What architecture for sustainable cities?

When we speak about sustainability, what precisely are we trying to sustain? Natural resources, ecological equilibrium, pleasant environments, in a sense nature itself. Nature is, however, a cultural construction, and our stance towards it must be understood in order to make architecture that responds
effectively to its sustinance. We see that today, nature has been entirely subsumed into the realm of
human experience. It is seen as an extension of urban living, one of many possible choices for recreation and entertainment, a pastoral idyl.
This project suggests a dialectic that reformulates our understanding of nature and sets up a strategy that offers both a vision of natural harmony and its impossibility.
By using the phrase “Et in Arcadia Ego”, wherein lies these dual, paradoxical qualities, the project recasts nature as an entity to set limits against and architecture as civilization’s protagonist.
To set up a fundamental difference between nature and civilization is to define a precise limit to urban growth. Human habitation must be an island in an expanse of nature. This concept formally relates to the medieval city of Ingolstadt, a walled city, a bastion in an expansive wilderness. The former Bayeroil refinery is positioned in perfect counterpoint to the old city of Ingolstadt. We propose to emphasize this counterposition by establishing an equally dense urban artifact on the site. Surrounded by forests that reclaim the land along the Danube, this new city will be its own bastion in this new type of wilderness.
We reject completely the classification of the site as a peripheral entity as a profoundly misguided statement. As central Ingolstadt is considered a historical entity with not much scope for further development, all future growth would have to be considered peripheral. This reflects a continental trend where all of Europe is just a peripheral development of historic cities. Not only does this type of development lead to an excessive consumption of natural resources it thoroughly destroys any quality of urbanity and nature creating a purely grey mediocrity.
Rather, we propose to create a new centre, a counterpoint to the old city, free from nostalgic constraints. The unique qualities of the site lend itself perfectly for this strategy. The scale of the refinery allows for the construction of a major urban development on the site without having to consume greenfield land. It will not be just another piecemeal growth but an urban area to rival the old town of Ingolstad.
A true reciprocal relationship between urban and natural forms is a mutually exclusive one, not a subtle blending, or an inter-dispersed organization but one where the urban is the built city and the nature is truly wild. In order to establish the centre as a true archipelago the biotopes that currently surround the site are reinforced and expanded. These natural areas are not managed, and the density of the wilderness alone should deter wanderers.
On the ruins of the refinery a new city is built. This city will hold the traces of the site’s industrial past. The former holding tanks that are arrayed across the site become voids in the new fabric of the city. These altered lands, home to a new modern Prometheus, an Arcadia.