Longevity of Materials

Wood can only last so long as a building material. Sooner or later it will be useless. Maybe fifty years. Isn't it more sustainable to use a material that lasts a long time and easy to repair? Most materials (including concrete) can be reclaimed and reused. Also, from a disaster proofing perspective I would never feel secure in a straw bail, timber framed house. It can be blown apart by high winds or destroyed by fire. Isn't that why we switched to bricks in the first place? A collective amnesia I think. A building should be built for longevity and resilience and if it takes a bit longer to demolish and reclaim its materials, so be it. Let's not be lazy about reusing materials.

Foster + Partners.

The environmentally conscious building movement is in a state of collective amnesia, and its taking hold. Eco-towns are springing up all over the place including one in Abu Dhabi, which is walled city, with enclosed streets for pedestrians only. Designed by Foster and Partners (seemingly the only architect in the world at the moment), it's enclosed streets shade pedestrians as they wonder around, with small cars on monorails to take passengers around the town (see pic). The project is funded by petro-dollars and will house a eco-power R&D community. It is an answer to ecological problems with self-sustaining solar power supply and waste recycling systems etc. But they have not taken into account the disasters that will and have in the past, come about as a result of climate change. Rising sea levels, storms, dry prolonged periods, maybe earthquakes etc. If you really want a sustainable town you must look at the disasters and unusual weather events that come with it, at least. If not all possible disasters.

Working with Wood as a Sustainable Building Material

Wood from sustainable sources is a great favourite of green building specialists but I don't like it as a sustainable building material. Wood is a great material, with fantastic aesthetic qualities and great beauty. But as a source of sustainable building material, it failed to convince me, along with the all advocates of properly sourced wood from sustainably managed forests. For a start if you take it to its logical conclusion, wood maybe renewable, but how much wood would be enough to build or contribute to housing all over the world? Sustainable forests + unsustainable forests wouldn't go far enough, especially when good fertile land is at a premium and competing with food and low carbon fuels. No, wood is a bad idea for building houses. The wood would have to be intensively farmed, not taken from sustainably managed. Also, in the wider context wood is flammable and weaker when reacting to flooding, earthquakes and impacts, and so would be no good in a disaster proofing context.

I believe that wood should be removed as an option in sustainable building methods and materials. At this early stage I think it's fine, but governments all over the world are pushing sustainable building practices onto statute books and planning laws, so at some point there will be a cry from the green lobby to say enough is enough and when that happens wood from any source would not be an option.

Sustainable Building

Green building as a concept; as a movement has been riding high in the last year or so. It has been realised by the great and the good that to properly insulate and to sustainably supply energy to all buildings will achieve the Kyoto targets that we signed up to, all on its own. For this reason and because it is cheapish to properly insulate homes, (relative to new energy sources and the technology that supplies it) it is seen as a great way to cut back on carbon emissions. However, while the world gears up to this idea and as businesses sign up to the principles, and as newspapers and TV news and Mr Schwarzenegger et al put their weight behind the ideals of climate change, the world 'sustainable' has been kind of passed over without proper attention. In essence, as I am sure you all know, sustainability is about preserving the ability of future generations to have the means to survive at a reasonable rate of comfort in the future. What we do shouldn't destroy what future generations can do, in terms of resources and so on. But what sustainability, if we use the word in its full sense, really proposes is that we sustain human life, whatever it takes (within reason). It means that our lives as beings are as precious to us now as they will be in 1000 years time when we are all dead. There are some in medicine that claim we will soon unlock life expectancy and live for two hundred years onwards almost as long as we like. Or at least the technology and knowledge we have will be able to do this, whether we choose to or not. So not only does sustainable living involve us and what we do now, but it also involves the unborn future generations in the far off distance. It may also involve us with medical marvels leading to indefinite life expectancy as well. However, this all depends on what 'sustainability' really means . The ability to survive just about anything that is thrown at us by nature, or each other perhaps. To 'sustain' life, is often to save it from an array of disasters which may just hit one continent or just one town, or all of them. For example, the kind of disaster that we are creating now with climate change, is exactly what sustainability is alluding to. Not just to stop extreme weather and flooding from happening in the first place, but ensuring that when it does happen we can cope with it and we can survive it. And to do this, we need sustainable i.e. disaster resistant building: Hence the existence of Future Towns and this blog.