AJ Footprint Live conference: The Green Rethink

On Tuesday Johnny Winter and I attended the inaugural AJ Footprint Live conference, promisingly entitled ‘The Green Rethink’. Keynote speakers Sir Terry Farrell and Dr Ken Yeang began each half by offering their vision of a sustainable built environment. Farrell paired sustainability with ‘urbiculture’, placing the city at the heart of sustainable development so long as it is developed holistically and diversely, particularly encouraging an active and vibrant ground plane (citing Darwin’s ‘tangled bank’ and Jane Jacobs’ notion ‘organised complexity’). 

Yeang, a well-known purveyor of the literal greening of the built environment, underlined we must “rethink our relationship with nature”. He suggested that the next generation of green buildings must: be better integrated with nature, function as a living system, repair wider fragmented landscape and enlist natural processes for systems such as closed loop water drainage.

The Green Rethink's first panel of the day

Some of the ideas and studies presented were already well worn, and packed panels did mean several sessions were too short to fully relate enough detailed information. For example The Technical Briefing panel crammed in the upcoming Part L revisions, Soft Landings and the issue of closing the building performance gap. Although this left almost no window in which to debate how this really feeds back into improving good practice, an interesting provocation was made by Roderic Bunn of BSRIA, in the suggestion that Part L should demand certain compliance within building operation.

The tight schedule was, however, studded with moments of inspiration. Patrick Bellew’s list of top green innovations to keep an eye out for was certainly compelling: electro-chromic glass, entrepreneurial energy storage, smarter green facades and joined up systems on site (e.g. the smart use of waste for power in Gardens by the Bay).

A few interesting points were also made in the panel entitled on ‘More Homes, Better Homes’. Alison Brooks hit the nail on the head by urging a renewed focus on the suburbs, using Newhall Be as a case study. Nick Raynsford MP noted that although mass house builders have shown improvement in recent years, the only way to sustainably solve the housing crisis with the immediacy required is through increased public spending.



Alison Brooks Architects - Newhall Be

Other case studies worth picking out included Architectes Associés work, which demonstrates the large scale potential of Passivhaus with their office and mixed-use projects in Belgium. Cloud 9's Media ICT project in Barcelona, effervescently presented by Enric Ruiz-Geli, has shown the great potential of “dealing in particles” in building façade technology (case in point below: nitrogen mist turning glass to translucent walls to prevent solar gain). The fact that these sorts of projects seem to thrive better on the continent suggests the UK planning system and construction industry must play some innovation catch-up!

Cloud 9 - Media ICT, Barcelona

Happold Lecture Take 2

Friday saw Robin Nicholson reprise his CIC Ted Happold Medal Lecture for Cullinan Studio and guests during a wine and cheese evening at Cullinans' canal-side office. Speeding through the last 25 years of the construction industry, Robin's lecture hinged on his experience of various landmark construction industry reports, taskforces and forums.
 

Throughout the talk, a common theme picked out by Robin was an increasing change of bias evident in each report, shifting towards a focus on the client and end user. This goes hand-in-hand with the more socially-driven agenda that has emerged at the forefront of sustainable practice.

 

 

For Robin, the 1994 Latham Report ('Constructing the Team') signalled the first time members of the construction industry created a "public interest manifesto", rather than a self-serving industry report. Four years later, the "industry-shaking" Egan Report ('Rethinking Construction') championed the concept of demonstration projects in order to better assimilate lessons learnt throughout the construction process - another move in favour of client and user. As well as this, Robin described the Egan Report as a significant "early stumbling" into sustainability. How much these projects realistically impacted upon future good practice is up for debate, however they made clear the complexity of true change in the industry.

But Robin maintains the future should be bright. From the optimistic Paul Morrell notion that "design is free if there is a 10% building performance improvement", to the presence of think tanks such as EDGE which continue to debate industry progress and direction , to the smartening of practice through BIM, its clear that attitudes are evolving. Success and sustainability will lie in properly seeing concepts through in practice - in Robin's words "now we just need to do it!"



Further reading:

- The Carbon Tracker Initiative's report "Unburnable Carbon 2013" which few audience members had come across.

- Zero Carbon Britain 2013 report: Robin noted that the Zero Carbon Britain launch had a very poor representation from the construction industry.

- EDGE 2013 report

 

 

Nairn's London

Joining us for lunch last Friday, Gillian Darley mentioned her new book about Ian Nairn - 'author of Nairn's London, the OUTRAGE series in the AR and more - you have probably never heard of him'. If you hadn't clearly others have as you can pay £264.94 on Amazon for a copy. I picked up mine for a pound in Hitchin in 1985 and found it an eye-opening prompt to take me exploring bits of London I might have missed. The overriding message which holds as true today as in 1966 is it doesn't matter what a building is like as long as it's good. Hence his inclusion of Owen Luder's newly completed Brutalist eyesore Eros House in Catford - 'This most craggy and uncompromising of new London buildings turns out to be full of firm gentleness' - alongside The Paragon at Blackheath - 'perfect urbanity meeting perfect rurality head-on' - alongside S.S.Teulon's St Mark's Silvertown - 'an architectural imagination the size of Blake's - it must be kept'.  It was and is now the home of Brick Lane Music Hall.
Incidentally, the freehold for Eros House is up for sale for £10,000.