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Architectural Review, The, July, 1997 by Peter Davey

'Is money to be gathered? cut down the pleasant trees ... pull down the ancient and venerable buildings for the money that a few square yards of London dirt will fetch; blacken rivers, hide the sun and poison the air with smoke and worse, and it's nobody's business to see to it or mend it.'(1) At first, it may seem that conditions caused by the Industrial Revolution against which William Morris argued so eloquently have greatly improved. But have they? There may be less violent rapes of the natural environment in Europe and most of North America, but think of the destruction of the rain-forests of South-east Asia, South America, and even North Australia; the drying of the Aral and the mighty Oxus; the pollution of the Caspian and the White Seas. The sun may be hidden less often now by palls of smoke, but we have come to fear its rays as they burn cancers into our skin because we have started to destroy the ozone layer.

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Clearly, building and the ways in which we plan and structure settlements are having enormous deleterious effects on the environment. A new report to the Club of Rome suggests that we have 50 years in which to work towards a sustainable future for humanity on the planet by achieving annual increases of efficiency in resource use of a modest two to four per cent? That prognosis is a good deal more optimistic than many,(3) but it does require immediate action by architects and other members of the building team, often at a rather basic level. For instance, the authors suggest that the way in which the professions are remunerated is fundamentally anti-efficient: 'If we had to set out to design a system of incentives and institutional structures to make buildings use about 10 times as much energy as they should do, be less healthful and comfortable than they should be, and cost more to build than they should do, it would be hard to improve on the system we've actually got'.(4) The old canard that the professions whack up the cost of buildings to increase their fees is not very well founded these days (if it ever was), for clients have on the whole evolved efficient systems for ensuring that it does not happen, and indeed for ensuring that they often get rather more professional services than they pay for. But there is an underlying truth: most clients are not prepared to balance long-term costs in use against capital investment, and normal development funding systems do not allow this to be done.(5) Similarly, utility providers in Western societies are usually rewarded on the basis of how much electricity or water they sell, rather than efficient use of resources.(6) Clearly, such attitudes can only be reversed by rethinking tax systems and building controls to encourage greater investment in sustainability. (And indeed, changing fee scales so that they are based on costs in use.)

Building-by-building

But much can be done on a building-by-building basis. Thank goodness that Germany, Switzerland and the eastern Scandinavian countries have not been abundantly blessed with oil and natural gas. There for the last two decades, enlightened clients have been calling on design ingenuity to make buildings which are environmentally sympathetic. (It can be argued that particularly in the most northern countries, where the Industrial Revolution happened very swiftly, cleanly and late, consciousness of the need to live in harmony with nature was never completely forgotten, even at the height of mid-twentieth-century techno-hubris.)

Progress (we must not be afraid to use the word again) will take place partly through thoroughly understanding the devices used in traditional buildings for obtaining equable internal climates, for instance convection chimneys and the thermal flywheel effects of mass. These may not be used entirely traditionally: think for instance of the ways in which convection is used these days in breathing walls (see pages 38 and 43 of this issue). Yet there seems to be much scope for re-thinking tradition: what for example of the physical properties (though not necessarily the materials) of thatch, or the cooling effects of evaporating water, or its thermal storage capacities?

New materials like types of glass which have low heat transmission but let in daylight to reduce the need for electric illumination are already greatly influencing energy consumption; developments in photo-voltaic glass will probably have a potent effect on buildings. New control systems, while far from creating intelligent architecture as some of the wilder-eyed proponents of building-science-fiction suggest, have made buildings more sensitive to internal and external climatic changes and able to respond to them automatically. In the age of Big Blue, such systems will undoubtedly become more sophisticated, though like that giant computer, not really intelligent in a human way.(7)

Beyond the individual building, new ways of analysing the ecological impact of materials and building techniques will enable sensible governments to introduce fiscal measures that will encourage resource husbanding.(8) It is suggested for instance that steel structures, particularly those made with electrically smelted metal, are probably more environmentally friendly than concrete ones,(9) and if this is really the case, it should be possible to use taxes to make concrete structures less attractive than steel ones. Similarly, recycling and conservation of materials in general could be made more appealing. In the UK for instance, it seems insane that repairs to historic buildings (which inherently conserve their inherited investments of energy and materials) should be subject to value added tax, while new additions to such buildings are not: a typical bit of legislation drawn up by bureaucrats and politicians with no conception of ecological responsibility.

Who's responsible?

Architectural Review, The, July, 1997 by Peter Davey

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