Spectrum of Urgency
In November 2021 the world turned its attention towards Glasgow for the COP26 conference. For the first time, the conference featured a built environment day in its proceedings, and construction – the ‘40% sector’ – was out in force. All sorts of pledges and promises were made. A year plus on, where are we now?
“The Climate Crisis has come to the West,” Sunand Prasad declares, as we circle something between a conversation and ad hoc interview, waiters silently hovering with canopés amidst the chatter of those around us, the hubbub of the UK Green Building Council’s (UK-GBC) evening reception, construction and property small talk echoing in our ears. It’s the evening before COP26’s big construction-related Cities, Regions and Built Environment Day and the crowd are dressed smartly, sharp shoes, jackets and smiles amidst the bonhomie.
Prasad, director of a sizeable London studio, is due to address the UN COP26 conference in the morning, on its putative built environment day, and launch a big piece of UK-GBC research: the Net Zero Whole Life Carbon Roadmap. But he has been holed up all day in a hotel, trying to get through a workload related to Penoyre-Prasad Architects, the practice he co-founded many years ago, before heading to the UK-GBC’s evening bash to make some brief introductory remarks at the reception. And then he’d said he’d give some time to myself – an itinerant eco-journalist who came upon architecture and sustainability’s millennial crossroad meeting space, more by chance than design, back at the turn of the century.
Prasad was talking about the live TV and media reports from the front line of the climate apocalypse that had rolled over lock-downed Western audiences through the last eighteen months – whether fires in California, Canada, Australia, Siberia or northern Sweden, or floods in Germany, Texas, Canada (again) or here in Britain. There were storm surges and hurricanes, tornados and white outs, a general exponential increase in weather phenomena which made it feel as if climate related events were happening on a – and more than – weekly basis. Each of these were usually followed with the disclaimer that, yes, these were in line with the scientific predictions. That strange weather had become the new normal seemed to have half-spooked and half-convinced much larger numbers of people into accepting Climate Change was, after many, many years, a clear and present danger, in ways that all the environmental NGO campaigns, all the Inconvenient Truths premiers, and all the disappearing charismatic megafauna – the polar bears and Indian tigers – hadn’t accomplished over the preceding years and decades.
“There are three COP conferences going on,” Prasad continued, “there are the politician’s COP, there’s the professional sector’s COP (like the people here, who are getting on with things) and there’s the activist’s COP, like the people chaining themselves to the GoldmanSachs Glasgow office entrance, just a street away”. Prasad didn’t have much time for the politicians: they’d been found wanting when it came to facing the climate challenge, incapable, or so it seemed, at arriving at solutions which changed things, their statesmanship irrevocably not up to the task. He sounded sympathetic to the activist world, the Greta Thunbergs, and Friday for the Planet, but there was implicit reservation about whether protest was as effective as protesters liked to think. Prasad’s in-tray that day had involved correspondence on two huge hospitals that the studio has won in the Government’s once-in-a-generation hospital-build programme. It is these kinds of pragmatic steps that he and many of his ilk see as the most effective contribution – improving the lives of the many through new built fabric, while, through the last two decades, working towards lower and lower carbon, and then carbon zero, and carbon negative, buildings. Much of the architectural profession has bought into like-minded perceptions of the social and environmental value of their work, and that their work is bearing results.
The building we were standing in was a case in point. A few minutes earlier, Prasad had introduced Basil Demeroutis, owner and managing partner from a developer called ForePartnership, responsible for the CadworksTM office block. Together, they extolled the virtues of CadworksTM; ‘Scotland’s Greenest Building’, and the city’s first net zero carbon building ‘in operation’. Designed by Glasgow studio CooperCromar, the office was brand new and being shown off to the UK-GBC crowd, one of many, before its opening proper, three weeks later in early December.
I’d made my way to CadworksTM from a documentary film on the state of the north Atlantic, screened within the bowels of Glasgow Art School, weaving down to one of the lower contour lines on the city’s hillside topography, to what is Glasgow’s compact inner city financial district. On the way, huge concrete cores reached for the sky. Again and again, concrete and steel buildings under construction were a feature of my various journeys across the city. Like many others, Glasgow City Council have declared a Climate Emergency, but looking out of a bus window or criss-crossing on foot one part of the city centre to another, what was evident was how the construction sites were busily using up large volumes of fossil fuel materials. Though anecdotal, the overwhelming sense was of a regional construction industry which hadn’t yet really begun to grasp the implications of genuine steps towards drawing down their footprint. There was COP-related publicity everywhere, not least the posters vast and small, strikingly plastered primarily, though not only, in the city centre. Yet the sense of tangible change in the built fabric – admittedly through a few first-hand experiential sightings – felt thin, if not invisible, on the ground. In my gut, I felt sceptical about CadworksTM, though a voice was also questioning the extent to which personal bias was interfering with my slant on things, but I kept these thoughts to myself. More generally, I hoped to get clearer insight into how well-developed Glasgow’s plans were for the transiting of its built fabric over the rest of the decade, as it sought to rapidly reduce the city’s footprint. The concrete steeples were still on my mind as I looked around the busy foyer and headed up a couple of flights of stairs to find the loo.
In autumn sunlight, two Septembers earlier, I’d been standing outside London’s Building Centre where many of the small organisations that comprise a significant tranche of the construction industry’s outreach, communications, and lobbying infrastructure are housed. One of these is UK-GBC, and a few days earlier I’d received a mailout about the Global Climate Strike which UK-GBC and other organisations were participating in. Fast forward, and I’d been there, with others, mainly architects, milling around waiting for the protest march to Westminster to kick off. This was in that long-ago, pre-Covid era, when Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion were taking the UK’s climate agenda by storm, and newfound radical green activist energies coursed through the public imagination’s bloodstream. XR’s ‘be reasonable, demand the impossible’ climate emergency festival-type blockades were proving surprisingly successful and popular recruiting sergeants to the climate cause, and had begun to spill over into the architectural world. A group called Architects Declare had been launched in May, aiming to energise sustainability action among its profession. Debate, discussion, and in places, argument, was becoming far more heated than it had been for many years. The Building Centre’s forecourt was busy with groups of architects from a few of the ‘usual suspects’ sustainability practices present – WaughThistleton, Architype, dRMM and FCB Studios.
Prasad was there too, in amongst the UK-GBC posse. I went over to say hello and to ask a question that had been bothering me for some time. The question was this: The construction sector is generally considered to be responsible for 40% of carbon emissions. The whole sector bandies that percentage figure about all the time, casually quoting the two numbers as if set in stone and a given. It was part of the default shorthand, unconsciously employed by architects, researchers, students, planning people and writers when interviews and conversation veered into sustainability terrain. Not for nothing did some refer to construction as the 40% industry or 40% sector. Yet, echoing this looseness, wracking my memory, I’d never heard anyone raise the question of why the figure never altered. For all the ardent statements about this or that aspect of building being a transformative step in helping draw down carbon and energy footprints, no one voiced the question of whether their design, engineering and architectural efforts were, in the larger scheme of things, actually leading to any meaningful impacts, narrowing the dial. Was it really that no one considered this? Or was it merely I wasn’t hearing about it? Was this a blind spot in construction’s edifice? Not so much an elephant in the room, as some related elephant-like creature waiting for the room to be built; enabling folk to finally be able to refer to the newly arrived elephant stalking the space.
Prasad listened to my question, and over the next weeks there was a brief flurry of correspondence. He also persuaded me to join the UK-GBC, whereupon I tried to follow up and expand on the point with a couple of his UK-GBC colleagues. There were all sorts of angles: when and from where, for instance, had the 40% figure originally emerged? No one seemed to know. The thousands of projects I’d seen in the architectural media, the hundreds I’d visited over the last twenty years, amounted to what kind of dent in that four-zero figure? If one believed the way professionals talked about the 40% sector, it was a big fat nothing, zilch, or even, to bring the charismatic number into play, a round zero.
Close your eyes. Try imagining the planet’s construction’s carbon footprint. Astronomical figures pass before your eyelids. Two for starters. First, figures for buildings currently on the planet: 255 billion m2 of constructed fabric, according to the World Green Building Council, with a new Paris (or 5.5 billion m2) being added annually. Second, there’s the amount of carbon gas emissions attributed to construction: 9.95 co2 gigatonnes in 2020, a UNEP figure. That’s 9,995,000,000 or a thousand billion metric tons in lettered numbers. One percent is 9, 995,000, or nearly ten million. These are almost unreal numbers to get one’s head around, though maybe less so than a few decades ago. Now step back a moment and consider Britain’s greenhouse emissions. Beginning in 1990, the baseline measurement year came in at 800 million tonnes, a much larger figure than 2019’s 447.9 million tonnes and almost double the latest audited statistics, 405.5 million tonnes, released in February 2022. But how to connect these sorts of figures with the stats the construction industry revel in, often in the form of press releases, articles and presentations. Connecting the two ends of the spectrum was what I’d been asking Prasad, UK-GBC and anyone else who cared to listen. The 405.5 million tonnes figure can be helpful, if only because it can be reduced by an order of a hundred – 1% is 4.05 million tonnes, an almost comprehendible figure.
I turned over how to break the figures down in my head. How might four million tonnes, or a quarter of that – one million tonnes – be imagined? Why was it only single buildings, not broader built environments? What might 1% consist of? Could it be visualised?
There were single buildings that were just about relatable to the 1% figure. In London, for instance, engineers Arup had audited Richard Roger’s steel Cheesegrater (aka the Leadenhall Building) emissions at 92,000 carbon tonnes. If you built forty Cheesegraters, you’d be closing in on the four million carbon tonne mark, and still have some bang for your carbon buck left over. But really, it wasn’t single building territory. There were surely places and projects which could be picked out and picked over that represented the 1%, at least of something. London’s Nine Elms district? The entire built fabric of the capital’s urban timber citadel, the London Borough of Hackney? High Speed 2? How many hospitals, schools and other public buildings did one need to get to 1%? If you put them side by side, all in a row, how many miles would that cover? How far to the moon would that get you?
This was necessarily eccentric terrain, personal backyard messing with carbon stats. But it also related to the big carbon world of footprint analysis that has become a key element in industrial sustainability’s kit of tools, developing alongside the growth of sustainable construction culture since the early 2000s. Dominated by programming, modelling and general computational analysis, the exponential growth in assessment approaches to the energy, environmental and carbon impacts of not only buildings, but any artefact, activity or process, had gradually been becoming the norm in the years since the turn of the millennium. Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), Carbon Footprinting and other related approaches, have been accompanied by a mushrooming of certification systems. BREEAM, the earliest certification system, was followed by LEED in the US and the German DGNB system, alongside alternative approaches and certification such as the Association for Energy Conscious Builders (AECB) CarbonLiteTM system and training, Cradle to Cradle and the health oriented WELL. First launched in 1990 by the Government’s Building Research Establishment (BRE), BREEAM has been refined, developed, updated and expanded, not least internationally, through the intervening years, and trumpets that over 600,000 buildings worldwide have been certified.
Through this growth, BREEAM hasn’t wanted for critics: its tick box approach and its focus, at least until recently, has been only on operational rather than embodied energy. Indeed, BREEAM has borne a cynicism among those more engaged with sustainability, some questioning both its methodology and the meaningfulness of its carbon footprint results. Engineers AKT II’s principal, Hanif Kara, has for instance described both BREEAM and its US equivalent, LEED, as “largely lies”, before noting that they don’t really work. If critics like Kara are even part way correct, discounting those 600,000 project’s carbon benefits may have something to do with the lack of reduction in the 40% figure. This hasn’t stopped BREEAM’s internationalisation, amidst exponential growth across the field, through research, technology and policy regulation, even if the complexities of assessment have meant these remain relatively blunt instruments with ongoing uncertainty around how accurate the figures are for building’s energy and carbon etc. The latter of the two – embodied carbon – has increasingly been a fault line through the last decade. Kit, from LED lamp bulbs to highly efficient gas boilers, has driven down energy and carbon use through building’s lifetimes, while increasing embodied carbon’s proportion of a building’s total footprint, split between just over two thirds (28%) and something under one third (12%) of the 40% total. A growing awareness of concrete’s incredible footprint – 8 to 10% of all emissions – has produced the popular tag line that if it were a country, it’d be the third largest emitter. In parallel, and in partial reaction to waking up to concrete’s impact, a broadening spectrum of timber, followed by other Bio based and Land based materials, systems and building examples, have been becoming increasingly mainstream building materials. Among many younger generation architects, this shift is increasingly a given. The slogan, that timber being to the twenty-first century what concrete had been to the twentieth, is already old news. Reuse of materials and refurbishment over new build, only recently completely marginal, has found increasing favour. ‘Circular economy’ became a contender for buzz phrase of the decade.
Alongside the complexity and uncertainty making the 40% figure so tricky to confidently pin down, there are those who question the 40% figure in the first instance. An email from the respected Edward Cullinan Architects mailed a news item about net zero, quoting 50%. In Germany, Berlin’s ZRS Arkitekten were making a comparable case for half of all carbon emissions originating in construction. Others pointed to how planning ought to be included. Design, which begins from the current car-centric paradigm, rather than bike and public transport – ‘the 15-minute city’ approaches – adds another fifth, and the figure jumps to 60%. Again, oddly, this umbilical link to travel infrastructure and planning is rarely mentioned.
What felt so curious, despite the uncertainty, is how there has been next to no debate about this, whether at the general level, across the industry, or within related professions, not least architects. There was any amount of outrage, protest and activism around fossil fuels, oil and coal, and for overlapping, if different reasons, nuclear and forests. But a veil of silence has always hung over the 40% sector.
Well, almost silence. The Extinction Rebellion-inspired Insulate Britain direct action campaign, which had seen activists gluing themselves to motorways, causing long traffic jams and theatrical outrage at Westminster, through the preceding weeks to COP26, graphically made the point, and the story proceeded to explode across the media. But the wide incomprehension that it was met with again underlined just how invisible the connection between climate and building is.
At the same time, not entirely surprisingly, the sector presented itself as sustainable at every opportunity, not least COP. Indeed it needed to, given public opinion; even if talking to just about anyone involved, and committed to shifting construction’s oil super-tanker’s overall direction, brought on individual and collective sighs of resignation.
Turning the super-tanker around, drawing down those stupefyingly abstract, ginormous figures was what the likes of UK-GBC, RIBA (the UK’s main architectural organisation) and C40 (the major cities network) were promising to do over the coming years, during their COP Built Environment Day. Together on the day, these and other construction-connected organisations released several reports providing road maps to achieving net zero. Each came with its particular slant, marshalling a host of arguments to support the pathways being detailed with interlocking strategies for achieving the stated objectives. In line with the overarching net zero targets and aligned to the Committee for Climate Change’s (CCC’s) uber-pathway, Britain would need to reduce its construction footprint by nearly 80% by 2035. Each time I stopped to think about that objective for a moment, it felt stupefyingly ambitious. Thirteen years hence, 2035 was less time than when 40% was first beginning to be mentioned in the early 2000s. Through much of the first twenty years, construction’s carbon emissions worldwide had been on an upward curve, shadowed by an ever-increasing carbon footprint. Not only this, but the carbon measurement science within reports appeared to be taken as a given, without, it seemed, second thoughts. You could choose to believe the claims with your eyes wide open, or wide closed.
And then there were events out in the real world, and far from the theoretical computer modelling, reality spanners easily throwing such nicely modelled paths entirely off course. Like a pandemic. Or a war. The abstracted modelling existed in a separate universe – one where such events didn’t seem to exist. Nor, for that matter, did the official figures pull the curtain open, regarding the challenges and problems both individual buildings and larger projects often encountered between on-paper initial performance and real life, once completed and handed over. I knew, from years of visiting buildings festooned with all sorts of sustainability credentials, that their claims didn’t necessarily add up.
That same day I’d come across Prasad, soon after the Global Climate Strike march had begun to wend southwards along London’s shopping roads, I found myself walking alongside a group of young architects. They began telling me about this climate emergency architectural network they were setting up. Architects Climate Action Network or A-CAN, they were going to call it. I wasn’t sure what they understood by climate action but was intrigued and decided to find out.
Over the course of the winter, A-CAN’s first meetings were held and with word spreading quickly, the A-CAN network took off across architecture-land, accelerating exponentially from a standing position through winter 2020, just as news began to ripple out about a strange new virus seeping from a city in China called Wuhan.
If Architects Declare reflected the forward-looking, older-generation architectural establishment, A-CAN were the latest iteration of a major mindset shift that had been bubbling across the profession’s youthful underbelly for some years. The 2008–2010 economic crash years had seen the collapse of iconic ‘wow’ architecture as the cool and hip thing for students to aspire to. No longer. Making, authenticity, intimacy and a long line of smaller, more immediate ways of doing (dressed up as practice) had emerged, embodied by the ex-Cambridge graduates, Assemble, and a string of similar community-oriented studio set ups. Nearly ten years later, it was possible to claim a direct connection from Assemble to Insulate UK’s motorway-blockade activism.
Here we were, though, in Glasgow in 2021, and climate change, as Prasad had declared, had come to the West. It felt as if there was something incredibly late about the declarations of eco-intent by the corporate developer standing in front of me. I couldn’t help also feel the same about the Net Zero Whole Life Carbon Roadmap: the roadmap which provided a pathway – well, a road – to drawing down construction’s footprint to one version of zero by 2050. This was nearly thirty years away. That sense, of the sheer lateness of these actions, a persistent ache, kept on returning. All the time, another COP narrative had been hammering away at how the next eight years, to 2030, were crucial; the ones during which fundamental change needed to happen. When I looked out at the horizon, the path disappearing over the edge of the code red for humanity, 2050 seemed an awfully long way away.
As they navigated security and made their way into the main auditorium, how many of the 40,000 international delegates were aware that the host venue, the Foster & Partners designed SEC Centre (1997) – the ‘Armadillo’, was a carbon laggard of a building? While delegates knew that a Built Environment Day, dedicated to the construction sectors net zero efforts, was, for the first time, part of this COP, the ironies that both the Armadillo and Foster’s neighbouring SEC Hydro Centre (2012) had F-rated Energy Performance Certificates or EPC’s (the second lowest in an A to G grading) may have passed them by. According to the EPC’s the buildings, hosting the Green and Blue Zones, emitted respectively 1090 and 3420 carbon tonnes annually, despite the Hydro Centre having received a BREEAM ‘Very Good’ performance certificate – an illustration of the certification system’s weaknesses. For construction sustainability specialists, the figures wouldn’t have been a surprise, rather they demonstrated that, despite all the fine talk, when it came to buildings going up, their carbon footprint aspirations quite easily disappeared in economising, value engineering and the like, if, that is, there’d been any attempt to reduce the footprint in the first place.
Foster & Partners, arguably the most successful British architectural business through the last decades, were to have a busy COP burnishing their credentials at various junctures through the two weeks. On the first Wednesday, the Armadillo’s architect, Norman Foster himself, shared breakfast with US foreign minister, John Kerry, live on COP’s YouTube TV station. But it was the conference’s afterlife which was to foreground Fosters and their approach to sustainability in a less flattering light.
Given the freshness of COP26’s afterglow, the symbolism of the unfolding drama just a few weeks later felt poignant. Days before COP26 began, Architects Declare co-published with RIBA their Practice Guide 2021 document: guidance for studios who had committed to the Climate Emergency, to align and develop their practices with their Climate Emergency rhetoric. By the end of the first week of 2022, Foster & Partners, along with Zaha Hadid Architects – another big concrete-led studio – had declared that they could not support nor endorse the Built for the Environment report, and at the same time withdrew from Architecture Declare.
The argument regarding operational and embodied energy had come to a head. The report recommended shifting the emphasis away from definitions solely centred around operational carbon: the carbon and energy used once a building was ‘operational.’ Or, to put it another way, from a focus on production to one on consumption. Long advocated by the more right-on sustainability-minded wing of the profession, for anyone who knew Fosters’ hi-tech work, it was easy to see the studio’s rejection of the report as strategic: messing with embodied carbon messed with the Fosters’ business model. Acceptance would have meant a wholesale starting over, not only regarding the fossil fuel materials the studio designed and built with – concrete, steel and aluminium – but threatening to overturn the sustainability claims of many of their high-profile projects. Fosters had form on this, and the controversy went back a long way. Across sections of the profession, the studio’s sustainability profile was treated with resignation. Forty years on, though a stand-out example of hi-tech, maintaining the University of East Anglia’s breakthrough Sainsbury Centre ate up the largest portion of the university estate’s energy bill. Their 2018 Stirling Award-winning London Bloomberg HQ, described at the time as Britain’s most sustainable office building, was widely, if quietly, ridiculed for ignoring embodied energy. Both Fosters and Zaha Hadid studios had already tangled with Architects Declare. One of the original signatories when the organisation was launched in 2019, the two starchitect practices withdrew their support and membership when the network declared the need to stop working on airports. Now each was distancing itself from Architects Declare. Emissions through the lens of carbon production – the approach still in use at COP21 – remained Fosters’ emphasis. As their spokesperson blandly put it, “we believe that the fundamentals of the Paris Agreement should be adhered to at all times.” For its part, Architects Declare had been talking about how sustainability had been ‘hi-jacked’ by a business-as-usual agenda. They didn’t name names, but it wasn’t exactly difficult to guess who they might be talking about.
The Fosters controversy was a high-profile architectural and construction industry illustration of the politics of carbon measurement. A small industry had grown up around carbon footprint analysis, yet at the same time carbon literacy remained thin on the ground. This, despite buildings increasingly coming with a welter of carbon stats: Waugh Thistleton’s Dalston Lane, for instance. When the Hackney architect’s largest cross laminated timber (CLT) project was unveiled in 2017, it had been relentlessly promoted as a carbon negative building. The figures looked impressive: a net carbon footprint of -2600 CO2, the CLT sequestering 3576 carbon tonnes and 976 tonnes of embodied CO2. But ask about the broader context of those figures and, in my experience, few effectively followed through. How many days office computer usage did the figures equal? How large a woodland – and with which tree species – did the numbers represent? To what level did Dalston Lane draw down the energy or carbon footprint of the stretch of Dalston Road it stood beside? To this day, relating the figures to the real world remains absent, while knowledge of how such figures were arrived at, the assumptions on which they’re based, and myriad other questions are left at the door of specialists – and their computer programmes. Neither the spectrum of software used across the carbon measurement service-based companies, nor the statistical methodologies applied, make it far into construction’s broader carbon debate. Studios and industry alike knew that technical wizardry was there, but didn’t seem to ask about how, or if, the methodologies held up.
As it was, any cursory glance at the conference’s construction events underlined that the 40% sector was very busy in Glasgow. News, when it came, that the fossil fuel lobbyists made up the largest single group present – 503 according to Global Witness – added fuel to climate activist’s fervour. While there weren’t go-to figures on construction sector numbers, what was clear was that the 40% industry was also out in force, representation surely stretching into the hundreds. From concrete and steel giants, Holcim and ArcelorMittal, to building materials, window, and brick manufacturers, St Gobain, Velux, Ibstock and Wienerberger, to name only four, and the Nordic countries’ largest forest products company, Stora Enso, all were present. The big international developers and construction companies such as Lendlease, Robert MacAlpine and Skanska; international architect and engineering studios from A to G and back again: Arup and Aecom through to Gensler and Grimshaws, the latter showing off an Eden Project pavilion in the heart of the Blue Zone. Trade organisations and companies with a mite less heft were also present: the likes of the European Heat Pump Association, the Passivhaus Trust, Forbo – the marmoleum manufacturer, and Rockwool – the Danish insulation company. Likewise, the UK and European timber sector bodies. Timber Development UK (TDUK) the newer of the two main timber associations rolled out its Growing Our Low Carbon Future: Time for Timber Manifesto, emphasising four key foci: jobs and growth, building more zero carbon homes, increasing woodlands and forests, and improving woodland management and general knowledge through schools and education. All could be found touting their wares, launching net zero carbon initiatives, and/or talking up the brilliance of their particular products, projects or services. Those who said that the COP jamborees were in significant measure trade shows were onto something.
Like so much of the merry-go-round of events, reports, talks and presentations, the Time for Timber presentation hove close to generic industry templates and followed a familiar arc – beginning with what they were going to do, and what, in the future, could and would be achieved. But the past was another country, with scant information on the success – or otherwise – of previous campaigns. Again and again though, I came back to the thicket of questions I’d politely pummelled Prasad with outside the Building Store over two years earlier: Why was it that after fifteen plus years the 40% industry was still the 40% industry? The figure had been there all through the years. And up to very, very recently, no one raised a feather.
The presentations obscured as much as they revealed. Through the surface, a dim outline of multi-layered webs of interests, priorities and alliances were semi-visible in the murk. Where research and more substantive work was involved, science, math and computational number-crunching was whirring away to come up with contextual stats and data – the inert scaffolding that reports are built on. There were so many devils in the detail.
‘Net’ – the sidestepping of a direct action, is an artfully disingenuous devil, and as old the hills. Just as sinners bought indulgences as they clambered up stairways to heaven, so footprint excesses are exchanged for carbon credits. Applied to buildings, a 1000 m-high block of solid concrete, could, if counter-balanced with enough woodland plantations, become net zero. Construction’s entire carbon footprint could, theoretically, at least, be subsidised by carbon credits. And why not? Maybe, as so many apparently believed, the strategy would work. Maybe net zero policing would be effective, and maybe the exchange market would be a celebrated success story in years hence. But weaknesses were obvious, and in a world where workarounds are big business – as well as relatively straight-forward – their susceptibility to abuse are surely tempting. As is the perennial kicking the can down the road, rather than focusing on the real work needed: delivering buildings which are literally zero carbon, and perhaps, shock horror, reducing the actual amount of building. Would that every carbon credit balancing act lead us closer to carbon heaven.
CadworksTM was an illustration of this. Walking up to the glass doors, lateral flow test at the ready, I could see that the foyer was already busy. Looking around I registered the first of several eco-features: a green wall behind the reception desk and the row of electric scooters. Later, I’d read up on the Fore Partnerships website about its cycle-in access ramp, another city first. There were other features too: solar panels, cement-free concrete, all electric heating and cooling systems and high-tech digital infrastructure driving down the building’s digital tech energy footprint. As a result, in part, of the different eco-tech kit embedded into CadworksTM, BREEAM had awarded the building an Excellent rating, while WiredScore marked the digital infrastructure as Platinum. There was another reward these extras had brought to CadworksTM: it was Scotland’s first net zero building. But from another perspective, one was entitled to ask: how many tonnes of concrete had been used in the building, releasing how many tonnes of carbon?
Net zero was only one starting point. Across the sustainable construction landscape, there was heated debate, which in places came close to stand-offs, about what constituted genuine carbon reduction, turning on definitions, perspectives and interpretations, as much as science. The Fosters controversy was first among equals in these arguments, though here, the science already seemed indisputable. Still, how the UK-GBC’s report would navigate squaring that circle begged sizable questions, and though not yet out of the box, there were only hours to wait.
Back at the UK-GBC reception, the foyer was quite animated. People were still arriving, but I needed to get out. I sensed that Prasad wanted to return to the evening as well. He had remembered my question from the Building Store though – “Its 39% or 38% now”, he said, drawing us back to the 40% sector conversation. Once again, for a moment, the same question sat on my lips. What would 1% actually look like? How might it be represented? I didn’t feel that much closer to an answer.
I sloped off into the Glasgow night and, crossing the River Clyde, made my way to catch a bus back to the friends I was staying with. Crossing the iron-girdered South Portland suspension bridge brought one to an indistinct no-man’s land, between the city centre, perched and rising on the north bank, and the beginnings of the brownstone housing, carpeting the low-rise townscape that began soon enough to the south.
That same morning, I’d walked a similar route, if in the opposite direction, beside the Clyde towards the Landing Hub, a venue for smaller and community focused groups mixed in with some out and out commercial set ups.
The entrance staff looked bored as again I offered my NHS Covid App and was zapped through. It wasn’t busy, a school class gingerly threading from one exhibitor to the next, ticking off the stalls. A pop-up site on a plot of free land awaiting ground-breaking, with a motley bunch of exhibitors thrown together by dint of being accepted onto the plot. Close to the entrance, sitting on a raised plinth, the COP26 House was a full-scale contemporary timber frame showcase, designed and built by the Scottish outpost office of the specialist timber framers, Carpenter Oak. Laden with its various sponsors, materials and products, visitors hesitantly stepped inside to take in the IKEA-style fit-out and ask questions of its architect. Outside, a group of burly men stood comparing business. Just a short distance along, Action Oak exhibited its work, while at the far end of the hub, a rig of scaffolding comprised of hundreds of solar-powered ‘little sun’ lights, assembled by artist Robert Montgomery, which bore the legend ‘End the Oil Age, Salvage Paradise, Now We Must Live in the Grace of the Sun’. By day, the Little SunTM lights provided by the Olafur Eliasson Studio were a mite drab; after sundown though they sparkled into life and lit up the hub. The art-slogan rumbled around my cranium and I remembered how excited I’d been when, in the early 80s, I’d come upon futurist Hazel Henderson and her seemingly visionary sentiment about the coming of a solar century. How brightly that future had appeared to shine. Now we were here, twenty years into the solar century, and there still wasn’t any certainty of whether the future looked bright. Or not.
Next to the scaffolding was a marquee for talks and evening party type events. Nothing was happening though, not surprising since it was mid-morning. There had been various building and architecture events, with the youthful and energetic A-CAN having taken over the space for various talks, workshops and teach-ins during the first week. Nearer to the entrance, another temporary tent showed off a mock-up vertical farm. It seemed incomparably high tech compared to the timber make-do opposite. A group from the school party looked on in that kind of bored wonder that comes over children when doing something they’re being told to do.
Close to the river, the Landing Hub was prize land for development. The same was the case across the other side of the river shore. And, inevitably, there were serial plans for major developments, regeneration and revitalisation along many sections of the waterside. As I left the hub, the empty brownfields across the Clyde were again in front of me. I would look into the plans once COP was over, I thought: how green they were, or weren’t. For now, though, the dauntingly unappealing mid-rises and one of Glasgow’s various raised motorways hugged the city’s horizon lines.
The same autumn that the Climate Strike march had headed south from the Building Store, Glasgow Council had published its River Clyde 2050 Strategic Development Framework (SDF), setting out the regeneration principles for the development of a long stretch of the Clyde riverfront, from the city centre up to Yoker at the city’s north-western gates. ‘A vibrant and green river’ read the strapline of the plan seeking to inject new life along the riverbanks. The document was headlined with three terms from planning-speaks’ favoured shorthand: sustainability, connectivity and biodiversity. New, integrated and continuous cycle and pedestrian paths would vie with turning the river basin blue-green and new drainage strategies to reduce the city’s vulnerability to the flash flooding in the document – the very same challenge which had featured in various international broadsheet reports profiling the city. Tackling – again – the decimated post-industrial landscapes, through further cultural regeneration, alongside housing in Govan and Partick – uncovering ways to introduce both residents and smaller businesses to the SEC zone waterfront, along with creative micro-businesses ‘activating the river.’
Walk the Costa del Clyde and one might wonder what this could mean, if and when the framework comes to be realised. Beginning and ending at Zaha Hadid’s Riverside Transport Museum, a jewel in the crown of the city’s museums and close to Partick, the walk turns inaccessible beyond the museum. The shoreline continues north-west for several miles; long stretches of empty post-industrial landscape gradually blurring into overgrown brackish shoreline countryside before widening into the beginnings of an estuary, just short of Dumbarton. If you begin heading into the city centre, for a sizeable chunk of the riverside walk you’re deafened by the nearby motorway traffic. The SEC campus is a tarmacked wasteland, surrounded at one end by a gaggle of corporate hotels. The difference between the on-the-ground reality and the fine words ricochets around emptily. And looking in from outside, as far as sustainability is concerned, to a certain extent this feels like the story of much of the city. It is clear that COP has given a massive boost to the city’s ambitions, underlined by the gathering storm clouds of the climate crisis, but once again, this is after such modest sustainable steps through the last two decades. But this is the case for so many cities – in Britain and elsewhere. Again, the sense of the hour getting late hung over Glasgow and its green aspirations.
It had declared itself a Climate Emergency city in 2019 and signed up to the aim of carbon neutrality by 2030. Yet that was in the first months of the pictures which have spooked so many: the fires, and the floods. It was before COVID, before COP, and now, before the Ukrainian war. Post COP, I wondered if the grain of what was being proposed would still meet the city’s zero carbon aspirations in eight years’ time. And if the framework would hold the line if, as, and when new disasters swept in to upend best laid plans.
At the far eastern end of the city council’s SDF plan, fronting the beginning of the city centre, was Custom House Quay, joined to the river’s south side by the cast iron pedestrian bridge. That Glasgow Council had designated this central piece of river city land a ‘destination’ piece of public realm development, wasn’t a surprise. The South Portland suspension bridge enabled pedestrians to cross over to the faded grandeur of Carlton Place. This momentary oasis continues with a row of handsome Georgian terrace houses, before a few hundred yards to the east, Glasgow Sherriff Court, a suitably brutalist fortress, surveils the river, and the far side of the Gorbals Street, one of the city’s Muslim Mosques, bookends the parcel of water’s edge.
Here, Hawkins\Brown, a large London office, along with multiple partners, were midway through the consultation phase of public realm design that would, in regeneration speak, re-activate the thin strips of land each side of the Clyde between the two main road bridges. The architects had worked up a first draft of soft-focus options for the city side: restaurants, a food hall and stalls, art pop-ups and green space, alongside major engineering works, a linear park, waterside greenery and surface water and flood management, to turn the riverbanks into new green spaces, and have since taken on its real life redevelopment. The renders suggested ribbon-like gardens will turn the land into Copenhagen on Clyde, though time will tell just how true a picture of the future they represented.
Whether or not this piece of public realm reflects its consultation renders, this central stretch of riverside will still be transformed beyond recognition. Once, when Glasgow had been the workshop of the empire, the waterfront had been a hive of waterborne industrial activity, which continued into the second half of the twentieth century. But it was on the south side where the symbolism of the changes felt more charged.
This was the Gorbals – one time slum and Glasgow district of folklore and notoriety. Gorbals was a byword for poverty and yawning social problems throughout much of the twentieth century. After the second world war Glasgow City Council embraced urban high rise as a solution for their extensive post-World War II slum clearance programme, becoming enthusiastic builders through the sixties and seventies. Four Crudens-built slab blocks went up in 1971, close to the river in the Laurieston neighbourhood of the Gorbals. As elsewhere across the city, though, the arrival of vertical living exacerbated rather than helped solve the many social problems. It took fifty years for high rises to be discredited, before these in turn were dynamited in 2010.
Immediately, the far side of Carlton Place was the slowly emerging replacement scheme to the high rises. Posters, this time publicising Laurieston Living’s third phase, punctuated the roadside. In planning since almost the beginning of the millennium, the first phase, designed by Page/Park and Elder & Cannon, two respected Glasgow studios with national profiles, had been completed in 2014, and phase 2 was nearing completion. One of eight Transformational Regeneration Areas spread across the city. The low rise – up to four floors – was described as a modern interpretation of Glasgow’s historical tenement blocks, the gridded master-planning echoing earlier Victorian-era layouts. Run by the New Gorbals Housing Association and built by private developer, Urban Union, when completed all three phases amounted to nearly nine hundred new homes, around a third of which were affordable. The first phase of primarily brick housing had won various housing awards. The blocks felt tidy and semi-suburban, with front-of-house parking space for many. Although a linear garden is a promised part of phase 2, the rather scant greenery didn’t really compare to the estate agent renderings I found online afterwards. Weaving through the housing on the morning of COP26’s dedicated Built Environment Day only underlined how wanting, seen through green-tinted glasses, both master-planning and execution of the actual building programme was. Though some technical sustainability was integrated into the design – SUDS drainage, roof PV’s, natural lighting – there were next to no social green features – bike sheds, electric car clubs, shared vegetable gardens – or any ambitious building-with-nature features, strongly suggesting that sustainability was still thought of as bolt-on extras at the time of their design – underlining another suspicion; that the city was only just beginning to get to grips with what real sustainability would mean.
Edging its eastern boundary, a dedicated cycle route ran each side of Gorbals Street. A dark green cycle-info stand, with sensor tech, racked up the passing cyclists, tallying the number in orange neon. But cyclists were far and few between: the cycle route and tech a wan eco-enhancement project awaiting its time.
As Gorbals Street led south, the band of land turned dishevelled and wind-swept, an aura of a desolation row, cross-hatched with Marc Auge’s anti-vision of ‘non-places’, hung over the streets and sites. Within a few hundred yards, anonymous industrial sheds kicked in, and a short distance further, an older solitary shuttered printworks, instancing a building phenomenon dotted across many parts of the city’s ripped backsides. Supported by plinths, the M74 cut a swathe through the inner cityscape, the row of concrete stilts receding into the distance, while vehicles, invisible, roared above.
Again, my mulled over yet again how incredibly late the moves to turn the city’s built fabric green seemed. Though perhaps I was being overly pessimistic.
If you delved beyond the headlines, it was possible to uncover green projects, some relatively recent, others which had been in train through the years and months before any inkling that a countdown to the Glasgow landing of COP was coming. In February, Glasgow’s first Liveable Neighbourhoods had been announced, with two pilot Liveable Neighbourhoods schemes and twenty-eight identified potential sites across the city. Look, and a mosaic of projects all over the city were there to be uncovered: a patchwork of instances of sustainable moves being made. The Strathclyde University-led climate resilient zone, within its Glasgow City Innovation District, was one; a pilot tower block project – the Carron estate, with substantial fuel poverty issues, that had introduced a new communal heating system reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption by two thirds – another. There was a pedestrianisation project, the Avenues, emphasising increased pavement space, improved lighting, more trees and, wait for it, free Wi Fi, and a major cycle-focused programme of 270 miles of new cycle lanes and footpaths criss-crossing the city to build up an active travel network. And in the razed, disappeared Gorbals, there were also signs of projects that could stitch the south side’s boho neighbourhoods to Lauriston and the ribbon-gardened riverbanks.
Anordain, a high-end artisan watchmaking company, had submitted plans for a watchmaker’s centre, where visitors could goggle at the watchmaking process up close. The plans included design by Edinburgh architects, Reich & Hall, of a single floor, timber frame building. Commenting to the reGlasgow site, one of Anordain team noted that the entire workforce were already green, either cycling or traveling to the current workshop by public transport. It wasn’t too difficult to imagine the project finding a home.
The next morning, I took another bus, this time out to Pollok Park. If Scotland’s second city has been marked by poverty and deprivation, Glasgow is also known for a relatively large number of parks, gardens and other urban green spaces. My COP visit had come on the back of another, just two months earlier. I’d stayed with friends and one day we’d gone to Pollok Park. As we left, we passed the Burrell Collection building, holding one of Glasgow’s sons, William Burrell’s art collection. The building had been undergoing a major, and somewhat controversial, revamp and expansion by London architects, John McAslan + Partners – see Burrell Collection Unstructured feature
But it wasn’t the new cultural showpiece that caught my eye. Rather, a funky looking, partially shingle-clad bus shelter drew my attention. Completely unrecognised and ignored, bus shelters are part of sustainable transport’s solution. If the infrastructure around travel is made more appealing, including comfort and convenience, such as making bus stops pleasant places to wait – and, while you’re at it, improving bus vehicle suspension and introducing cycle provision on trains – some small indentation into car culture’s default dominance might, just possibly, occur.
The autumn day was sunny and the park was turning sylvan brown; I could feel myself catching breath after the frenetic city-centre, crosstown journeys, trying to make one meeting, event or building tour or another. Those would continue soon enough, but at that moment I could feel a tension layer lifting away, my body system slowing as the sun warmed my cheek.
The bus stop was there, to the side of the park’s exit road, presumably a minor support act to the Burrell Collection being readied for its March launch across the field. Oddly singular – there weren’t any others I could see – with more steel in its structure than I’d remembered, its external walls were still covered by shingles. I took it in, walked around it, took several album’s worth of photos, and wondered how the whole thing could have been timber, before setting off back down towards the entrance again, the thrum of traffic gradually growing louder.
Far away, COP26 was heading towards its zero-point final day denouement. The penultimate Cities, Regions and Built Environment full day had finally arrived, Sunand Prasad had already chaired the Net Zero Whole Life Roadmap launch, and amidst a wave of carefully choreographed announcements, the UK-GBC’s moment came and went. Sometime before its 10 a.m. start, the broader built environment related pledges, commitments and hope heavy stats were uploaded onto a plethora of green construction related websites. Dressed-to-impress numbers were the headline. $1.2 trillion worth of real estate assets were being managed by the UN backed Race to Zero programme. Forty-four new businesses, worth $85 billion annual turnover, had signed up to the Net Zero Building Commitment. In all, a total of 156 signatories consisted of 122 businesses and organisations, twenty-eight cities and six states and regions. The businesses and organisations were now signatories. The influential C40 Cities Group had corralled over a thousand cities and local governments to join the Race to Zero), representing 722 million people, and could reduce global emissions by 1.4 gigatons by 2030. The parallel, sister Race to Resilience campaign added to the story: seventy-five regions and thirty-three cities, representing 300 million people, had signed up to its programme. Like Race to Zero, a tranche of other initiatives went live, including a climate resilience metrics framework, an Infrastructure Pathways guide and a Global Resilience index, for insurers, developers and finance. In all, twenty-six new initiatives were launched. This was shock-and-awe by numbers; the construction arm of industrial sustainability was having its own day in the sun.
By then, the UK-GBC’s Net Zero Roadmap report was public. Like so many of the reports, research and programmes released during COP, the roadmap must have consumed many, many research hours. But there wasn’t any legal, policy or regulatory ramifications: no changes would directly flow from its publication. An influencer, the report was about building arguments for policy shifts. One lead recommendation provided yet another signal that the path carved out to reach the 2050 net zero goal required embodied carbon emissions becoming legally binding, focusing on their consumption rather than production. Another brick in the aluminium wall for the likes of Fosters and Zaha Hadid.
The report also tackled providing an overview of built environment carbon emissions today, and the glide path of reductions needed for tomorrow, though also yesterday – or yesteryear. So, there it was, at last. A breakdown of the 40% sector. When I scanned it though, it was completely different to my imaginings. Sub-divided into four groupings – new build, domestic retrofit, non-domestic retrofit, and infrastructure – these trajectories to zero were mapped, graphed and generally sliced and diced against key targets by key dates – all gas boiler sales, for instance, phased out by 2030. Embodied carbon wasn’t the only area requiring regulation. All buildings would increasingly require various transparent documentation, like energy performance certificates, to demonstrate that they’d done what was stated on the box. An elaborate scaffolding of sticks and carrots, encouraging and rewarding good and penalising bad behaviours, threaded through the document. Arguably, the most ambitious legal ask was the call, yet again, for a complete overhaul and retrofitting of the insulation, heat and lighting of housing. ‘It’s the existing building stock, stupid’ had been a cry already in the noughties, but as nothing effective has been delivered in the interim, here it was again: Insulate UK, in more respectable clothes.
The solutions were tech-centric, while the language, as ever, desiccated technocrat-speak, pulling the story, or so it seemed, towards the best mousetrap yet. Part impressed, part dispirited by the pliant lack of poetry in the bureaucrat’s mindset, scanning one section after another, the obvious question was: What next? What will it bring on? How much influence will it have? What quantum of green-sky dreaming is needed, to be confident that a meaningful threshold might actually be reached?
The wondering stayed with me. What would the UK-GBC report mean in itself and in the wider COP26 context? How long before it’d be considered old and stale, and the focus turned to the next project and the next programme? All through the twenty plus years of writing about sustainable building, I’d watched projects and programmes being launched. The template of fanfare, of mighty and impressive-sounding claims, declarations of promises to deliver, defined the shape and paradigm. Here, the scale was so much larger: part of an international effort, in lockstep integration with the broader net zero carbon journey. But the body language was pretty much the same thing.
My mind drifted to the patterns informing this world. I’d watched and seen and heard about countless failures – where buildings, technologies and systems hadn’t performed in anticipated ways. Studios went quiet about projects, technologies went wrong, and material footprints stopped stacking up if one dug deeper. There was acknowledgment in places, but often people moved onto the next amazing challenge, ignoring or forgetting the past inconveniences. It felt that there were big psychological blind spots across the professional world – a world that for the most part didn’t do psychology. I didn’t feel I’d grown cynical exactly, but much more questioning. What had become of all those projects? What were their influence over the years’? Had they made a significant impact? Had they made any?
Industrial sustainability was hardly limited to the built environment – it was the shining centrepiece of so many of the announcements being made through COP26. The day before had been the Transport Day. There was, again, the usual pomp, hype and excited fireworks around the tranche of electric vehicle-related announcements. But also, an undertow of anxiety threaded through the electrification of everything: how to meet the limited availability of rare metals needed not only for electric vehicles engines, but wind and PV’s (the stalwarts of the energy transition) as well as iPhones and comparable computer tech.
Tech, so its hundreds of thousands of advocates believed, would fix the climate and carbon problem. Yet, tech solutions also closed off other pathways and parameters for navigating the narrowing time-window and drawing down carbon and temperature. By financialising climate change, governments, international bodies and corporate environmentalism had closed off wider-lensed, if less profitable, pathways: a focus on reducing consumption, for instance, with less emphasis on productivity and more on fulfilment – the turning of Gross Domestic Productivity, as in Nepal, into Gross Domestic Happiness. Steady state economic thinking and the degrowth agenda were alien and anathema to industrial sustainability.
The possibilities of recalibrating and slowing cultural tempos and society, and of, bluntly, doing less, were beyond COP’s pale. So was staunching, rather than encouraging, the flow of rural populations to cities – always presumed in climate futures modelling – as were the support of local systems and living lightly. All these felt as nothing, when set against the greening of steel, direct carbon capture, or the arrival of bridge energies like liquid natural gas or green hydrogen.
Though the likes of the C40 cities network embraced the bike, a vision of car-free cultures often felt like a vision too far. Cities with electric vehicles were the assumed future, rather than free shared transit- and bicycle-dominant urban cultures. Gardens, and the gradual emergence of shared productive gardens which took up land, were set against the norms of housing development. But scant mention of these broader parameters, or discussion of such possible futures (not so much as the solution but merely being brought to the table), were making it into COP26’s corporate conversation. Rather the route map to the zero-carbon future was settled, it was only a matter of implementation.
Corporate environmentalism could only go so far. But how far? And was it enough? The default was generally to the technical rather than the human focused, the commercial rather than community, and to cultures of acceleration rather than the slowing of societies. Was this really the road? I felt it closed off other avenues to possible futures. There was a relatively benign technocratic vision, but all the clean tech, all the smart innovation, and all the new products and industries might also lead towards a less sunny, dark even, future. Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale came to mind.
More likely, this future was merely bland and missing in human dimensionality – if the worser of the forecasts are avoided. And it wasn’t so much tech’s omnipresence, rather technocracy’s tendency to default to building the better mousetrap. Everything was a machine, be it a more biological, moist machine. And if the machine could be well enough fine-tuned, whether through new bio-receptive concrete, passivhaus thermal bridging or super strong eco-composites, it would deliver the solution.
There was a reality chasm out there. The industrial revolution, and the subsequent technical trajectory, had brought many, many benefits, though also, and this was generally passed by, untold problems, often kicking in the need for further rounds of solutions to these problems. Nuclear power, for instance. Or the whole carbon credits gravy train. Perhaps the paradigmatic example was Direct Carbon Capture (DCC). You caused a problem, but instead of fixing the problem, another technology has been developed to mitigate things, while the original problem wasn’t addressed, let alone fixed. It felt like a process in a runaway state, unstoppable, and like a psychological state, an addiction, ever postponing a day of reckoning. Often, where possible, the can was kicked down the road. The process philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, had once spoken of how humanity could neither live with nor without technology. Implicit in Whitehead’s words, was a psychological domain, related, again to addictive properties. Across industrial sustainability there was nothing of this. There never is. That the technological world seemed incapable of entering this psychological terrain felt somehow telling. Indeed, this denial expressed itself, at times, in strange ways. At times, it felt strangely like war: industrial sustainability against the environment.
What was it about, that reality divide? And what, for that matter, did I know? An old, much smaller conference floated into the memory palace. On the last day of Desire Lines, an environmental arts conference held in Dartington, Devon, back in 2005, the final session was in a philosophical and somewhat sombre mood. One of the joint chairs asked the audience how many thought that the environmental crisis and climate change was too far gone to be stopped. To my surprise, a significant majority of the audience raised their arms. But that was then.
If you bought the 2050 net zero journey, whether as a UK-GBC researcher, an EV exec or sub-Saharan solar farmer, a leap of faith was required that the stages on the journey were going to work out. The carbon reduction targets would pan out, arrive on schedule and the planet’s people would move on to the next goal needing reaching. Your confidence meant neither needing a plan B, nor the precautionary principle as back-up insurance.
It felt as if there were some for whom this confidence about the pace of the carbon drawdown was laced with complacency. And a far too relaxed attitude to what was coming the planet’s people’s way. What if things didn’t land quite the way intended? A pandemic for instance, or, perish the thought, a major war? If the climate emergency was real, was the 80% – the four fifths – reduction in emissions that the UK Government was legally bound to by 2030, really enough of a response? The Greta Thunberg blah, blah, blah line might sound crude and extreme, but it touched unspoken nerves. It was a dividing line between the UK-GBC glide paths, and the more edgy passion of A-CAN’s networks. Where, along the reality divide, I wondered, is the line?
I was still stuck on the 40% stunner. I was stuck on how nearly every architect I’d come across accepted the foundational premise of the construction industry: of its existence. It had been 40% in 2005. Now, as the UK-GBC report stated, it had been sliced a notch down, to 39 or 38%. That was down 1–2% in fifteen years. It wasn’t exactly confidence building that the same sector was going to draw down its footprint at the pace being outlined, to 78% below 1990 levels by 2035, and fully net zero by 2050. Or maybe there was something else going on – the sector knows it won’t and can’t meet these targets, but admission appears also nigh on impossible. There were other pathways, of course. One, from a Danish architect colleague, Søren Nielsen from Copenhagen’s Vand Kunsten, hit the nail on the head. A moratorium. Stop building completely. Full stop. Now that was radical.
I walked along a path winding through trees, away from the Burrell Collection bus shelter, out of the park and back to the dual carriageway main road and to another, this time, everyday bus stop. Before long a bus came into view. Did I think about this on the bus back into town? In truth, no. A UN interpreter had been waiting at the stop and we fell briefly into conversation – how friendly Glaswegian’s were, how much time she was getting between shifts to explore the city, before returning to New York. Soon enough the bus was near to the city centre, and after getting off I once again made my way across the Clyde and back towards the Landing Hub.
There, at the hub’s far end was an events marquee. Tonight was the last evening to be hosted by A-CAN. Joe Giddings, one of A-CAN’s founders, walked up and said hello. Giddings was part of this recent generation, perhaps not yet quite as used to, nor so invested in, the rewards of professional success and ambition – who’d looked for different paths, turning their architectural careers and journeys towards something different, and more radical than their elders. A few architects involved in the theatrical XR direct action would be charged by the authorities and had, or were serving, prison sentences. Others were becoming the new role models, mentors, and movers and shakers of this splintering within the profession. Ambition, competition and success though, was also clearly part of the landscape. A quick scan of the architectural press revealed the changes in the air, too. Sustainability-inflected campaigns, such as the Architectural Journal’s Retrofit focus, hadn’t been on the magazines radar just a few years back. Now the AJ was passionate in its retrofitting convictions. Culturally too, architects had been morphing from organising under accountant- or lawyer-like names to kissing cousins of underground music bands. Well almost. From Bark Psychosis to Studio Bark wasn’t quite the stretch that Pink Floyd to FeildenCleggBradley might once have been. Still, the youthful names continued to sound sensible: Arboreal Architects is no God Speed You! Black Emperor, even if the woody trading title reflected how the ground was shifting.
Yet, like their elders, the critiques were from inside architecture. Technological critiques, be it BIM, augmented reality, or robotics, didn’t extend beyond the architectural pale. I’d been waiting years for some Young Turk to talk up how the endgame of robotics married to machine learning could well see the total eclipse of the professional classes, bringing on the death of the architect. But the day never seemed to come. Nor was there any discussion around another of my hobbyhorses: degrowth, and steady state economics. A direct challenge to the regime of building as usual, green or otherwise – degrowth hasn’t found a footing in architecture, let alone construction. I’ve yet to come across an architect who introduced degrowth into a conversation, let alone one who’d developed any sustained degrowth strategies, even if it occasionally turned up. Enough, brought a degrowth theme to the 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennale, curated by another of these young UK upstart practices, Interrobang. But afterwards, Interrobang didn’t pursue projects, programmes or practice that sought to develop a degrowth agenda. Instead, the moves they made rather suggested the Triennale was a stepping-stone for Interrobang’s members career ambitions. (Indeed in the intervening months since this piece was finished, and in a move rich in irony given this essay’s partial UK-GBC focus, one of Interrobang’s erstwhile members, Maria, now Smith Mordak, vaulted out of Webb Yates Engineers (within which Interrobang once nestled) into their new CEO role at UK-GBC.) Was that a degrowth strategy? Or, take an entirely possible discussion of the simple principle of a reduction in building. This invariably stalls at the first hurdle: jobs. Asking the question of what one tenth, or one fifth less building in Britain would do to carbon footprint dynamics is, professionally, though also imaginatively, unrealistic. In place the power structures and building schedules of industrial sustainability grind on.
I couldn’t help wonder why. A-CAN had caught the imagination of the current generation, a generation which was determined to play its part in the professional world. Still, what was clear was that the gradualist and establishment path embodied by the UK-GBC and much of the architectural establishment wasn’t doing it for some of those more awake in this generation, not least the A-CAN networks. A thirty-year glide path to a net zero carbon construction sector seemed hopelessly relaxed, as if, well, there wasn’t actually an emergency. On the spectrum of urgency, the Race to Zero was more dawdle than race.
This was the key divide: the gradualists and the immediates. The future shall likely play out on the continuum between such scenarios, even though it feels unlikely that by the end of this decade there shall be a clear sense of what the latter half of the century will be like. As it is, UK-GBC’s road to zero was but an indication of the 40% sector arriving at the happy ending of net zero. How much has happened in the months since COP26 to push the road map closer to governmental regulation? Conflict is said to account for 6% of carbon emissions, though is not included in UNEP net zero considerations. John Kerry recently said that the Ukraine war hadn’t stopped the Glasgow agreement. But nine months on (when this was piece was completed), how much else has happened that means the pathway will need to be re-worked? To what extent is the industry seriously changing, and leaning in towards more serious reduction targets? A group of built environment carbon specialists have developed Part Z, a proposal to amend building regulations to make whole life embodied carbon targets and limits mandatory. It received some parliamentary support and there is some industry backing, but to date hasn’t advanced much further. And to what extent, if at all, did the sector reduce its footprint in the first year since COP, and since the UK-GBC’s report launch. All this is somewhat up in the air at present, not least due to the spiralling distraction of the Ukrainian conflict. Meanwhile, the planning consents keep coming and the buildings get bigger, higher, taller.
Giddings and I chatted for a while before he introduced me to another young A-CANner, Kerry Watton, who had taken on getting A-CAN Northern Ireland going. The marquee was beginning to fill up, young architectural and building related folk arriving for A-CAN’s last session during their COP26 residency. Scott McAulay, another viral wonder blazing into view across the architectural firmament, with his set up Anthropocene Architecture School as the final act. As McAulay, a small, elfin DJ figure, was getting prepared on the stage, Watton and a just-graduated young architect, keen to get involved in A-CAN, began talking in front of me. The conversation turned to architects’ fixation on style and aesthetics; how buildings look. “It took me a long time,” Watton was saying, “but I finally realised it doesn’t matter what a building looks like.” The young newcomer beamed in agreement, recalling how dissatisfied she’d been during her undergraduate course, as Macauley called the marquee crowd to order.
I didn’t have much idea of what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t on show. The elfin DJ ran through a set of building examples and pointed up mismatches between building’s performance and what was required to bring them into line. We were split into pairs to work on specific questions, like what I felt about COP26, about sustainability, or about the climate emergency. I felt old, trying to formulate a sentence to encompass the emotional ride of the last days, to the beaming young architect, freshly out of school, radiating enthusiasm and hopes and dreams at what she’d do with her young architectural life. As we compared notes about the experience, it began dawning on me that I was running out of time there and then. I was meant to be at an evening meeting before long and would need to head off for the next crosstown sprint. A brief time later, after a few further words with Giddings, where again we knocked about the reality difference between UK-GBC and A-CAN’s take on the meaning of emergency, I slipped out of the marquee, McAulay’s Scottish brogue rippling over the enthused young audience. It was already dark and the Little SunTM installation looked magnificent, shining its hundred micro-star lights out across the empty Landing Hub plot.
Yes, this long piece is a mite dated, with the world beginning to turn towards Dubai and COP28, but I felt it was still worth featuring, for reasons other than aiming for up-to-the-minute-ness and in the absolute present moment. Write if you disagree (and if you agree) ol