News 2009
Architects get set for Copenhagen
Date posted: 06/11/09
Understanding the amount of carbon that is tied up in buildings, exploring new materials and discouraging home ownership are three ways that architects can help ameliorate climate change, according to speakers in the last session of WAF, entitled ´Road to Copenhagen.´
Critic Charles Jencks chaired the session elegantly, with just a hint of weariness as he recalled that architects have been talking about sustainability, albeit with a different title, since before many of the delegates to the conference were born. ´Architects are utopian professionals,´ he said. ´The world is starting to catch up.´
Kim Nielsen, founder of Copenhagen-based 3XN, seemed to believe that the main thing that the world should learn from the forthcoming talks in Copenhagen, is to make the world more like Copenhagen. He showed images of regeneration of public space, of café culture and of swimmers in cleaned up docks, and cited figures for high levels of cycling, saying that other cities had to imitate and exceed these achievements. He also discussed the research department that his practice has set up, gathering information that it will apply to forthcoming buildings on phase-change materials that can reduce energy consumption and on surfaces to glass that can clean up pollution.
Simon Sturgis, of London-based architect Sturgis Associates, described a calculator that his practice has devised that makes it possible to calculate not only the carbon consumption of the building in use, but also the embodied carbon in the components of the building, depreciated across the lifetime of each. ´It is important for us to know how much carbon our buildings use and how much we build in,´ he said. As a result of this metric, the practice has saved elements of existing structure on several building projects.
Philip Follent, Queensland Government Architect, produced frightening statistics about just how many of the residents of his state would find their homes under water by the end of the century. He blamed our greed for space and subsequent carbon profligacy on the prevailing mania, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries, for home ownership. ´Copenhagen should pressure countries to review the taxation situation on private home ownership.´ Now there´s a truly radical thought.
