The Guardian view on buildings: out with the new! For the planet’s sake
A new and highly swanky hotel lands in Edinburgh, a mass of shimmering bronze-coloured coils, and all anyone can think to say is: doesn’t that look like a giant poo emoji? Londoners are confronted with plans for a giant burningred orb, which will supposedly serve as a concert venue, and it brings on the shudders.
New buildings can amuse or repulse us, induce awe or yawns, but there is a case for thinking of them less as objects to walk around and more as processes to worry about – because the process of building is one of the most wasteful and carbon-hungry engaged in by humanity. We tear down old houses or shops, and to create new ones, we cover the Earth with materials that have gobbled up fossil fuels: Concrete, of which the world pours enough each year to patio over every park and mountain and back garden, every square inch, in England; steel, of which every tonne produced emits nearly two tonnes of carbon dioxide; plastics. While Conservative MPs argue over who is going to foot the bill for green energy for our homes, hardly anyone in Westminster discusses the upfront carbon costs of building houses and office blocks and shopping malls. Yet construction directly accounts for about 10% of our carbon emissions. Turning approximately 50,000 buildings to rubble every year creates twothirds of all the waste produced in this country. If the UK is ever to translate its net zero ambitions into reality it will need to change the entire building industry.
Never one to decline a hard hat or an ersatz bridge, Boris Johnson would doubtless enthuse about the new construction materials that scientists are working on. Technological fixes may have their place, but while waiting for them one obvious approach we can pursue right now is to stop indiscriminately tearing down buildings. That is the ethos of the most recent winners of architecture’s top prize, the Pritzker. Anne Lacaton and Jean-Phillippe Vassal have condensed their philosophy into a slogan: “Never demolish, never remove or replace.” Meanwhile in the UK, the trade journal Architects’ Journal have pursued a RetroFirst campaign, urging architecture practices to reuse, refurbish and retrofit buildings rather than simply throwing up new ones.
Architects can advise their clients, but the big obstacle is that new is cheaper than old. First, the state encourages the use of the wrecking ball by putting 0% VAT on new buildings; even refurb and repair incurs the full 20%. Given that one advantage of Brexit is that it allows the UK to set its own VAT rates, there is no reason that system should not be reversed. Second, since so much building in this country happens under the aegis of the public sector, it should be easier to enshrine a minimum threshold for demolition.
This is not to say that no new hospitals or houses will ever be built, but such measures would make clients, architects and builders more mindful about the materials they have in front of them. They would bring construction within the circular economy. And impose constraints on architects that may spur them into greater creativity. Out with the new, and in with the old!
nology that allows for regular jaunts back to specific memories. Nick (Hugh Jackman) runs a service along with his longtime work partner, Watts (Thandiwe Newton), that gives people the opportunity to travel back, briefly, reliving happier, sunnier times. When Nick falls for the mysterious lounge singer Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), he finds himself savouring the present over the past but when she disappears, he uses this technology to figure out where she might be.
The reminders of Inception become so distracting that the film starts to border on pastiche. A device that allows for mind travel – check, an old song used for memory recall – check, the ghost of a beautiful but damaged woman haunting our hero – check, an oft-quoted line repeated by the hero about a journey – check, a tortured relationship between a rich man and his son – check. It’s overwhelming, even suffocating at times, which is a shame because there are elements here that work independently, without the need for the Nolan playbook to be so obsessively followed. For a while, Jackman’s grizzled noir schtick is fun enough (he’s an actor who can sell a lot) and the big, expensive slickness of the film surrounding him is inventively designed (it pops on the big screen, where, sadly, few will end up watching it). The world of the film is often confusingly built (there are references to the war and the border with little clarity on what this all means) but it’s aesthetically powerful, a version of Miami that’s believably waterlogged with people choosing to live nocturnally as the days are too hot.
But the film’s big romance is less sizzle and more fizzle. The pair’s chemistry, shown over just a few scenes, is as wet as the Miami streets, and while Ferguson gives good femme fatale, she can’t quite convince as a down-on-herluck lounge singer with a secret addiction – the actor is far too refined to nail that sort of grit. The dialogue is often stilted, going through the motions rather than gliding, and what Joy seems to think is a labyrinthine plot is actually rather disappointingly straightforward. The reveals are thunderingly obvious replays, often relying on characters’ great stupidity not to spot them first time around, and as Joy reveals that her box of tricks is actually kind of empty, we start to clock-watch rather than care about what’s in front of us.
There are, of course, many poignant things to say about how some of us choose to relive the past until it slowly breaks us in the present, how moving on can seem more impossible than continually going back, despite our awareness of the self-masochism of such nostalgia. But there’s nothing revelatory or even heart-grabbingly resonant here. File under: if you loved Inception then you’d just about tolerate Reminiscence.
Reminiscence is out in cinemas and on HBO Max in the US and in UK cinemas on 20 August