HOW CAN ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTALISM IN ARCHITECTURE BE RETHOUGHT?
ECOLOGY
We were recently asked to talk about selling sustainability at the RIBA Small Practice conference. We described how we have been most successful at making clients “see green”, when we have been able to build up a complex discussion around, and understanding of, the idea of ‘value’ with the client. Ideally this includes: 1. Discussing the growing market value, and demand for, sustainable architecture, and the operational and everyday benefits of this approach. 2. Discuss the key ideas that lay behind any properly ecological approach, in particular introducing as ‘best practice’ ideas such as ‘Cradle to Cradle’ and ‘the Triple Bottom Line’ 3. Generally disseminating research material and ideas developed in our academic practice. 4. Giving the client reading lists and homework!
Our fundamentally ecological approach means that we need to engage with the underlying commercial business model as early as possible. For a building to be sustainable we need to work with the client, to design not simply an object, but rather design an entire lifecycle process. As well as lifecycle analysis of materials, this process also includes the costs of using the building. In this way we are able design buildings and process that continue to add value throughout their lifecycle.
We have been repeatedly asked by branding and management consultants to contribute to think tanks and workshops - typically to develop ideas for new products and services, and to develop new business models. This has included working for multinationals WHSmiths, British Petroleum, Procter and Gamble. This kind of work has helped us to realise the value that our ideas and general thought processes have, and we are keen to continue to grow this part of the practice, and to bring this broader offer to all our clients.
Our work has developed an understanding of architecture as part of a broader ecological model. Architectural objects are cultural artifacts that work as a series of systems within other systems. We start our thinking from the experiencing body of the inhabitant. This body is partly natural, but it also extends out into the world, projecting itself into, or empathising with, or feeling alienated from other fields and systems, whether social, emotional, spiritual, economic, environmental, and technological. These extensions are primarily cognitive - that is to say imagined, but are also physical in important ways. They are formed and reformed by the clothes we wear, the buildings we inhabit, the cities and regions that we live in, and the technologies that we use and interface with. The term space is often used when we want to describe both these ecologies and their inter-relationships. In total, these spaces form our cosmology - our imagined and real relationship to the universe.
We believe that the urgent new social demands being made upon architecture to re-imagine itself with regard to planetary sustainability, must be articulated and managed through a holistic ecological approach.
