Making Sustainability Concrete

Abstract

Abstract “Sustainability” is an increasingly fashionable design criterion for celebrity corporate architects, their clients, and the governmental bodies that regulate urban development. Yet determining if and how a building is actually sustainable remains controversial, with different actors positing qualifications that are often at odds with each other. In this article, the authors explore how the ideal of sustainability is made concrete in contemporary corporate architecture, focusing on the design of one of Google's new corporate campuses in Silicon Valley that has been extensively touted and recognized as admirably green. The article draws attention to how various experts who participated in the design of Google's new campus rendered sustainability differently and argues that the temporal and social structure of the design process worked to compel coordination and compromises among these experts’ different renderings. Ultimately the authors advocate for problematizing the design process as a key site where political questions about sustainability in the built form get settled pragmatically.