Being inspired
You need not be an environmentalist to appreciate the elegance of natural systems, and their structures, textures or colours. It is not new to be in awe of the power of nature, or to recognise that evolution avoids waste. However, only humanity can disregard immediate ecological constraints.
It is true that ecologically aware designers rely on natural metaphors as precedent for architectural experimentation. Yet it seems paradoxical that often the same environmentalists, advocating a deference to ecosystems, are creating unprecedented buildings demonstrating human ingenuity.
Nature may inspire, but environmentalists argue that we can only imitate nature. The observation of nature leading to the socially refined abstractions of science is a human achievement.
However, it is what we do with those insights that matter, and our actions in turn present further environmental possibilities and ideas.
We use nature dynamically, as a source of inspiration, whilst recognising that man transforms the environment. The most imaginative contemporary architectural and engineering practices are ecologically minded, but could they do better? Does it help to think about sustainability when building human environments, or does a deference to nature limit creativity?
As the challenge of our age, (sustainability) has to represent the best thinking of our age.
Because nature has been around for a few billion years developing robust construction systems, we can learn from them.
We can use natural forms as a precedent and, of course, as a metaphor.
Sustainability is a richer agenda that just the question of low energy design.
Click to go to the next presentation in this session by Duncan Price
Is everything worth building naturally precedented?
Austin Williams (chairman) I want this session of Building Audacity, Being inspired, to look at issues of design inspiration, and whether we design to replicate natural systems and forms, or whether we attempt to overcome and better nature, if such a thing is possible. I would like to introduce the speakers, Brian Edwards, Duncan Price and Alex Cutler.
Brian Edwards (was at the conference) the head of Huddersfield School of Architecture, author of Sustainable Architecture, and editor of Green Buildings Pay. He has also written for the Architects' Journal debating with Martin Pawley on the pros and cons of sustainable development.
Brian Edwards I admire Martin's alternative point of view, and I am going to respond to some of his argument. I take the view that sustainable development is intellectually more interesting, professionally more challenging, and socially more demanding than any other agenda of our age. Not just for architecture, but for the whole of society. As the challenge of our age, it has to represent the best thinking of our age.
My main theme is being inspired by nature. It seems to me that when Martin asks "…where is the evidence that sustainability exists?" the answer is it exists in nature. Nature exploits renewable energy and local materials, nature recycles its waste, nature rejects malfunction with extinction, and nature, and this is relevant for mankind's' activities, moves towards ever-greater richness and complexity.
Nature uses a minimum of resources to create the maximum of diversity and beauty with the maximum of recycling, and the minimum of waste. You could say of man that we use the maximum of resources with the minimum of diversity and the minimum of recycling. We have got to get those two orders together, or what you might call learn from nature.
For green aesthetics there are four guiding principles we need to follow:
- Solutions grow from place
- Making nature visible
- Design with nature
- Ecological accounting informs design
First of all solutions grow from place. Each place has its own climate, its own supply of materials, its own social and environmental agenda, so we must not transplant a universal solution into a specific place. I encourage my students to think about how a building is fashioned by the dynamics and the particulars of a place.
Place, not placelessness, is the answer. Place embraces climate, both physical and social, the specific and not universal, and a sense of both the geography and history of space. With fidelity to 'place' you have correct orientation, good connection, solutions which respect vernacular traditions, and local sources of material and labour, including designers. Place gives you an architecture that is understandable, respected and ultimately robust. Place brings urban design, conservation, energy design into a coherent whole. Place creates difference according to region, custom and local resources.
Since Brundtland we have moved from a concern about energy after the oil crisis to a bigger view of environmental issues. We are beginning to face up to ecology and bio-diversity. We are also facing up to the Brundtland definition of sustainable development, which brings society and economic systems into the big picture. We need to face up to not only the evolving definition of our subject, but the way in which design and construction are necessarily altered in tension between the global scale and the local application.
Second the thing to do is to make nature visible. To allow nature to inform the design, and to bring nature to the surface rather than hide the systems of natural ventilation, or whatever. It is an approach you might call "biomimicry", and because nature has been around for a few billion years developing robust construction systems, we can learn from them. It seems to me that we use nature to inform and fashion what we do. We can use natural forms as a precedent and, of course, as a metaphor.
I try with my students to look at nature as a metaphor, to guide them through a design problem. Ideally, buildings should replicate natural systems. They should recycle their waste, generate their own energy, and grow into structures of ever-greater beauty over time. A building should be a tree and the city a rainforest. Each tree, each a different species according to function, should be colonised, all adding to visual complexity and social interaction. As in a true rainforest, greatest activity is in the canopy, each tree or building striving to occupy the light.
Our cities should be complex orders not simple ones. The forces of complexity are held in place by various systems - financial, social class, town planning, and transportation - each seeking to impose low level order upon naturally divergent systems. Only in mature and cities like Madras, Cairo, Rome, London and New York does an order approaching the richness of a forest exist. And here government action, and much professional activity, seems to seek to drive richness from the streets, facades or skyline. Only the forces of nature regulate the forest - sun, rain, microclimate, resources, prey dependency - with the result that it moves towards ever-greater diversity, interaction and ultimately beauty. Time creates complexity as species compete. The resulting habitat is often dangerous but fit together - and like coral reefs, sublimely beautiful.
Third, and following Ian McHarg with his seminal book Design with Nature of 1970, we need to understand that nature is not something we should be fighting, but should bring into the design as a creative force. Nature should not be rejected but embraced. Nature is about the beauty of flowers, birdsong, the tactile quality of natural materials, the pleasure of natural light and natural ventilation. It is also about healthy, natural cities where the air is clean and there are tranquil spaces for contemplation.
Designing with nature means exploiting all of nature's assets and resources - energy, water, land, and minerals. The systems in nature are the systems that buildings ought to replicate. If nature provides the ultimate model how can we achieve what Frank Lloyd Wright called in The Future of Architecture an "…architecture which grows like nature"? What techniques are there to inspire our action as designers in the twenty-first century? What can we do to achieve "…sweetness, simplicity, freedom, confidence and light" that in his Architecture, Mysticism and Myth of 1892 William Lethaby predicted would emerge from a marriage of nature and man?
In 1999 Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken and Hunter Lovins have written Natural Capitalism: the next industrial revolution. We can learn from this inspired message, but it runs the risk of commodifying nature by subjecting it to the rigours of Stock Market evaluation. If one measures nature with the accountants' eye, society may lose the deeper message.
We need to begin to see the building as an ecosystem. We need see the planet and the building performing the same function. A building should be a microcosm of planetary systems, so we have inputs and outputs, with the implications being scarcity, pollution and a diminished quality of life. We need to see this as a system to help evaluate projects.
As rules of thumb half of all energy, half of water, and half of raw materials used go into construction. 80% or more of our time is spent in buildings, so the resource crisis has considerable ramifications on our activities. Brick is supposedly the oldest building material that we have. I could drive my car about seven miles on the embodied energy of a brick, being the energy it takes to make and transport it to site. You can recycle your bricks, recycle your concrete blocks and recycle, to a degree, your bags of cement or concrete. To differentiate our architecture some of the principles might be to locally source heavy materials, to design obviously using materials which are much more readily recycled, and to design for disassembly.
This is the opportunity facing architects, when they specify high-tech materials. The life span of a typical building is close to our human life span of about 80 years. The life span of our cities is pretty close to the life span of a coral reef or a rainforest, a thousand years, tens of thousands of years. So when we construct a building, even if it has high embodied energy, that energy must be wisely used so materials can ultimately be recycled. We need to measure development, to get a feel of how much energy is embodied, and how much recycling is taking place, a look at the consequences of the resources we use, where they come from, and the consequences for life cycle systems involved. The impact design has on bio-diversity, on health, social equity, and the quality of our cities and buildings.
This of course makes the equation much more complex and its not so easy to deal with. I have some sympathy for those who say we can only deal with what we can readily measure, but as we move from into the full cultural agenda of sustainability we now have to wake up to these other challenges and to see them as opportunities. To see them as way of making a greater, richer, and a more exciting architecture.
So the fourth and final way that we learn from nature is to use ecological accounting to inform the design decisions we make. I do not mean just energy accounting, which the Building Research Establishment has been promoting through BREEAM or similar assessment schemes, but ecological accounting.
We need to substitute ecological design for low energy principles. Energy conservation is part of ecological design not visa versa. I am, with all due regard to Whitby Bird and Partners, trying to rescue sustainability from low energy design. It puts off a lot of good architects, and it puts off a lot of good architecture students. Sustainability is a richer agenda that just the question of low energy design.
These are early days for ecological accounting, but we ought to be giving enough time to develop this as a science so that we know what the likely ecological footprints of our buildings are going to be. We need this to make the best choices initially, to choose options for recycling, to consider flexibility, to think about the health of users and the health of the city. We have got to make sure, and I think that this is a challenge for the next generation, that we use ecological accounting to inform our designs. The aesthetics of green design will grow from:
- New 'softer' technologies
- Celebration of place
- Valuing cities not edges
- Quality not quantity
- Prioritising energy, ecology and environmental factors in design
- Celebrating public not private values
- Respective diversity over singularity
- Celebrating green complexity over modernist order
We need to start thinking in terms of ecological design and environmental wellbeing and the question of heath. I think we need to move back from a mechanistic view of sustainability so that we do not just have a high tech science solution.
"Being inspired" means looking beyond the monoculture of modern cities with its land-use segregation, its class divisions, and its dependence on farming based upon genetic modification of the world's rich inheritance of plants and animals.
"Being inspired" means learning from nature at many levels - the aesthetic, the systemic and the spiritual. These approaches will give us the architecture we need. Seen in this way nature can bring useful perspectives to bear upon one of mankind's greatest acts - the making of cities. Lean, beautiful, stretched to the limits and enriching our lives.
Nature provides a model for that and we have to remember that nature is the clue to sustainable future. Thank you.
Austin Williams Next is Duncan Price, a building physicist and associate at Whitby Bird and Partners. I haven't a clue about the issues that he will address, but I think the benefits of science maybe part of it.
Welcome / What's New? / Activity / Services / Books / Shop / Links / Contact /
This website is maintained by abley@audacity.org and all material is Copyright © 2002 Audacity Limited where not copyright of the originator.