A sustainable future starts now

Architects are, to varying degrees, changing their processes and priorities to create more sustainable designs. But it can be difficult to get clients and others on board.

Here, members of the profession explain how they are approaching this issue and discuss the best ways to move the industry forward.

Imagine a future where Sydney, Hobart and Darwin experience severe flooding almost every day. Food and drinking water are contaminated, leading to 870,000 cases of bacterial gastroenteritis. Infectious diseases are rife, with between five and eight million people exposed to dengue fever. Heat stress, power outages, breakdowns in public transport, and psychological and behavioural disorders are all wreaking havoc.

According to the Climate Council’s report Climate change 2015: Growing risks, critical choices, this is the scenario Australia will face in 2100 if nothing is done to curb today’s greenhouse gas emissions. In 2018, the United Nations warned the world that we have only

12 years left to limit global warming to 1.5°C and that it would require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

Although time is running out, it’s not too late to change the trajectory, and architects are well-placed to lead the change. After all, according to the World Green Building Council (WGBC), buildings are currently responsible for 39 percent of global energy-related carbon emissions. The WGBC threw down the gauntlet with its Bringing embodied carbon upfront report (2019), which called for the sector “to dramatically change the way buildings are designed, built, used and deconstructed.”

We spoke to some leading voices in the Australian architecture profession – all of them signatories to a worldwide declaration of climate and biodiversity emergency – about what action needs to be taken moving forward. We asked them about the preparedness of the industry, the challenges architects are facing, how architects can encourage their clients to be more sustainable, and how to limit the use of materials with high levels of embodied carbon. Their responses highlight the complex, diverse and myriad approaches architects can take.

Caroline Pidcock

The spokesperson for Architects Declare says designing efficient building envelopes plays a big part in reducing carbon emissions.

This call to action has highlighted things we haven’t necessarily focused on before, particularly carbon in buildings. People have been very focused on operational carbon but not necessarily embodied carbon, which is going to become increasingly important. As architects, we are so well placed to make a big dint in reducing carbon in the atmosphere.

If we continue to design buildings in a business-as-usual way now, in five or ten years’ time, [these buildings] will be behind where they need to be.

It’s imperative that we help create buildings for our clients that are resilient and futureproofed, that people will want to rent or buy in the future, and that the insurance companies will actually want to insure. It’s not just a nice-to-have, it’s really serious – this is what we have to be doing. There are a number of forces at play that will help move this big ship in the right direction.

But apart from that, buildings that are naturally comfortable don’t take a lot of energy to heat and cool, and are much better to be in. The days of the totally glazed skyscraper being cooked all day by the sun are, thankfully, over.

Architects have a really big role in helping their clients shape their projects into the sustainable projects they need to be. Clients do look to their architects for leadership in providing valuable buildings or valuable outcomes for them. And the most valuable outcome we can provide is a building that is really low-carbon in its construction and operation, and really resilient for different weather conditions going forward. Architects need to bring their clients along on that journey and they do need to be able to walk away from a project when the client won’t or doesn’t want to come on that journey.

Architects need to design buildings that operate in a net-zero-carbon way: concentrate on making the building envelope as efficient as possible and then supply all of the power with renewable energy, whether it be on the building, which is ideal, or purchased from somewhere else. That is the very simplest thing and people can do that right now.

An efficient building envelope is one that keeps the heat out in summer and keeps the heat in in winter. [These buildings] don’t let unwanted sunlight in in summer but they do let desired light in in winter. They’re very tightly sealed so you can control how much energy comes in and how the energy moves around the spaces. They have operable windows so when the weather is good, you can open them up and get fresh air in, rather than having to rely on airconditioning 100 percent of the time.

The other thing is to focus on keeping existing buildings, improving their envelope and really valuing the embodied energy of the existing materials. Build less, build smaller and work with landscaping and other things to help make those environments function better and be much more desirable to be in.

Ken Maher

The president of the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council (ASBEC) says regulations need to be lifted and more incentives introduced.

The challenge we have is the difference in the range of skills across the built environment industry. It’s important that there is capability and if there is a concerted effort between the regulatory side and the voluntary side, then we can make it. But it does require focus on the regulatory side as well as encouraging all parts of the industry to rise to the challenge.

This essentially means starting with the National Construction Code. One of ASBEC’s strategic priorities is to bring the code up to the appropriate standards.

In order to do this, our approach is to commission research, develop evidence and use that evidence to advocate and lobby government.

The built environment can really contribute significantly to the overall reduction of carbon emissions. Our argument to government is that you can act on this, it’s relatively direct and easy to do and if you don’t do it, you won’t get to where you need to.

The standards are not going to change suddenly but we need a trajectory where we lift them step by step. The industry can’t radically change, regrettably, but it can continuously improve its performance.

Green Star is obviously the voluntary side and, at the upper end of the industry, it has an effect on some fairly major projects. But the building code is at the bottom end, where minimum standards for acceptable performance have to be lifted very significantly if we’re going to get to a zero-carbon built environment.

There also needs to be an incentives program. Whether it’s through taxation incentives, building approval incentives or low-interest or no-interest loans, there are a range of current measures that can be used to encourage the industry.

Incentivization is critical. But education and better monitoring of performance is also critical. It’s one thing to set performance standards, but we need to ensure the standards are actually being delivered in practice. These things do lift the game.

Architects need to catch up on how well informed they might be, so they can answer questions from clients and they can put to clients what the opportunities are. Again, we’re probably a little bit behind the eight ball across the industry as a whole. If we think of the percentage of architects who are more active in this area, it’s still relatively low.

We all recognize that this is a critical issue now and architects should be encouraged to see this as one of the most important things for their profession. There are many other things that are important, obviously, but the health of the planet [is] something that we need to be engaged in, in a very tangible way. Many small steps are equally as important as seeking major change. It’s a cultural issue for the profession. I really hope the profession continues to be interested and continues to make a key contribution. Architects generally are focused on this and their voices do need to be heard.

Belinda Allwood and

Ellen Buttrose

Two members of People Oriented Design explain how the challenging climatic and political environment of Far North Queensland impacts their approach to sustainable practice.

BA: It is different practising in a region – and one of the fundamental [differences is that] the climate emergency conversation has political overtones [here]. In Melbourne, for example, most people are probably singing from the same song sheet. Whereas we’ve got a much [greater] variety of opinions.

EB: It’s really important not to alienate and polarize. It’s more about empowerment. The role of an architect is to educate and bring our knowledge to the table and move projects forward with a sustainability lens. We like to provoke discussions [about sustainability] from the development of the brief through to completion.

We have, with projects to date, come at sustainability in a holistic way, starting with looking at the building footprint and how small it can be, and really responding to our unique climate in the tropics.

BA: Our philosophy is about challenging people on how much building they need for a range of reasons, starting from affordability to consumption of materials and running cost. Most residential clients still want to have the option of airconditioning in their buildings. But we challenge them on their reliance on that. We work with them to design places that are passively cooled so they’re not as reliant on airconditioning. Whereas a house that is not so sustainably designed might rely on airconditioning for six months of the year, we’re designing houses that reduce it down to maybe a few weeks in the absolute worst days of summer. Or it might be the odd day here and there that adds up to two or three weeks’ worth.

We can design the places so that they are ventilating, they’ve got deep shade, we’re keeping the sun out, and keeping that ventilation flowing through so people are comfortable.

EB: In a commercial setting, the office spaces are literally the only parts of the building that are airconditioned. Circulation, kitchens, bathrooms and meeting spaces can all be outdoors, passively designed or only shut down when it’s absolutely required.

BA: The thing that we should not lose sight of is the fact that we need to be thinking systematically and at all scales to make this work. Let’s work closely with our allied professions. We should also realize that one of the most important things here is that we’ve got to use our collective voice to influence government policy as well as [working] on a project-by project basis with clients and educating on a larger scale.

We actively seek to engage with our local authorities here and make sure we’ve got a place at the table when there are discussions. Historically, architects are very good at talking to each other.

But as a profession, we have to break down the silos, connect outside our profession and be really good at advocating.

Paul Toyne

Grimshaw’s practice sustainability leader says that achieving net-zero carbon emissions won’t be enough and more action is needed.

If we had buildings that are net-zero carbon – in other words, they don’t take any more or produce any more carbon – all we’re doing is maintaining the status quo.

All the indicators that we use to look at the health of the planet – whether it’s acidification of the oceans, declining fish stocks, desertification, the quality of the air or greenhouse gas emissions – they are all going in the wrong direction.

We’ve got a challenge. Standing still and being net-zero is not going to be sufficient. We’ve got to start thinking about how we can use the built environment to be not just non-takers but to actually be restorative and put things back. We need to regenerate.

At Grimshaw, we’ve committed to a goal of delivering net-zero carbon ready buildings by 2025, and socially and environmentally regenerative buildings by 2030.

There are certain things that you can do around regenerative design – but will they make the biggest impact? And can they be smarter? I think we should be working collaboratively to try and identify how to do that.

How can buildings give back?

How can they help purify the air, for example? How can buildings be netpositive in terms of energy? Could they be producing more energy than they need, which would help to reduce the need for energy production elsewhere? It’s that kind of line of inquiry that we need to be thinking about.

It’s about understanding that the built environment takes so much from the natural environment, which is causing some degree of imbalance, and it can lead to instability, particularly around climate, so we need to rebalance. Net-zero is the first opportunity to break the system, to halt it. And then we need to go further – we need to restore.

We have a very wasteful society, whereas in ecology, there is no such thing as waste – everything is a resource. Look at the way materials are broken down and the nutrient flows and cycles.

We have to redesign our systems to be thinking like that.

That takes us into circularity in design where nothing is wasted and the maximum value of anything is always optimized. The other thing is that nature is fairly resilient. We need to build resilience. We need to adapt, we need to learn from that. I think it’s important to understand the way the natural ecosystems flow, and what we can learn from nature in terms of the way that it’s designed.

We’re making a mistake if we don’t learn from the millions of years of evolution and from the natural wonder of the world that we are stewards of at the moment.

Jefa Greenaway

The Greenaway Architects director says a lot can be learned from Indigenous knowledge systems.

There is some deep wisdom that resides among Indigenous voices and there’s an opportunity here to facilitate knowledge exchange, where essentially Indigenous knowledge systems can be explored.

I would argue that Indigenous people, in the Australian context, were the first ecologists. If we think about something as simple as the idea of only taking what you need, that is a sustainable practice.

I’ll give an example which is quite illustrative of this and is really a metaphor: you don’t cut down the tree to remove the bark to make a canoe. You only remove what you need, which means the tree remains intact – you can harvest it for further material down the track and it’s therefore able to be used by other native fauna. This is a way of thinking that is essentially caring for Country. It’s a pretty time-honoured tradition that is embedded as a normal way of being as opposed to an afterthought.

In terms of some of the work that we do in contemporary practice, it is about the frugality of material selection – specifying products that have a small carbon footprint, for instance – and looking at opportunities where one can retrofit or transform existing buildings rather than demolishing them and starting again. All these things start to become the framework of how one engages in design practice and [this framework is] informed, in many respects, by the values that underpin it.

For me, that is a very useful way to frame our contribution in this space as design practitioners and architects. In particular, we have a certain social contract with the communities that we engage with. It comes with certain responsibilities and obligations. One of them is to not do harm and to leave

things better than [when] we started. That is very much attuned to an ecological practice and being mindful of our impact.

Ultimately, we have to understand that we have impact. That’s not to say that Indigenous people haven’t groomed the landscape or manipulated the environment to satisfy and meet human occupation, but it’s how one does it [that matters], and the extent of the impact. The architecture practices that are doing this well are the ones that are taking a holistic approach and looking at it in a systemic way rather than just looking at it in isolation.

If you speak to Indigenous people and understand some of the ways of knowing and being, [there is an] understanding that everything is interconnected. You can’t take out an understanding of one part of the world without it having an impact [on another]. Everything – from the land to the waters and how we intersect and interact with them – is connected.

Engaging with Traditional Custodians, knowing the Country that you’re located on and seeking inputs and insights about how one might engage with a given project, can broaden a frame of reference and [help us] move beyond the standard default positions and contributions.

Helen Lochhead

The national president of the Australian Institute of Architects outlines the steps the Institute is taking to support its members in this challenge.

The Australian Institute of Architects is undertaking a number of key initiatives: the first part is getting our own house in order, the second part is advocating to government in terms of policy and procurement and what they need to do, and the third part is educating the consumer public so that they can be good clients and demand better outcomes.

We have established a Climate Action and Sustainability Taskforce. We had more than 80 submissions from highly credentialed people from large practice, small practice, very active members of Architects Declare, people in government working in policy, right through to academics and researchers who are very well known in their fields.

The taskforce, as a brains trust, will work through what we need to do as practitioners, what governments need to do in terms of policy and procurement, and what clients can do in terms of better procurement practices. We will be providing toolkits to help clients actually live better in their own houses and also educating the consumer public in terms of how to have a more sustainable environment.

We will also be looking at our award programs so that we don’t just have a sustainability award; [instead], we will have a baseline point of entry for all awards. Design excellence is about designing sustainably and responsibly.

That will be something that we will need to work on in the next few years because it will take some time to change practice. It will also involve benchmarking what buildings were briefed at and what they ended up being built at, including some gap analysis of what the aspirations were and what ended up getting valuemanaged out. That will be a pretty relevant piece of research because it will allow us to advocate to government and to the industry as well.

What we need is a two-way conversation where the community, industry and government demand more sustainable construction – and architects will rise to the occasion. They already do, when given the challenge. We need to make it not “best practice,” but “expected practice.” Architects are capable and architects can do much more than they’re doing today.

We need to be part of the public debate to influence change. That’s a role the Institute can play. But it’s also the responsibility of each and every practising architect to educate their clients – and to sometimes not take the clients who don’t want to do the right thing. But that’s not always an economic decision that people can make.

If we do all those things, if we provide all the toolkits for our architects, if we educate our clients in terms of what they should expect and what the benefits of more sustainable construction and more sustainable buildings can be, and then we advocate for better policy, better procurement and better standards to raise the baseline holistically, then we will have an ecosystem which supports a more sustainable future.

Kerry and Lindsay Clare

The directors of Clare Design say that regulation is key, but the challenge extends beyond our buildings and into the urban realm.

KC: The industry needs the government to help us because there aren’t enough decent rules. It’s very hard for a client to understand why an architect will say, “No, you can’t do that,” because then they say, “Well, we can – there are no rules saying we can’t.” If [the government] draws a line, it’s much easier to tell your client that they have to meet the requirements, whether it’s solar gain in winter, cross ventilation in summer, et cetera. Regulations help us enormously.

But this is a very complex issue. There are no easy answers. A lot of architects need to understand that they need specialist advice. It needs a lot of education and a lot of specialist input. [At Clare Design] we still seek advice to refine our designs to get the best outcomes for our projects and our clients.

LC: The New South Wales Apartment Design Guide [the 2015 update to SEPP 65, which was introduced in 2002] is a good principle guide. And that’s just the minimum. It should be for all buildings [across the board]. There are 10 clear points and you should be able to satisfy those points easily.

Something is wrong when you look at some buildings in Queensland, for example. I’ve seen apartment buildings that are 10 or 12 storeys or more, with whole

walls of full-height glass facing west and unshaded. Even with airconditioning, those rooms will struggle to keep cool. You’re basically condemning people to live in airconditioning because it’s the only way those buildings would work. It’s a disgrace.

KC: With density becoming more of an issue, the extra population and how we house them will be a very big challenge. Highrise buildings beyond 20 storeys are actually chasing their tails with respect to the energy it takes to build them, to maintain them and their operational energy.

The super highrise is not the answer. The density in the inner areas of Paris and parts of Rome and Barcelona seems to be quite high compared to Australian cities and yet they’re still pleasant.

Our challenge is housing the population sensibly without a lot of negative impacts on our cities. We still want trees, parks, walkable streets and access to sunshine. That’s our big challenge.

LC: There is still the human aspect – we can’t forget that. Science is really critical and fundamental. But you can technically design something that meets all the standards, [yet] people don’t want to occupy it. It is important to consider the psychological aspects of making places so that people want to occupy them. That is also part of the environmental equation.

Emma Williamson

The CEO and co-founder of The Fulcrum Agency explains how her practice is “working invisibly behind the scenes” to influence better outcomes.

We’ve always had a really strong focus on sustainability in our design. One of the things highlighted through Architects Declare is the compounding awareness of the consumption of resources.

We’ve always felt that we need to be really mindful of that and it’s one of the reasons that we have sought, in this new practice [The Fulcrum Agency was founded in late 2018], to often work invisibly behind the scenes – not necessarily concerned with the buildings, but concerned with getting everything right before the building’s even commissioned.

If we want to make the biggest impact, we can’t just obsess with the building. Our practice is very much focused on being as useful as possible, to make sure that our clients get the best possible outcome.

One of the clearest examples I can give is a project we worked on in Broome several years ago, called Broome North. It was essentially working towards doubling the amount of housing that’s available in Broome. We worked as the architect, as part of a big team, on what that subdivision would look like. But before the subdivision team was even pulled together, we went and did an early scoping analysis.

One of the things that we did was a research project, where we put small weather stations all around the site. At the time, it was low-level scrub. We took readings of the site to get the actual weather and wind movements, rather than taking the generic weather pattern of Broome. In doing that, we were able to make a really strong argument for reorienting the whole subdivision – even though we knew that the subdivision would not have houses designed by architects. By changing the orientation of the blocks, all of the houses had a better chance of being naturally ventilated.

Then we worked with the housing providers to tweak their base designs to increase the opportunities for natural ventilation. We also made an argument for increasing some of the boundary fences between some of the properties, making sure the setbacks were wide enough so there was actual movement of air. All of those things worked to reduce the running costs for people who can’t afford huge power bills but also, obviously, it consumes less energy, so it’s good for the environment.

We spend time talking to our clients about the maintenance and the running cost because, for them, that’s a really big issue. A lot of our clients are not-for-profit organizations and a lot of them are located remotely. Either one of those, or the combination of those two things, means that buildings which consume a massive amount of [a client’s] financial resources can become uninhabitable quickly and have major health impacts. Being able to communicate with clients about where they are saving money is important because that’s the language which resonates. We need to choose our language carefully.

We’re really conscious of the kind of value we can add by moving our clients forward. We’re not judging them on where they are now, necessarily; we’re working with them to make their own advancements in these areas.

Jeremy McLeod

The founder and director of Breathe Architecture outlines some actionable steps for a more sustainable future.

The Victorian leaders of Architects Declare Australia have been talking about really simple, clear and key actionable items and working with the broader Victorian architecture community to push out those ideas.

The first [idea] was going carbonneutral in 2020. Step one is converting to 100 percent “green power” to trigger market change from “black power,” or coal- and gas-fired power, to renewable power, in an environment where the federal government won’t set new targets on renewable energy.

We’ve also been working on a big renewable energy campaign to switch [everyone] to 100 percent green power. Fundamentally, the idea is that we will be able to use our volume to get green power for everyone at the same price as black power.

On top of that, the next simple step is that we’ve started preparing a template document to send to all of our consultants to say to them, “It’s time for you, if you’re working with us in the built environment, to take responsibility for your own carbon emissions and to switch from black power to green power and be carbon-neutral by the end of 2020.” We want to encourage all of our consultants to join us on that.

After that, we’re focusing on switching off gas in projects. The minute you take gas out of a building, it forces you to electrify the building. The minute you electrify the building, it gives you the opportunity to buy renewables and have no carbon associated with the operation of that building.

Then, there is embodied energy and there are three key things to tackle with that. The first is reducing the cement content in a building. The second is reducing steel or replacing steel with recycled steel. The third is putting local FSC-certified timber into the building. When you use local timber, you can pull out the steel and you can use the timber to sequester carbon.

You can still have thermal mass in structural concrete but [we’re suggesting] you take the cement out and replace it with fly ash or slag or even geopolymer.

Fly ash and slag are waste materials of the steel industry, so they’re really cheap. You can also specify recycled aggregate and recycled steel for reinforcing.

We’re going to issue a set of standard key specifications that you can write in. This might start, this year, with 30 percent recycled cement content. Then, next year, we can start ratcheting that up so that as the industry starts to adopt it, it gets easier and easier.

Everyone who studied architecture in the last 20 years already knows what they have to do. Our job is to help them come to the realization that they just need to do it and be tenacious enough to bring their clients along with them.

Clients often ask, “Will

[sustainable techniques] cost more?” We say, “It depends on how you measure cost.” There are financial mechanisms to deal with that. With a multi-residential project, for example, we now use environmental upgrade agreements where we help facilitate a loan with the local council that pays for environmental upgrades on the building so that the developer doesn’t have to pay for it.

The residents get the benefit through a low-interest loan, which gets paid off through their rates.

Neil Logan

The co-CEO of BVN shares how the practice is developing an action plan to tackle the crisis.

Our action plan is grouped into three main components: knowledge, advocacy and design. We are in the throes of creating a framework will become an adjunct to our design conversation framework. There’s overarching knowledge, which is about how to do things better, but there’s also knowledge that has fundamental impacts on projects.

If you’ve got the tools in place and you’ve got the knowledge in place, then those decisions you make on projects are ultimately better because you’re more informed; you can communicate to a client or a builder the reasons why you’re doing something. Our thought processes advocate for a good outcome for the project. If you can back that up with real, deep-rooted knowledge about a topic, then it becomes a more convincing position and more of a gathering point for the project team, which includes clients and builders. You’re able to make good, solid decisions on the project. People understand [when these elements are] not seen as a “nice to have” but as something that is essential to the project.

If our design process creates that baseline of conversation within the studio about regenerative and sustainable design, that builds knowledge, and that knowledge builds the ability to advocate properly because we’re saying the right things. It becomes a holistic circle of interrelationships between those three components.

Advocacy and the single voice within the industry gives us a platform.

Our clients and our buildings won’t be as green as they can be unless we’re all talking the same language and pushing for the same outcomes.

We’re also looking at technologies that we use as architects within the practice – collaborations with software developers to create plug-ins to Revit would allow us to more readily understand the embodied carbon of materials. We’re trying to get a smarter, faster process so that design decisions are more holistic.

One of the failures of the green movement 20 years ago was that the outcomes of those conversations were about additions to projects: if you did this in addition to doing something else, it would be more sustainable. Today, I think clients still see [sustainable elements as] nice to have, or they attribute dollars to those things, as opposed to seeing them as an investment in a successful outcome. Most of the conversations we have with clients are about sharing knowledge [and] educating them about what we can actually achieve.

Fundamentally, from our perspective, if we’re not there having those conversations, if we’re not knowledgeable about the process ourselves and can speak tangibly and with sincerity about it, we’re not going to influence outcomes on projects.

You can say no to a client but, equally, you can say yes and use your influence to try to get the best outcome.