Sustainability

In his study Ten Shades of Green: Architecture and the Natural

World (2000–05), Peter Buchanan supplements his descriptive
analysis of ten exemplary green buildings with ten precepts that
cover a wide spectrum of sustainable practices, from the
optimization of natural shade, light and ventilation to the use of
renewable sources of natural energy; from the elimination of
waste and pollution to the reduction of the amount of energy
embodied in the construction materials themselves. Buchanan
writes:
The common building material with the least embodied energy is
wood, with about 640 kilowatt-hours per ton ... Hence the
greenest building material is wood from sustainably managed
forests. Brick is the material with the next lowest amount of
embodied energy, 4 times (X) that of wood, then concrete (5X),
plastic (6X), glass (14X), steel (24X), aluminum (126X). A
building with a high proportion of aluminum components can
hardly be green when considered from the perspective of total life
cycle costing, no matter how energy-efficient it might be.4
Statistics such as these should certainly give us pause for
thought, including the sobering fact that the built environment
accounts for some 40 per cent of total energy consumption in the
developed world, comparable to what is consumed by road and jet
travel. Much of this profligate use is due to artificial lighting,
which swallows up some 65 per cent of our total consumption of
electricity, with air conditioning and digital equipment coming a
close second. It is equally sobering that a large part of any
contemporary land-fill is invariably made up of building waste: it
accounts for some 33 per cent of the average municipal waste
stream in the United States.
In the face of these dystopic statistics, Buchanan’s
recommendations have a markedly cultural character, such as his
advocacy of building according to the anti-ergonomic principle of
‘long life/loose fit’. This precept was naturally integral to the
load-bearing masonry structures of the past, bequeathing us a
legacy of eminently adaptable buildings, mostly dating from the
18th and 19th centuries, many of which we have been able to put
to new uses. Such residual value is more difficult to achieve today
on account of our standards of minimal space and our
commitment to the paradoxically inflexible lightweight building
techniques of our time.
Buchanan insists that every building should be closely
integrated into its context. He therefore urges architects to pay as
much attention to such factors as microclimate, topography and
vegetation as to the more familiar functional and formal concerns
addressed in standard practice. Exemplary in this regard is Renzo
Piano’s Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre [797], built in
Noumea, New Caledonia, in 1998, where the so-called laminated
timber ‘cases’, 20 to 30 metres (65 to 88 feet) in height, refer, at a
giant scale, to the traditional Kanak hut. These cases are capped
halfway up by sloping roofs that are either solid or glazed
according to the function of the spaces beneath, which range from
meeting halls to exhibition spaces and dance studios. The inclined
roofs are framed and stiffened by steel rings, and, where glazed,
are covered by a layer of external louvres. The remainder of the
complex consists of a single-storey orthogonal structure, housing
exhibition space, administration and research offices, and a 400-
seat lecture hall. Informally arranged along one side of this mat-
building, the timber cases evoke through their spire-like forms of
varying height the profile of a traditional Kanak village. While
this allusion was endorsed by the Kanak themselves, one can
hardly overlook the post-colonial context of this work – above all
the paradoxical fact that, funded by the French state, it stands as a
memorial to the Kanak freedom fighter Tjibaou.
797 Piano, Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre, Noumea, New Caledonia,
1998. The timber ‘cases’ simulate the profile of the traditional Kanak hut.

Buchanan’s eighth precept stresses the crucial role to be

played by public transport in sustaining the ecological balance of
any particular land settlement pattern, since urban sprawl, no
matter how green it might be in itself, can hardly outweigh the
energy consumed in the daily commute by automobile between
home and work and its accompanying environmental pollution. In
opposing this entropic prospect, Buchanan stresses the benefits to
public health that derive from dense urban form that is well
served by public transport and thus sustainable in the wider sense
of the term.
An entirely different stratagem towards sustainability is
evident in the forty-five-storey Commerzbank [798, 799], realized
by Foster Associates in Frankfurt in 1997, structured around an
atrium rising for the full height of the building, with four-storey-
high sky-gardens alternating from one side of the atrium to the
other to admit light and air into the central shaft. The
Commerzbank is also clad in double glazing throughout. Here, the
outer skin serves to buffer the wind and weather, so that the
manually operated lights of the inner skin may be opened at will
to ventilate the offices. The building is automatically sealed and
air-conditioned only when the climate is extremely hot or cold.
The design’s most radical spatio-social innovation turns on the
displacement of the service core to the apices of the triangular
plan, thereby affording visual access across the atrium to the
elevated sky gardens and vice versa. These garden terraces not
only serve to ventilate the atrium but also to provide an interim
semi-public breakout space. Adjustable glass dampers span the
atrium at the level of every twelve floors in order to modulate the
Venturi effect of air movement within the central shaft.

798 Foster Associates, Commerzbank, Frankfurt, 1997. Section showing

air movement through the atrium.
799 Foster Associates, Commerzbank, Frankfurt, 1997. Sketch of a typical
view across the offices into the ‘sky-gardens’.

In the United States, where 5 per cent of the world’s population consumes
24 per cent of the world’s energy, there has been a tendency to deny the
reality of global warming and to continue with the maximized consumption
of non-renewable energy. This denial is evident in the reluctance of the
American government to enforce progressive environmental regulations as
a standard mode of practice, an obtuseness that has sometimes been
welcomed by architects on the grounds that sustainable design curbs their
freedom of expression. Such an attitude is as reactionary as it is perverse,
given that responding symbiotically to the exigencies of both climate and
context has invariably served as a mainspring for tectonic invention since
time immemorable. Equally sustainable – given our proliferating of
building waste through wanton destruction – is, as Buchanan implies, the
potential for conservation, conversion, repair and reuse of existing
buildings. This is exemplified by the brilliant restoration, expansion and
refurbishment in 2012 of Astley Castle, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, UK, by
the architects Witherford Watson Mann, for which they were awarded the
Stirling Prize in 2013.
Materiality
Unlike the ubiquitous white architecture of the early Modern
Movement, when buildings were invariably rendered in cement
over a light skeleton frame and treated as though they were made
of a neutral material verging on the immaterial (a condition that
was virtually achieved after 1945 with the ubiquitous, totally
glazed Miesian office building), the expressive materiality to
which this section alludes has at least some of its origins in the
load-bearing brick churches that the Swedish master Sigurd
Lewerentz designed during the last two decades of his life: St
Mark’s in Björkhagen (1958–60) and St Peter’s, Klippan (1963–
66). No one has written more perceptively of the expressive role
played by brick in these works than Richard Weston:
the sense of containment by bricks is overwhelming. You walk on
brick floors, between walls of brick, beneath brick vaults, which
span between steel joists, swelling gently like ocean waves ...
what photographs cannot convey is the almost preternatural
darkness, which binds the fabric into an all-enveloping unity.5
Among the most accomplished practitioners of this emphasis on
material have been the Swiss-German minimalists Jacques
Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, beginning with their holiday house
in Tavole, Italy (1988), in which stones from the site were loosely
packed into a delicate reinforced-concrete frame, and their Ricola
Warehouse in Laufen, Switzerland (1987), which, set before the
cliff-face of a disused quarry, was faced by way of contrast with
fibre-cement planks of varying depth. The simple spatial
requirements in each instance enabled the architects to treat the
material as the primary aesthetic presence in contrast to the rather
passive character of the space-form. This emphasis on the tactile
character of material would henceforth become the hallmark of
their practice, a mode that invariably has been at its most effective
in small and spatially unified commissions, from their copper-
sheathed six-storey signal tower in Basel (1995) to their Dominus
Winery [800], in Yountville, California, of 1997, a simple single-
storey masonry enclosure made out of granite rocks of varying
size held in place by wire mesh. This highly aestheticized
approach, with its tendency to emphasize the external surface
rather than the internal structure or space, has since become an
increasingly decorative aspect of their architecture.

800 Herzog and de Meuron, Dominus Winery, Yountville, California,

1997. Gabion construction in granite.

Peter Zumthor, practising out of Haldenstein in the

Graubünden, is the other leading Swiss-German minimalist
architect. He first rose to prominence with his all-timber shingle-
clad St Benedict Chapel built in Sumvitg in 1988. He would go
on to consolidate his emerging craft-based reputation with his
thermal baths at Vals of 1996, where thin layers of precisely cut
stone (locally quarried gneiss) were used to encase the massive
concrete matrix of a reconstituted bathing establishment, yielding
a sombre yet sensuously introspective interior partially hidden
within the interstices of a rather remote Swiss Alpine village.
 Trained as a cabinetmaker and with years of experience in
conservation work before beginning to practise as an independent
architect, Zumthor could hardly be more removed from the
sceptical aestheticism of Herzog and de Meuron, even though he
too displays a tendency to favour surface effect over either spatial
or structural values.

Despite subtle differences in their approach, both Herzog and

de Meuron and Zumthor have nonetheless exercised a common
influence on a whole generation of Swiss architects, including, to
varying degrees, Diener and Diener, Gigon/Guyer, Peter Markli,
Marcel Meili and the firm of Burckhalter and Sumi. Where the
practice of Annette Gigon and Mark Guyer is concerned, among
their finest work to date has been the Kirchner Museum in Davos,
Switzerland, with which they made their name in 1992. A decade
later they capped this triumph with an equally tectonic
archaeological park built in Osnabrück, Germany, to
commemorate the battle of Varus in AD 9. Both works are
predicated on the striking use of contrasting materials: fair-faced
concrete with panels of steel-framed translucent glass in the case
of the Davos museum, and marine plywood plus Corten steel
retaining walls in Osnabrück.

Swiss-German minimalism would also seem to have exercised

a certain influence outside the country, notably affecting the work
of the Dutch architect Wiel Arets, whose Maastricht Academy of
Art (1989–93) [801] was deftly inserted into the historic core of
the city. The complex configuration of this building consists of a
four-storey trabeated reinforced-concrete frame filled with glass
blocks.
801 Arets, Maastricht Academy of Art, 1989–93.

A comparable emphasis on a single all-enveloping material

also characterizes the work of the Japanese architect Kengo
Kuma, whose Stone Museum in Nasu in the Tochigi Prefecture
(2000) is constructed out of narrow bands of stone. A very similar
emphasis is present in Kuma’s stone-faced extension of the
Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee, Scotland, completed in
2016.

While a mineral origin is still perceivable in brick, glass,

concrete and even metal, it is surely undeniable that stone and
wood display their original in nature with a phenomenological
intensity that can hardly be rivalled; it is this intensity that endows
them with a primordial sensibility that other building materials
lack.
 Timber has also played a remarkable role in recent bridge
construction, particularly in Switzerland, in the hands of such
distinguished engineers as Jürg Conzett and Walter Bieler – the
former for the inverted, cable-tied timber trusswork of his
Traversina footbridge, erected in 1996 across the deep Via Mala
ravine in the Graubünden, and the latter for a 30-metre (98-foot)
laminated straight-timber span built across the river Thur at
Bonaduz in the same year.

An additional factor that has completely transformed the

scope of material expression today is the greatly increased ease
with which materials can be transported across the globe, from
their site of origin to the point of their final application, with stops
for specialized fabrication in between. This was already the case
with Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
of 1984, which was clad with a red sandstone quarried in India
and machine-cut in Italy. A similar but even more dramatic
exercise in global production was the totally glazed exhibition
pavilion built in the grounds of the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio,
in 2006 to the designs of the Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima
and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA). Storey-height sheets of iron-free
plate glass were rolled in Germany, shipped to China where they
were laminated, tempered, cut and bent, then transported to the
United States where, to add insult to injury, they now enclose the
Toledo Glass Museum in a city which, prior to the deskilling of
American industry, had been one of the primary centres for glass
production in North America.
Habitat
Our failure to develop a sustainable, homeostatic pattern of
residential land settlement over the past half-century is the tragic
corollary of our incapacity to curb our appetite for consuming
every possible resource. Towards an Urban Renaissance,
pointedly published by the British government at the millennium,
estimated that 3.8 million new households would be required in
the UK up to 2025. It recommended that two-thirds of these units
should be built on existing intra-urban detoxified brownfield sites
rather than be allowed to contribute to the subdivision of formerly
agricultural greenfield land. A rider to the report published in
2005 showed that 70 per cent of then-current British development
was on brownfield sites, as opposed to 56 per cent in 1997.
Although aspiration to a middle-class way of life tends
increasingly to be the norm irrespective of class, the challenge for
architects is how to create a sense of ‘home’ without resorting to
kitsch or indulging in a nostalgic iconography that has no relation
to our contemporary way of life. Low-rise, high-density housing
has long been a viable option: one thinks of the Siedlung Halen,
Berne, built to the designs of Atelier 5 in 1960 (see p. 360), and
the equally canonical, more extensive Puchenau settlement built
in stages along the Danube near Linz to the designs of the
Austrian architect Roland Rainer (see p. 587), the first phase of
which was completed between 1964 and 1967. What is
remarkable about this carpet housing model is the way in which it
may be brought to serve the housing needs of different classes,
from the urban poor of the developing world, who continue to
construct low-rise ‘squatter’ settlements, to the urbanized middle
classes of the developed world, who are served by the car and
occasionally by public transport. It is perhaps indicative of certain
cultural differences that while this mode of settlement may be
found fairly frequently throughout Continental Europe, it has
generally been resisted as a residential pattern in Anglo-American
society. As the transportation specialist Brian Richards noted in
his first study, New Movement in Cities of 1966, it is
economically impossible for public transport to complement car
use without the residential land-settlement pattern having a much
higher density than the average suburban subdivision.

While considering the genre of low-rise, high-density housing

as designed for low-income urban populations, we should
acknowledge two separate experimental housing estates, built in
Latin America some forty years apart, that now appear as mirror
images of one another: the Previ estate outside Lima, Peru, built
in 1974 during the government of Fernando Belaunde Terry,
under the direction of the British architect Peter Land; and the
realization of a prototypical settlement, designed by the Chilean
architect Alejandro Aravena and built under the auspices of the
Chilean Ministry of Housing in Iquique, Tarapacá, in 2004 [802].
The Previ estate entailed the construction of twenty-three
different types of low-rise units designed by various teams of
Peruvian and international architects, while the Elemental project
represented a collective effort to provide affordable dwellings
without overloading the occupants with debt. The first phase at
Iquique comprised one hundred ‘starter’ units, each 30 square
metres (323 square feet) in area and built at the cost of $7,500 per
unit. These three-storey narrow-fronted megara, built of concrete
block, provide for a living room/kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom
and an access stair. In order to allow for enlargements by the
occupants themselves, the units are spaced apart at intervals equal
to their width, so that additional rooms may be constructed easily
between the party walls. The block layout also yields a series of
small squares capable of functioning as communal spaces.
802 Aravena, housing project, Iquique, Tarapacá, 2004. Elevation.

The most crucial change that has occurred in the late 20th and
early 21st centuries is the engineered eclipse of subsidized rental
housing, which had been central to welfare state policy between
1945 and 1975. This has now been replaced, more or less
universally, by the ‘housing market’, which has done little to
alleviate either the perennial housing crisis or the proliferation of
suburban sprawl. A one-off exception is the medium-rise Quartier
McNair [803], completed in the Zehlendorf district of Berlin in
2003 to the designs of Baumschlager and Eberle together with the
Swiss architect Anatole du Fresne, who was formerly a member
of Atelier 5. The settlement consists of an orthogonal permutation
of 263 dwellings of two to three storeys, of varying plan type and
size, arranged in an alternating block pattern reminiscent of Le
Corbusier’s Pessac housing of 1926 (see p. 168). Despite the
green roofs and the deployment of solar panels, it is regrettable
from the viewpoint of sustainability that the parking areas were
not finished with permeable perforated-concrete paving rather
than asphalt. In Switzerland this method, facilitating the
absorption of storm water and the seeding of parking areas with
grass, is virtually a standard technique; it is only marginally more
expensive and is capable of offsetting the ‘urban heat-island
effect’ that is exacerbated by the use of asphalt. In the final
analysis, it is the overall form rather than the detail that allows the
Quartier McNair to function as a potential alternative ‘market’
model for inner-city housing. Not least among its virtues is the
fact that it is but twenty minutes by public transport from the
centre of Berlin.

803 Baumschlager, Eberle and du Fresne, Quartier McNair, Zehlendorf,

Berlin, 2003.

In terms of providing for the housing needs of the middle

classes, Baumschlager and Eberle have designed some of the
most viable medium-rise housing settlements of any practice in
Europe over the past two decades. Nowhere have they been more
successful in this regard than in their Lohbach Siedlung in
Innsbruck, Austria (2000) [804]. This generic four- to six-storey
development is predicated on apartments of varying size, planned
around four sides of a light-court. What imparts a culturally
ecological dimension to these blocks is the fact that apartment
balconies on the perimeter may be closed off with full-height
folding shutters so that, depending on the movement of the sun
and on the presence or absence of the occupants, the blocks
appear as forms of varying opacity. The overall composition has
been carefully considered in relation to the alpine backdrop, while
pedestrian movement at ground level has been enhanced by
sensitively landscaped gardens. In addition to the folding shutters,
the sustainability of this project stems from the provision of
photovoltaic panels, from the harvesting of rainwater, and from
the provision of a heat-recovery plant in the basement. At the
same time the luxurious ambience of the whole derives from its
facing materials: from the combination of copper-clad shutters,
glass balustrading, and the sliding full-height timber-louvred
screens that cover the window openings.

804 Baumschlager and Eberle, Lohbach Siedlung, Innsbruck, 2000.

All of these housing schemes are but various attempts to

reintegrate the individual dwelling into some kind of collective
whole, and it is just this drive to recover a former unity that has
led late modern architects like Steven Holl to search for new
forms of residential aggregation, from his Fukuoka housing
complex, completed in Japan in 1992, to his Hybrid Building in
Beijing. The latter comprises a self-contained urban fragment of
728 apartments housing 2,500 people together with the essential
services required by a neighbourhood of this size. These services
are housed partly in glazed bridges that link the eight apartment
towers, ranging from twelve to twenty-two storeys in height, so as
to form a loop around the central open space at ground level. The
latter is focused about a cinema complex, suspended above a
reflecting pool. The harvesting of rainwater in this ornamental
retention basin is only part of the comprehensive sustainable
strategy adopted in this development, which includes green roofs,
naturally ventilated and illuminated underground parking,
external sun blinds, openable windows, and, above all,
geothermal heating and cooling.