What does it mean to the AEC industry that no-one, not a single of us, from the average joes to the most succesful architects, engineers and builders have been able to perform their job, their craft, without harming the planet. Architecture as a field of study has historically focused on form and function, but today’s practitioners are being asked to add the environment to their long list of concerns and responsibilities. Even the best architects of the past century were able to achieve such acclaim only at the expense of the environment. They may not have been aware of it the time, so we can hardly fault them, but we can use our current knowledge to add nuance to our history, and help us direct our path into the future. We know now that many of our past behaviours, and indeed many of past inventions and revolutions in efficiency, productivity came at a direct, yet externalized, cost (think of the ecosystem and soil degradation connected with increased farmland productivity coming from industrialization).
When we look back on colleagues from the past, we must accept that regardless of how great they may have been, regardless of how much of our own success must be partially attributed to those who came before us, and regardless of how much we may celebrate their achievements, they cannot be idolized completely, because all this was done while destroying the environment. Our understanding of them and the profession we inherited from them, must include an understanding that the degradation the environment, a certain degree of tragedy of the commons, was baked into their work from the beginning. And then we must conclude that this assessment applies to the current generation of thought and work leaders today.
Now, are these unfair standards to compare to? Is it at all possible to construct new buildings without harming the environment? Without contributing to resource scarcity? We certainly aren’t able to today, not at any scale of relevance. So perhaps the standards are unfair, however, this argument misses the point. The point isn’t to shame the profession, past or present, or cancel anyone, to use the modern colloquial, but rather to ensure that the profession does not blindly accept the ideals and role models put forward in these people as the correct ones.
Modern starchitects are brands. Large firms (architecture or engineering) are industry-leaders, and are often those with the most resources to effect change, and yet are the most risk-averse. And now those brands and those firms are increasingly being applied to convince the public that sustainable design is possible, and that they can give it to us. There are a number of problems here.
Firstly, there’s a problem of priority and urgency. CEOs, partners and leaders of firms today are old (generalizing). And much like in the wider debate on climate change, age plays a big role in how the importance and urgency of climate change mitigation is perceived. The older generation of architects and designers may very well understand impending climate emergency, and be willing to focus large amounts of energy on reducing the carbon emissions of their projects, but in my experience they never truly give climate the same priority as form, function and aesthetics (let’s call these layer 1 design priorities). This is because they are born into an era where sustainability was nowhere to be found in the classrooms of the time, meaning this generation is locked into a paradigm where they can only add sustainability as a second layer (layer 2). The prior aspects are ingrained via centuries of accumulated study and work, and embodied (to varying degrees of success) in literally every building out there to date.
What we need, however, is a rearranging of those two layers, a total re-education, where sustainability, climate change considerations and eco-systems thinking are the baseline criteria, and the previous layer 1, while remaining important, take second rank.
This is a crucial thought, and in fact we must penetrate further to a second point. Because not only is a total renewal of the design process required, architects and engineers must also more strongly than ever begin to take a stand on the very nature of the service they provide. Which clients do we say yes to, which projects do we accept? While the ethics around project selection have always been present in the profession, they now become every more important, now that we know that every square meter of floor area matters in our race against the climate countdown clock. We cannot continue to construct unnecessary square meters - it is very clearly another example of class-ism, and neocolonialism, as the poor and developing countries will increasingly be disallowed the opportunity of even the base need for shelter without bringing us nearer to climate collapse, all because the potential pool of affordable (in a climate sense) square meters is spent on second, third, forth and fifth homes, luxury apartments, hotels and resorts, even space stations and exoplanetary bases. It is simply unethical. And it implicates all large architecture firms and brand names, who, almost by definition produce output intended to be iconic, singular, and thus often lavish, extravagant and wasteful in terms of material.
It’s been accepted that construction and infrastructure are holy parts of our economies, ignition-options that allow economists and politicians to drag faltering economies up out of the dirt by providing investment opportunities to kickstart spending, and speculative investors of all kinds to hedge the money in a market that always grows (until it crashes). But when we use construction as an economic tool, when we build only to keep fiscal engine running, and not to provide real shelter to real people, or real educational and cultural assets to a population, we enter a dangerous vicious cycle, leaving actual needs unmet and actual buildings unused.
Which brings us to growth. There is by now a lot of writing discussing the misunderstanding of infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible. Architects and engineers must understand that every unit of material used in one building is a unit of material not able to be used in another, and as the amount of material on this planet is finite, that leaves two options: reusing material or not building. In a sense this will become the dichotomy of the future - find a way to construct your new product or building from pre-existing assets, be they defined as waste, stock or just buildings, or don’t produce/build at all. Might as well get on board early. This points to the importance of establishing a reuse infrastructure, as I’ve written about before, but also puts a fine point on the previous point - build only what is necessary.
