Architectural Advocacy: The Bullitt Center and Environmental Design

Abstract

In order to better understand the intersections of environmental communication, advocacy and materiality, this project analyzes how Seattle’s Bullitt Center embodies and enacts messages that offer arguments in favor of changing attitudes and behaviors through its spatial and material design. Through a rhetorical analysis of the building’s design, media coverage of the site, and interviews with the designers, the author offers a case study that illuminates the importance of architecture and materiality in environmental discourse. By encouraging behavior-change in tenants, shaping industry practices and standards, persuading manufacturers to reformulate products, and challenging existing municipal policies, the building reacts to the environment, humans and policies in ways that underscore its agentic capacity and its durability as a material environmental argument. Ultimately the Bullitt Center modifies our understanding of the persuasive power of architecture and the role of advocacy in campaigns for sustainability.

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