Today there is considerable research and attention addressed to creating sustainability in architecture. With regards to the building industry, responsible for such enormous waste and carbon footprint, most of these claims stress ways to reduce CO2 emission and consider life cycle assessment, often through implementing passive technology and the use of environmentally friendly materials and renewable energy. One could argue that most of these concerns can be taken care of within the common modes of architectural conceptions and production. In fact, most contributions to sustainable architecture keep within known spatial concepts built in environmentally sound materials, using adequate insulation with “clean” and an often self-sustained energy supply. This pragmatic and technical approach lacks a broader understanding of sustainability, including aspects of human needs such as sophisticated social contact, good neighborhoods, public health, well being, and aesthetics. We believe that the current prevailing discourse and focus on sustainability requires a fundamental shift to really grasp the ecological challenge. This shift has an impact on the space-generating process, as well as on space itself. It requires reconsidering dominant mindsets of modernity from an anthropocentric view, moving from instrumentalising the world, and imposing our own design on it, toward a relational and ecological metaphysic. This ascribes interconnectedness and a principle of unfolding not only to persons, animals and plants, but also to materiality and the world itself. We can trace such perspectives in Taoism or the ecological philosophy of such theorists as Michel Serres, Arne Ness or Freya Mathews. Thus contemporary notion of sustainability is still essentially materialistic. It emphasizes on solutions within a given context but eschews creative engagement with it. Instead of, for example, utilizing sun or wind energy and imposing it on pre-designed architecture, we should explore the energetic as well as the poetic potential of sun and wind for creating specific living-forms and spatial arrangements. Precisely this encounter with and mutual unfolding of humans, matter, energy and the environment outlines our vision of relational space. The creation of this space requires a communicative engagement, and synergistic collaboration with particular, local and global resources and knowledge fields. There is no sharp division between the living and the non-living, the natural and the artificial.All our projects are developed in this synergistic mode within an assemblage of contextual circumstances and intrinsic material qualities. Far from passive ingredients, they have a space generating capacity as active participants in the design process. For example, at the Expo Shanghai 2010, the encounter between specific aspects of Norwegian Culture and possible future users in China led us to a space of 15 “pine-trees” forming the Norwegian Pavilion. The material qualities of Norwegian timber, Chinese bamboo and German membrane construction were synthesized with the pavilion's infrastructure and exhibition into a specific “Expo-Forest assemblage”. In our work the relational space is by its nature heterogenic, not as a post-modern narrative collage, but as a fine weave, a field of interrelated, sensitive elements, responding to its surrounding environment. During the design process, they become synthesized in between empirical and experimental sequences, and woven together into architecture. This creates a layered and interwoven space like a tied and, at the same time, untied knot, a star with convexities, a shared, consolidated nest, mesh, fold with individual sensitive tentacles, ramifications reaching out into the surrounding as interchanger. The result, we hope, is a meeting space accommodating both, a shared social and an individual meditative encounter. The aesthetic expression emerges by meshing and interlocking the narrative and substantial traces of the process into an intense atmosphere and evocative space, which appeals to all senses. We attempt to allow this extended confluence with contextual, human and material resources in all our projects. Often they are determined by their contractual and economic constraints, by time pressure or fixed ideas of the client. But every project offers opportunities for experimentation, where particular and authentic qualities can be unfolded, and included in the generation of space. To find and foster these rare plots is our aim and endeavor as architects.