Responsibility and Reluctance
Several of the MArch courses concern ecology and sustainability. There are observations about changes to the environment brought about by the building industry, extrapolations from these observations that suggest a future of Bad Things™, and the formulation of new imperatives for building in order to avoid the realisation of these bleak possibilities. Buildings, and their immaterial consequences, are fairly complicated without these ecological imperatives. The design of all but the smallest and simplest buildings is a multi-threaded and fuzzy process, lacking in determinism, and providing fertile ground for major fuck-ups. Ecological considerations are pushing building industry fuckupability up by an order of magnitude, with major, global repercussions.
As an architect, I am not interested in taking up this gargantuan responsibility. I do not want to care about embedded energy in the materials I choose for their beauty, and I don’t care whether their production relies on sweat shop labour. These are all important considerations, but it’s not what I signed up for. Someone else can take that up. (In a different manifestation of the same emotion, I am not interested in devising fudges and CSS hacks to placate the users of non-standards-compliant web browsers. I just want to design cool pages. The World Wide Web Consortium has just yesterday made the DOM level 3 specification a recommendation; another standard with which Internet Explorer will not comply.) I just want to design cool buildings; produce designs that do not merely emerge out of necessity, but are crafted out of desire.
Sure, sensitivity to ecological issues is as much part of design as sensitivity to gravity. But this all-inclusive view of design is an unattainable ideal that no-one can claim to practice. The design of a house is also the design of its users’ lifestyle, and through them, the lifestyles of those they affect. The tree of connections moves quickly to encompass a neighbourhood, a city, a country, a world. Ecological concerns for the building industry make this more apparent, as the choices an architect makes are shown to have direct global consequences, affecting farmers in South America as much as the family the designer is trying to house in the UK. In practice, designers do not undertake to solve all tangential concerns; they delineate an area of interest and work within that.
So I choose to not concern myself with these problems of economy and chemistry in my design process. Someone else can deal with that. I prefer to limit myself to the small, the controllable, and the neat. While I’m happy to be aware and responsive to complex, global issues, I find that they move my design production towards aesthetic directions that I do not want to follow. I am more comfortable with different kinds of constraints; the kinds that do not place me in a culpable position versus South American farmers, for instance.
This reluctance to undertake responsibility is very conscious. Responsibility leads to stress and stress makes me unhappy. The magnitude of financial, social, ecological consequences of building make building design a very uncomfortable undertaking in a way that, exempli gratia, graphic design isn’t. As the size and complexity of my final year design project increases, I am reminded of the self-imposed ceiling of design complexity I set a few years ago. As a professional architect, I intend to specialise in extra small buildings. Or extra rich clients.
Comments
Luckily, we’re not in a totally free market, the building products industry is not entirely driven by the specifying architect. Hopefully the BRE will make sure we get both beautiful and energy-efficient (whatever that word means) materials to design with. I mean, hey, that’s what we’ve all signed up for!
But you’ve got to wonder how long initiatives such as BREEAM are sustainable in their own right. It’s interesting that, when there’s a - shall we say - “marketing” advantage to being able to demonstrate that your new office development has a good BREEAM result, the industry rushes to *be seen to do* the “right thing (TM)”. But when it comes down to the sustainability of natural resource consumption (for example), it takes legislation and associated taxaton to *force* the industry to “do the right thing (TM)” - I’m talking landfill tax here. Next question is what’s going to happen about the through-life impact of buildings? The 50% of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions coming from its building stock sort of thing — I wouldn’t be surprised if legislation forces the industry to deal with the implications of this — look at what’s happened to Part L. What I’m saying is, that apart from a select view practices, or where there’s a public-facing advantage to be had — the industry basically needs to be forced into doing the right thing in the absense of a direct economic argument for it. I’ve spent the past nine months asking the industry what “value” means to it — sustainability is currently a very small part of that perception.
That’s interesting. But I am optimistic. Students (at least at Bath) are being taught in a way that makes sustainability a necessary consideration, much like structural performance.
But you see, as I read your comment, my eyes glazed over. And that’s the point of my entry. I want to design ecologically responsibly, but I don’t want to have to wade through politics, legislation, and “scientific” papers with hidden agendas.