Aiming for a sustainable tomorrow
.In early March 2020, before the pandemic hit Finland, I was interviewed by Tapio Kaasalainen for SAFA (The Finnish Association of Architects). You can find the Finnish version here and here. The longer, unedited transcript is below, in English.
TK: What was your introduction to sustainability in architectural design?
My path to becoming not only an architect, but also one being engaged in sustainability and working with the future generation of architects started by spending a year in Indonesia on school exchange with AFS in the early 1990s (before we even used the term 'sustainability'). I lived with Prof. Toni Atyanto’s family – Tony Atyanto is an architect and professor, and he would bring student project material home to review. These projects were rooted in the local vernacular, and placed sensitively on the site using local materials. Inspired, I enrolled for an architecture degree upon my return to Belgium, where the disinterest for contextual thinking and the focus on ‘trophy design’ was in such stark contrast to my own background and Indonesia’s contextual grounding that I struggled, and disappointed, I moved to London to gain work experience in the late 1990s. There I was naturally drawn to the emerging specialty of viewing architecture through a sustainability lens, and I enrolled in a sustainability masters. This move marked my self-acceptance as a strong contextual designer – where context generates and drives my architectural approaches, and most importantly, I was given the agency to explore this in my studies in the UK.
TK: How do you see the role and responsibility of an architect in sustainable construction?
Firstly, architecture to me, and how I see my role and responsibility as an architect, truly found its meaning through sustainability. It is about creating delightful spaces not only for a client and users (and definitely not for the architect themselves!), but about our obligation towards the greater good, safeguarding future users and citizens by reducing local and global impacts.
Secondly, our reliance on cheap energy has allowed us to collectively ignore diversity of places, such as local resources, geographic region and climate, and even disregarding diversity of people (meant in its broadest sense). As a result, the built environment has directly contributed to the current climate crisis we now face, and spaces that do not work for all. The buildings we design not only affect the climate and use of resources, but also the people who use them, for better or worse.
Thirdly, architecture, if done well, outlives its creator- that is a powerful thought, yet one which I think far too few of us remember. Once you are aware of the environmental and social implications of the architecture we create now, and how these last over time, this awareness changes your world view, and affects how we design and view our own role. But if we do not do it well, we lock in mistakes and problems for decades to come, such as for example high energy use buildings, or those affecting health and well-being. Sustainable architecture, is not only about the measurable but also the qualitative and immeasurable aspects of our living environment. As a profession, the ethical responsibility to engage with sustainability is no longer debatable.
TK: What do you consider the key challenges and opportunities for architects posed by the climate emergency?
We are now in an era of architecture with resource limits; this does mean closing doors to certain options and solutions, and while many architects are reluctant to do this as they often see it as a constraint on their creativity, I see it is as the opportunity to open new doors, and to creatively think of new ways of doing things. And that excites me. This responsibility is also what I try to convey when working with students. Architects have a fantastic capacity for curiosity and lateral thinking to enable them to see and understand interrelationships, and challenging the status quo, and so are uniquely positioned to help create a more sustainable world.
We clearly need radical new approaches and thinking to support a systemic shift that is needed in our society towards a carbon neutral transition. We also need to have consistently high standards in all aspects of sustainability, which means that we now know that architects cannot claim a project is sustainable when it is low energy but neglects its users’ needs, or has not considered low impact materials and so on; we need a truly holistic approach.
We also cannot forget that the climate emergency throws twin challenges at us: we need to both buffer and adapt against the effects of climate change while also reducing the impacts on the climate. It is no longer a question of how much the planet is warming and how high sea-levels will rise and precipitation events will change; it is a question of how much by when, and how we can adapt to it.
To meet these challenges, we need more experts in these different areas, as the typical broad knowledge that an architect operates with is now not sufficient. As architects we need to acknowledge our own limitations, because, despite the best intentions, lack of proper expertise leads to unintended consequences from ill informed decisions, further contributing to the climate breakdown, instead of offering solutions for it. So we need to work more closely with other disciplines (engineers, ecologists etc.) to make well-informed decisions, and drastically increase our own ‘climate knowledge’ to become experts in specific aspects (together with colleagues I am working on a guidebook on this, out in 2021).
TK: Your specialties include affordable housing design. How do the goals of affordability and environmental sustainability support or hinder each other?
Money can buy certain sustainability solutions (and help maintain them and reduce risks). But good passive design solutions are at no cost if embedded from the early stages of the design, so sustainability and affordability do not need to be mutually exclusive. And passive design is majorly enhanced if projects benefit from good and sensitive urban design and planning from the start, as taught by colleagues at Tampere University. But if we neglect those initial design-decisions at urban and building scale, problems are difficult to fix without adding other systems, making the building more complex and more expensive to build and use. In fact, a sustainable building is more cost effective in its operation as energy use is minimised. We start a new Sustainable Architecture course in 2020, and we will be exploring exactly these issues, which are also set out in my book. In London, I worked as architect and sustainability leader at Levitt Bernstein Architects, one of the main five housing design architects in England, working on low budget and low energy, 100% affordable housing schemes. An example is Granville New homes, completed about 10 years ago; the urban form was generated from the orientation and overshadowing of other buildings, to enable solar access to the community gardens and into homes. Architecturally we worked with reflective materials to maximise daylighting within the scheme and for its existing neighbours, and to minimise summer overheating we included solar shading elements.
TK: What was your introduction to sustainability in architectural design?
My path to becoming not only an architect, but also one being engaged in sustainability and working with the future generation of architects started by spending a year in Indonesia on school exchange with AFS in the early 1990s (before we even used the term 'sustainability'). I lived with Prof. Toni Atyanto’s family – Tony Atyanto is an architect and professor, and he would bring student project material home to review. These projects were rooted in the local vernacular, and placed sensitively on the site using local materials. Inspired, I enrolled for an architecture degree upon my return to Belgium, where the disinterest for contextual thinking and the focus on ‘trophy design’ was in such stark contrast to my own background and Indonesia’s contextual grounding that I struggled, and disappointed, I moved to London to gain work experience in the late 1990s. There I was naturally drawn to the emerging specialty of viewing architecture through a sustainability lens, and I enrolled in a sustainability masters. This move marked my self-acceptance as a strong contextual designer – where context generates and drives my architectural approaches, and most importantly, I was given the agency to explore this in my studies in the UK.
TK: How do you see the role and responsibility of an architect in sustainable construction?
Firstly, architecture to me, and how I see my role and responsibility as an architect, truly found its meaning through sustainability. It is about creating delightful spaces not only for a client and users (and definitely not for the architect themselves!), but about our obligation towards the greater good, safeguarding future users and citizens by reducing local and global impacts.
Secondly, our reliance on cheap energy has allowed us to collectively ignore diversity of places, such as local resources, geographic region and climate, and even disregarding diversity of people (meant in its broadest sense). As a result, the built environment has directly contributed to the current climate crisis we now face, and spaces that do not work for all. The buildings we design not only affect the climate and use of resources, but also the people who use them, for better or worse.
Thirdly, architecture, if done well, outlives its creator- that is a powerful thought, yet one which I think far too few of us remember. Once you are aware of the environmental and social implications of the architecture we create now, and how these last over time, this awareness changes your world view, and affects how we design and view our own role. But if we do not do it well, we lock in mistakes and problems for decades to come, such as for example high energy use buildings, or those affecting health and well-being. Sustainable architecture, is not only about the measurable but also the qualitative and immeasurable aspects of our living environment. As a profession, the ethical responsibility to engage with sustainability is no longer debatable.
TK: What do you consider the key challenges and opportunities for architects posed by the climate emergency?
We are now in an era of architecture with resource limits; this does mean closing doors to certain options and solutions, and while many architects are reluctant to do this as they often see it as a constraint on their creativity, I see it is as the opportunity to open new doors, and to creatively think of new ways of doing things. And that excites me. This responsibility is also what I try to convey when working with students. Architects have a fantastic capacity for curiosity and lateral thinking to enable them to see and understand interrelationships, and challenging the status quo, and so are uniquely positioned to help create a more sustainable world.
We clearly need radical new approaches and thinking to support a systemic shift that is needed in our society towards a carbon neutral transition. We also need to have consistently high standards in all aspects of sustainability, which means that we now know that architects cannot claim a project is sustainable when it is low energy but neglects its users’ needs, or has not considered low impact materials and so on; we need a truly holistic approach.
We also cannot forget that the climate emergency throws twin challenges at us: we need to both buffer and adapt against the effects of climate change while also reducing the impacts on the climate. It is no longer a question of how much the planet is warming and how high sea-levels will rise and precipitation events will change; it is a question of how much by when, and how we can adapt to it.
To meet these challenges, we need more experts in these different areas, as the typical broad knowledge that an architect operates with is now not sufficient. As architects we need to acknowledge our own limitations, because, despite the best intentions, lack of proper expertise leads to unintended consequences from ill informed decisions, further contributing to the climate breakdown, instead of offering solutions for it. So we need to work more closely with other disciplines (engineers, ecologists etc.) to make well-informed decisions, and drastically increase our own ‘climate knowledge’ to become experts in specific aspects (together with colleagues I am working on a guidebook on this, out in 2021).
TK: Your specialties include affordable housing design. How do the goals of affordability and environmental sustainability support or hinder each other?
Money can buy certain sustainability solutions (and help maintain them and reduce risks). But good passive design solutions are at no cost if embedded from the early stages of the design, so sustainability and affordability do not need to be mutually exclusive. And passive design is majorly enhanced if projects benefit from good and sensitive urban design and planning from the start, as taught by colleagues at Tampere University. But if we neglect those initial design-decisions at urban and building scale, problems are difficult to fix without adding other systems, making the building more complex and more expensive to build and use. In fact, a sustainable building is more cost effective in its operation as energy use is minimised. We start a new Sustainable Architecture course in 2020, and we will be exploring exactly these issues, which are also set out in my book. In London, I worked as architect and sustainability leader at Levitt Bernstein Architects, one of the main five housing design architects in England, working on low budget and low energy, 100% affordable housing schemes. An example is Granville New homes, completed about 10 years ago; the urban form was generated from the orientation and overshadowing of other buildings, to enable solar access to the community gardens and into homes. Architecturally we worked with reflective materials to maximise daylighting within the scheme and for its existing neighbours, and to minimise summer overheating we included solar shading elements.
TK: You work towards bridging the gap between research and architectural practice. What are the causes behind this existing divide?
Generally, the information and knowledge gap in architectural practice is mainly caused by lack of resources and different working cultures. In practice there is too little time to research in depth when in the midst of tight deadlines, while academics have often too little time (and gain little reward in terms of their personal career progression) to reach out to practice. This also creates a reverse information gap: i.e. academics might not be aware what are the most pressing issues the real world faces. Perversely, a lot of publicly funded research is behind a paywall and requires already time and money pressed practices to pay for access to that knowledge, though we are slowly moving in the right direction by making research freely accessible to the reader. (for example I am one of the Associate Editors at Buildings & Cities, a new open access journal)
TK: What kind of research do you think would help narrow the aforementioned gap, and/or how could practice change to do the same?
I would like to see a culture change to more openly share and create a much closer connection between research (and teaching) and practice (whether formal collaborations, or more informal ones), and a small community like Finland is well placed to achieve this. Only together can we move forward more effectively to achieve the systemic change that is needed in our own industry to support the carbon neutral transition.
TK: You’re very interested in how buildings perform in reality. What are the main issues separating design from reality and what would be your main message to architects on this topic?
The information gap just mentioned also particularly relates to the ‘building performance gap’: i.e. how (and if) buildings work in reality as intended in our designs. The 2018 ACE (Architects Council of Europe) report highlighted that Nordic architects are behind others in Europe with regards to obtaining ‘post occupancy evaluation’ feedback: for example, in Finland only 7% of architect respondents said that they check how the building performs once built (technically and/or for its users), compared to 13% in Europe and 19% in the UK (ideally this should be 100%!). In other countries collecting feedback once the building is in use has shown that many design decisions did not work as intended (for a whole host of reasons), but this enabled them to fix issues, learn from them and try to avoid them in future designs. In Nordic countries we know even less whether our designs actually work in reality, and this hinders us in evidence-based design. We create interventions, but far too rarely do we go back to check if that intervention works as intended. Our forthcoming co-authored book 'People, Energy, Buildings- Architecture for a Changing World' uses feedback from buildings to illustrate the interrelationship between design and its impact on people’s health and well-being, and building energy use. In the end, the planet does not care about theoretical, paper-based CO2 emissions, but actual ones. In the same vein, people’s well-being is affected by real situations, not paper-based intentions. So, in addition to climate up-skilling and interdisciplinary collaborative working, we also need to become more forensic. In the UK some say that it is a no-brainer as doing so pays for itself, and others have created new revenue streams from their ‘forensic architecture’ (see e.g. here)
You have academic and practice experience from many countries. What are some common things and differences that you’ve noticed when it comes to handling the topic of sustainability in research, practice, and education?
I actually only practiced in the UK but bring experience from the UK and Denmark in research and teaching. The drive towards sustainability in architecture and good housing design has become embedded in all these regions, but the deep humanistic and contextual approach is more pronounced in the Nordic region. Given the colder climate here, the building design and construction standards are by far superior in the Nordic region, and I am hoping that this also will mean there might be a smaller building performance gap between design intentions and how buildings perform in reality.
At the same time we have started to notice a shift also in the Nordic region towards over-development and reduced design quality of apartments in new developments due to maximizing land values (for example out of proportion large blocks that overshadow common spaces and neighbouring units, deep plans, small units, compromised daylighting and views). This is an unwelcome shift, and one that architects should resist and be more critical of, as it comes back to the earlier discussion about locking in detrimental impacts on people and the climate for decades to come – it is the exact opposite direction of where we need to be heading towards.
Another difference is water and loss of territory affecting the UK and Denmark, and that this is starting to be taught in schools (if not yet fully understood in practice). Finland’s more gradual predicted climate change means it is not so much yet at the foreground. Though I think this will change with the Finnish government’s ambition towards a carbon neutral society by 2035, so the role of educators is to include sustainability in the architectural curriculum.
Having recently moved to Finland, how has the experience been and what are you looking forward to?
I have never before been made to feel so welcome in a community (the ASUTUT research team and Finnish colleagues in the architecture unit in Tampere deserve special mention here!). I have also never met so many inspirational people that are quietly doing so much good work. I just wish you were slightly less ‘quiet’ about the work you do in research, teaching and architectural practice, as so many others elsewhere could build on this and learn from (instead of reinventing the wheel). So I hope I can contribute with you and to the community, and that together we can advocate the work you are doing in Finland to make it more visible to those outside the Nordic region. This way we can look forward to making a difference together for Finnish society, and beyond.
Generally, the information and knowledge gap in architectural practice is mainly caused by lack of resources and different working cultures. In practice there is too little time to research in depth when in the midst of tight deadlines, while academics have often too little time (and gain little reward in terms of their personal career progression) to reach out to practice. This also creates a reverse information gap: i.e. academics might not be aware what are the most pressing issues the real world faces. Perversely, a lot of publicly funded research is behind a paywall and requires already time and money pressed practices to pay for access to that knowledge, though we are slowly moving in the right direction by making research freely accessible to the reader. (for example I am one of the Associate Editors at Buildings & Cities, a new open access journal)
TK: What kind of research do you think would help narrow the aforementioned gap, and/or how could practice change to do the same?
I would like to see a culture change to more openly share and create a much closer connection between research (and teaching) and practice (whether formal collaborations, or more informal ones), and a small community like Finland is well placed to achieve this. Only together can we move forward more effectively to achieve the systemic change that is needed in our own industry to support the carbon neutral transition.
TK: You’re very interested in how buildings perform in reality. What are the main issues separating design from reality and what would be your main message to architects on this topic?
The information gap just mentioned also particularly relates to the ‘building performance gap’: i.e. how (and if) buildings work in reality as intended in our designs. The 2018 ACE (Architects Council of Europe) report highlighted that Nordic architects are behind others in Europe with regards to obtaining ‘post occupancy evaluation’ feedback: for example, in Finland only 7% of architect respondents said that they check how the building performs once built (technically and/or for its users), compared to 13% in Europe and 19% in the UK (ideally this should be 100%!). In other countries collecting feedback once the building is in use has shown that many design decisions did not work as intended (for a whole host of reasons), but this enabled them to fix issues, learn from them and try to avoid them in future designs. In Nordic countries we know even less whether our designs actually work in reality, and this hinders us in evidence-based design. We create interventions, but far too rarely do we go back to check if that intervention works as intended. Our forthcoming co-authored book 'People, Energy, Buildings- Architecture for a Changing World' uses feedback from buildings to illustrate the interrelationship between design and its impact on people’s health and well-being, and building energy use. In the end, the planet does not care about theoretical, paper-based CO2 emissions, but actual ones. In the same vein, people’s well-being is affected by real situations, not paper-based intentions. So, in addition to climate up-skilling and interdisciplinary collaborative working, we also need to become more forensic. In the UK some say that it is a no-brainer as doing so pays for itself, and others have created new revenue streams from their ‘forensic architecture’ (see e.g. here)
You have academic and practice experience from many countries. What are some common things and differences that you’ve noticed when it comes to handling the topic of sustainability in research, practice, and education?
I actually only practiced in the UK but bring experience from the UK and Denmark in research and teaching. The drive towards sustainability in architecture and good housing design has become embedded in all these regions, but the deep humanistic and contextual approach is more pronounced in the Nordic region. Given the colder climate here, the building design and construction standards are by far superior in the Nordic region, and I am hoping that this also will mean there might be a smaller building performance gap between design intentions and how buildings perform in reality.
At the same time we have started to notice a shift also in the Nordic region towards over-development and reduced design quality of apartments in new developments due to maximizing land values (for example out of proportion large blocks that overshadow common spaces and neighbouring units, deep plans, small units, compromised daylighting and views). This is an unwelcome shift, and one that architects should resist and be more critical of, as it comes back to the earlier discussion about locking in detrimental impacts on people and the climate for decades to come – it is the exact opposite direction of where we need to be heading towards.
Another difference is water and loss of territory affecting the UK and Denmark, and that this is starting to be taught in schools (if not yet fully understood in practice). Finland’s more gradual predicted climate change means it is not so much yet at the foreground. Though I think this will change with the Finnish government’s ambition towards a carbon neutral society by 2035, so the role of educators is to include sustainability in the architectural curriculum.
Having recently moved to Finland, how has the experience been and what are you looking forward to?
I have never before been made to feel so welcome in a community (the ASUTUT research team and Finnish colleagues in the architecture unit in Tampere deserve special mention here!). I have also never met so many inspirational people that are quietly doing so much good work. I just wish you were slightly less ‘quiet’ about the work you do in research, teaching and architectural practice, as so many others elsewhere could build on this and learn from (instead of reinventing the wheel). So I hope I can contribute with you and to the community, and that together we can advocate the work you are doing in Finland to make it more visible to those outside the Nordic region. This way we can look forward to making a difference together for Finnish society, and beyond.