There’s a long tradition of manifestos in modern architecture, of calls to arms to rally round some ideology of one sort or another. (There’s a great anthology of them, Programs and Manifestos on 20th Century Architecture by Ulrich Conrads.) Le Corbusier’s 5 Points made a particularly pithy manifesto. Easy to memorize, each followed from and was dependent on the others, and together and separately they constituted an overturning, a reversal, of traditional architecture/construction with the goal of ushering in the irrefutably Modern Era. In the end, though it seems to have ended up all about style and suburbia...which was so not the point.
I think it’s time for a new manifesto, but this time a pragmatic, rather than ideological, overturning of both recent architectural obsessions and rote tradition. We need 5 new points that bring the issues of building into the landscape and city: No building is alone. The future is transdisciplinary. So with apologies to Le Corbusier and all the ranting and raving modernists who came before me, here we go:
![](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_e9HlyRRfVpo/TCuIOTJ2YmI/AAAAAAAAAHU/NUBD-Va8_cM/s320/portland+streetcar.jpg)
5 New Points for Sustainable Urban Architecture:
1 Complete Streets. Just got back from Portland, and this is a shot of one of their wonderful complete streets…H Street will one day look like this. The street is the key to the city.
2 Productive density. It’s that perfect mix of 7-up units per acre, mixed use, and physical design that make such liveliness not just possible, but probable.
3 Green Roofs, which are quite like Corbusier’s original roof gardens. Their benefits are too numerous t
![](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_e9HlyRRfVpo/TCuImf01D6I/AAAAAAAAAHc/EVA8d4JzCDQ/s200/DC+green+roof.jpg)
![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_e9HlyRRfVpo/TCuJ8hgqK6I/AAAAAAAAAIE/nQPiJyp6Z_g/s200/london+brise+soleil.jpg)
Under my new 5 points, every design needs to begin with the fundamental question: what can this building do with energy and the environment because of what it is and where it is.
So why is all this so important? Le Corbusier claimed that building was at the root of all social unrest in the 1st quarter of the 20th century. And he was correct then as now. Building is the key to the entire sustainability problematic: where we build, what we build, how we build...and for whom. We’ve heard this before; we can’t say we weren’t warned...
“Society is filled
![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_e9HlyRRfVpo/TCuJpyBtQvI/AAAAAAAAAH0/im9EhTCwlD8/s200/ZGF+windmills.jpg)
Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture, 1927