Norman Foster’s stance on climate is something no one can agree on

Architectural culture is becoming increasingly polarised by diverging attitudes to the climate emergency. The resulting battles threaten to produce only losers, and to prevent us from coming close to meeting the world’s commitments on carbon reduction.

A recent interview given by Norman Foster showed up fault lines with uncomfortable clarity. Foster asserted that ‘there are a lot of dangerous myths about materials, recycling and sustainability’. He made an argument for the sustainability of concrete for new buildings, and floated some decidedly blue-sky hopes about the potential for aviation fuel made from seawater.

These are positions strongly at odds with the analyses of many sustainability specialists, and on social media some responded to the interview with angry denunciations of Foster’s architecture, his helicopter, and even his entire generation. Others angrily shouted back their admiration for Foster’s architecture and leadership. There was little sign of common ground.

Monstering the great figureheads of contemporary architecture is not merely unproductive, it is unjust. Foster is a giant presence, and deservedly so for his remarkably interesting early collaborations and for his extraordinary ability to grow and nurture his worldwide practice over a period of such stylistic clashes and fast-changing global economic patterns. The output of Foster + Partners must be among the most substantial of any practice ever, and its technical and aesthetic quality is impressively high. Its work includes undisputed world classics like the Sainsbury Centre, the Reichstag and Willis Faber, and it continues to innovate and explore, decade after decade.

Fosters’ decades of success began at a point where almost no one on earth knew what harm fossil fuel exploitation was doing

It cannot be easy to be such a long-standing, successful and high-profile practice in a climate emergency. There is a business to run, salaries to pay, costs to meet. Here in 2023, it finds itself with a back catalogue of work that – as we suddenly see – has, like most other architecture of its period, been responsible for substantial carbon emissions and other environmental impacts. Fosters’ decades of success began at a point where almost no one on earth knew what harm fossil fuel exploitation was doing. Its architecture found, and continues to find, ingenious and elegant ways of improving the amenity of buildings through the use of high-technology services and materials.

But very gradually, over the last two decades, we have each been waking up at our different paces to the scale and nature of the challenge posed to us all by climate emergency. For most of us who were adults at the turn of the millennium, the ‘greenhouse effect’ was a relatively marginal scary story told by a few scientists. If we’re honest, many of us non-experts probably hoped it might turn out to be a false alarm like the millennium bug, or rapidly fixed like the degradation of the ozone layer. Over the years since, it has grown first as a source of guilt, anxiety, and small-scale behaviour change like trying to use fewer plastic bags. Finally, for an increasing number of people, it is now coming to be recognised as the biggest threat in all of human history, requiring significant change that will impact almost everything humans do.

So how should leading architects respond to such a massive and unevenly distributed shift in understanding?

The gold standard is Yasmeen Lari, whose practice used to build big, carbon-intense projects like the Pakistani State Oil Company Headquarters, but who now works on very low carbon, emergency housing for people hit by natural disaster.

Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari watches the roof being installed on her practice’s disaster risk reduction centre

It is not realistic to expect many architects to manage such a radical shift, but I am not persuaded that Foster’s latest interview is the right answer either. It offers unquantified assertions about improvements in certain areas relative to conventional contemporary practice. Surely what we need is a more radical, all-encompassing reconsideration of what we build, how we build it, and what we expect its performance to be?

While he once claimed to have no power whatsoever as an architect, a preeminent figure like Foster does have the profile to increase public understanding of the 39 per cent of anthropogenic CO₂e emissions that derive from the built environment, and to push for the changes in regulation, taxation and insurance that will support rapid decarbonisation. An interview that doesn’t do this feels to me like a missed opportunity.

For now, we are all still operating in a fossil-fuel world. We all produce avoidable emissions in at least some parts of our working and personal lives. As we work to improve, a first urgent step is to find a way to talk about our architectural present without divisive hostility, but with courage, precision and clarity.

As the American writer James Baldwin put it, ‘not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’

Barnabas Calder is a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool and author of Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency (2021)