Modern Building Design

Video Transcript
Week 1 Step No. 1.5
Session Title Are Buildings Evil – Part 1
Presenter Professor David Coley

Are buildings evil? Hello, and thank you for watching this lecture. What I'd like to do
today is to change the way you look at buildings. I would like your eyes to be drawn
automatically towards the overglazed facades, the uninsulated walls, the unnecessary
heating systems, the incomprehensible controls, and the gaps around external doors
that are all around you.

If you start to recognise these elements of poor architecture and engineering, I will
have been partly successful. However, if you start to see these as morally
unacceptable and ugly, then I will have truly succeeded. In short, I want to change
your aesthetic values.

I probably need to be a bit clearer about the title of the lecture. I looked up the
definition of evil, and found this. Being inanimate objects, it would be impossible for a
building to be seen as conscious, or capable of deliberate action. So, maybe a better
title would be "Are we who commission, purchase, design, build, operate, or occupy
buildings evil?"

Being that we all carry at least one of these functions, this is clearly an unsettling
question, particularly as we as individuals tend to each believe ourselves to be
reasonably good people and our actions logical, even if others aren't. The words in the
definition that I would like you to pay attention to are conscious and harm. It is
against these that I suggest we test ourselves.

I only plan to talk about one aspect of buildings, their energy consumption, and the
implications this has for the planet's climate. There are other environmental issues for
the built environment, including water use, the use of harmful chemicals, indoor air
quality, damp, mould growth, hypothermia, and fuel poverty. However, I believe
climate change trumps all of these as a global concern.

How much will the climate change? This is unknown. But even if we rapidly rectify our
behaviour, almost all estimates point to at least a two degrees centigrade rise in
mean global air temperature, and at least four degrees if we do little. Being that we

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are doing next to nothing, it might be best to make four degrees the working
assumption.

So, how much difference will four degrees make? Well, the difference in annual
temperature between Nice and London is only five degrees centigrade. And, as the
warming will be greater over land than oceans, we might like to plan for at least such
a rise. This is going to be a considerable challenge to the developed world. But what
about those already on the edge?

The graphic shows in yellow and brown those parts of the planet that will not be able
to support their populations because the conditions will mean that they will not be
able to grow enough food, or they will simply be under water if we allow a four
degrees rise in temperature. There is little controversial in the image. The science is
sound, and the assumptions that went into producing it are extremely conservative.

So, what is the plan for those living in the yellow and brown areas? I can only see
three possibilities. One, encourage mass migration into the green areas, like the UK,
Canada, and Siberia. We might be talking about a billion people, so we need to ask if
this is likely to be politically acceptable. Two, we force people to stay in the yellow
areas, and feed them through a massive permanent Berlin-style airlift. Three, we let
them die. I can't see any other options.

It is worth reflecting that many of the countries that will suffer the most are those
with the lowest per capita carbon emissions, whilst those with the highest are likely
to suffer the least, in part because they will be able to import food if necessary, or
build sea defences. So, it would be true to say our carbon emissions will harm the
poor and the already hungry in Africa and Asia far more than those in North America
and northern Europe.

Hence, any organisation that is in a state of buildings and therefore emits carbon, yet
cannot show sustained measured progress towards greatly reduced emissions, might
be accused by future generations of something akin to institutional racism. The same
accusation could be made of countries that do not show considerable progress, either.
Racism is a strong word to be using, but it's hard to escape it.

So, to what degree are buildings implicated in climate change? If we look at where in
an industrial society carbon emissions come from, we find that half are associated
with heating, cooling, lighting, and other non-industrial activities in our buildings. This
makes the building sector the largest single emitter of carbon, not, as many people
assume, industry, aircraft, or 4x4s.

If we could zero-carbon the built environment, we would have gone a long way to
solving the problem of climate change. The sad truth is that, unlike other sectors, we
do know how to do this, and in a cost-effective way. This is our first hint that we
might be evil, as we are clearly consciously not doing so. There is another relevant
characteristic that buildings have - they last a long time. A new, energy inefficient

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building built today will continue to be inefficient long after its occupants have
bought new efficient cars or computers.

It is interesting to compare the difference in energy efficiency between a fuel-efficient

car and a non-fuel-efficient one, and that of an efficient and an inefficient house. A
highly efficient car might do 75 miles to the gallon. A 4x4, 20 miles to the gallon. A
difference of less than a factor of four. An inefficient house however, might cost
£1,500 a year to heat, yet an efficient one only £50. This is a factor of 30. So, why is
there an increasing criticism of the gas-guzzling car and its owner, but little of the
owner of the gas-guzzling house or office?

I'm not sure that we've got into the position where we see the energy-related issues
of buildings in any kind of visceral way. We need a new way of thinking, a new
language to relate the form of such buildings to the harm they are starting to do to
those around the world less fortunate than ourselves. We need to be able to spot the
difference between an efficient and an inefficient building as we walk around town or
across campus, or view a set of plans.

Once we can do this, we then need to react to poor architecture not just
intellectually, but emotionally, much as we have learned to do over issues of slavery,
famine, racism, and gender. Only then will we be able to bring enough passion to the
issue and create enough momentum to force those designing or purchasing buildings
to apply technologies that reduce this harm.

Interestingly, the problem isn't, in many ways, the building. A simple house built of
little more than stone, mud, and straw 200 years ago would have been heated and lit
by an open fire and a few candles, and hence used very little energy. And none of it
would have come from fossil fuels. The problem is that now we wish to cut ourselves
completely off from the seasons around us, and experience much higher temperatures
in the winter and cooler ones in summer, and to have lots of lights, and to do this with
total disregard to the planet's well-being, or much of its population.

Most of us don't live or work in mud cottages. Surely, with the invention of modern
materials and techniques, we must be using a lot less energy per building. After all,
we have loft insulation, cavity walls, and double glazing. Unfortunately, the evidence
doesn't look good. The graph shows the current mean energy use of a large number of
schools in England as a function of the date of their construction.

So, in general, a new school uses no less energy today than an old Victorian school
does today. This doesn't look good if our philosophy towards future low-energy
buildings is just to add a bit more insulation every few years. We've had a bit more
luck with domestic properties. But even here, the suppression of energy use has been
modest, and only recent. A 1980s house uses no less energy today than a Victorian
one does today.

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We urgently need to have a totally different philosophy, and to make the jump to
buildings that use almost no energy. In commercial properties, the story is much the
same. Here's one example from the university sector. This very recent, well-insulated
triple-glazed university office building uses the same amount of energy per square
metre as this old single-glazed uninsulated 1950s office block on the same campus.

No one would accept the same level of performance from a car or airplane built today
as one built 60 years ago. Yet in construction, this is seen as fine. Some of you are
possibly wondering why we have so dramatically failed to reduce energy consumption
in our buildings. The really embarrassing thing is that we don't know why.

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