An Architect's Guide to Designing for Sustainability - Part One
Earth is just the most perfect place in which to live: its continents and islands, oceans, lakes and rivers support an amazing abundance and variety of life. Our planet provides the ideal incubator and shelter for this to happen.
Water, as a regulator of temperature and transporter of nutrients, is essential to life. Water is available on Earth as solid ice, liquid and vapour forms. The global interchange of glacier-ocean-atmosphere systems maintains a comfortable environment to support life forms from polar bears to tropical parrots. Earth is just close enough to its shepherding star, the sun, to receive warmth and light but not to burn up living organisms.
The evolution of Earth, from a clump of stellar debris to a spinning dynamo and the gradual build-up of a protective atmosphere, is unique in our solar system. There is, as far as we know, no other planet like it. Only two of the known planetary satellites, Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Titan, offer anything likely to sustain life as we know it.
The seasons happen because the planet’s axis is not perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, but tilted at an angle of 23,5 degrees. The North Pole, tilted toward the sun, is at its maximum during the northern summer. The rays of the sun strike the Tropic of Cancer at 23,5 degrees directly north, warming the northern hemisphere more than the southern hemisphere. During the northern winter, these positions are reversed. The South Pole is tilted towards the sun and the sun’s rays are concentrated over the Tropic of Capricorn at 23,5 degrees south and spread more thinly over the northern hemisphere. In spring and autumn the equator points towards the sun.
Magnetism built into the core of the Earth wraps the planet in a vast curved envelope of magnetic force. This protective cocoon, the magnetosphere, wards off the lethal stream of ionised or electrically charged particles blown off the sun. As the Earth and its magnetic fields plough through the solar wind, a shockwave builds up just like a supersonic jet. The charged particles are slowed down and diverted around the magnetosphere. On the other side of the Earth, the dark side, a teardrop-shaped tail up to 500 earth diameters long is formed.
Yet, our spheroid planet, which Carl Sagan refers to as our ”pale-blue dot”, although significantly large in human dimensions with a diameter of nearly 12,960 km, significantly old (4,5 billion years and the literal birth of time and space being set as 15 billion years ago), and surrounded by an immense emptiness of space, supports life-forms in a surprisingly thin segment of its structure commencing from just under 5km below the surface and extending to 8,100m above. Beyond these confines human life needs artificial support whilst birds and insects die far below these limits. For all the immensity of space – the Milky Way is a huge, whirling pinwheel made of 100 billion or more stars with tens of billions of other galaxies beyond its edges – it is to all intents and purposes lifeless beyond this 13km incubating layer of Earth. “Viewed from deep space, our entire habitat of land, oceans and clouds is revealed as a thin, delicate glaze – its beauty and vulnerability contrasting with the stark and sterile moonscape on which the astronauts left their footprints.”[1]
It is from this womb-like layer that the 6 billion people and millions of other living species inhabiting Earth draw the resources needed to sustain life, and into which they discharge their waste. Over time, this process of consumption and discharge has accelerated as our human population has multiplied. Whilst early peoples lived in a state of balance between the demand and supply of Earth’s resources, the modern world has reached the point where current demand exceeds supply. Whereas early peoples lived off the interest of the Earth, modern man is consuming the capital. Worse still, the waste generated by this consumption is polluting the depleting remaining capital, further reducing the effective balance.
Despite the stunning time spans of the evolutionary past now being part of our common knowledge, many folk still consider humanity as the final culmination of the creative process. Cosmologists, on the other hand, understand this current time as only a small blip in an even vaster time span that still lies ahead. Given the development period of modern man relative to the age of the cosmos, human maturation and the development of intelligence and complexity may yet be in its infancy. If this is so, who can begin to grasp what marvellous biodiversity is still to come?
Tragically, though, through stupidity or ill intent or both, the human choices and actions of this century could determine the continual future of life, for make no mistake, the Earth will survive, but humanity may not be an integral part of it. The next few generations could put at risk life’s potential and bar its human future.
Many leaders around the world and in many spheres of occupation have realised that the rate of consumption of Earth’s finite resources and the concomitant waste generation could continue indefinitely: It has taken just a sliver of the Earth’s history – the last one-millionth part, a few thousand years – to alter the patterns of vegetation far faster than ever before. The start of agriculture had much to do with this change, but the pace of change accelerated as human settlements formed and populations increased. Within 50 years – little more than one-hundredth-of-a-millionth of the Earth’s age – the amount of carbon dioxide, which until now had been dropping, began to rise ominously fast. As with any change, it generates its own changes: anthropogenic development has resulted in the Earth becoming an emitter of radio waves from all the televisions, cell phones and radar transmissions.
It is projected that the sun will collapse on itself like some giant soufflé in 5-6 million years’ time, but long before then, in 1 billion years’ time, its energy output will increase by at least 10 percent, turning Earth into a hothouse[2]. The comfort that these time frames would normally provide us with are not to be experienced any longer, for who would have predicted this unprecedented environmental spasm (human population increased from 1950 to 2000 faster than over the 4 million years since it emerged as a distinct species) so soon in the Earth’s history? As Sir Martin Rees puts it:
“But will this eternity be filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life, or be as empty as the Earth’s first sterile seas? The choice may depend on us, this century.”[3] It is this realisation that has given birth to the concept of sustainable development.
The United Nations has held a number of summits and conferences on the subject, the first United Nations Conference on Human Settlements being held in Vancouver, Canada in 1972. In 1992 the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro gave rise to the Habitat Agenda and Agenda 21, formulated as the road map for sustainable development. The Second United Nations Conference followed this focus on sustainable development on Human Settlements (Habitat II) held in Istanbul, Turkey from 3 to 14 June 1996, and later that year the Habitat Conference held at the United Nations in New York. The 2002 Earth Summit held in Johannesburg, South Africa was a Rio +10 celebration and offered an opportunity for re-appraisal of progress post-Rio. The Resolution of this Summit is attached as an annexure.
These conferences have seen a swing from a “green-centred” agenda to a “people-centred” agenda and the acceptance that environmental protection must go hand-in-hand with human development. This approach crystallised the notion of economic, social and environmental sustainability, or the triple bottom line reporting approach. Current thinking is beginning to place the emphasis on social sustainability or well-being with economic prosperity and environmental stewardship as sub-sets. It is precisely for this reason that architects should engage themselves in the process through the design process, for they are co-responsible for realising social well-being in the built environment.
Architects play an indispensable role in the production of the built environment: they are required to provide imaginative thinking, be at the cutting edge of technology, exercise strategic managerial skills, and be skilled craftsmen in order to conceptualise and manage the delivery of the physical infrastructure that is fundamental to the development of the communities they serve. Architects are acknowledged for their potential to add real value through the devising of physical solutions in response to the brief, maximizing the potential of the site, and overcoming planning and other constraints.
Architects exercise a significant influence on the lives of citizens, including current users, those who pass by their buildings, and those users yet to be born. They therefore must ensure that they deliver physical infrastructure that is responsive to society’s needs. A role that architects have played since time immemorial is that of trusted advisor to their clients when undertaking the procurement and delivery of public facilities and infrastructure.
The growing global realisation that good corporate governance goes beyond the financial and regulatory aspects to include an integrated approach is and will continue to place a new responsibility on the architect as trusted advisor. Clients increasingly expect that those who design the physical structures which they develop and occupy will contribute to their well-being without depleting the resources of their world. This expectation is placing new demands on architects to familiarize themselves with the issues of sustainable development and to ensure that they are competent at designing infrastructure in a sustainable manner.
Assessing the opportunities and constraints that the environment places on development, instead of reducing the impact of the development on the environment, is but one of the paradigm shifts required. Improving economic viability over the full life-cycle of the structure and delivering social improvement are further areas in which architects must develop their skills and knowledge.
The demand for quality by end-users has highlighted the need to improve the performance of both the client and the design professionals to ensure value for money, fitness for purpose and quality. There is a need to develop a culture of performance measurement so that the efficacy of innovations can be evaluated and continuous improvements promoted in cost, time, defects, durability, adaptability, maintenance, reuse and environmental performance. Sustainability-led design requires a more sophisticated understanding of the natural and built environment than is required by conventional development. It behoves architects to expand their awareness of the broader environmental impacts of their buildings.
This initiative of the Commonwealth Association of Architects is aimed at ensuring that architects within the Commonwealth are able to make their contribution to ensuring the sustainability of their developments. In this regard it takes cognisance of the newly accepted and widely used instrument for integrating economic, social and environmental issues into the formulation of plans and programmes, namely, Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA). Unlike the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) approach that focuses on the effect of the development on the environment, SEA assesses the effect of the environment on the development. This approach, in considering the opportunities and constraints that the broader environment places on the development, acknowledges context (e.g. the political, institutional, social and biophysical environment), integrates current legislative procedures into the formulation of plans, and is sustainability-led.
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