- Climate emergency: a history of architecture from the bottom up
The architect and visionary Richard Buckminster Fuller knew it with the solemnity of Greta Thunberg, but with some more poetry: we live on a fragile planet that moves through the sidereal abyss, piloted by a species with suicidal tendencies, the human.
As the last Climate Summit has once again revealed, the reckless behavior of the species at the controls of the planet is due to the difficulty in implementing the agreements required by the change of course. Very complex agreements that concern politics, the economy and ways of life, and which are supported by statistics in which hardly any sector goes well: from Chinese or Indian manufacturers who did not know how to 'get on time' to industrialization to the urbanites at the wheel of cars whose emissions pollute as much as the farts emitted by the millions of cows destined to satisfy our carnivorous gluttony.
Even worse than the Chinese industries or Irish cows come architects, urban planners, engineers and real estate developers. In the capitalism of the megalopolis, the construction sector already accounts for a third of global warming and, although this alarming fact has given rise to the promulgation of countless laws and regulations whose purpose is to promote energy savings, we must recognize that such Measures remain ineffective. Ineffective not only for its foreseeable administrative vulgarity, but, above all, for its simplistic claim to sustain itself fundamentally in the calculation , as if making buildings, cities and habits clean and efficient were the exclusive competence of management , that word that the Technocratic idolatry has raised the condition of fetish.
The other great technocratic fetish of our day is, of course, sustainability , benevolent and almost universal concept ("sustainable development", "sustainable economy", "sustainable society", "sustainable culture", "sustainable cooking") which, applied to architecture, it serves to label buildings constructed with low ecological impact materials, and whose machinery and maintenance consume little energy over the years.
This sustainable mode - this accounting mode - of understanding the relationship of buildings with the environment would have nothing wrong if it were not because it is rudimentary in its eagerness to reduce the complexity of the architecture to numerical data. The measure of architectural sustainability is given today by certificates issued by specialized companies that, accrediting the ecological condition of a building, also endow it with an ethical prestige that often produces perplexity : how is it possible - we ask ourselves - that so many completely glazed constructions and hermetic can emboss green certificates despite refuting the most common sense?
The question applies to skyscrapers dizzyingly rising from the desert sands in Dubai and Doha. It is also valid for those who flourished in many European capitals, from the ecological glass splinter -The Shard- carved by Renzo Piano for London by Boris Johnson to the no less vitreous and ecological tower that the Swiss Herzog & de Meuron built for the pharmaceutical Roche in the historic center of Basel. And finally, for icons such as the recently inaugurated Leeza Soho Tower in Beijing , the contorted posthumous skyscraper of Zaha Hadid that boasts a prestigious ecological seal despite its glass skin, its anti-urban vocation and that 194 meter high atrium that convert one of those buildings in which what is not built is worth more than what is built.
These examples - just a handful among thousands - suggest something disturbing: that the most banal approach to sustainability, based on mere data computation, tends to dispense with aspects as essential to architecture as type, form, constructive tradition. and the urban model. Reduced to an affordable calculation for the rich, the march of the sustainable - environmental marketing - ends up functioning as an alibi of buildings that have no other value than their prestigious and expensive environmental certifications.
What, then, would be the sensible version of sustainability? The answer is difficult, but, in any case, it happens to assume that, many times, the ecological is neither green, nor recyclable, nor light, nor transparent. Such suggests, at least, the offices of Dietmar Eberle in the Austrian town of Lustenau: a resounding volume of reinforced concrete that is able to take advantage of thermal inertia and natural ventilation to dispense with air conditioning and heating.
However, and as many as the benefits of cases like this are, there is something unavoidable: in the end, sustainability has less to do with buildings than with cities. Artifacts for prosperity and enlightenment , cities are also black holes that feed on huge amounts of resources and secrete no less huge amounts of waste. If this is added to the fact that cities have already become the ecosystem of most of the population, it is not difficult to deduce the following: in terms of architecture, any sustainable program that - like the Green New Jeremy Rifkin's global deal - make himself dependent only on the placement of photovoltaic panels on the facades, obtaining environmental seals and the magic of smart cities will be doomed to failure.
Barcelona is not the same as Detroit. The war of sustainability will be fought in the cities: battle will have to take place in fields such as density, transport, pollution, water, heat islands , energy networks and the impact of megalopolis in the rural territory. Those who are called to pilot our planet, to land first to understand our cities: only then, at ground level, can they amend the twisted course of the Earth spacecraft.
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