any museum or opera house. Their destruction was mourned, but in neither case was there any cultural platform upon which to plead for their survival.

Peter & Alison Smithson famously realized this inherent problem of modernism when, in 1953 at the 9th CIAM Conference in Aix-en-Provence, they presented photographs not of clean, white, machine-age objects or shining new towns, but of Bethnal Green, a London East End slum, photographed by Nigel Henderson with his wife Judith Stephen, an anthropologist. “The short narrow street of the slum succeeds,” the Smithsons officially proclaimed, “where spacious redevelopment frequently fails." This was a sharp rebuttal to Le Corbusier (who founded CIAM a generation earlier) and his insistence on a universal order that would check the entropy of urban chaos. The Smithsons’ proposed antidote to the ensuing collateral cultural damage was called, a “shift to the specific,” wherein architects would focus their design on specific cultural attributes of a place at of the various scales of City, Neighborhood, Street, Room and Doorway. These distinct physical attributes constitute in aggregate our physical culture, and it is their recognition and preservation that deserve our fullest attention.

Meanwhile, the lot I purchased long ago next to my house – for which I am constantly drawing plans – has suddenly become a field, complete with mice, raccoons, wildflowers, bramble and a few volunteer shade trees of uncertain species—no doubt all of them on the City’s official nuisance list. My architecture-self sees the lot as empty and incomplete, begging for an orderly arrangement of wood, stone and glass. But perhaps it is full in a way I don’t yet value or understand. I think I’ll leave it alone for a while and see.

* Louis I. Kahn, quoted in John Lobell, Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1985), 44.