On reasons to stop demolishing and stop building

When we start to chase ideas for our events it feels a bit like butterfly netting, or chasing a whisp of an idea that’s like a genie escaping its bottle. You want to see how it can form into a solid shape.

For some people that genie can look menacing.

It’s been like that with the next Big Debate on Carbon Triggers. The idea was to focus on the nascent idea in Australia of not demolishing buildings — despite the familiar list of arguments so often trotted out to defend demolition: poor fire safety, outdated or unwanted spaces, stranded assets and so on.

But prod and poke these wispy ideas a little and you sometimes strike solid motherlodes of work that had been simmering away in their creative juices elsewhere in the world and have already solidified into something that merits serious attention.

A moratorium on new construction for instance.

Not just a moratorium on the demolition of existing buildings but a halt to new ones.

Thanks to some well placed contacts we are fortunate to have, the Carbon Triggers Big Debate on Tuesday next week did its job and revealed glimpses into what could be the next big reframing of a sustainable built environment in the midst of a climate crisis.

For instance, we discovered that at a recent convention of international architects in Spain there was generous airtime given to the concept of a moratorium on new construction; not just demolition.

It might sound like a call from the wild. But remember architects are the people ahead of the curve. Their job is to imagine the future. When they formed the original Architects Declare in the UK in 30 May 2019, many observers thought it a little too dramatic.

But today, there’s not many people outside the deep oil state who question the validity of that sentiment and the urgency it conveys.

The underlying drama for building/unbuilding is that the built environment is an extractive industry, as much as mining is.

Materials all come from nature, and some are then further transformed through massive carbon emissions to create concrete and steel for instance, which further depletes nature.

The move to stop new construction looks like it started to gain traction from at Harvard University  but its genesis points back to French architect and urban designer Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and her book A Moratorium on New Construction

In one interview Malterre-Barthes was asked what architects would do if not design new buildings.

“Take care of our existing building stock,” she says.

“If we don’t build new, we have to take care of the stuff we already have, right? Our existing stock is immense if you consider it globally. Apart from renovation and adaptive reuse, maintenance could also be an architect’s primary task, something Menna Agha already articulated.”

Architects’ focus could shift to maintenance, given that in many countries they’re responsible for how the building operates for several years after completion but are not yet paid for this, she says.

The other big job they have – she notes is, as we said above – is to design futures.

But their training is limited to the styles and materials that make up business as usual. They’re deprives of known ancient Indigenous knowledge systems that reveal “other ways of creating climatic and material solutions”.

What about housing?

Caring for our existing buildings with new vigour and imagination might also solve our housing crisis Malterre-Barthes says, since building new housing does not generally benefit the people who need housing the most.

On carbon, this architect verges on devasting. There’s a carbon myopia at play she says.

“I think at times the decarbonisation discourse is repackaged greenwashing. Life cycle assessments and carbon calculations are just tools. They can be used to serve problematic narratives that suggest, for instance, demolishing and building new is better than upgrading a structure. This is one limit of these calculations.” 

There’s an innate failure in these tools to quantify damage to community networks destroyed by demolition and to nature from material extraction, she says

These are deeply uncomfortable views and we know they don’t align with the reality of the industry that its most committed sustainability advocates face on a daily basis.

One insider told us not long ago that we had no idea how difficult it is to get any advances across the line.

Then there is the argument that in the face of this reality what’s critical is that we head in the right direction.

We don’t offer the above observations to say we need these radical ideas implemented tomorrow but as thoughts and goals that should guide whatever we impose on this beautiful fragile planet of ours.

For our Carbon Triggers Big Debate on Tuesday, what we hope for most of all is to acknowledge a North Star of our choosing and to see what shape that escaping genie takes.