Creating an environment that is fit for the future
© 2015 – Alexandre Gonzalez
"We know how to build efficient carbon neutral buildings. The problem is that we don't," says Alistair Guthrie, Professor of Environmental Design at Nottingham University and Arup Fellow during a presentation at the opening of the Solar Decathlon Exhibition.
Alistair Guthrie is a professor of environmental design, and a leading thinker and practitioner in sustainable design and construction. As a fellow of Arup, he contributes to the firm’s reputation as the go-to office providing engineering solutions for some of the world’s most complex architectural projects, from the Sydney Opera House to the CCTV headquarters in Beijing China to more recently the Shard in London. He was invited to EPFL by Archizoom to talk about “Responsible Design” at the opening of the Solar Decathlon exhibition. We talked to him about Arup, the Solar Decathlon, and the role of architects and building engineers in mitigating climate change.
What would you say are the greatest challenges facing today’s architects and building engineers?
From my point of view, the biggest challenge is creating an environment that is fit for the future, not buildings and infrastructure that will become redundant in twenty years time because the technologies that power them and things that we consider to be important are not addressed. When we talk about a building being fit for the future, we aren’t only talking about its carbon footprint. We are also talking making buildings that are fit for living. Health, I believe, will be a major challenge, so what we build and the environments that we create need to be suitable for healthy living, improve our health, and be places where people enjoy being.
This works for new buildings, but what about the existing building stock?
I always say that in building design the first line of defense is the building itself – its fabric – and getting that right at the start is important. With existing buildings, we already have the fabric, which is often quite difficult to modify. This brings us to the second line of defense, its systems. Today we can make efficient systems for heating, for cooling, for lighting, and huge, huge developments in these areas have happened in the past 10-15 years that will help us to improve our existing building stock. And the final plank, the third line of defense, is renewable technologies – producing energy using renewable sources. And again, Europe has made quite big steps towards decarbonizing our power supply, and I think that will continue in the future.
With the COP21 Conference currently taking place in Paris, climate change is on a lot of people’s minds. Should architects and engineers lead the charge in providing new solutions to address climate change, or do states first need to impose stricter regulations?
Well, we know how to build efficient carbon neutral buildings. The problem is that we don’t. It’s not about coming up with new ideas or new technologies; basically we know what to do. What is holding us back is that people too often fall back on what they have done before. So there is a lack of invention, and it might be from the client, from the surveyor, the cost control, from the developer. So how you overcome some of those issues? At the beginning of a project, I like to say to the client or to the team that we should imagine what we could possibly achieve, and then aim for something that is better than normal.
One of the things that regulation does is, it levels the playing field. I think that some of the biggest advances that brought about better buildings had to do with regulation. I don’t necessarily like that idea, but it is what happens. If everybody is working in the same direction, we get good results.
How would a firm like Arup go about participating in the Solar Decathlon competition?
Most of our projects don’t involve architecture, but just about everything else, so we work with other architects to carry them out. That said, our way of working internally is as a combined discipline team. We don’t have structural engineers and electrical engineers and so on, but we all work in the same team. In the company, we have a person who leads the team and is responsible for bringing in all the disciplines that are necessary – sometimes from a much wider field that everything that we can offer –, and also organizes our collaboration with the architects. Most of our collaborations here are organized as workshops. We’ve found that the most successful collaborations are when we start the journey together, setting the right direction with all parties around the table. That, I think, enables you to integrate, to initiate new directions, new ideas, collaborations, and then you can move forward from there.
