In African societies, it is customary to say that homes belong to those you have not yet met. This is how we talk about those to come... Isn’t that really the best definition of the concept of sustainability?
An ancient meaning of sustainability
Let’s establish an approach to sustainability that sees it as a kind of intergenerational contract determining that the actions we take today must not compromise the existence of those who will come after us. On this point, let’s try to create a new ethics of sustainability to regenerate the contemporary debate around issues of living together and the habitability of our planet, starting in Africa, by isolating and combining related catalysts in traditional architecture.
The idea of an exclusive right to enjoy things, the very notion of property and any exaggerated sense of ownership are, we know, not prominent in the African way of thinking. Traditionally, things are loosely for everyone... Homes in particular: the whole village often got involved in building them, with a great deal of millet beer.
If an initiation space is about creating the feeling of belonging to the same community among the entire class; a building site for a new house – just like the many rites that punctuate life on earth – reactivates and strengthens this link. The communal aspect of architecture is therefore its first gauge of sustainability.
Although the wife generally manages the African home that her husband started building, the doors must permanently remain open to all. The home is therefore the main node of a complex system: an interlacing of collective obligations and responsibilities to others, which incidentally makes it relatively permanent.
The home therefore extraordinarily crystallises the very first performative system humanity has ever developed: people augmented... by people.
Reforming sustainable architecture
Man is insofar as he dwells
M. Heidegger.
Following Heidegger’s point of view, the traditional African home would not appear to be the “machine for living in” of Le Corbusier but rather a machine to learn to dwell in! It conceptualises more than it models “sustainable housing”.
The principles of cosmoarchitecture can be linked to contemporary issues: gestation = sustainability / anthropomorphism = responsibility / differentially = equality / gyration = balance / fractal = democracy / panoptic = solidarity / totality = inclusion / unity = cohesion.
According to this entangled ideal, sustainability could participate, as it does in the African mindset, alongside: “responsibility”, “equality”, “balance”, “democracy”, “solidarity”, “inclusion” and “cohesion”, aspects of a single movement with dwelling as the potential modality.
In 2005, we offered a system tool to this effect: “Grille en 8” to envision the horizon of a modern “cosmoarchitecture”.
Cosmoarchitecture claims to be “global” architecture, in other words, building and dwelling in the way that cosmoarchitecture prescribes also encapsulates ethics and politics: the communality of living things, different scales, unity of the spectrum and balance. As such, cosmoarchitecture wants to be a new relational contract based on an anthropocentrism that is part of this “global” architecture. Also it weaves into its environment. All living things have a home there. The idea of solidarity between generations runs through it and the actions taken today must leave room for the future. It doesn’t introduce a rupture in the world’s housing or in our modern existence (in the sense of our life on Earth) from the maternal breast to the grave. In a sense, it invites a more general consideration that is fundamental to dwelling: a way of being in the world that extends beyond the domain of housing by fixing the conditions for installation and the functional logic prefiguring this way of being. Also, from the outset, building is caught in a complex bundle of relationships and responsibilities, which often mobilises ritual to make and unmake. Prefigured in traditional society, cosmoarchitecture is a modality of the “World system” that opposes the civilisational “modern” approach to human installations.
Ideally, cosmoarchitecture would thus engage the idea of "living together" in its sharpest and most contemporary form through its own means. It would have to have a relationship with the ethics of materials.