October 16, 2007

All buildings should be design gems, says architect

Nova Scotia recently announced its intention to be the greenest province in Canada by 2020. This sounds like healthy competition to me.

If it truly signals a re-focus toward goals and away from results, then all may be good.

Eastern Canada — under populated, ripe with development opportunity and relatively clean — is poised to fare well. The ten per cent of Canadians who live east of Quebec have a real chance to plan now for more sustainable patterns.

It’s obvious now. Globally, our inevitable shift away from a fossil fuel base will need to happen much quicker than anticipated.

Architects Corner

Daniel Goodspeed, FRAIC

The evidence is everywhere; our current mode of resource consumption includes far too many unsustainable patterns. The message is clear and I sense that it pervades the zeitgeist. Things must be done. Preconceptions must be challenged.

Many of the concepts and attitudes that comprise our culture will have to change in the near future. Social attitudes require adjustment. Nowhere is this more important than in attitudes towards “built space” because the creation and operation of buildings is responsible for over a third of the carbon emissions in this country.

Building owners and investors will need to better appreciate and value the architectural design process. We can no longer afford to view any building as a short term asset to be discarded after a 30-year economic life.

The design of new buildings can and will respond to these initiatives. With appropriate changes in perspective and policy, this can be done and done quickly. Witness the rapid improvement in energy performance in our housing stock brought about by the R-2000 program in the 1990s.

Equally as important, we will need to develop better methods and systems to improve our existing building stock. We have to acknowledge that all buildings represent a serious commitment of energy and resources.

Architects spend their time concerned with the utility of built space and the durability of its enclosure systems. Major advances in the understanding of material durability and envelope physics have vastly improved our buildings. The useful life of our modern constructions can feasibly be measured in centuries.

Architects see the need for more sustainable patterns in the deployment of resources and consumption of energy. The 2030 Challenge, a global initiative, sets the laudable goal of making all buildings carbon neutral by the year 2030.

It is too easy for architects to sit back and criticize society for not placing appropriate value on architecture and design. Unfortunately, I believe we architects may have fostered this attitude ourselves.

Throughout my architectural career I have found it commonplace that a clear distinction is drawn between architecture and buildings. In classical terms, architecture is thought to embody firmness, commodity, and delight.

Frank Gehry, Hon. FRAIC said once that our cities have few pieces of architecture and many buildings.

I have always found this to be a perplexing distinction, one that is certainly not sustainable. It is at best shameful and elitist. At worst, it is a contributing factor to the increase in the wasteful throw-away mentality that our society has increasingly exhibited over the past century.

We all would be better served by regarding all buildings as architecture, recognizing that there is such a thing as bad architecture.

Why isn’t every building useful, durable and delightful? We know how to do it. What we don’t know can be learned. Every building can be built in a responsible manner with efficient use of resources and to operate in sync with natural processes. Attitudes can be changed, starting with our own.

It should be second nature: every building has an architect.

They should all be gems.

aniel Goodspeed, FRAIC, is the Atlantic Regional Director, with the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada

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