And the future? Buildings and cities of the future must conserve energy and materials so we can live in harmony with the planet.

Despite the brilliance of Stirling's Stuttgart and Gehry's Bilbao, the thoughtful power of Snohetta's library, the penetrating reticence of Zumthor and Leiviska, monuments cannot make up a city. We cannot live in a state of constant climax, nor can a humanly satisfying life be set amid a background in which formal and spatial events struggle against each other in a kind of three-dimensional, multi-branded brawl. There will have to be some sort of matrix from which the monumental emerges. It will not do to say (with some of the proponents of high PoMo) that in a democratic society we each deserve to build a monument, that everyone's 15 minutes of fame should be translated into three-dimensional built stuff. Such a way of making cities would result in universal road-to-the-airport syndrome, where ducks and decorated sheds succeed each other ad nauseam--at best caviar mixed with marrons glaces, at worst (ie normally) tacky, shabby and completely banal.

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To suggest that there should be a hierarchy of importance in the environment is not a call to return to the pyramidal societies of the past but a plea for the public realm. Cities all over the world are growing at a colossal rate. In poorer countries, combined technological and agrarian revolutions are drawing people to cities with forces as powerful as those that caused the explosion of tiny towns in the north of England during the first industrial revolution 250 years ago. In richer countries, there has been a colossal expansion of the suburbs caused by increasing populations, changed family structures and burgeoning affluence.

Shanty towns and suburbs are both cating land at a rate unprecedented since civilization (the culture of cities) began thousands of years ago. Such land is almost by definition highly fertile, for before the development of mechanized transport, cities had to be located as near to their sources of food as possible. Now, with transport costs in many countries being held artificially low by government intervention, food sources can be much more dispersed and, by using artificial fertilizers, they can be on land which was previously unproductive (while of course increasing pollution). But all this has costs: ecological ones that are masked by conventional accounting. As the history of places like Easter Island shows, a civilization can collapse if it cannot understand ecological imperatives because they are masked by conventional rituals. The islanders chopped down every tree they had to support a religion that demanded more and more huge carved monoliths. Lack of trees led to erosion; the agricultural base collapsed; the islanders had to resort to civil war and cannibalism. Their civilization ended.

We are (I hope) a good distance away from cannibalism at the moment. But we are beginning to move on a downward path. Most of us (except Texan fanatics) have realized that we are living in a world with limited resources, and Easter Island is an analogue that, as Jared Diamond points out, we should never forget. A tiny piece of land isolated in the vast Pacific has extremely important lessons for a little planet drifting round a small star on the edge of a galaxy. (1) Gaia, James Lovelock's name for the complicated, interrelated self-organizing systems of relationship between the organic and inorganic aspects of the earth, is totally indifferent to individual species. We, as a species, happen to have been successful since we discovered the benefits of civilization. We have been particularly and spectacularly successful in the last couple of centuries, when the natural world has been dominated as never before by us and our machines, and we have exploded in numbers like a bloom of algae in an over-nitrogenated lake.

Modern, mechanical civilization is becoming unsustainable, as phenomena as different as global warming and the AIDS epidemic dramatically demonstrate. Gaia will survive, but it is utterly unconcerned with humanity. Unless we can live in harmony with the planet, we shall perish as the algae do when their bloom becomes too great; their pond becomes sterile, waiting to become repopulated by windblown seeds and the life-forms that attach themselves to the legs of wading birds.

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But it would be better for us to continue to be successful and learn to live more sensibly. So we need to change our relationship to the planet. Instead of trying to dominate it, we should study and respect it, and try to work with it. Here, architects, planners and landscape designers are immensely important, for buildings consume more energy and materials in their construction and running than any other human activity, save perhaps transport and manufacture. Eroded as our professional architectural status is by commerce and bureaucracy, we can still make a huge difference to the relationship of humankind to the planet.

Yet ecologically aware architecture is only part of the answer. As I never tire of pointing out, the Nazi party was the only successful green political movement ever to achieve power. There are some very strange authoritarian creatures in the rich undergrowth of the green movements: think of Wright's Broadacre City. Wright was very far from being a fascist, but his ideal rural community bears uncanny similarity to the very authoritarian society portrayed by Thomas More in Utopia. Each male citizen of Wright's city was to be given an acre of land at birth that, on coming of age, he would be expected to cultivate to feed himself and his family. Wright did not reveal what would happen to a chap who didn't want to live as a tiny smallholder, but presumably punishments would have been unpleasant, socially, if not physically.

Broadacre City was an early apotheosis of the modern suburb, then scarcely out of its infancy. It celebrated its huge, low density, land-take, its reliance on the automobile, its narrow and oppressive values (though Broadacre's were supposed to be rather more idealistic than the ones real suburbs have now). If we are to live in greater harmony with the world (and with each other), suburban form must alter. Few doubt the advantages of suburbs for certain people at certain periods of their lives. Suburban living offers close contact with nature, and low levels of pollution of all kinds: it is in many ways ideal for families with young children (though not for teenagers).

Of course, suburbs are popular, but they must change if we are to survive as a culture. Without losing their essential attributes, they should be more dense, less demanding of land and less generative of car travel. Few models of such development have been explored, and few of these have been followed up, but at Boras in southern Sweden planners offered architects opportunities to speculate on how suburban development could be densified. Two schemes in particular: from Finland (by Helin & Siitonen) and from Denmark (by Vandkunsten), showed provocative new approaches to making dense suburban developments that made the most of opportunities offered by the hillocky forested landscape and by technology available to maximize use of ambient energy (AR November 1993).

A more dense example of eco-suburbia is to be found in Sutton, London, where Bill Dunster has developed a scheme that offers densities at least comparable to those of surrounding Victorian terraces (far higher than Boras) and makes maximum use of technologies not readily available when Boras was designed (AR November 2003). Another approach to making more ecologically aware suburban living is shown in the house and office designed for themselves by Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till in Islington (AR January 2002). There, on a very difficult site next to one of the main railway lines from London to Scotland, quite ordinary and easily available materials such as sand bags, straw bales, solar collectors and corrugated polycarbonate sheet were bravely used to make an experimental building with unusual thermal capacitance and receptivity to ambient energy.

In Santa Monica, Pugh Scarpa Kodama have ingeniously shown how low-cost housing can be almost energy self-sustaining by using photo-voltaic arrays, solar collectors and careful orientation (AR November 2002). In south-east Asia, Ken Yeang and one or two others have shown how the abundant ambient energy of the Tropics can be used to modify internal climates by using geometry and planting. Several ideas have emerged for tapping the wind power, for instance by incorporating turbines into tall blocks, but such proposals have yet to be tried, perhaps because they obviously have very difficult if not insuperable problems with noise made by the turning mechanisms. The Foster practice and architects like Christoph Ingenhoven have shown how breathing skins on office blocks can considerably reduce energy consumption and improve working conditions (see AR July 1997).

Stefan Behnisch has done wonders in the Genzyme Center in Boston by creating the first green office block in North America, where careful manipulation of sun and daylight, use of natural convection, recycling, night cooling and many other devices are estimated to make very considerable energy savings and health improvements compared with a conventional building (AR April 2004). On a grand scale, there is the possibility of a hydrogen revolution. The key problem of finding ways of generating and distributing hydrogen massively without using fossil fuels is yet to be cracked--there is no point in adding to carbon dioxide production to create large quantities of liquid hydrogen which is dangerous and difficult to manipulate, even though when it is burned, the product is nothing more than water vapour. But developments in hydrogen production using solar, wind and wave power, give hope of breakthrough within a decade or two. How can architecture and planning respond? We ought to be thinking now. In Cambridge, England, for instance, there is a scheme by which solar energy is used to break down water to provide hydrogen that powers a small fleet of buses.

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Even more urgent is the need to explore imaginatively the energy-saving and life-enhancing technological developments available today. They range from electro- and phototropic glass to integrated systems of climate control and energy conservation. We have few examples of their use so far. For instance, glass skins that can change according to the weather, those that can generate electricity and ones that are self-cleansing. The technology is there. More design invention is needed.

As yet, nanotechnology may seem both impossibly arcane and quite remote from applications in design. Yet if it can be made to work (and progress seems increasingly rapid), nanotechnology will have immense implications for the manufacture of buildings and their contexts. Molecular robots will be able to combine and change to make buildings that might begin to build themselves. They will certainly be able to alter rapidly in response to the time of day, weather and seasons.

What of cities themselves? How can they be more ecologically apt? Many experiments in the last few years have shown that as well as investigating the possibilities offered by technology, we should be looking into those of human geometry. Cities and other settlements should become more dense, and more mixed in function, to reduce both resource-expensive journeys, and destruction of agricultural land and wilderness. How can we evolve urban relationships of habitation, work and leisure that offer advantages like the privacy, human scale and contact to nature for which people flock to the suburbs? Architects, planners, engineers and landscape architects must collaborate.

Their influence may be muted by absurd and clumsy business and bureaucratic structures. In a recent article (2) Richard Rogers, the leader of the UK government's Urban Task Force pointed out that, despite some excellent planning ideas for reintroducing housing into London (mostly on brownfield sites), 'decision-making is left in a quagmire of mediocrity. Many of the delivery bodies operate first and foremost as land dealers and surveyors concerned with numbers and management, not design ... if we don't get the design of cities and neighbourhoods right, then all our work on crime, education, health, jobs and social exclusion will be undermined'. Architects and the other design professions must produce imaginative ideas about how to create better, greener, gentler cities because no one else is going to.

It is impossible to say what such cities will look like. Only Curitiba in Brazil has evolved a thorough-going environmentally conscious plan (AR May 1999), and that is highly specific to the local climate, economy and topography. The advent of democratic, ecologically aware buildings and cities will restore variety and wonder to a world that is being homogenized into placelessness by the antiquated absurdities of the building industry and a morass of inapt management systems.

Much of the technology is available--it must be imaginatively applied. Architects must abate their fascination with figure and focus on humanity--the potential is huge, exciting and wonderfully rich. We inherit wonders from our ancestors: we are bound by the ethos of our profession to add to them for our successors. P.D.

1 Diamond, Jared, Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, Allan Lane/Penguin, London, 2005, p29ff.

2 The Guardian, 29 January 2005.

RELATED ARTICLE: excerpts

SCANDINAVIAN COMPOSITION, Peter Davey, November 1993

Swedish social idealism is not dead. In 1990, Boras, a small city some 35 miles inland from Gothenburg in south-west Sweden, held a competition for part of Hestra Garden City, a new housing area on the town's north-west edge. The Stadsbyggnadschefen (city building director) Hasse Johansson had the idea of injecting new initiatives into the rigid Swedish bureaucratic system (which produces well made and appointed affordable housing, but at the cost of architectural and social imagination). He set up a Nordic competition for four areas of housing, each to be designed by a Swedish, a Finnish, a Norwegian and a Danish architect. The winning architects in each sector were to bring the best of their national social housing traditions to bear on a delightful forested landscape, permeated by traces of agricultural activity like old dry-stone walls and punctuated by little rounded hills left behind by glaciation. A real community was to be created which could, in twentieth-century Scandinavian fashion, enjoy the natural landscape as well as having social existence. It is to be a proper settlement, with school, nursery, shops, restaurant and library in a central building. The Danish and the Finnish housing schemes are reviewed here. Each has particular national character within the overall context of decent social democracy.

DESIGNING OUR FUTURE, Peter Davey, January 2001

A year or two ago, Max Fordham, the distinguished environmental engineer, remarked that, 'Even if [human generated] global warming can't be proved to be taking place, we should behave as if it is'. By its nature, climatic change cannot be determined with any accuracy over a short period of time. As we all know, there is a great deal of randomness about the weather ... and it is ridiculous to make generalized inferences on the basis of a couple of hot summers or wet autumns. Only observations over decades or even centuries can demonstrate whether or not climatic alteration is really taking place ... undoubtedly, the world has been getting warmer in the last couple of decades. Since 1980, the global mean temperature has begun to climb well above the likely range of natural variability experienced in the previous 120 years ...

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We simply cannot tell whether or not this global warming is natural, or human-made, or a combination of the two ... Fordham's proposal that we should behave as if it is a product of human activity must be taken seriously ... So anyone involved in originating buildings, clients and consultants alike, can make a real difference to the planetary balance ... All students should be taught about the importance of the ecological imperative from the first hour of their first year. By intermediate stage, a thorough understanding of the principles of passive and active energy conservation should be expected. At graduation, students should be required to understand total environmental impacts of their work, both as individual buildings and parts of a greater organism.

NATURE TALKING WITH NATURE, Charles Jencks, January 2004

Do people have to understand all this--for instance, be familiar with the evolution of the universe to respond to those parts of the garden where this story is told? It seems to me better in the first instance if they come on these installations in the right frame of mind, interpreting and feeling the garden according to their mood and the few cues provided, not as if they had to pass an examination in astrophysics. Since in garden art, as others, there is always more significance than intended, and since perception is best as an active, projective affair, the intended meanings can be secondary, left to be uncovered later. On the other hand, the kind of cosmogenic art that interests me engages the mind and makes claim on deep truths that are revealed at a certain time and place. It manifests such things as diagrams of nature--forces, laws, mental constructs, truths of the universe--that appeal only to those who take the trouble to decode them. Symbolic art is most effective when it stimulates the search for meaning and turns it into a basic part of the experience. Of all the arts, gardening is well positioned to engage in that dialogue of natures--cosmic, physical, organic and human--that captivates the mind and senses. [On his garden at Portrack, Scotland. Photo: Charles Jencks, from The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, Frances Lincoln, London, 2003.]

LANDSCAPE FORM AS A REDEMPTIVE STRATEGY

Kenneth Frampton November 1999

Since Megalopolitan development now takes place at a global scale few options are available that are capable of significantly improving the socio-cultural and ecological character of the average urbanized region. Other than insertion of new systems of public transport, only one possible strategy seems to be universally available: blanket application of landscape interventions ... as a way of improving the environmental harshness of large tracts of our urbanized regions. The ubiquitous black-top parking lots of north America are a case in point. For clearly all such lots could be transformed into shaded parking areas through subsidized application of tree planting as a public coordinated programme. Given the present escalation of global warming, ecological low-term benefit accruing from such provision would be considerable, the related enclosure of such places by planted berms would lead to further cultural benefits, together with the enactment of legislation prohibiting the use of asphalt for the surfacing of parking areas, to reduce the destructive distribution of water run-off produced by the automotive system. It is easy to construct parking bays out of perforated, prefabricated paving elements filled with grass, so that the entire parking network throughout a megalopolis could be transformed into a landscape. The ecological and cultural benefits are self evident.

This general greening strategy possesses other pastoral benefits: first the tendency to reduce the built environment to an endless proliferation of free-standing objects would be overcome by landscape which would integrate everything into the surface of the ground, second, landscape would have the advantage of being more accessible to the man in the street, than the contemporary built environment with the seemingly unavoidable harshness of its instrumentality.

PACIFIC RIM & PLANETARY CULTURE, Peter Buchanan, August 1991

Throw away your atlases. They are all utterly obsolete. Familiar projections by Mercator and others are centred on the Greenwich Meridian. Imprinted thousands of times over in our memories is the gestalt of continents framed by water and framing in turn between them the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The Pacific Ocean is neither framed nor properly present. Nor too often enough, is it evident how the USSR and Alaska lean towards and almost touch each other (like Michelangelo's God and Adam) across the Bering Strait. But since the bombing of Pearl Harbor drew attention to the very centre of that ocean and its accessibility from both sides, the Pacific has progressively become not the edge of the world but its very centre. Perched precariously and opposite each other on its seismically unstable rim and locked in a symbiotic competitive interplay are Japan and California, the two key centres of the late twentieth century.

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AFFIRMATIVE ARCHITECTURE

Catherine Slessor March 1995

The power of architecture to heal division and improve the lot of humankind will be greatly tested in the coming years, as South Africa struggles to transform itself. We seek to reflect this in our coverage of a range of projects across South Africa's broad social and cultural spectrum. As the political climate changes, overwhelming social problems are slowly being addressed, widening the role of the architect and generating new ways of working. From these tentative beginnings, progress is being made towards an inclusive and life-affirming architecture ... In the past [the roles of South African architects] have been extremely precarious, but now the future depends on them.

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KINDERGARTEN CHATS, Peter Blundell Jones, September 1996

For a recent building in Stuttgart, Hubner sought to create a network of spaces within a recognizable order, yet he also allows for variety and encourages exploration. Most important was to get the scale right, so that the spaces did not seem too large. The adoption of a module of 2.75m, based on the requirement of about 20 children sitting in a circle, set the size for a series of aedicules or houselets, the conceptual components of the building. On the outside, these display the small scale appropriate to children, while fulfilling the need for a building which seems large enough to compete with surrounding trees and the five and six-storey neighbours. On the inside, they are interconnected, the module defining a frame that may be left open or closed. In the short-stay kindergarten, located in the basement, the aedicules supply specialized corners in the otherwise open-plan teaching spaces. In the first floor creche, they make up a large group space. At higher levels, they break into more intimate and enclosed attic-like bedrooms where the longer-stay children can take a nap.

SIX THEMES FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM

Juhani Pallasmaa, July 1994

DEFENCE OF ARCHITECTURAL QUALITY

Architecture continues to have a great human task in mediating between the world and ourselves ... It is evident that the current cultural condition renders the emergence of profound architecture as difficult as of profound literature. The post-historical condition tends to erase the very foundations of architectural manifestation by uprooting ideas and experiments before they have had time to take root in societal soil. It turns them into instantaneous commodities in the market of images, into a harmless entertainment devoid of existential sincerity.

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Some of the essential questions of the architectural profession today are: can architecture define a credible social and cultural goal for itself; can architecture be rooted in culture in order to create an experience of locality, place and identity; can architecture recreate a tradition, a shared ground which provides a basis for the criteria of authenticity and quality?... I wish to suggest six themes for the re-enchantment of architecture at the turn of the millennium. I firmly believe in the continued human mission of architecture and its possibility of grounding us in the continuum of time and in the specificity of place ... The six themes that I regard essential for the strengthening of architecture's position in the post-historical reality are: 1. Slowness, 2. Plasticity, 3. Sensuousness, 4. Authenticity, 5. Idealization, 6. Silence.

THE NATURE OF GOLDSWORTHY, Peter Buchanan, February 1988

Partly to recapture the wellsprings of art, the original awe at nature's variety and sense of oneness with the universe found in primeval art, many sculptors, particularly in Britain and the United States, now work with natural materials in nature. But while the Americans, often with earth-moving equipment, work at the heroic scale demanded by their huge landscapes, the British work in smaller more modest ways. Most modest of all, but amongst the most delightfully moving, are the ephemeral sculptures of Andy Goldsworthy ... Crystalline shards of ice, precariously poised beside a pond, form an arch that glistens and sparkles in the sunlight ... In another season, coloured leaves or petals stuck by spittle form chains or patches of contrasting colours that soon break up as the parts curl or blow away. A chain of leaves slides slowly over the still surface of a pond or even floats away in a conga dance on the surface of a stream, casting a shadow that leaps over pebbles and bright winking wave patterns in a self-destructive and frenzied fandango.

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