Sustainability and the Toilet Siphon: Transcending Green Architecture

The concept of sustainability is slowly dissolving: either it is used as a poetic reference, insomuch as it has become a synonym for good and right, or it is reduced to a bureaucratic procedure. Most of these disappointing outlooks come from the ubiquity of sustainability, whose excessive visibility prejudice its strength and effectiveness: that’s why we need to transcend the concept itself of sustainability, for rethinking its original ethical inspiration. Indeed, just like it happened with the toilet siphon, which revolutionized buildings and cities but on the basis of which no architect would legitimise a project, sustainability must become intrinsic.