Sustainable architecture isn’t easy but the unsustainable kind costs the Earth

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AJ 20.10.22: Climate crisis - read the digital edition

In a time of myriad crises, the climate crisis seems all-encompassing. But what feels different now is broader social awareness of it, and the peril our planet’s in – and with it a distinct attitude shift. Good. It is increasingly unacceptable to throw away, to squander, to chuck/burn/demolish resources – and that goes for buildings too.

And though it might seem like forever, it really is only relatively recently that it has even been possible to construct and maintain those Modernist architectural marvels that crowd out the covers of coffee table books and prettify Insta feeds. All that glass, concrete and steel, all that heating and cooling: a tremendous amount of energy goes into maintaining clean lines and perfect façades.

Today, we know what all that energy expenditure, and those C0₂ emissions, are costing us: the Earth. And it’s too much.

In their third essay for the AJ, Barnabas Calder and Florian Urban take an unflinching look at the issues with recent approaches to building – but stress the importance of going forward with agency. ‘Mies’s 1924 statement that, with industrialised construction, “the social, economic, technical and also artistic problems will be readily solved” might still hold true, as long as the new construction industry is built on the principles of low embodied carbon and renewable energy,’ they write.

Measurement is part of all this – assessing the carbon cost of your building and mitigating it. Navigating this new world of whole-life carbon assessment isn’t easy. There are pitfalls and challenges of timescale and greenwash – as senior reporter Will Ing expertly captures in his news feature.

But the general direction of travel should be towards a better, more thoughtful approach. If you’re going to build new, surely you should build to last (hats off to you, Níall McLaughlin, for your RIBA Stirling Prize-winning Magdalene College library). If you’re looking at a site with an existing building on it, really take the time to assess what can be done with that existing structure – can you re-use it? Or part of it? And just because you’re looking to save on resources, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be building beautiful. We all need to be inspired by our built world just now.

As Calder and Urban put it: ‘Architecture can contribute to saving human life on earth not only through direct decreases, building by building, in carbon emissions, but also through creating a beautiful, exciting vision of a zero-carbon future. Fear and guilt are de-motivating; stunning images of profoundly sustainable architecture will help people to run towards a zero-carbon future, rather than merely running from an unsustainable present.’