Decency and forethought: it is foolish to behave as if we as a race can go on treating the planet as we have been doing since the Industrial revolution. Architects and their colleagues owe professional duty to humanity and the planet.

Another issue devoted to green building? Why is there one, or even more a year?

In fact, every issue of The Architectural Review is, we hope, green, but some are greener than others because we must regularly review the latest exploratory work in an area of activity which is of vital importance to Immankind Buildings take up rather more than half of all our energy use: they add more to the pollution of the atmosphere than transport and manufacture combined.

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Some people believe that global warming is a natural phenomenon. Undoubtedly the world's climate is changing, but they argue that this might be a very short term effect the climate changes quite radically and randomly for decades think of the little ice age of the seventeenth century. They may be correct, but as Max Fordham probably the world's brightest environmental engineer has suggested, even if they are right, we should behave as if they were not: global warming is happening and we are very probably responsible for it.

Further, some would argue that it does not matter at all that the world is heating up; to them, the submersion of Pacific coral islands, the deforestation of the Himalayas and the Andes, and the aridation of areas like the southern United States and the southern Mediterranean is unimportant the market will provide solutions. Will it? To most of us (apart from the most committed total devotees of the market system it seems highly unlikely that the quantities of carbon dioxide and fluorocarbons we are pouring into the atmosphere from the buildings we design are not having some effect on the climate. Every generation since the Renaissance the beginning of modernity thinks that it has unique problems to cope with. Of course it does not all human problems remain the same), but it is clear to most that we are doing far more potentially to alter the nature of the planet than any of our predecessors.

We and our colleagues in the engineering professions, must rally to make really responsible professional and inventive efforts to reduce the deleterious impact of our work on the world. It is absurd and immensely destructive to build standardized buildings from the Arctic to the Antipodes. We desperately need a new sense of regionalism, based on climate and topography: one in which each building will respond to context, breathe gently on the world, and use the abundant supplies of ambient energy the universe provides. Of course, we cannot close down the power stations the electric grids that alarmingly in the US and Italy are apparently beginning to break down or the dams and irrigation systems that have so distorted the delicate ecologies of many of the poorer parts of the world.

Proper professional roles

But we have to invent systems that will add to the infrastructure we inherit and be capable of sustainable growth. For the imagination to achieve this, we must rely on the professions. There is an absurd notion, being promoted stridently by both the RIBA and the AIA and virtually every government in the developed world, that the architectural profession is merely part of the building industry. Certainly it is. But the professions have much more important responsibilities. Imagine doctors being described as a branch of the pharmaceutical industry or lawyers as a division of stationery manufacturing. We would never go to a clinic nor make a will. A profession should offer the possibility of using its arduously won knowledge to benefit society as well as individual clients.

Professional people are not only called to then life by ability to draw and count, cut kindly into bodies or make amazingly agile arguments. They are trained at great expense in traditions that are distilled from the work of their ancestors. All professional people have a wider responsibility than trousering their fees. In architecture we should have an oath, similar to the Hippocratic one, which most graduating medical students swear some version of on joining then profession. Our oath should be based on the BruntlandCommission's definition of sustainability: that we will build in a way which meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. (1)

In everyday terms, this would have profound effects on the ways in which we design. For instance, we should build to recycle and with recycled elements: we should try to source materials locally to cut down on transport emissions (which can be measured in product miles (2) we should standardize building parts that we cannot touch and feel yet devote more craftsmanship to the bits with which we make direct contact). The traditional virtues of the thermal properties of mass, proper response to sun orientation, and natural ventilation are essential parts of good design. But as important is the need to keep our eyes open and seize the opportunities offered by technologies not directly related to building. Nanotechnology's possibilities may give amazing new potential to buildings: instant response to climatic change: flexible reconstruction to cope with function alteration: instant modification at the whim of the owners. But such developments are at least a generation away.

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Imagination and invention

Yet much is at hand. In a recent book. Brian Edwards and Peter Smith point to numerous technological developments that can be adopted now. They suggest for instance that we are only beginning an exploration of the properties of phase change materials for storing energy. Sodium sulphate for example a very cheap substance can be used as an energy sink for it melts with heat and solidifies in cold and in so doing, latent heat-is released or captured. Quite a small reservoirof sodium sulphate can act as thermal flywheel for a sizable building.

Light emitting diodes LEDs are at last being used a bit in buildings after then first glimmering some fifty years ago in primitive electronic devices. LEDs can produce light with far fewer watts per human than conventional incandescent of fluorescent lamps. Why are we not using them much more extensively? Why are we not using solar cooling particularly in hot countries. It is home that some of the warmest places on earth like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia have been blessed with huge resources of fossil fuel If it were not for their oil wealth, such countries could undoubtedly be in the forefront of using their abundant solar radiation to cool buildings as well as warm them up. At last, there is some hope that we may be able to evolve architectures that properly respond to climate, but clients in such countries are often deeply wedded to the appearance of buildings a decade before last, so air conditioned PoMo still reigns in the Gulf, to the great detriment of the planet.

In more temperate climates, wind energy could be much more extensively used Already Denmark devices a quarter of its power from the wind: Britain would reputedly be able to provide a third, with suitable infrastructure. New developments in design of wind powered generators may make them less obtrusive and noisy.

Hydrogen technology offers hope of a way of living decently with the planet. But it has to come of age. We have yet to evolve effective ways of generating large quantities of hydrogen from water and distributing it without burning large quantities of fossil fuel. Again harvesting ambient energy offers wonderful possibilities it used in electrolysis of water.

There is so much to learn; so much to explore Instead of messing about with blobs and similar formalistic stupidities, we should be investing a fruitful and generous future based on decency and forethought for our successors P.D.

1. On Creation Future World Commission on environment development on unique

2. Australia Both bourdeaux in floria building. In special Spond London and NewYork 2nd word pp191 2D