Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-machine Age [Paperback]

"..every self–professed environmentally conscious architect must read it.." (Building Design, 8 March 2002) 

"…turns cherished assumptions on their head through original thought and sophisticated argument…sophisticated and refreshing…book of the month…" (In the Sticks, January 2003)

"..every self–professed environmentally conscious architect must read it.." (Building Design, 8 March 2002) 

"…turns cherished assumptions on their head through original thought and sophisticated argument…sophisticated and refreshing…book of the month…" (In the Sticks, January 2003)

In this age of ever–increasing environmental awareness, the issue of sustainability is set to become the dominant factor in architectural design. At a time when, like most professions, architectural practice is increasingly governed by legal guidelines and requirements, competing policy demands require architects to aim for economic, social and environmental sustainability whilst also trying to effect social progress. Sustaining Architecture in the Anti–Machine Age asks whether these two ambitions can be reconciled.
Featuring contributions from architects, journalists, academics and legal consultants, the book takes a balanced look at the subject, giving the full range of sometimes opposing views. Examining all the key issues, it considers why the industrial development of town and country is considered unsustainable rather than socially imperative, and whether the aim of raising the level, standard and performance of arhcitectural production conflicts with the promotion of sustainability.
Over the last decade the profession and practice of architecture has changed rapidly. Sir Michael Latham′s ′Constructing the team′ and Sir John Egan′s ′Rethinking Construction′ attempted to turn the building industry from labour–intensive trade contracting the capital intensity of manufacturing. Paul Hyett, the current president of the Royal Institue of british architects, has a mandate to establish an environmental duty of care. Sustaining Architecture in the Anti–Machine Age considers what these initiatives mean for architects.

In this age of ever–increasing environmental awareness, the issue of sustainability is set to become the dominant factor in architectural design. At a time when, like most professions, architectural practice is increasingly governed by legal guidelines and requirements, competing policy demands require architects to aim for economic, social and environmental sustainability whilst also trying to effect social progress. Sustaining Architecture in the Anti–Machine Age asks whether these two ambitions can be reconciled.

Featuring contributions from architects, journalists, academics and legal consultants, the book takes a balanced look at the subject, giving the full range of sometimes opposing views. Examining all the key issues, it considers why the industrial development of town and country is considered unsustainable rather than socially imperative, and whether the aim of raising the level, standard and performance of arhcitectural production conflicts with the promotion of sustainability.

Over the last decade the profession and practice of architecture has changed rapidly. Sir Michael Latham′s ′Constructing the team′ and Sir John Egan′s ′Rethinking Construction′ attempted to turn the building industry from labour–intensive trade contracting the capital intensity of manufacturing. Paul Hyett, the current president of the Royal Institue of british architects, has a mandate to establish an environmental duty of care. Sustaining Architecture in the Anti–Machine Age considers what these initiatives mean for architects.

IAN ABLEY is a site architect for a commercial practice, and Director of audacity.org.

JAMES HEARTFIELD is a journalist and television producer, and author of Need and Desire in the Post-Material Economy (Sheffield, 1998) and Great Expectations – The Creative Industries in the New Economy (London, 2000).

Introduction

Ian Abley, audacity.org

THE BANAL APOCALYPSE
Sustainability is the moral imperative of the age of architects, insists Paul Hyett, President of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). At the beginning of the twenty-first century architects are expected to be ever more creative, while being mindful of the impact of their building designs on the ecological systems of the planet. In the Brundtland Report, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) described the requirement to reconcile architecture to the environment as follows:

There are thresholds which cannot be crossed without endangering the basic integrity of the system. Today we are close to many of these thresholds; we must be ever mindful of endangering the survival of life on earth.

Writing for the January 2000 edition of The Architectural Review, Catherine Slessor sensibly observed that the Brundtland Report 'serves as a starting point, but it hardly suffices as an analytical guide or policy directive'. Slessor also articulates the hopes of many practitioners when she argues that 'sustainability should not be seen simply as a corrective force, but as a new mandate for architecture'. The starting point of agreement is that no-one wants to endanger life on earth, or to develop in unsustainable ways.

A fundamental contention is whether human life is to be prioritised over all other species. With that privileging rests the legitimacy of architects to build a human environment out of nature, extending the stock of natural resources through the developmental process. Through agriculture and architecture humanity has successively transformed the natural environment to sustain human society. Even to imagine that humanity should make corrections (or apologies) for living on the planet recognises, in its weakest possible expression, that humans are the only species capable of developing science and technology to work out what these 'corrections' might be. If we can do this, then why not accept that humanity can make transformative change for the better? Pamela Charlick and Natasha Nicholson consider the privileged human position in nature in Chapter 4, 'Ecological frequencies and hybrid natures'. It is interesting, as John Gillott and Manjit Kumar explored in Science and the Retreat from Reason, that science has sharpened our self-identity despite any cultural reaction against science and technology:

Science has also changed forever humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos. From being the inhabitants of a body at the centre of the universe, around which the rest of the universe revolved, we now see ourselves as the inhabitants of a tiny planet. We revolve around an ordinary star, on the fringes of a galaxy which is one among countless others.

Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age considers this cultural reaction against science and technology among architects in particular. The anti-machine reaction co-exists with an increasing dependence on advancing science and technology. However, standing for the privileging of humanity is not how most architects attempt to formulate an analytical guide or policy directive out of the morality of sustainability. Rather than cut to the core issue of the relativisation of humanity as one species among many, as Charlick and Nicholson are prepared to do, most architects come to a criticism of science and technology through a moral condemnation of consumerism. The argument is usually in the form articulated in Cities for a Small Planet, where Richard Rogers imagines that the suburban semi-detached in sprawling aggregate might be the death of us:

The world-wide growth of urban populations and grossly inefficient patterns of living are accelerating the rate of increase of pollution and erosion. It is ironic that mankind's habitat - our cities - is the major destroyer of the ecosystem and the greatest threat to humankind's survival on the planet.

The accusation is that in their concern for our wellbeing our parents have pursued the unsustainable development of suburbia. The claim is that unless we change patterns of development we will continue to threat- en the wellbeing of our children, or their children. This is an unwarranted insult to our parents. Their efforts to make a better life have been recast as a destructive act against the wellbeing of their grandchildren or great-grandchildren. A conventional semi-detached house, a garden and a car or two seems modest enough, and hardly the end of the world. It is difficult to have any sympathy with the proponents of sustainability when they repose the finest of motives, maintained over the working lives of many parents, as a moral lapse of self-restraint in consumption. This sits very uneasily with what we know to be the real familial relationships that have sustained successive generations through the twentieth-century growth of suburbia.

It is only when sustainability is depersonalised that the blame can be diffused. However, the imperative to act responsibly remains. In Modernity and Self-Identity Anthony Giddens recognised that ,apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence'.5 It is at the level of personal behaviour that Paul Hyett wants to apply sustainability, asking in Chapter 1: 'If Sustainable Design isn't a Moral Imperative, What is?’. Hyett agrees that sustainability is a mandate for architecture, adopting the approach that Phil Macnaghten recommends in Chapter 6 to relate sustainable development to everyday life. It is through mundane demand management that architects are encouraged to foster a sense of environmental responsibility, to overcome the remoteness of global issues to local reality.

FROM MORAL IMPERATIVE TO ENVIRONMENTAL DUTY OF CARE
Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-machine Age has been produced following the Building Audacity conference in July 2000 at The Building Centre, London, and as Paul Hyett announced 'his candidacy for the presidency of the RIBA. (We are very grateful that Hyett kept with this book project over the election. For the transcript of the Building Audacity conference, visit audacity.org.)

Hyett predicted that 'sustainability issues will grow in the new warmer millennium', and he is raising the debate:

What is now needed is a crusade through which British architects and the RIBA address both their obligations to…