The Guardian Weekly

Building sustainabl­e castles in the sky

Architects are starting to see the climate crisis not just as a problem, but an opportunit­y to rethink the world anew

- By Rowan Moore ROWAN MOORE IS ARCHITECTU­RE CRITIC OF THE OBSERVER

Nearly 40% of UK greenhouse gas emissions, to use a figure architects love to bandy, are caused by the built environmen­t. It’s an arresting figure. It suggests that the design of buildings and the planning of cities can do much to counter climate crisis.

Architectu­re 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? So what would architectu­re look like if all involved 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, Cecilie Sachs Olsen and Matthew Dalziel, which opens later this month. “Just fiddling around with what the market gives us is not enough,” says Harper.

The argument of Architects Declare goes something like this: architects 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.

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.

Slightly more radically, the architectu­ral profession needs to reconsider its values. 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, the convention­al processes of architectu­re are too slow to make any difference. 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.

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 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.

 ?? LIVING NEW YORK; NICK CLARK/ALAMY ?? Mycelium is now also touted as both an organic substitute for plastic and a vegetarian substitute for beef Architects are exploring the possibilit­ies of mycelium, the fungal substance that gives mushrooms their structure, most conspicuou­sly with these temporary towers built outside MoMA’s PS1 gallery in New York
LIVING NEW YORK; NICK CLARK/ALAMY Mycelium is now also touted as both an organic substitute for plastic and a vegetarian substitute for beef Architects are exploring the possibilit­ies of mycelium, the fungal substance that gives mushrooms their structure, most conspicuou­sly with these temporary towers built outside MoMA’s PS1 gallery in New York
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