Modern futures; sustainable development and cultural diversity. The contemporary passive discourse on what is sustainable and diverse; new abstraction

Abstract

[EN] At a time when architecture should be applying sustainable development and cultural diversity should acquire consistency to bring architecture closer to society, we detect, however, a paradoxical homogeneity. Why does all architecture seems to serve a global style, regardless of its latitude, its culture or its need? In the duality between implementing new global concerns and the approach of architecture to social development, the global seems to prevail. Current energy and technical strategies and infographic media provide a patina of homogeneity, transforming identity into equality. What we call today 'sustainability and cultural diversity' is a mask that is a capitalist invention to hide a socio-economic crisis around architecture and housing. The differential value of architecture compared to other professions with a pragmatic perspective is that it develops historically with art. Architecture contains pragmatism in its usefulness, but it cannot be pragmatic in itself. But the current world approaches architecture in a pragmatic way. It is used as a stiletto of power, but does not address its quality and the possibility of shaping those contemporary principles of sustainability and diversity. The difference is in identifying that critical capacity. And this from an space-time dimension, historically inserted. The meeting of the artistic with the critical is presented as the guarantor of the non-existence of debts. These two sides of the same coin are in a single material; the abstraction. It is urgent to understand sustainability and cultural diversity as a process of progressive demand for abstraction that provides art and criticism, applied in the profession, in institutions, in governance... In such a way that a solid opinion in this sense, at the same time educational, is conveyed to the citizens. Only in this way will the ascription of architecture to the place and to its social identity progress, with a new affectivity between profession and citizenship.