Revolution? Architecture and the Anthropocene

Introduction

Architects are self-described problem solvers, and yet over the past 50 years there has been little profession-wide recognition of their part in the environmental problem, let alone any coherent response to it. Why has there been such indifference, even active resistance, to leaving behind business as usual? This question may sound out of date, as recently there has been a cascade of campaigns, initiatives, pledges and targets from a much wider swathe of architects and their institutional bodies demanding change. Architecture students too are much more vocal in much greater numbers about their lack of preparedness to help reset a damaged and damaging built environment. Like the melting ice caps, the big freeze in architecture’s attitude to the environmental seems to have finally reached a tipping point towards much greater activism. If so, what took us so long, and what is there to stop us slipping back into passivity once again?

The four essays in this book are an attempt to answer these questions, and to understand why architecture has been consistently behind the environmental curve over the past 50 years. Some of the answers, at least, lie within the culture of architecture itself, or to be more precise, within the culture of western architecture from the start of the 20th century. This culture, expressed most vividly in the Modern Movement, has reverberated through architectural practice and education for over a century, and has made it uniquely difficult for architecture to allow itself either to recognise its place in what is now an environmental crisis, or to do enough about it. And this is true even though the Modern Movement always had within it its inverse, a nature-centric practice. It was not the dominant version of modernism during the 20th century, however, and until very recently, looked like it would continue to be marginalised. But globally, events have overtaken us, and those who don’t mind a sixth Great Extinction of species do mind when one of those species might be our own.

This is the fourth and final book in a series I’ve written over the last two decades on the relationship of architecture to the natural environment, beginning with Taking Shape: a New Contract between Architecture and Nature in 2000, followed by Digitalia: Architecture and the Environmental, the Digital and the Avant-Garde in 2008, and Ecological Urbanism: the Nature of the City in 2015. The four essays in Revolution? examine, first, the Modern Movement’s astonishing success in establishing its legacy in contemporary architectural culture; second, the inability of the environmental movement to ignite and transform architecture in the same way; third, the importance of shifting architecture back to a materially-based view of itself to increase its effectiveness; and finally the need for architectural education to urgently reconsider how and what it teaches in the volatile 21st century.

This is in no way to diminish the extraordinary contribution that a minority in architectural practice and education have made to the development of environmental design and environmental thinking over the past 50 years. Without them, we would be incapable of the overdue redirection we might now be seeing. In each essay, therefore, are examples of innovative and determined people pursuing other ways of practising architecture and other ways of training architects for this critical century. They are pulling the model of a nature-centric practice out of the margins and into the centre, which this time must hold, or architecture may find itself nothing but a quaint throwback, with engineering and the sciences looked to for solving problems too pressing for an unprepared architectural profession.

Overthrowing

[T]oday’s architects must prepare the way for tomorrow’s buildings.

Bruno Taut, A Programme for Architecture, 1918

1.1 Malmö, Sweden

Successive generations of the environmentally engaged since the mid-20th century have seemed doomed to reinvent the environmental wheel. Not in terms of technology – environmental systems and software have certainly progressed – but ethically, politically and architecturally, the narrative has barely changed. Every 20 years or so, there has been the same discovery of environmental over-exploitation, the same alarm over what that over-exploitation will ultimately do to our benighted species, the same kinds of statistics implicating the built environment, and the same exhortations to do better. The planetary condition has worsened as far as our survival is concerned, and the warnings have become more shrill – Extinction Rebellion (2018–) has a decidedly more theatrical ring to it than Earth Day (1970–) – but the message remains exasperatingly familiar: do more and do it faster.

The urgency of ‘faster’ has increased over the decades, of course. If one ignores something dangerous for 50 years, it tends to get more dangerous. Climate change is now on everyone’s lips, and a generation so young it can’t vote has made a highly emotional connection with the increasingly serious consequences. But climate change is an effect not a cause, shorthand for a master-slave relationship with the biosphere made possible by the Industrial Revolution. That relationship was out of balance then and appears increasingly life-threatening now, not so much for life on Earth – some version of that will endure – but for our lives on Earth.

And yet an appreciation – emotional and/or intellectual – of the seriousness of our situation still only animates a minority of the world’s population, and only a minority of the world’s built environment professionals, including those, like architects, with pretensions to leadership. Victor Olgyay’s book Design with Climate urged exactly what it said on the cover in 1963: create a located and more energy-efficient architecture by making design decisions in response to regional climatic conditions. The book was simultaneously seminal and marginalised, and its successors have fared little better. Which poses the question: why has the environmental movement not gained the same traction as the Modern Movement did? Why has it not overthrown the dominant modes of designing and building and organising settlements? For a profession still devoted to the modernist view that nothing is but designing makes it so, architecture has been incomprehensibly slow to design with the natural environment in mind.

If one walks through a business or residential district in almost any city on Earth, one sees the Modern Movement victorious, if usually debased and stripped of its social agenda: universal extrusions of steel and glass, or steel and concrete, to heights sufficient to exploit their sites for maximum return. Sometimes the anonymity is replaced by crudely gestural ‘signature buildings’ made of the same steel and glass or steel and concrete, all vying for our weary attention [1.2]. This is not to say there’s no architecture being produced today that is thoughtful, daring, enriching, even beautiful. There is, but the majority of clients and architects are still lazily commissioning and designing high-carbon buildings long after environmental knowledge has rendered them obsolete in form, materials and even programme.

Post-war, the Modern Movement erupted all over the world after a gestation period of 30 years. The environmental movement has had almost twice as long and is still a tentative and apologetic presence. These are of course generalisations, but the fact that those architects – and clients – who are inspirational exceptions remain exceptions,