perspective

Iain Borden

Sustainability and
architectural design
In April of 1958, a momentous event took place in
the history of UK architectural education: the
“Oxford Conference”, at which 50 architects met to
consider how architecture was to be taught. Their
decision? That, in contrast to previous
arrangements involving architectural practices,
architects should be predominantly taught within
universities, leading to a higher standard of both
professionalism and academicism among
architects. The result was a profound shift both in
the content and practice of architecture in the UK.

Half a century on, another “Oxford Conference” has been held, with
similar ambitions to “reset the agenda for architectural education”.
But this time around the focus is different, no longer about general
operations and standards, and instead concentrating on sustainability,
climate change, environmental responsibility and renewable energy.
The need and urgency for such discussions is, undoubtedly,
considerable. The exigencies of a world in which temperatures,
sea-levels, populations, pollution and fuel costs are all rising, while
fossil-based energy reserves are falling, mean architecture must do
more to help in the creation of truly sustainable cities and buildings.
So why do I feel a certain sense of unease at the clarion call of this
latest Oxford Conference, and why, indeed, could it even threaten to
reduce architecture’s great capacity to contribute creatively to our
cities today?
One of the suggestions implicit in many discussions of sustainability
is that the architectural profession in general and architecture schools
in particular are somehow unaware of the environmental agenda, and
that some kind of enormous restructuring or “resetting” of
architectural education is therefore required. This is just poppycock.
Most if not all architectural schools are acutely aware of the relevance
of sustainability, and even the most cursory of glances at the various
summer degree shows held around the country shows an incredible
variety of approaches. At the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture,
both whole teaching groups and innumerable individuals are
looking at a whole range of different ways in which sustainability
can be developed and embedded within architecture in general
and architectural education in particular. Perhaps most readily
understandable here are technical solutions to problems of
sustainability in architecture – those dealing with materials,
insulation, construction and the like in order to decrease energy
usage and increase energy-efficient performance.
Prototype pavilion with deployable external insulation.
Funded by UrbanBuzz, Make Architects, DSP
Architecture, the UCL Bartlett Architecture Research
Fund and the UCL Graduate School
For example, one group within the school, lead by Stephen Gage
(Professor of Innovative Technology), is exploring ways in which
buildings might actually adapt physically according to the usage
patterns of its inhabitants, and so minimise energy use and losses.
Part of their exploration has been through a full-scale prototype
pavilion (ingeniously based on a standard shipping container unit)
which uses deployable external insulation to dramatically enhance the
environmental performance of windows, simply by closing them up
whenever people are not actually present in the internal space. The
thermal shutters are designed to encourage big windows back into
buildings, countering recent trends to reduce window size to prevent
heat loss.
But architecture is not just about technology, and we need social
propositions as to how architecture interacts with lifestyle and urban
design. Here the imaginative and creative architecture can help to
speculate about possible futures outside of some of the more usual
constraints of commercial architectural practice. For example, one of
our graduate teaching groups, Unit 12, led by Jonathan Hill
(Professor of Architecture & Visual Theory) and his colleagues
Matthew Butcher and Elizabeth Dow, explored the architectural and
urban design of the town of “Hubbert Curve” (named after
geoscientist M. King Hubbert who predicted that available fossil fuel
reserves would be dramatically reduced by 2050 and fully depleted by
2200).

Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
“Town of Hubbert Curve/Levittown”, section through
hemp-farmer’s house, with ice room cooling system
– John Ashton, Diploma Unit 12, tutors Jonathan Hill,
Matthew Butcher and Elizabeth Dow
In this stimulating proposition, each student’s project has a
reciprocal relationship with at least three other projects in the town.
As they explain:
“Sustainable, the town trades and exchanges with its environment; one
expands and contracts, receives and donates, adapts and adjusts, in
response to the other. Self-sufficient, the town generates its own energy;
each building produces its own energy and creates an excess that serves the
general needs of the town. Discursive, the town encourages social and
political engagement, and the interaction of public and private lives.
Independent, the town learns from earlier centuries as well as those more
recent, inventing and adapting narratives, histories and myths that define
its character. Seasonal, the town is responsive to its climate and site,
creating conditions that are conducive to its survival and growth.”
Significantly, these kinds of architectural and urban proposition not
only suggest new technical and social ways of addressing
sustainability, but also ways in which issues of sustainability can enter
into architecture in more subtle ways, and particularly by creating
new agendas for architectural aesthetics and representation. In
projects such as Kyle Buchanan’s “Super-Sextant” (graduate teaching
group Unit 11, led by Laura Allen and Mark Smout), one sees a new
architecture of vision, a project that responds to the landscape, the
horizon and the tides of the River Thames – that is, an architecture
which both reflects and helps to engender a deeper and more varied
appreciation of our natural landscape.
“Super Sextant”, view of model from above
– Kyle Buchanan, Diploma Unit 11, tutors Laura Allen
and Mark Smout
And in the proposal by cj Lim (Professor of Architecture & Cultural
Design) for a new eco-city in GuangMing, one sees an even more
ambitious proposal. Shortlisted by the Chinese Government in
an international competition, this design creates a whole new
landscape typology, incorporating farming into the fabric of
the city – lush grazing and arable land are placed on the roofs of the
huge circular towers that make up the city. Additional land for crops
is available on a series of eighty vertical farms; 10m2 allotments are
cantilevered off a central spine and stacked one above the other like
the branches of a giant tree, and dispersed throughout the city.
Water also plays a significant part in the proposition,
as cj explains:
“Lakes and reservoirs are used to reinforce the hydrology and ecological
dynamics of the site. The increased expanse of water encourages
displacement cooling of the surrounding areas and freshwater
fish-farming. The lotus, a multi-use cooking plant, displays poetic beauty
in the lakes, providing contrast to the robust arable fields.”
So what do these highly varied design propositions tell us about
sustainability, architecture and cities? Above all, they demonstrate
that what we need in architecture is not the unfortunately
all-too-common simplistic approach to architectural sustainability –
emphasizing environmental performance in largely functional and
economic terms and/or reducing it to a set of aesthetic and cultural
clichés based around green roofs, wind turbines and open-toed
sandal-wearing vegetarians – but a whole variety of different kinds of
architecture and architectural education. Above all, architecture
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
 “Architecture is not just about technology, and we need
social propositions as to how architecture interacts with
lifestyle and urban design. Here the imaginative and
creative architecture can help to speculate about possible
futures outside of some of the more usual constraints
of commercial architectural practice”

Project for GuangMing eco-city, China

– Prof cj Lim with Fulcrum, Techniker,
Alan Baxter Associates and others

schools must continue to develop and explore their own ways of dealing Profile / Professor Iain Borden
with sustainability, and the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture is
Educated at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
determined to pursue exactly this path. UCL, University of London and UCLA, Iain is an
architectural historian and urban commentator. His
Individual students, too, must be free to develop their individual wide-ranging historical and theoretical interests have
agendas and research, as befits graduate-level university study. It is lead to publications on, among other subjects, critical
worth remembering that students’ general competence in matters theory and architectural historical methodology, the
of sustainability and the environment is already guaranteed by the history of skateboarding as an urban practice,
boundaries and surveillance, Henri Lefebvre and
regulatory prescription of architecture courses, and this leaves some Georg Simmel, Renaissance urban space,
free to take on the sustainability agenda in much greater depth, architectural modernism and modernity, contemporary
but also others free to head off in other directions of investigation architectural practice and theory, film and
and speculation. architecture, gender and architecture, body spaces
and the experience of space. His photographs have
This raises the other subtext which often underlies calls for a greater been widely published both in his own publications
focus on sustainability, the suggestion – sometimes implicit, sometimes and those by other historians and architects. He is
currently working on a history of driving as a spatial
explicit – that sustainability is the problem, the most important issue experience of cities and architecture.
with which architecture must now get to grips. Well, no. Without for
Iain is a frequent contributor to conferences and
one minute wishing to decry the importance of sustainability, there are exhibitions and has lectured widely around the world.
at least three other areas of equal or perhaps greater significance, He is currently a member of the RIBA Education
as UCL’s Grand Challenges for research make clear: global health Committee and of the Standing Conference of Heads
(beyond malaria and HIV to all aspects of medical need across the of Schools of Architecture. He serves on the Editorial
Board of the ‘Journal of Architecture’, and is a Visiting
world), intercultural interaction (how societies, groups and individuals Examiner at Central St Martins. He has made
understand, respect and live with each other) and human wellbeing frequent appearances on television and radio in the
(all of the qualities of everyday life that make us truly alive, from UK and abroad, and is currently working on a
political rights to personal love, from enjoyment of the arts to television documentary about skateboarding and
urban space.
expressions of ideas). Whatever the exigencies and urgency of
sustainability, these other three agendas also require our architectural He has a number of PhD students researching
historical and theoretical studies of architecture in the
attention, for without these qualities and standards of life then we
USA, Indonesia, South Africa and Europe, and
cease to be truly human, to be really global citizens. dealing with such topics as representations of
landscape, race and politics, sexuality and space,
What are we left with? Sustainability in architecture and architectural postcolonialism, wastelands, architectural modernism
education? Yes, of course. Is there more to be done? Yes, undoubtedly. and postmodernism, and 18th-century roads.
Is this the only thing facing architecture today, and which must be
focused on above all else? Clearly, no. Instead, we need that diversity
of approaches to architecture that, when vigorously and creatively Contact
adopted, can serve both architecture and society as a whole so well. Professor Iain Borden
A diversity of architecture schools (and other schools in the UK and Professor of Architecture & Urban Culture
across the world are pursuing their own ways of tackling sustainability and Director
in architecture and urbanism), a diversity of practices, a diversity of UCL Bartlett School of Architecture
architectures, a diversity of students. This is how architecture can best
Steering Committee Member
continue to be at once imaginative, creative, thoughtful and truly UCL Urban Laboratory
useful, and this is how, ultimately the real challenges facing us today –
+44 (0)20 7679 4821
including sustainability – can be best addressed. i.borden@ucl.ac.uk

Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities