Glenn Murcutt vs Renzo Piano. Two ways to put sustainability on the map

Abstract

This article presents a compared analysis of Glenn Murcutt (1936) and Renzo Pianos (1937) architectural discourse. These are two architectural leading figures with a career path spanning over 40 years. The aim is to examine, through their oral speech (conferences, interviews, etc.) their different ways to approach the issue of sustainability in architecture. The chosen format of oral speech, as public speaking, totally or partially improvised (the importance of speeches read on a paper has been relativized), allows for a better understanding of the architects persona, and analyze a more spontaneous, free kind of speech, a personal style of storytelling (together with a specific body language). Only the recent upload to online video platforms (especially in the last 5 years) of analogic video content, has allowed to give it a second digital life. From 2016, improved speech recognition based on artificial intelligence processes, has automatically transcripted video to text in more than 165 languages). This is relevant to the analysis, as specific searches by topics can be made on an already mapped multimedia content of hundreds of hours. This analysis aims to develop some sort of digital archaeology of the personal architectural narrative of these two figures within the broader, global narrative. Disperse, little known or disregarded interventions can be retrospectively examined, in their temporal context, enabling to establish new interpretations and visibilize the relationships between the topics that have always made part of the architectural discourse, such as politics, economy, sociology, ecology and sustainability (more recently), technology, and even poetics, as the personal way of each architect to see the world and express his architecture with words.