30: (Sustainability) + Pleasure, Vol. I: Culture and Architecture S/S 2009

This and the next issue of Harvard Design Magazine are devoted to questioning and overcoming the commonly held assumption that the pursuit of sustainability and the pursuit of pleasure are in tension if not opposition. Here, broad cultural issues and architecture, and the design of objects are studied. Sustainability is put in parentheses in the title because this term is contested and ambiguous: usually referring to technological prowess in reducing energy consumption and natural damage, the world should also imply much broader realities, including the social, the cultural, the economic, and the psychological—the ecological in its fullest sense. The city, in this view, is an endlessly independent network.