The Guardian - Rowan Moore
Should we stop building airports? Return to mud and thatch? The climate
crisis is an opportunity for creative thinking, but the values of
architecture need a radical overhaul
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| Ilford community market in east London, opening next year, will have no concrete foundations and a timber structure stabilised by rocks in metal cages. Photograph: Interrobang Architecture and Engineering |
Nearly
40% of UK greenhouse gas emissions, to use a figure architects love to
bandy, are caused by the built environment. Or a bit more, depending on
the definitions used.
It’s an arresting figure. It suggests that the
design of buildings and the planning of cities can do much to counter
climate crisis.
Architects like to think of themselves as public-spirited,
well-intentioned people. The profession tends to attract people who want
to change the world for the better. And what could matter more than the
prevention of environmental and societal collapse? It makes squabbles
about architectural style or form seem trivial by comparison.
So what
would architecture look like – more importantly, what would it be – if
all involved really and truly put climate at the centre of their
concerns? Would there be no more concrete, given the material has been
fingered as particularly destructive? Or an end to
towers clad in panels that have to be replaced every 30 years? Or much less building altogether?
It is a question raised earlier this year by the launch of
Architects Declare, in which
17 winners of the Stirling prize
proclaimed a set of principles by which they and – they hoped – others
would from now on work, and by the debate that followed.
How serious
could these architects really be, went one of the reactions, given that a
number of them are designing major airports? A more radical version of
the question will be put by the young curators of the
Oslo Architecture Triennale,
Maria Smith, Phin Harper and Cecilie Sachs Olsen, which opens later
this month. “Just fiddling around with what the market gives us is not
enough,” says Harper.
What is considered sustainable differs wildly depending on who you ask.
The World Green Building Council, an organisation supported by members from the construction industry, holds up the seemingly surprising example of
Barangaroo,
a huge high-rise development on the Sydney waterfront. Harper and Smith
cite traditional earth-building techniques and ingenious experiments in
building structures without cement or steel.
Somewhere in between is a
building like the Stirling prize-shortlisted
Cork House in Eton, about which nobody has a bad word to say.
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| The Stirling prize-shortlisted Cork House in Eton. Photograph: Ricky Jones |
The argument of Architects Declare – which might be called the sensible middle ground – goes something like this: architects (and for that matter contractors, clients, engineers and everyone else involved in making buildings) have no excuse for not giving their utmost to make their work have as little impact on the environment as possible. They have to consider everything – how far stone might have to travel from quarry to site, for example, and whether or not a building’s components will end up as landfill when it is demolished.
It is not enough to
reduce what are called the “in-use” costs – heating, ventilation,
lighting, water, waste, maintenance – but also the “embodied energy”
that goes into construction and demolition: quarrying cement, smelting
steel, firing bricks, shipping materials to site, putting them in place,
taking them down again and disposing of them.
Until recently the
construction industry has concentrated on in-use costs. The British
building regulations, for example, set reasonably high standards for the
performance of buildings, but are silent on embodied energy. This makes
no sense – there’s little point building something that performs
magnificently in use, if it takes decades or centuries to pay back the
expenditure of energy that went into its construction.
Painful choices may be required – giving up some dearly beloved
brutalist-style concrete or a favourite brick. It might mean some
genuinely difficult dilemmas: concrete, if used right, slows the rates
at which a building cools down and warms up (good) but is made with
cement, a material that singlehandedly accounts for about 8% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions (not good).
It should be possible to make a humble kitchen extension using materials dug up from the ground around it
Sustainable design shouldn’t be seen as just a technical fix, a
matter of paying the right consultant enough money to make sure the
building ticks enough boxes, or of buying the most magical available
piece of cooling technology. It should rather be integrated into the art
of architecture.
The ideal is that it should help buildings be all
round better, longer-lasting, more pleasurable, more beautiful –
“generosity, quality of materials, what people want – it kind of makes
them endure” is how Alison Brooks, one of the Architects Declare
signatories puts it. It could mean more natural stone, more timber. This
is why the Cork House appeals – its material is lovely stuff, which
also happens to be renewable, recyclable and highly insulating.
Slightly
more radically, the architectural profession needs to reconsider its
value systems, what is considered good and what bad. Architects are
still trained from studenthood to perform in what Steve Tompkins, one of
the driving forces behind Architects Declare, calls a “competitive and
individualistic profession”. They get more glory for designing a
singular new building than they would if they worked out a good way of
insulating old houses.
Yet, as most of the building stock of the future
is already with us, and as demolition and rebuilding entails the
chucking away of whatever went into making the original building, the
latter is likely to be more useful than the former.
All of which, if every architect pursued it with full commitment,
would be a significant advance. This collection of good principles,
however, doesn’t answer the airport question, which highlights the
limits on architects’ powers: it is not up to them to decide how much
air travel there is in the world, which leaves them with the choice of
refusing the commission to design airport buildings, or helping them to
be as “green” as they possibly can be.
Grimshaw Architects, Foster and
Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects, signatories of Architects Declare,
have opted for the latter. They are working on terminals in Heathrow,
Mexico City and Beijing, respectively.
For
Jeremy Till,
head of Central Saint Martins school of art and design, these
architects’ choice is a “farce.” “You can’t have a carbon-neutral
airport,” he says. Architects have to do more than be well-intentioned
instruments of what he calls “an extractive industry.” They have to be
activists as well as designers.
Maria Smith and Phin Harper believe drastic times call for drastic actions. If, as the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
said last autumn, there were only 12 years left to limit climate change
catastrophe (make that 11, as nearly a year has passed since then), the
conventional processes of architecture are too slow to make any
difference.
By the time a well-considered, carefully calculated
development has successfully traded off the inputs and outputs that went
into its construction, it will be too late. Rather the whole attitude
to construction has to change now. Which also requires the economic
system behind it – that is to say, capitalism – to change.
Their Triennale in Oslo, a series of displays and performances
starting on 26 September, will apply to architecture the economic and
political idea of degrowth – the beliefs that an alternative has to be
found to the continuously rising GDPs that are fundamental to capitalist
economies.
For Smith and Harper it is about using resources that
already exist and, rather than serving “utilitarian goals of investment
and profit”, concentrating on “what really makes life worth living”.
“All the ingredients for a good life exist somewhere in the world,” they
say – it’s just a question of enabling everyone to have access to them.
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| Hy-Fi, a temporary tower outside MoMA PS1, New York, made of mushroom mycelium. Photograph: Living New York |
For
architecture this might mean learning from indigenous building
techniques based on using renewable materials close at hand, such as mud
walls or thatch, enhanced with modern technology. Smith and Harper give
as examples machines for making bricks out of mud, wall panels made of
hemp and lime, materials made from compressed recycled denim or from
ground-up pine needles mixed with pine resin. There is a technique for
building columns by filling heavy duty fabric with sand or rubble. There
is mycelium, a form of fungus that can be
made into bricks.
A practical example of this thinking is the
Ilford community market,
a project by Smith’s practice, Interrobang, which is due to open next
year. Here there will be no concrete foundations, but a timber structure
stabilised by rocks in metal cages that can be demounted and
reassembled with minimal waste or impact.
It should also be possible to
make a humble kitchen extension, argue Smith and Harper, using materials
dug up from the ground around it, “rather than importing steel
reinforcement from China”. It would only require a different idea of
what a kitchen extension should look like.
There are a few gaps in the thinking articulated by Smith and Harper.
If action on climate is urgent, we probably can’t wait for the entire
economic and social basis of the modern construction industry to change
first. It’s also not obvious how some of the experimental techniques
they mention can be developed at speed and realised at sufficient scale
to make a meaningful impact.
They themselves don’t pretend to have all the answers. But then, it’s
also clear that more moderate members of the profession don’t have all
the answers, either. What is clear is that everyone involved in the
design and making of buildings has to do everything they can to mitigate
their effect on climate. Which, if we’re really lucky, will also lead
to better architecture.
Material change: reinventing how we build
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| Barangaroo, Sydney Harbour. |
Barangaroo, Sydney
A
large-scale commercial development
that tries to modify conventional processes rather than replace them;
for example, by reducing the amount of cement in concrete, or using
water from an adjoining bay to help cool the towers of homes and
offices. Its approach has won awards.
Sandbag columns
The Canadian architectural
practice YYYY-MM-DD are developing what might be called super sandbags:
structural columns made by containing sand or rubble in the type of
heavy-duty fabric used for shipping construction materials. In
principle, it means you could build using whatever is available on a
building site, but it’s still at a speculative stage.
Radical recycling
Ma-tt-er,
a London-based “materials research design studio”, are pushing the
possibilities of natural and recycled materials – plaster made from
mussel shells, floors made from seaweed, denim from old jeans compressed
into a load-bearing material.
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| Mussel shell plaster. Photograph: Ma-tt-er |
Mycelium
The fungal substance that gives
mushrooms their structure is now touted as both an organic substitute
for plastic and a vegetarian substitute for beef. Architects are
exploring its possibilities too, most conspicuously with temporary
towers built outside MoMA’s PS1 gallery in New York.
Engineered timber
The
processing of wood
such that it’s strong enough to build multistorey buildings is proof
that experimental techniques can become mainstream. Engineered timber is
now frequently used as an alternative to concrete, at large scales.
The
only snag, as the engineer Mark Skelly points out, is that there isn’t
enough sustainably sourced timber in the world to make all buildings out
of it. The simplest way to build green is not to build at all: existing
building stock is a vast store of carbon and of resources that are lost
when a building is demolished.
Re-use is usually seen as less glamorous
than building new, but it’s a good use of architects skills to find
ways to adapt rather than replace.
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