The world around us is urbanising at the rate of lightning. In this tsunami of urbanisation, buildings are the major energy guzzlers, accounting for around 40 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Green Building Council. As a consequence, we see a large number of green building certifications and related software and technology being developed.
Yet we are unable to develop sustainable buildings as a mainstream construction norm. The issue is not a lack of technical know-how, but the failure to acknowledge that sustainability is an urgent need for our environment, not an added aesthetic or optional layer.
The root problem lies in both architectural education and practice, where there is a significant gap in understanding the value of sustainability.
In major academic institutions, sustainability is either taught as an elective course or as a checklist in architectural studios. Here, the aim is to disseminate the central concepts of the theory so that students are familiar with sustainability. This approach leads to either sustainable solutions developed by them becoming too speculative, like a green skyscraper that is not executable in reality, or they add just an afterthought to complete the checklist. Seldom do these solutions adopt an evidence-based design approach, which can deliver better, more executable ideas.
Although the ideas of context-based design, climatology, building physics and materiality are embedded in the architecture curricula and have been taught to the students, an integrated understanding of all of them and how they form the crux of sustainability sporadically eludes the design exercises.
At a few institutions, everything is taught effectively at an academic level, and students graduate with a wealth of creative ideas. Still, a few months of practice make them forget what they have learned, as concepts of sustainability are not yet mainstream.
Only a few firms make sustainability their core focus in practice. Others fail because they lack either the vision or the expertise, or, if they do have both, they fail at the financing stage. The novel ideas that drive sustainability in design concepts sometimes have high initial costs. Poor financial planning will mean taking these initial costs out of the budget and reverting to conventional design methods. This often leads to sustainable design strategies being seen as added embellishments rather than the skeletons of the built environment. Here, architects play an important role by becoming proficient in the language of business and reframing sustainability as long-term assets that enhance human productivity rather than short-term investments that seem like an added cost.
The bridging of architectural education and practice is the need of the hour, more than ever before. Like in other fields of engineering and applied sciences, where many industries and academia collaborate, similar actions are required in architectural education and practice. There should be more practice-sponsored labs where students can work on real-life problems and develop creative solutions that are tested for feasibility, viability and scalability. Here, students and academia will get the boost to conduct more cutting-edge research and develop novel solutions and practices, and will gain access to more reliable data that can be used in mainstream design and construction.
Knowledge transfer from both academia and practice can make sustainability a normal practice, rather than a utopian concept. It will also lead to more scalable solutions.
Just one or two buildings cannot achieve sustainability. It will require a fundamental shift across academia, practice and the field to bring about this change, where it is not an afterthought or add-on, but an integrated concept of the design, build and operation process. The younger generation of leaders in the building sector should be rigorously trained, as they can play a significant role by advocating integrated design processes that bring all stakeholders, including contractors, clients, engineers, financing bodies and operators, into the design process from the earliest stages.
The role of an architect needs to undergo a dramatic shift, from merely a creator of design to a creator of destiny, the destiny of this planet and its inhabitants, a planet with finite resources for human consumption. Future architects need to design consciously, which means not only designing with the latest active technologies but also acknowledging and learning from indigenous practices.
In fact, a sustainable architect will also be mindful of how much to build. In a nutshell, the architect’s signature should not be a mere mark on the paper, but a seal of affirmation that another sustainable solution is about to sprout, one that will not only maintain the status quo of the planet but also gradually heal the already-made damage.