Sustainability

While architects cannot solve all the world’s ecological problems, we can design energy efficient, socially responsible buildings and we can influence transport patterns through urban planning. Importantly, sustainability also implies a way of building that is sensitive to its location and the culture that has shaped it. Although we work on a scale unimaginable 40 years ago, sustainability is an issue that has driven the work of the practice since the early days and continues to inform what we do today. It is a thread that runs through from the very beginning to the present and on into the future.

Sustainability is a word that has become fashionable over the last decade. However, sustainability is not a matter of fashion, but survival. The United Nations, in its latest Global Environmental Outlook, outlined a series of possible environmental scenarios for the next thirty years. At worst, it foresaw crises triggered by increasing water shortages, global warming and pollution. It suggested that these trends might be slowed, but only if nations work together to address radically the global consumption of natural resources and energy, and to halt man’s degradation of the environment.

It is generally accepted that global warming is due to rising atmospheric concentrations of ‘greenhouse’ gases – most importantly carbon dioxide and methane. But few people are aware that in the industrialised world buildings consume half the energy we generate and are responsible for half the carbon emissions, the remainder being divided almost equally between transport and industry. Architects clearly have a role to play in challenging this equation.

Sustainability requires us to think holistically. The location and function of a building; its flexibility and life span; its orientation, form and structure; its heating and ventilation systems and the materials used; together impact upon the amount of energy required to build and maintain it, and travel to and from it. Only by finding new solutions to these problems can we create sustainable forms of building for the future.

This is something that has motivated us as designers from the very beginning and offers one of our greatest challenges going forward. To help us make new advances in sustainable design we have within our studio our own Research and Development Group, which includes a Sustainability Forum. The Forum was established to consolidate and develop the practice’s knowledge base and has allowed us to develop better access to information on new products, materials, and research findings. In many of our projects we have pioneered solutions using renewable energy sources, which offer dramatic reductions in pollution. Examples, which include the Commerzbank Headquarters in Frankfurt, the New German Parliament at the Reichstag, City Hall, Greater London Authority Headquarters, the Free University in Berlin, the Hearst Headquarters in New York, and the Masdar initiative in Abu Dhabi, are not confined to buildings. Working with industry we have created a new generation of super-efficient wind turbines and new forms of cladding systems that can harvest solar energy.