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- [00:12]
A
Hello and welcome to the Urbanist, Monocle's program all about the built environment. I'm your host, Andrew Tuck.
- [00:18]
B
Coming up, take your own history seriously, take the connections around you seriously. Try to understand where certain people, conditions that we face today are coming from. Don't take no for an answer, but also say no more often.
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A
How do we reshape our perspectives on architecture to help us in an age of climate crisis? Today on the program, we speak to two of the authors behind a fascinating new book which posits a wholesale rethink into the field of architecture in order to acknowledge that the practice is fundamentally entangled with climate change, politics, history and social justice. Unpacking the topic through the eight themes of land, resources, economy, infrastructure, work, culture, policy and knowledge. No stone is left unturned in the pursuit of an answer to our climate challenges. That's all ahead in the next 30 minutes right here on the Urbanist with me. Andrew T.
- [01:19]
Architecture is Climate is the title of a recently released book which looks at the role architects, planners and designers can have in helping face the climate crisis, from the way we build buildings to the choice of materials, land and more. The book comes from the research collective Mold, and it aims to challenge the foundations of architecture in an age of climate breakdown by reimagining the field as a spatial practice inseparable from politics and ecology and social justice. The book explores these eight interlinked themes, from land and labour to infrastructure and more, and I was recently joined by two of its authors and members of mold, Jeremy Till and Tatiana Schneider. I began our conversation by first asking Tatiana to explain what the Mold Collective is and what it actually does.
- [02:10]
B
Mold is many things in one. Mold started life, if you wish, as a part of a research project. We started working on that project and found that we needed some kind of identity other than just being researchers on a research project. We tried to capture somehow the kind of work we were doing and somehow mold stuck with us because mold refers also to fungi, to rhizomes. And we like the way mold actually exists and creates relations with other beings and is actually quite intelligent as well. And it seemed to be an apt metaphor for the kind of work that we were doing and we're interested in.
- [02:53]
A
Jeremy out of Mold has now come a book called Architecture is Climate. It's a deliberately kind of provocative title. In a way, it's challenging the industry of architecture, the discipline. What does the title mean for you?
- [03:07]
C
I think it's both provocative and necessary inasmuch as architecture is locked into a certain ways of doing and certain set of value systems mainly to do with aesthetics and refinement. And in doing that they have architectural culture and architects themselves have kind of bypassed their relationship to climate breakdown. They sort of deal with it at arm's length through so called sustainable buildings, which what we talk about in the book is that we see them as just like band aids. They're just kind of temporary plasters over a much deeper wound. And what that doesn't do is to acknowledge architecture's own, let's use the word complicity within climate breakdown the way that it is part of the problem and therefore if it's part of the problem, it's not going to be able to solve the so called problem. And so by talking about architecture is climate, we're saying that you have to acknowledge the relationship between architecture as a discipline and a way of thinking with all the issues of climate and don't stand outside it as some kind of expert applying these band aids.
- [04:23]
A
So when we hear about a building, for example, being LEED certificated, you don't see that as much of a gain.
- [04:29]
C
I dismiss it completely. If Norman Foster's airport in Saudi Arabia for a so called eco resort, that is in one sentence you've got three carbon crimes in an airport in Saudi Arabia for an eco resort can be graded as potentially li platinum. I think one has to question the whole basis on what these systems of certification value and assess. Now please, if you're designing a building, take very, very seriously its carbon footprint. Take very seriously in particular its embodied carbon. Take very seriously its use of fossil fuels. All of that is necessary, but it is by no means enough. And so what the project attempts to do is to say what are the other ways in which you can use architectural intelligence in a productive, joyful way which has meaningfully addressed the roots of climate breakdown rather than try to get away with some of the kind of more surface level of sustainability.
- [05:32]
A
Tatiana I guess the interesting thing, if I was an architect, I'd say, look, I'm governed by the rules of the land. Best practice is all I can really hope to achieve. I'm a small company. And I guess the other point that many architects would say is, look, you know, I'm in a partnership here, there's the bit I can do. But somebody owns the land. There's a developer who is value engineering in this project and is expecting a profit at the end of it for you. Are architects dating the wrong people? In a way, they need to have a new set of dance partners.
- [06:03]
B
That's a nice idea. I think yes, they do need a new set of dance partners and need to expand that field quite substantially. I would also say that maybe architects as we've come to know them, and Jeremy mentioned that already, I think it's really important to keep on doing very, very good work and sort not give up in the system that we're actually in and try to also work with that system. But at the same time, there are so many other things that need to be considered when we do architecture. Architecture tends to be understood as a building, as an object. I think we need to begin to see architecture as much, much more than this kind of object. You can compare it to maybe a mushroom or to an iceberg. The building is only what we actually see on the surface and everything else is underne. So architects and together with other disciplines, they really need to begin to grasp what is underneath. So it's not just architects and developers, but beginning to see architecture as this wider project of spatial production, if you wish, and bringing other people on board and by doing so, maybe also expanding what we currently do.
- [07:16]
A
When I was talking about different partners, I know that you do see your role as activists trying to change the way that architecture is perceived or delivered, and a little bit you want to deliver some social justice in your work.
- [07:26]
B
As a. Yeah, I think there's a social justice angle, there's an activist angle, but there's also a real pragmatist angle there as well. Because what we see in graphs that come out of the news, we see that the world is burning, that it's getting hotter, that predictions that 10 years seem to be true, they don't hold up any longer. So there's a true necessity also to change gear in a way. And this is what we need to do. So activism, yes, but also pragmatism. And we have to do something in order to change this.
- [07:57]
A
Jeremy, again, when we think about the challenges and what needs to be delivered, do you think the kinds of things that we'll talk about that you discuss in the book in a second can be delivered, though at scale? Because I think that often when we think about projects which are very plugged into social justice, to delivering a kind of climate aware project, connecting into the neighborhood and the community, often people find it difficult to see how that could be done at scale. So your city needs a new museum or your city needs a new school. Do you think the lessons in the book can be taken and applied at scale?
- [08:35]
C
Absolutely they can. I mean, one of the examples we use is very well known, which is Kate Raworth's Sternot economics has been adopted by the city of Amsterdam as their economic set of protocols. So it's not just to do with the examples either. It's as much to do with trying to rethink it and reconceptualize how you see architectural thinking. There are of course some examples that we use which are lovely and they are small scale. You could argue that if they were multiplied that would change, you know, things for the better. But in the end, I think it is to do with trying to understand that we cannot continue going on as we are, that we cannot continue to extract, we cannot continue to have endless growth measured through gdp. We have to have other ways of thinking. So it is a kind of systemic way of changing thinking at scale of which we are a small part. We're part of a large group of other thinkers and researchers operating in the same field.
- [09:38]
A
But a challenge for you. So here in the UK for example, they're aiming to build 1.5 million homes in one government's term in office. And you say we have to cut back on the GDP ambitions, but in a way, 1.5 million houses or homes is part of GDP, is not disconnected from the economy and where people live and where they're moving to. Do you think we should give up on those kinds of ambitions or do you think you can build at pace, 1.5 million homes that meet the kinds of criteria that you would like to see?
- [10:07]
C
Well, what's the sacrifice going to be of those 1.5 million? They're tearing up planning regulations in order to allow developers to march over nature. They're tearing up other ways of procuring housing through different economic systems like community land trusts or community housing, in order to say the only way that we can do this is through a market led approach. Now there are examples we've got in the book of how you could do those forms of housing in a manner which doesn't demand the mass developer to come in, which respects nature and its environment, which has different forms of shared ownership, as interesting. You get most radically, often in places like Switzerland, which has proper sustainability built in. So it's coming at an enormous cost. The headline, it was a very stupid political thing to do to even lots of people saying, what a dumb thing to do to put 1.5 million at the beginning, because the only way you can deliver that is by giving in to quite, in the case of some of the housing developers, quite tough and in the end irresponsible ways of building housing.
- [11:10]
B
I think because you talked about that we might need new museums, we might need certain things, or that we might need a certain number of housing. The same issue. We do have that in Germany as well. We have it in Norway, we have it in Switzerland, we have it in Austria. Everywhere now governments are making up these numbers of units that we in inverted commerc society needs. But where do these figures come from? How are they actually configured? Who set them up in the first place? When we look at space, built space, actual built space, we see that we do have enough built space, we have enough square meterage, you could say, to house everyone adequately. But sometimes this space is in the maybe wrong or not so adequate location. Sometimes we talk about people living on a lot of square meters when we should maybe think about different models of how we could also live on less. But also I think it's really important to talk about whether, especially in the case of housing, we talk about social housing or other types of housing. In Germany we have a housing crisis, yes, but not a general housing crisis, but one of affordability and social housing. So when we have figures in Germany now of 400,000 units that need to be built within the next couple of years, this needs to be social housing, but it will not be social housing. So these numbers really need to be challenged and need to be looked at closely and need to be understood and then approach around to really address what we actually do and how we do it.
- [12:35]
A
Well, I guess that backs into what for example happened in New York where they're saying you can't build the correct pace to keep up with so called demand. First of all, you have to have make sure there's an affordability cap put in place and we'll see how that works. Rent controls have proved tricksy and complicated in some places and more effective in others. But that's the same idea, isn't it, that you need to do two things. Of course you need to build some new places, but you also need to make sure that people can afford.
- [12:59]
B
But it's not just rent controls, it's also about who owns these buildings. Jeremy talked about community land trusts, for example, and you already mentioned the housing cooperatives in Switzerland and housing cooperatives exist also in many European countries. You could talk about the great tradition of social housing here in the UK also Peabody setting a really great example also of how social housing could be thought in different ways and at community friendly and affordable ways. So I think it's also about who owns in the end this housing and that makes a significant contribution to affordability in the long term.
- [13:34]
C
And if I take a very recent example, which is the Sterling Prize shortlist, on the Sterling Prize shortlist, there were two private houses, excess square meterage, almost certainly their sustainability credentials are not published, so we don't know. And yet on the long list, just off the short list, was a community housing trust with a property sustainable agenda. It was all there, but the architects at the top of the award system decided to privilege a certain set of values, mainly to do with very clever. They were good private houses over a more social agenda, to do with both social justice, because it was a community trust, and climate justice because it was properly sustainable.
- [14:18]
B
And architecture is complicated because architecture is valued and judged by its visuals, by its external aesthetics very often. And when it comes to these awards systems, you tend to see what is actually on the picture. This is another big critique, I think, that is also in our project and in the book, that we need to look at how we value architecture and what we value when we look at architecture. Is it to do with the visuals, the aesthetics, or is it about the benefit certain buildings and projects bring to communities or to wider society? How is profit possibly redistributed as well into wider sections of society rather than into the pockets of. Of a few?
- [14:58]
A
I've got two questions. First of all, so at the end of the chain, the person who's thinking about where they may end up living, are you saying that they should also make some sacrifices, that actually maybe they shouldn't be seeking aesthetics and beauty above all else in where they want to live, that actually practicality and robust climate credentials is equally as important as somewhere that looks nice to live?
- [15:21]
B
Yeah, I think there's a balance to be struck. I'm not saying that things shouldn't be beautiful and well designed. And I think if we look at the Nordic countries or if we look at Switzerland, we see how much value is actually placed into good and solid designs. But at the same time we have to look at where materials come from and what material supply lines contribute to the climate crisis also, or how buildings might also be used in wider speculative mechanisms. Are they simply, as the Swiss say, beton gold, concrete, gold, or are they something that can be distributed in terms of wealth to broader society?
- [16:05]
A
Jeremy, almost the same question for you, because I do think it's interesting, the questions you're raising. Of course they challenge architects and we'll come back to that one second. But they also challenge the end user, don't they? Because you are saying, look, perhaps you can't have so much space and perhaps your dream of Owning a home has to be foregone because you need to be part of a community organization where the land is held in trust or the land is owned by a co operative and you don't have that sense of ownership that many people in this country, for example, and in other countries certainly seem to aspire to. So everybody along the chain has to have a bit of a reassessment about what they get out of architecture, don't they?
- [16:44]
C
Well, yes and no. I mean, I think the idea that we can only, which Thatcher particularly promulgated, that we can only be happy if we own our own house, is a kind of myth. There's no real evidence of that in many European countries. You know, there are many more people renting than owning and I don't see that they're unhappy because of that.
- [17:04]
A
Well, many of them are because that's why we have to have these new rent laws. Because the UK is a good example where local authorities, cash strapped, can't afford to maintain the public housing they do have. So they're dependent on private developers. The private developers say they don't have an ability to, to build the kinds of units because of the supply chain is now so intensely overpriced that they can't deliver cost effective buildings. So you do find lots of people in rented accommodation who don't want to be in rented accommodation because private landlords are often complicated or don't do the work. And also local authorities are not that good. And even some of these housing associations. Peabody still has great credit with people here in this country, but there are lots of housing trusts that are not that good. And I think that that's the problem is that you have to really change people's mindset along the whole chain.
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C
Yeah, the system is broken. The system's broken in every way. I mean, the developers may say that they can't afford to build it because of their supply chain. What they're really saying is that they can't afford to build it because they're not going to be making their £60,000 profit on each house. I mean, that's an extraordinary profit margin they're operating on. And they legally can claim that they have to make that under the viability assessments. And of course the rental system in the UK is broken. And of course things like Right to Buy were an absolute disaster. Over 50%, 50% of properties which were brought onto Right to Buy are now being let on the private market, in many cases back to social landlords or to councils at an inflated rate. So, yeah, the System's broken. That doesn't mean that looking at alternatives isn't.
- [18:35]
A
No, no, no. I'm just saying that we understand from your book, in this conversation, the very serious questions you have about architecture and where architecture is headed and how it's delivered, delivered for both of you. What needs to happen to that bit? First of all, so, Tatiana, is that the education system that we have for architects around the world, is that at fault? Do you have to change the way that people are taught? How do you get a generation of architects who, when they go into practice, think, I know what I want to do, I want to change the way that this industry is run. I want to separate myself from some of the players that are going to compromise my needs. What do you think needs to happen to architects?
- [19:11]
B
I think a lot needs to be happening. At the same time, I wouldn't want to say, let's start with this. And then something else follows and then the other bit follows. And again, this is what our project does. It shows that a lot of people are doing already really, really great and really interesting work across the globe. And they're doing that in education, they're doing that in practice, they're doing that in multidisciplinary organizations that really challenge the way how we do things already. So it's not that we have to invent something here that is not already happen. It is already happening. Wherever you go, whether you go to South America or North America, whether you go to India or the Far east, it's there. I think it's about looking closely, looking carefully, and helping those who are already doing great work to do that work even more effectively.
- [19:59]
A
Jeremy?
- [20:00]
C
I think it's also, if you do take education, for example, in the last 30 years in the UK, the numbers of people entering our education have tripled from 2,000 to 6,000. The massive oversupply or the kind of dream that they might one day win the Sterling Prize, of course they won't. So what happens to the ones which won't graduate into the profession? How do you use an architecture education, which I think is an amazing education, to begin to address some of these systemic issues? I mean, what architecture does, and we write about it in the book, what architecture does is a very kind of unique set of capabilities and abilities. It's always multiscaler. It goes from a door handle to the scale of the city. It's always temporal. It always looks at the past, its experience in the present. It projects into the future. It's always relational. So it's got lots of kind of wonderful attributes to the education and to the way architects think. The issue is that often that is funneled into an increasingly difficult mode of creating great architecture. So. So what we argue is use these ways of thinking in a much broader field than just within the design of a building. And one of the arguments we make, which is kind of the takeaway from the book, is that climate breakdown demands systemic change. We can't just deal with it through band aids, Obviously can't deal with it through cop, because that's failing, because it's compromised. It has to come up with a set of systemic changes. And the systemic changes, they'd be economic, they'd be social, they'd be. To do justice, will be accompanied in an ideal world with new social formations, how we relate to each other economically. And those social relationships will be always accompanied by spatial relationships, how we sit around a table to how we design a housing scheme. And so within those new spatial relationships, there's lots of ways by which architectural intelligence can be used. And so the project, although it might start in a kind of quite. Quite, well, not difficult, but quite a strident critique of the current system, ends up in a place of possibility, potential and hope.
- [22:16]
A
I know you don't want to only focus on projects as the shining examples here, but is there a project in the book that, when it came up, you thought, okay, this addresses some of these spatial ambitions for design and architecture and how we live. What would be one or two that.
- [22:29]
C
Either of you thought, I'll do one to start with.
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A
Okay, go.
- [22:32]
C
Okay. There's this firm in Tokyo called Atelier Bow Wow. They're very well known for a beautiful book they call Made in Tokyo, which plots the everyday. They were involved in a scheme called the Timber Network, which they were looking at a failing set of villages in which the old crafts were dying out, but they were also. The timber supply was being exploited. So they were looking upstream and downstream. And what they did. And this was. This is a very brilliant piece of work because it's spatial, it's relational, and it's social. They looked at how they might revive these villages through the reviving of new forms of craft, which at the same time began to use the timber from the forests which were being exploited. It's called the Timber Network. So there's a kind of great relational thing going on there, of which some of it is. There are some buildings in it, really amazing, actually made of timber. But there's lots and lots of other things going on as well, because they understood the relationship between materials, jobs, resources, Ecology, economy and all of that. So it's that joining up. And so it is a Tele Bawa project, but it's done with the local community, it's done with the local authorities, it's done with the timber supplies and so on and so forth. And it's the ability to join all of those up to create new sets of relationships, which I think is so amazing about that project, but also amazing about the potential for architectural thinking.
- [24:03]
A
Amazing. What a great example of a nice corrective to me as well, not to think too much about the building, but to think about all these other things that literally in this case flow up and down river from this. But for you, Tatiana, another project, maybe.
- [24:15]
B
In the book I put another architecture project on the table because this is, after all, the discipline we come from. And it's a French housing estate, grandparc, in the city of Bordeaux. And the city of Bordeaux has many housing estates from the 1960s. And you know, these buildings, I think, very well here in the UK as well, sort of slabs, big concrete slabs up to 20 stories high. And very often these buildings, they've come to the end of their life in a way, or at least so people say. And in Bordeaux, what they did, in a very interesting coalition between architects, the city council and local community organizations, they looked at these buildings and the architects played a major role in also saying to the city, look, we cannot just go on demolishing these buildings and building new things. We have to see what we do with the existing fabrics. And this housing scheme, Grand Parc, about 540 units, so quite a substantial number of dwellings, three buildings in total, was refurbished with residents in place. And that is one of the really interesting bits, because very often when buildings are being refurbished, people have to move out to different locations. You destroy communities also in that kind of process, because the people initially sort of making up these communities in these buildings, they have to move out elsewhere. Then the building is being refurbished for five, six, seven years, and then these people will most likely not move back into this thing again. And in that case, they managed to keep people in the building and they created not just better spaces by adding another layer of wide balcony layer in front of these buildings, but they also managed to keep these communities intact. And for me, this is a really interesting example of working with the existing, adapting, retrofitting the existing, keeping communities in place. So really respecting also the sense of place that is sort of forming in these entities. And I think it should be replicated wherever you go.
- [26:15]
A
Let's leave people with some encouragement, Jeremy, if I was a young architect listening to this, or an old architect listening to this. Beyond telling them what they're doing wrong from this book, what would you say to architects thinking about what they can do?
- [26:28]
C
Well, most simply is just to think about where else they could operate beyond what they're doing at the moment in designing buildings. How could they go out to their. They could become an activist in the local political party, they could join a community land trust and help within that. They could go into a health office and say there's a relationship between people overeating and the design of the places that they're living in. There's so many places and it's a very rich field. And Tatiana and I taught at Sheffield together. When we were at Sheffield, we did try to expand the nature of architecture education and we did a big project there, which precursor to this one. And if I look now at where those students are, they're all over the place. They're working in local government, they're working in economy, they're working in local food distribution networks. And it's a wonderful thing to see because they're taking what they learned in architecture school into a much broader thing. And I was speaking to someone from the number 10 policy union, coming for a longer conversation, and he says, we started to employ architecture students because they understand that policy is not just a technocratic instrument, it's an instrument which is far broader in where it joins things up. And we found our architect students are really good at doing that.
- [27:46]
A
There's some hope in the people that you can see in these organisations. Tatiana, what would you say to people who are thinking, what should I do?
- [27:54]
B
I think it's about, I don't know, there's no scarcity of examples actually showing you what you could do. The sky's the limit in a way. There's practices that really built on that knowledge that they learn in architecture school. But of course take it on and find your niche. But also I think it's really important to connect your own being, your own histories to the places that we are situated in. So take your own history seriously, take the connections around you seriously, try to understand where certain conditions that we face today are coming from. Don't take no for an answer, but also say no more often to things that you really shouldn't be doing any longer.
- [28:37]
A
And Jeremy, finally, if people want to get hold of Architecture is climate, how do they get a copy?
- [28:41]
C
It's being published by DPR Barcelona, amazing publishing house who do books of this genre. It will be open access. So that it can also be downloaded. We think it's a beautiful object though, so it's worth having anyway. And then there's an associated website called architectureisclimate.net which has over 120 practices on it with all the examples, but also has got and we got a set of cards here. We looked at all the practices and we analyzed what are they doing and we came up with a kind of matrix and we got it down to 33 what we call prompts for the future, which are kind of just one off prompts which when you're stuck on a project, you can look at and hopefully the project will move slightly sideways and slightly into more than slightly, radically into a more justice place.
- [29:32]
A
My thanks there to Jeremy Till and Tatiana Schneider. To find out more about Architecture is Climate and to purchase a copy of the book, you can head to DPR barcelona.com.
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And that's all for this week's episode of the Urbanist. You can follow us for new editions of the show every week. And you can subscribe to Monocle magazine for reports on all things design, architecture and urbanism too too. Just visit monocle.com the Urbanist is produced by Carlo Trabello and by David Stevens, who also edits his show. I'm Andrew Tuck. Goodbye and thank you for listening. City Lovers.