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?
Ian Abley The benefits of labour saving do not seem to be a factor in environmentalism.
Brian Edwards The stress on resources is not so much about a global warming problem but a consequent global health problem.
Lucy Pedler If you take the fatalistic view, we will go on a path to destruction.
Graeme Jennings We have a clutter of clone buildings which have add on turbines and wind sails, and goodness knows what else.
Martin Pawley When environmentalists talk about creating jobs, they imagine that instead of using bulldozers and high energy consuming equipment, you should use men with shovels. The response to that idea of course is why not use ten times as many men with teaspoons?
Lucy Pedler We are not saving the environment. We are saving ourselves.
Click to go to keynote speech in the next session by Brian Edwards
Will our children thank us for sustainable development?
Ian Abley (chairman) (Following Lucy Pedler) The argument for low embodied energy ecological design is leading to an aesthetic discussion to be pursued with Brian Edwards, Duncan Price and Alex Cutler in the next session, Being inspired. In this discussion I want to take a step back, and work through something I find personally difficult to deal with in my job as a site architect.
Construction professionals have different lists of good or bad forms of development, technology and materials. Sometimes these lists are internally contradictory.
For Graham, development into the countryside seems bad, if I heard you correctly you were arguing in favour of urban density, and yet you suggest forming new settlement with the New York archipelago project. Martin is obviously against the Urban Task Force approach of high density, as a nineteenth century vision of the city. Britain is one of the most urbanised countries in the world yet is only 12% developed, so there is a question of whether land use is good or bad.
Similarly the discussion of production concentrates on whether construction technology and materials have high or low embodied energy. For Lucy a low embodied energy and low energy in use approach is the aim, whilst for Graham it is energy in use that is paramount, allowing advanced technology. Martin recognises the logic of upgrading a stock of inefficient existing buildings. Yet why is it good to save materials and achieve energy efficiency, when people have to work laboriously on a building site? The benefits of labour saving do not seem to be a factor in environmentalism. Can I open up to questions on these contradictions?
Brian Edwards May I ask the panel whether they think that the over riding issue in the next century is energy or questions of health, as Lucy brought in the health dimension. It seems to me that the stress on resources is not so much about a global warming problem but a consequent global health problem. Is sustainability a health issue or is it the current agenda of energy that matters?
Graeme Jennings Our preoccupation is energy now because we do look as if we are going to have problems with climate change. If nothing else perhaps we ought to be building a lot of buildings on legs as the sea level rises in the south east of England for example. If they are going to last for 25 years most of the buildings we are putting up might well be under water. This is my point about environmental agnosticism. It is really difficult to judge. I agree there are health hazards, but there are all kinds of health hazards that need to be resolved. People are extremely sensitive to any kind of health scare. Whereas providing you have a comfortable life style the energy issue does not affect you personally.
Brian Edwards I was asking about not just human health but global health. Global warming is the subset of a global lack of ecological wellbeing. I was trying to broaden the discussion.
Lucy Pedler I give a presentation to architects called "Healthy Buildings", as health on three levels. There is the health of the planet, the health of construction workers and the health of the building occupants. It is a different way of saying the same thing, putting health as a priority instead of the environment. We have visited all the manufacturers of the products offered at Construction Resources, are very careful to drop any dubious products, and consider very strongly the health of the people who are using them.
Ian Abley Martin pointed out that most people would be living in megacities within our lifetime. Those people will be benefiting from developments in cleaner technology that our own development has achieved. Do people think that human health is a consequence of a level of development, or can you achieve health from any developmental position?
Lucy Pedler I was raising three health concerns and not taking one against the other. Health is a question of where that energy comes from. Had we got solar power further advanced we could have had the same level of health care without burning very limited resources. Energy makes good health care, but you do not have to get it from fossil fuels.
Graeme Jennings Our history is littered with instances where humans have taken from the planet, and we will continue to do so. I remember when the government closed mines. The issue for coal miners was not working in dirty, cramped conditions and getting lung disease. The government was taking away their livelihood and their communities. The social issues are very complicated and there are going to be some hard choices. If we had not had a war in Iraq, we would have made massively less environmental damage than any of us in this room will ever cause.
Lucy Pedler If you take the fatalistic view, we will go on a path to destruction. That may be what some people would rather do, to enjoy the lifestyle that they have got now and sod the future. I think that if we want to see the human race continue in some form or other, then we have to consider what we are doing. We are responsible for the way the environment is now. It is not that the environment will destroy us, but the results of what we do may destroy us.
Duncan Price I would like to take the health issue in conjunction with whether we should be building with either low or high technology. Should we emphasise low-tech, labour intensive building? If so how do you reconcile that approach against the fact that in Africa something like 24 million people are predicted to die of Aids. You could say that perhaps there are other ways we should be using resources other than promoting rammed earth building techniques. Where do the panellists think we should be directing resources?
Graeme Jennings As I said, there are some hard choices. If you are involved in theory, on the writing side, those choices probably do not raise themselves as often as when you have to make day to day decisions for people who use buildings. It does help to have a clear analysis of what people need, and to have a balanced view of those needs. To design the best solution for each building, and not to be driven by a fashionable view that is considered sustainable, particularly when our design industry is dominated at the moment by imagery. We have a clutter of clone buildings which have add on turbines and wind sails, and goodness knows what else. It is difficult to judge whether these technologies are working and taking us anywhere.
Martin Pawley I agree with that. Can I just make a couple more points about how resources relate to a quality of life? When environmentalists talk about creating jobs, they imagine that instead of using bulldozers and high energy consuming equipment, you should use men with shovels. The response to that idea of course is why not use ten times as many men with teaspoons? Life becomes an adversity. The other end of the spectrum is when you produce something utterly useless like the European Fighter because it involves thousands of jobs. There is a descent into abstraction at the high-tech end and a descent into adversity at the low-tech end. There has to be the recognition at some point that the purpose and meaning of life is not to have a job, or that somehow you should be able to live, to enjoy art and culture.
Caspar Hewett We could have an improved life and environment for future generations. The idea of progress is missing. Surely the whole purpose of development was always to improve the human condition. The substitute discussion about a quality of life is difficult because environmentalists define it in non-material terms. When we use terms and phrases like 'quality of life', we have to be clear of what we are actually talking about.
Vicky Richardson Martin said the consequence of sustainability is likely to be greater legislation and restrictions on what designers can do. It seems to me that one of the most dynamic strands of contemporary architecture is what has been called "eco-tech", where architects are interested in the technologies of doing more with fewer resources. Graeme talked about experiments with materials. So is sustainability necessarily a limit? Couldn't it almost be an inspiration?
Graeme Jennings Right. We have a constant flood of things we would like to examine and experiment with, and some of them are low-tech materials that have been around but we use them in a different way. I was trying to make the distinction between material technologies like cardboard which may have potential problems, and other mainstream materials which could be dismissed immediately as being scientifically risky. Some experiments may well become the materials and technology of the future, like these phase change materials depending on sophisticated physics and chemistry to get them right.
Ian Abley This discussion is leading into the second session on design inspiration, so we can pick up these things again, but if the panel could sum-up in their order of speaking please.
Martin Pawley The talk about saving the environment deeply fascinates me. There are video games where the reward is saving the galaxy. I think talk about sustainability is really imaginary. We do not control the environment, and it will be glad of our help in the same way that the computer game is glad when we save the galaxy. Whether its through health or energy and so on, we can express sustainability in lots of different ways, and you can scare people half to death with the statistics that you produce. Whether our actions really amount to more than saving the galaxy in our minds I don't know.
Graeme Jennings Trying to distinguish between moral and technical issues is a useful approach because morals and technicalities are mixed up together. Architecturally speaking, of course, it is really quite impossible to distinguish, because the architect's training is to mix those considerations together. I would enjoy spending the week talking about morality. You have to find evidence before you begin to make judgements on technical issues. With sustainability you can begin to build up the technical evidence to avoid those things that are going to prove detrimental to future generations.
Lucy Pedler I would just like to say that I do not see the environment and humans and separate. We are not saving the environment. We are saving ourselves. It is a selfish point of view if you like, but we are doing it because we want to survive as a species. We are part of the environment, but human beings have done great damage to the environment. We need to rectify that damage if we want to continue.
Ian Abley Well I want to continue! It is now time for refreshments before the next session. Being inspired is to be chaired by Austin Williams, Technical and Practice Editor for the Architects' Journal.
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