Article fromA&B 06 | 2022 issue
The conflict between an architect's personal interest and the needs of the environment is not limited to the fact that suggesting certain solutions may prompt the client to change architects. Environmentally friendly solutions usually require more work from the architect than less friendly ones, and the client is not always willing to pay for this extra work.
Very often repeated in recent years, and especially since the Pritzker and Mies van der Rohe awards to Lacaton &Vassal studios, the statements to never demolish that the most environmentally friendly is a building that already exists, because you don't have to burden the planet by building it, are true. Complying with them means saving materials and energy, and reducing waste. But the other side of the coin is that complying with them often requires much more organizational or conceptual effort on the part of architects and contractors. The same is true of using recycled materials. You have to find them and organize their acquisition. It is much simpler to order something new.
From a great many architects constructors or other people involved in construction you can hear the fable that it is always cheaper and faster to tear down an existing building and build a new one than to make adaptations to the one that exists. That this is a fairy tale is attested to by situations where there was really very little time and/or money. The Warsaw Uprising Museum could not have been put into operation nine months after the competition for its design was decided, if instead of adapting the former tramway power plant into it, it had been decided to demolish it and build a new building. Obtaining the same cost would have required solutions of a much lower standard. Similarly, the school with a Ukrainian curriculum arranged on the initiative of the Open Schools Foundation under the direction of the xystudio studio in the adapted space of an office building in Warsaw's Mordor district - if it had been built from scratch instead, it would have taken much longer than two months to come into being. Even more spectacular is the use of existing buildings for temporary hospitals or refugee accommodation without further changes.
I see the origins of the fable, which could more bluntly be called the demolition lie, precisely in the fact that while adaptations make it possible to achieve results faster and cheaper, they require more design or organizational effort, for which the client is very rarely willing to pay extra. This is because, unfortunately, in practice, design and construction are often treated as completely independent expenses.
However, there are also situations when an environmentally favorable action is financially beneficial to the client, and the problem to overcome is widespread preferences among architects. The use of extensive glazing in most cases causes buildings to overheat not only in summer, but also on warm spring days. It often entails installing air conditioning or mechanical ventilation. Traditional buildings with thick walls and moderately sized windows are characterized by greater thermal stability than those heavily glazed. That is, a longer period of heating up and cooling down. As a result, in Polish conditions, air conditioning can be dispensed with altogether, and the heating period can be significantly reduced by opening windows at times of the day adapted to the current temperature. Before the period of so-called cold gardeners, which falls in mid-May, the house can be heated by opening windows when it is warm. And during the hot season, by opening them at night and closing them during the day. The house can also be cooled in the cooler days that fall between hot weather. There are also more sophisticated solutions, such as thermally buffering verandas.
A traditional interior solution is to use curtains, drapes or carpets to insulate against the cold. Here again, the fondness for minimalism is to be overcome. Fashion can become an ally of low-carbon and climate-moderate architecture. Acceptance that on hot days it is elegant to be dressed in short pants and a T-shirt, and sleep only under a sheet, and when it is cold one walks around in a sweater or other thick clothes, and sleeps under a thick quilt and aa couple of blankets with socks on his feet, and maybe a bathrobe, would make it possible to make the indoor temperature standard more flexible, setting it between 18 and 26 degrees, and thus reduce energy consumption for heating and cooling. At 18 degrees in winter or 26 in summer, it is again easier to function in a house that has walls of windows than with a glass wall behind which it is freezing or sweltering.
The architect's role in working toward climate-moderate and low-carbon architecture can also be to influence the developer's choice of location that favors walking, biking and public transportation, and discourages the use of cars. The same direction should be followed at the stage of preparing designed (from scratch, or even better transformed) buildings and complexes, shaping them in such a way that it is much more convenient to reach them on foot than by car. An urban planning solution used in many countries, and once often in Poland as well, is to locate schools and kindergartens, as well as other public buildings, in such a way that one has to walk a certain distance from the place where one can drive to the entrance to them - preferably no less than from the nearest public transportation stop.
In the case of architects working for builders large enough to be a partner in discussions with local authorities, the architect can support the client in its efforts to reduce costs by reducing the requirements for the number of parking spaces, offering the local community inin return to allocate some of the savings to publicly accessible green spaces, and encouraging authorities to introduce a paid parking zone around the area, which is a better remedy for balancing parking supply and demand than building more spaces. On a broader scale, both investors and architects should join in lobbying for the abolition of taxing investments with the obligation to build parking spaces, and instead introduce, including for residents, fees for parking in public spaces at a rate that commercial parking lots can compete with. This would encourage many people to park farther from home, to give up their own cars in favor of using rental cars, or to walk, bike and take public transportation. And as a result, it would reduce not only the emissions caused by car traffic, but also those resulting from the amount of concrete and asphalt loaded into the construction of streets, parking lots and the underground floors into which these parking lots often have to be crammed. Social groups who find it difficult to give up their cars, not because of their preferences, but for objective reasons, should be compensated for the introduction of high parking fees by preparing special financial support for them along the lines of the 500+ program. In no way should they be exempted from the fees, as they too should be encouraged to use alternatives to their own car. If only such as cabs.
