Bricolage Sustainability: Addressing the Fundamental Misalignment Between Environmentalism and Patronage-Based Practice

Architects are pre-inclined, in identity, training, and legislation, toward patronage-based practices. This bias has had a significant impact upon the architect’s pursuit of sustainability, causing the professional to emphasize environmental approaches rooted upon linear and hierarchical processes and specifiable material palettes. Although not without reason or benefit, this prejudice toward predictability causes the architect to struggle when attempting to realize environmental gain through the use of unconventional means, reclaimed materials, or localized processes. To realize more profoundly sustainable work demands a shift in practice. Specifically, architects must replace top-down patterns of engagement for those that incorporate local wisdom. They must question their allegiance to specifiable material palettes and embrace the potential held by reclaimed or idiosyncratic means. And they must challenge the notion that the needs associated with the construction of the project at hand are inherently more important than those associated with its inevitable de-construction. In short, they must begin to think less like engineers, and more like bricolers. To investigate this premise, this writing will study three community-based projects, each of which was recently realized using a distinct, bricoler-inspired approach. From globalized crowdsourcing to hyper-local, peer-to-peer production, ad hoc construction to digital simulation, and design-build to viral propagation, each of the offered studies will lend readers a unique perspective into new, more sustainable forms of practice. And, hopefully, incite a radical re-imagination of each.