It might not seem intuitive, but beauty is important in sustainability – the more we value something from an emotional point of view, the more we will look after it. It’s why beauty is one of the “petals” of achievement that can bestow Living Building Challenge status.
Danish architect Lasse Lind, who is a partner of GXN, the innovation arm of 3XN, and designer of the new Sydney Fish Markets and Quay Quarter, says the way we see beauty and value can change. Think of the 80s buildings, once considered beautiful but now relegated to “ugly”.
The same might go for the swathes of building stock worldwide built in the 60s. Feelings change. Lind says it’s the power of fashion, “call it the zeitgeist” he says. We think of plain 60s flats now considered “cool”. Perhaps the enormous planetary value of retaining embodied carbon can become something that morphs aesthetically, he posits.
This is just a taste of the wider dimensions of how to think about buildings that Lasse will bring to our 1 April leaders forum, Building/Unbuilding – what construction needs now.
Speaking from Denmark on Wednesday evening, Sydney time, Lind reveals a robust intellect that he brings to the problems of our built environment.
Surprisingly, given the received wisdom on all things Danish, Lind is not uncritical.
Yes, Denmark has perfected prefab or Modern Methods of Construction, but maybe too perfectly, he suggests.
But Lind says there’s been a cost to pay for Denmark’s early work.
MMC has delivered loads of housing, and it’s “perfected a very efficient way of constructing” but in the process, it’s also lost something, a “sort of craftsmanship of buildings”.
In its place has been “a factory made product, rather than a building being some sort of cultural and social endeavour.”
Worse is that this efficiency has been delivered with an unfortunate abundance of concrete as its primary raw material.
“So, we are spending vast amounts of carbon and resources on essentially producing concrete buildings and brick buildings …that are not really adaptable and flexible to future change.
“In a way, we’ve been perfecting the wrong things.”
Lind’s company – and his country – is looking for better materials more in keeping with the needs of our planetary challenges.
Prefabrication in Australia makes a lot of sense given the scale of the housing need, but it needs to avoid the losses that Denmark has made in “quality – urban quality; architectural quality”.
Lind says there’s a lot of interest in alternatives to concrete such as timber and fast growing bio composite materials such as hemp, eelgrass and switchgrass.
These are also being pursued in Australia, and Lind is familiar with the work of Tim Schork at Queensland University of Technology.
Eel grass, he says, is of particular interest in his home country – it grows in water and has multiple uses such as insulation or for processing into boards.
“Essentially, it’s a very traditional building material. So, in many ways, we are trying to take some of these traditional materials that are off the land, that is local, but then bring them into an industrialised, pre-fabricated methodology, because that’s how we build today.”
This can re-introduce the organic and emotional feel of traditional materials to some extent he says, but through an efficient industrialised process.
Design also plays a part, he says. It’s where you can generate “quality for the users, and that has a quality for the city”.
Of course, the big and growing focus is on materials that can also be recycled.
There’s a tradition in Northern Europe of what’s called “half timbered houses”, essentially houses where the timber and wood were recycled through different generations of buildings, but where the style of the buildings and appearance was highly localised by the materials available in that area.
“For me, that’s a blueprint on how we should look at industrialised buildings today. We should enable that continuous reuse of resources, that kind of, let’s say, pre fabrication or kind of modular logic, but at the same time, allow for local materials, local adaptations, local styles, which is something that we’ve lost through modernism.”
How to achieve these ends in Australia is the big question.
MMC needs a continuous pipeline of demand that can make the business viable. It’s the absence of this that has sent soaring ambitions in this field to the wall.
We flag our notion that a big government commitment to housing could solve a great many problems for the built environment and Australia’s productivity at the same time.
Things like the pipeline of demand for MMC; the generation of a market for sustainable low carbon materials, better productivity in building but also in the general economy by removing the stress and time wasting of homes far from places of work, the ability to train a new generation of apprentices… and more.
Lind agrees that there is a place for the growing support for governments to build large quantities of social and affordable housing.
Designing for disassembly
Lind’s company has gained a lot of regard for its design for disassembly.
So, what are the opportunities for this?
This is a hard call. The building industry is known for its focus on repetition and minimising risk. Which is another way of saying “business and usual”.
Changing up the game is not hard from a technical perspective, Lind says. “It’s not rocket science to design things so that they can be taken apart. So, I think the challenge is not a technical one.”
In his company’s big experiment, one key solution was to use lime mortar instead of cement based mortar. This means the mortar can be simply hosed out.
His big point is it’s not that hard. Nor even more expensive.
“If you simply use a different type of mortar and a different type of joints, you can essentially build in the same way, but then you can take it apart.”
In his company’s experiment, it was “2 per cent innovations, maybe even 5 per cent”, but that came with no extra cost.
“It’s actually not more expensive, it’s not more difficult, it’s just a slightly different way of building.”
So how do we break through the barrier?
We need to convince people “it’s the right thing to do,” Lind says.
And maybe a change in the business model.
A house built for disassembly does not come down after two years – it might be 20 years before the need emerges. For this you need not so much deep pockets but long range pockets.
Again, something for governments to think about.
Don’t miss out on hearing from Lasse Lind and the two experts joining him.