The Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena — winner of the 2016 Pritzker Prize, founder of the “do tank” Elemental, and the mind behind the “half a good house” approach to incremental housing — once put a quiet, deflating truth into words:
“It’s very hard and takes a lot of time, energy and effort to go beyond the idea of business as usual. No wonder it is difficult to produce quality in the built environment.”
Alejandro Aravena
Let’s stop on that phrase: business as usual. When something feels business as usual, it’s because systems are in place that let it flow as easily as possible. The chain of actions, the market’s expectations, the mutual understanding between stakeholders, the end user’s requirements — all of it is streamlined toward a standardised outcome. Some people need something; some companies provide it. Think of grocery shopping, of buying clothes, of architecture. The system tolerates a little deviation, but it always points at the same target.
There’s nothing wrong with business as usual — unless it quietly erodes the very thing that sustains it: resources. And today, it does. We extract more than the planet can regenerate, and nature’s regeneration time is not aligned with our rising demand.
So if we want sustainability to become business as usual, we need a working model. What is the most sustainable system we can actually point to? Nature. And nature runs on different rules.
A market regulates itself with one fast signal: price. Nature regulates itself with several slow ones — energy cost, risk, time, survival pressure. A predator weighs how much energy a hunt will cost, what it risks, how long it can wait. A market does none of this; it asks only what something costs today. And here is the difference that matters most: markets self-correct fast, nature self-corrects slowly. Price moves in a day. A forest, a fishery, a soil takes decades. So a market optimised for efficiency and price will overshoot an ecological limit long before any natural signal can correct it.
Our own industry has a perfect, uncomfortable example of that overshoot. Lighting has become spectacularly more efficient — across candle, oil, gas and electric light, a thousandfold since 1800 — and yet we don’t use less light. We use vastly more; light consumption has risen many thousands of times over. The LED revolution promised energy savings, and instead the lit surface of the planet keeps growing, year after year. This is not a failure of the technology. It’s a well-known economic pattern called the rebound effect: when efficiency makes something cheaper, we don’t consume the same amount for less — we consume more. Efficiency, on its own, did not make light sustainable. It made it cheap, and so we lit the world.
Rebound effect: why more efficient light didn’t reduce how much we use. The energy we might have saved is spent lighting more
This is why I can no longer accept the sentence I hear from clients over and over: “We want sustainability — but if it’s expensive, then no.“ That is no longer a position any of us who shape how the world gets lit — designers, specifiers, manufacturers — can represent. Because the question was never really about price. It was about which system we are optimising for.
Nature’s answer is instructive. It does not optimise for maximum efficiency. It optimises for resilience — built out of diversity and redundancy, the very things an efficiency mindset wants to strip away. A monoculture is efficient and brittle; a forest is “wasteful” and endures. Sustainability, it turns out, is not the pursuit of efficiency. It is the balance between efficiency and resilience.
So what shift do we need? We stop treating efficiency as the goal and start treating it as one variable among several. In lighting, that means designing for enough light rather than more of it; for longevity, repairability and reuse rather than lumens-per-watt alone; for a diversity of solutions rather than one streamlined default. The sustainable future won’t be a single clean system where everyone knows where they sit. It will be many interconnected ones — reducing demand, re-using what already exists, recycling, finding a use for what’s left over. That future isn’t far away. It’s already happening. What it needs is coordination — because right now clients, designers, users and industry are all singing different songs, and no one is in tune.
Aravena is right that going beyond business as usual is slow, effortful, expensive work. But that is exactly the work. The alternative — efficient, cheap, and quietly eroding its own foundation — is the one we can no longer afford to call usual.
Further reading – – Links in the SHIFT Library, bookshop.org
- Janine Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (William Morrow, 1997) – the case for taking nature as a working model for how we design and make things.
- Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics (Random House Business, 2017) – a framework for an economy that meets human needs within the planet’s limits.
- Alejandro Aravena, Elemental: Incremental Housing and Participatory Design Manual (PHAIDON, 2018) – the architect’s own account of treating cost and constraint as the design problem.
- The Monocle Companion No. 5: Fifty Ideas on Architecture, Design and Building Better – Venice Architecture Biennale Special (2025). The piece that started this off.
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