Sustainability means building things to last

Sustainability – that multi faceted, meaningful yet meaningless word that is at the forefront of architecture. I have problems with very many aspects of it but mostly due to prevalent “green-washing” by designers to give a green sheen to very non-green projects. I also have a deep problem with the construction methods being touted by the passivehaus institutes and BRE amongst others. Architecture has had a fairly torrid century when it comes to pioneering new methods of construction. Almost all of these problems have arisen from designers forgetting the immutable constants of designing buildings for normal people to inhabit that are capable of withstanding our climate .

Every time I see a beautifully photographed, untreated timber clad house in the south of England I have to remind myself what a ten year old timber clad house looks like in the west of Scotland – it ain’t pretty. In fact there is no easy way of putting this – the current construction methods of the residential housing sector are not built to last beyond the standard 10 year warranty period. Surely the very first guiding principle of sustainability is to build something that will still be used for human habitation in 200 years time. Modern timber frame houses are constructed from very low grade timbers and particle boards, unproven over time. They are wholly unsuitable to future layout changes and even extensions are difficult. Dealing with internal moisture is nigh on impossible over the long term and the rate of decline of a modern timber frame building once the weathering skin is breached is remarkable. But they are cheap, easily meet the building regulations regarding the conservation of heat and power and keep the NHBC warranty verifiers happy.

Look around the west of Scotland, northern England and Northern Ireland – what are the old buildings made of? The reason they have lasted so long is their extremely robust materiality ; brick, stone, slate, concrete. My own apartment is a basement of an 1886 built sandstone tenement. It has been refurbished a few times in its 126 years and I have just added to that. I think it’s safe to assume that it will still be occupied and modified to other’s needs in another 126 years whereas the 7 year old Glasgow Harbour development on the Clyde is looking very tatty already. Its acres of North facing Powerwall/Sto render on Metsec metal stud walling is lauded as being "sustainable" but its looking baggy, saggy, mouldy and very very shoddy. Any bets on it being here in 26 years never mind 126. This applies to most of the "BlairBoxes" built in the recent housing boom.

We live in a disposable society; we’ve known that for a long time. Most things have obsolescence built into their design – otherwise how can a company such as Apple survive unless we buy a new device every 18 months. An original I Pod would be 11 years old now and if the battery had been easily replaceable there’s no reason to assume it wouldn’t be doing exactly what it was designed to do for another 11 years.

Buildings aren’t ipods – they are much more complicated; they have to fulfil technical, societal and spiritual needs. They need to last and current “sustainable” construction methods won’t last. I have just finished a brick and concrete house; it is constructed to full current building regulations for conservation of heat and power – however it has a hewn-from-solid feel that makes me suspect it will still be housing a family and serving their needs long after my grandchildren are grandparents. Not something I can confidently say of a modern timber frame house – no matter how well you build it.

The car is dead! Long live the car.

I have a thing about cars – old cars mostly but a nerdy obsession nonetheless. I can tell you the cylinder capacity of most 1980s BMWs, I can tell you who has designed every engine in any Ferrari road car, I can set up and tune a weber carburettor and I can identify almost every British car of the last 50 years just by looking at their rear quarter panel. Like I said nerdy in the extreme…but I am no longer the owner of an everyday car.

So for the first time since I was 17 years old I no longer have access to a car that I can use anytime. I sold the last one and I have just joined the CityCarClub. I have had a bit of an epiphany. Cars are becoming obsolete in their current form for anyone who lives in a city or even a suburb and technology is currently available that could see cars disappear off our streets but be available to all at a minutes notice and it starts with schemes such as the citycarclub.

I have always had a serious dislike of anti-car ideology. Groups such as Reclaim The Streets, cycling zealots and many others who want to banish cars from cities and eradicate cars altogether for purely ideological reasons. The automobile was one of the greatest and most socially liberating inventions of the 20^th century and the one invention that had the most profound effect on society, architecture and town planning. Not all of the effects were good as any of Corbusier’s sketched examples of town planning will testify. However cars are mass public transport – i.e. transport that moves the population en-masse. Crucially cars are public transport that suits our needs as individuals and it is when we ignore the extremely potent effects of individuality we risk disaster. Again look back at Corbusier and the Modern Movement and their insistence that we all live in things that look exactly the same – an utter failure of an idea that has decimated the respect that architects were once held in. Individualism means that we don’t all work in one single building and live in another single building therefore getting a bus from building A to building B is never going to be a viable form of public transport. Cities are and always will be gloriously chaotic yet interlinked and strangely efficient. They cannot and should not be solely designed around transportation of any one kind. We all participate in multi-destination journeys on a very regular basis – some short range journeys, some long range journeys and mostly a combination of the two. 

The solution to these complex journeys for the past 50 or so years has been lots and lots of little painted metal and glass boxes cluttering up our streets being driven from point a to point b parking for a few hours at point b, driving to point c and parking there for a few hours etc etc. So we naturally have congestion and parking problems blighting every city. However what if all cars were available to all? By that I mean you just took the nearest one and left it where you stopped using it and it became immediately available for someone else to jump in and use. Then streets would not need to be lined with miles of parked cars doing nothing. Cars could easily drive themselves to centralise locations for fuelling and servicing or merely to ensure that they were distributed more evenly and not all clustered around the pub on a Saturday morning! Self driving cars have been around for a few years now and it is only the consumer’s wariness of the concept that is stopping manufacturers rolling them out. You can buy a Ford Focus now that parks itself. Also CityCarClub (other services are also available) uses a simple online booking and monthly subscription service that means you can locate one with your phone, book it on a whim and it will always start, always have fuel in it and always be insured, taxed and have decent tyres on it.

What this means in terms of urbanism and architecture is the almost utopian idea of urban design; not having to consider car parking with every proposal. If cars took themselves off to a central location after use to be used only on demand then we could reclaim the streets without any militant shouting or enforced tofu eating. Think of an on-demand, personalised, driver-less taxi for a monthly fee.

So then imagine a world where you step out your door to see no parked cars, no congestion (because computers don’t park in daft places, have road rage fits or drive in bus lanes!) and transport on demand. Its one of those utopian ideals that has advantages at every angle. Much less fuels needed, much less raw materials required, much less (or possibly) no road deaths. Its everything banning cars from city centres would achieve with none of the serious consequences of such a luddite retrograde move.

As I book my citycarclub Prius for next week it is becoming apparent that this is not some delusional vision of the future but will become a reality sooner than most people think. We’ll all pay a monthly subscription to use cars and large centralised organisations will concern themselves with the operational needs of the vehicles – we’ll just use them. This concept is probably terrifying most motor manufacturers and fuel companies but as ever it is the market that will win over on this. Conspiracy theories of BigOil controlling technology to keep us hooked on petrochemicals is just fantasy – remember at one point Microsoft were the biggest, richest, most powerful company on earth; where did that get them? Apple came along with more desirable products and Google popped up with cloud computing and now Microsoft is heading the same way that IBM did – bound for the history books of obsolete companies. Exxon Mobil will go the same way. Where does that leave people’s attachment to their cars?

Most people don’t have an emotional attachment to their cars, plenty do but most don’t. I have noticed a growing trend amongst friends to being totally indifferent to most forms of car. However the UK’s £3.5 Billion classic car industry shows that it is still very popular and can also be a lucrative hobby that drive large parts of the economy but doesn’t clog up our city streets. Trust me I never thought of driving my 1967 Fiat Dino Spider to B&Q – I only did about 1500 miles per year just doing scenic drives and I see no reason why that cant continue – it is recreation not transport.

Everyone reading this who is thinking I am turning my back on noisy old bangers fear not! I’m just about to begin my daily trawl of carandclassic to see if there is a decent Alfa Montreal available in the UK…or maybe its time for a proper yank V8, but not an uncouth yank car so maybe a Jensen CV8 hmm decisions decisions.

The CityCarClub Prius is for transport – the bellowing V8 for the occasional Sunday afternoon. The car is dead! Long live the car.

Churches for a Secular Society

Baroness Warsi, Alain De Botton, Dave etc everyone seems to be getting in a bit of a lather about religion recently and It has made me stop and consider the most obvious manifestation of Christianity in our towns and cities; churches.

Look across the skyline of my home city of Belfast or my adopted home of Glasgow and you will see a vast array of spires and steeples and there are plenty of more modest places of worship without the phallic skyline announcers. Now consider how many of these churches actually have a congregation rather than a small handful of attendees; how many of these churches actually positively contribute to their locale with culture, employment or even use of the space.

It seems a great waste of such a wonderful architectural legacy that communities that surround these buildings don’t get any use out of them unless they sign up for whatever ideology attached to the church. More pressing is the fact that many of these architectural gems are under serious threat due to very poor stewardship by the churches. One needs only to look at the plight of Greek Thomson’s St Vincent street church, The Lansdowne Church on Great Western Road or Carlisle Circus church in Belfast to see what years of dwindling congregations and donations does to expensive to maintain buildings. Although there are plenty of examples of well maintained but seriously under used churches – my personal favourite is the Wellington Church opposite Glasgow University. A stunning piece of classicism that could be so much more than a sparsely attended temple.

So what can we do? It seems perverse to be struggling for funding to build new community centres and cultural venues and the like while these building remain empty. However there is no avoiding the facts that it takes quite a lot of money to maintain these buildings and that for them to flourish they need to have a commercial heart that draws people to them to either spend or give money. Turning them all into superpubs is a regressive step in many people’s eyes , including mine. However both Cottiers and Oran Mor have lively theatres, restaurants as well as pubs – both are social and cultural hubs. Maybe not quite in the way that Alain De Botton extols in his new book “Religion for Atheists” - Agape Restaurants these places certainly are not. However a warm summer evening outside Cottiers sees children and dogs running around and people socialising and having fun. Oran Mor’s “A Play, A Pie and A Pint” lunch time theatre shorts are quite rightly lauded as giving an extra cultural dimension to theatre. The simple conclusion that cannot be avoided is the two best examples of re-used ecclesiastical architecture in Glasgow are both licensed premises. The attraction of a cold libation in a warm social environment is undeniable and thus these wonderful, dramatic pieces of architecture are brought back to life. The statutory authorities should more easily grant entertainment, drinks and catering licences and relax certain change of use planning issues to these buildings if the applicant includes a sizeable and meaningful social and/or cultural dimension to the project. A truly public/private initiative. Surely this is not beyond the grasp of the various city councils with lots of vacant and/or under used ecclesiastical properties under their jurisdiction.

Architectural Education part 1

There has been plenty of negative commentary regarding the annual RIBA presidents Medals and the irrelevant, dystopian nature of all of the projects - essentially bemoaning the fact that architectural education is still churning out graduates only trained in making nice images. This is only hinting at the real problem here which is the direction of the universities, their staff and their curriculums and not the students who are a talented bunch just essentially doing as they are guided.

In my experience of teaching the uppermost concern of the staff is how their student's work reflects on the staff and not the student's actual developing skillsets. There is a terrible vanity at the heart of architectural education that is reflective of the rather towering vanity out in practice where we still marvel at archiporn images of totally empty buildings, agonise over detailing just because it’ll “look good in the journals” and generally sacrifice societal usefulness at the unforgiving altar of aesthetics…It seems somewhat hypocritical to criticize students for doing the same – i.e. sacrificing all in the pursuit rich imagery as the work must by definition remain theoretical.

I’m not actually sure what I learned in the interminable five years at university – because I know I learned 10 times as much in two years of practice with an inspiring mentor. Something most of my contemporaries readily agree to. Which is bad news for 100s of very well paid, low pressure architectural teaching jobs around the country.

However Turkeys don’t usually vote for Christmas and the architectural education establishment and the RIBA will keep on rearranging the chairs on the deck of the sinking ship RMS B-Arch. We have arrived at a perfect storm of a prolonged construction downturn, massive university fees and an increasingly devalued profession and the water is lapping over the bows…

My ten pence worth of a suggestion: Architectural education as we know it should be replaced wholesale with a 2 year, high intensity, theoretical, creative course followed by 3 years of internships, apprenticeships and learning how the industry works by first hand working. No debt, no time wasting and young architects being both creative AND useful…Plenty of issues to thrash out but it increasingly seems like the only workable solution.

I’ll not hold my breath for this to be adopted but trust me – it’ll be forced upon us at some point through necessity and admissions dropping off a cliff.

@linearchitect .

Decide or not...trial and error

Today is one of those days where I have to make a fairly big decision regarding the design and construction of a new building. Its a big decision that will potentially either cost my client a lot of money or save him and me a great deal of hassle and time. It will also influence an infinite number of other decisions flowing from this one.

Back when I was working in a large office it was very easy to either hide from these decisions or spread the liability around by getting everyone's input. Now I am the only one in the decision chair and it all falls down to me.

I have not really spent too much time over the past few years considering these situations as they arise quite frequently but I was asked at the weekend, when inspecting a new house I designed that is nearing completion "what would I have done differently?" It occurred to me I do not seem to be wired to think like that. Once a decision is made the consequences thereof flow in a single linear direction - there is no rewind button just the learning of lessons and the development of ideas and techniques based on experience.

That may seem contradictory; is learning lessons from consequences of decisions not the same as thinking what you would have done differently? Ultimately I do not believe it is because in the timeline that is the conception, design and construction of a building every decision leads to another and the effect compounds and varies exponentially. Leading to the ultimate cliché; "We are where we are" which is the perfect response when confronted with questions such as "what would you do differently"