Resourcing the future

Why do construction professionals choose resource efficiencies over labour productivity, rather than aspire to achieve both?

Such a supposedly sustainable approach considers human labour as the renewable resource.

This unnecessary polarisation favours savings in resource use, including land use, to the point that increasing urban density is now an obsession while construction remains a site based chore. So will our children thank us for sustainable development? Will the pursuit of sustainability turn construction into a resource efficient and capital intensive manufacturing industry, or just modernise the construction site?

There is now a groundswell of the converted and a greater public demand for sustainable buildings, but let's not forget that this follows the vanguard of experimental design.

Collaborative design working across disciplines is needed but this is not made easy by the distinctions and liabilities imposed on the separate professions and their straightjacket of procedures

New materials and their associated technologies represent an area of construction due a huge growth in the next few years.

Click to go to the next presentation in this session by Lucy Pedler

Will our children thank us for sustainable development?

Ian Abley (chairman) (Following Martin Pawley) I would like to introduce Graeme Jennings, architect director of b Consultants, the authors of the Guide to sustainable roofing systems for Redland Roofing. You will find a courtesy copy of the Redland guide in your delegate packs.

Graeme Jennings Good morning everyone. My position between the other speakers in this session may be coincidental but it is fitting. I speak today as a design practitioner trying on a daily basis to find the middle ground between the exciting changes brought about by sustainable building techniques and the agnosticism of many of the people we are designing for. Whether they are clients, users or the person in the street, many seem genuinely confused about the value of green or ecologically sensitive design.

There is some terminological difficulty with the word. A sustainable project to many, especially development managers, is simply one that can "wash its own face" financially. Sustainable agnosticism revealed in comments such as "let's wait and see", or "why take the risk?" and "why pay more?" or "it's not proven!" raise a serious issue. How do we filter out myth and fashion from our main goal of designing buildings to meet a whole range of human needs, one of which is the obligation our generation has to the natural environment and the next generation's enjoyment of it.

To my mind it's crass indeed to believe that we as practitioners can ignore such an important obligation. With the evidence that buildings presently account for about 50% of total energy used and that 90% of that is energy in use, designers must take their responsibilities seriously. These responsibilities must be weighed against other constraints, and sustainability is just one of many considerations against which we test our designs.

To me good designs are sustainable, but we can all think of sustainable buildings whose credentials are unquestionable but whose designs are unharmonious. Surely, we must also be alert to the holes in some of the sustainable reasoning. Who can have not have wondered how it is that some large commercial buildings having acres of glass are justified as equally sustainable as those ubiquitous housing association houses with depressingly small windows?

There is now a groundswell of the converted and a greater public demand for sustainable buildings, but let's not forget that this follows the vanguard of experimental design. Government policy and statute will take over as the shapers of this public demand. There are many ideas outside of the everyday world of designing and making buildings that will have profound effects on development, such as a tax on environmental "bads" rather than "goods".

Just one idea, which I read the other day, would be a greater tax on the ownership and use of resources, such as land, energy and the environment as a pollution sink. The European Union carbon tax would be just a start. Although we still have relatively little legislation on how buildings should further sustainability there is a great deal the design and construction industry could do to make buildings more benign to the environment.

Our recent work with Redland Roofing, the largest manufacturer of roofing materials in Europe and part of the world-wide LaFarge Group, emphasised to us what the industry can do for itself without waiting for regulation, or jumping through Research and Development hoops for every single building project that we undertake.

The Redland Guide, written by my colleagues at b Consultants, is to be found in your delegates' pack. So you can make up your own minds as to its value. It is essentially a prologue to the choosing of roofing components. It needs to be extended further to make it industry and specification friendly. Still, if there were more of such well respected, shorthand methods of assessing and using materials it would help make compliance commonplace rather than fashionable, and we could then return to our main activity of providing balanced buildings to satisfy future human need.

The second area that concerns us at b Consultants is that many of our professional practices and methodologies are simply inadequate to achieve well considered buildings with a sustainable pedigree. Collaborative design working across disciplines is needed but this is not made easy by the distinctions and liabilities imposed on the separate professions and their straightjacket of procedures. Despite these demands in the studio we practise interdisciplinary design between engineers, architects, scientists and often managers, artists and subcontractors. In practice this means encouraging a level playing field in the studio for everyone who needs to influence the design and in particular it means finding an early balance between technological and artistic demands.

We strongly believe that interdisciplinary working results in better, more holistic ideas and designs. Building design must at all costs be human centred. For example last year we were one of the winners in a competition entitled Living in the City. This was to create high density housing on a very large site of 2.25 hectares in the centre of London. We employed the usual and the not so usual green approach.

The construction strategy was pivotal in the design though it was virtually ignored in the exhibition and press. It suggested a self-sufficient site or at least as near to that ideal as one could get. By that was meant a site that took as few materials in as possible by road and exported next to nothing. The demolition of hundreds of tons of the redundant brick arches that the development was to sit over would provide hardcore and aggregate for a huge masonry spine wall to support the residential units. This was perhaps not particularly novel but a human centred way of having housing units on very high densities of 500 houses per hectare, almost 13 times the average London density at the moment.

Also we sometimes enter a realm of fantasy mixed with a bit of engineering. We entered a competition in New York to provide an idea for new settlements, based offshore. These ideas are about the human value of architecture, and so the third area we are fascinated with in the studio is materials and technology. New materials and their associated technologies represent an area of construction due a huge growth in the next few years.

Some will involve hitherto unknown material science, some will be the re-use or recycling of spent materials, but the majority will be clever developments or composites of existing elements. There will be unorthodox uses for simple materials, like the low-grade recycled cardboard of immense potential that we worked with in the Local Zone in the Millennium Dome, and forming the exhibition panels downstairs. It is a complex problem to make recycled cardboard like this structurally workable, to make it fire proof, humidity proof, and so on. Other times we will use more sophisticated physics to produce renewable energy, like photovoltaic cells already many times cheaper than a few years ago, or phase change technology, which are crystalline materials that take in and give out heat.

Our usual approach is to experiment with materials and technologies like these in a small way, either in our own houses or for some ambitious client, to see if it works on a small scale without putting it into mass housing first of all.

So I think my plea at the end is that new materials and technologies must be given a chance to contribute to more sustainable buildings. If we cut out all experiment now we may also cut the technological lifeline for the generations that follow.

Ian Abley I hope the itinerary today is not coincidental. Next, I am pleased to introduce Lucy Pedler who is a committee member of the Association for Environment Conscious Building, and consulting architect at Construction Resources, the first ecological building merchant in Britain.

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