Who's responsible?

A hundred years ago, William Morris pointed out that it was no-one's responsibility to reverse assaults on nature. Now it is clearly everyone's. The first replicable experiments in ecologically aware architecture are emerging.

'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.

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.

Government action (local, national and supra-national) is also needed to encourage sensible planning, the fundamental aim of which should be to increase the density of settlements, and in so doing reduce land-take, journeys and energy losses between buildings. That government action can have a radical effect for good, even in unpromising circumstances is shown by Curitiba, the capital of the state of Parana in Brazil and that country's fastest growing city. Under mayor Jaime Lerner, an architect, a land use and transport plan was adopted which promotes dense development while allowing 52[m.sup.2] of open space per person, one of the highest levels of any city in the world. The key is a public transport system which relies on bus lanes with special buses and tube stations, providing the mass transportation capacities of a metro system at a 500th of the cost. As a result, 'nearly 70 per cent of the population use the bus system every day. Benefits include a per capital petrol consumption 30 per cent lower than cities of comparable size in Brazil, the cleanest ambient air of any Brazilian city, the highest car ownership and the lowest car drivership'.(10) This is one of the most inspiring examples of communal imagination at works, but there are many others; UNESCO ought to be analysing and collating the best to try to inspire other local governments worldwide.

Our business to see to it

Worldwide effort is essential. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, William Morris announced with some pride that 'Men urged by their necessities and desires have laboured for many thousands of years at the task of subjugating the forces of Nature ... To our eyes, since we cannot see into the future, the struggle with nature seems nearly over, and the victory of the human race over her nearly complete.'(11) How curious to look back from his future to find that kindly prophet (one of the first people to have green consciousness in our sense) so very wrong. It has become clear that we cannot possibly win a contest with nature - nor should we wish to. If we continue to oppose natural forces to the extent we are doing now, the planet will simply change to make human life vastly unpleasant, or perhaps even impossible. Everyone has some responsibility for trying to avert this quite likely and imminent future - none more so than those who design the man-made environment, who if they use imagination responsibly, will begin to evolve new architectures and forms of planning which will draw on ancient wisdom and modern technology alike to help humanity live in harmony with nature.

1 Morris, William The Lesser dArts, 1878, collected in William Morris Centenary Edition, Nonesuch Press, 1974, p513.

2 vonWeizsacker, Ernst with Amory B. Lovins and I., Hunter Lovins, Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use, Earthscan Publications, London, 1997, pp256-268. The book is a compost heap of ideas and case-studies on environmental sustainability, fecund and chaotic.

3 Though not of course as optimistic as some of the gung-ho technophiles like John Maddox, whose book The Doomsday Syndrome (Macmillan, London, 1972) was a useful, if somewhat Panglossian, riposte to early eco-catastrophe scenarios.

4 von Weizsacker et al, p178.

5 von Weizsacker and his colleagues suggest that 'the commercial interest in long-lived structures could be spurred if ... structures were leased instead of being sold. With leasing, the construction firm would have a vital commercial interest in durability and low maintenance costs' (p80). In Britain, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has been set up to do just this but there is little indication so far that it will lead to better environments, or even buildings that are more efficient in terms of resource use, because construction firms still tend to choose the safest and dumbest designs which are cheapest in capital cost, hence rather defeating the point of the whole process.

6 The privatisation of many utilities in developed Western economies has reinforced this trend and made it more difficult to reverse.

7 Probably just well, for computers which could learn to make value judgements about unlike variables might really become a threat to the human race as many science fantasts have proposed.

8 Because buildings very rarely travel across national borders it should be possible, even in an age of free trade, for national governments to impose taxes to encourage appropriate resource use. An analogy might be building controls: in Europe, it would plainly be imbecilic to have the same building regulations from Sweden to Sicily.

9 von Weizsacker et al, p78. The authors cite work by Christa Liedtke of the Wuppertal Institute on the material and energy consumption of manufacturing electricity pylons in concrete and steel. The conclusions cannot of course be translated direct to building, because they leave out the implications of providing fire-proofing of structural steel. See for instance p37.

10 Ibid p128.

11 Morris, William, Useful Work versus Useless Toil, 1885. Collected in Centenary edition, op cit p609.