Reflections in Ireland
It had been thirty years since I was last in Dublin, when I entered the Red Room in the Architecture School of University College Dublin to participate in critical reflection on their future direction in an era of climate change, part of a series of events under the banner of Earth Week.
‘The Climate Crisis makes the question of how we use the earth's resources central critical to the future of architecture. We're dedicating the week to exploring and understanding planetary resources from close up and far away and how the capacity to operate with resources in mind can be embedded in what we teach and how we teach.’
Considering the future training of Architects brings together two questions – how the profession will change in response to the climate and biodiversity crisis, and how we best deliver training in the 21st century. In our conversation, we found some renewed sense of purpose for a troubled profession by overlaying these twin issues.
Today, many practicing Architects struggle with a growing realisation that their sector is a leading cause of climate change, global inequality and destruction of Nature. At the same time, young Architects increasingly reject the exploitative and patriarchal culture that they often find when they leave education and enter commercial practice, saddled with debt.
These are of course related human responses to the de-humanising and de-futuring culture dominating contemporary Construction, entrenched as it is in extractive practices. In Europe we consume three times the resources that the world can bear and half our material consumption and 40% of our climate emissions come from construction and the built environment. The recent E.U. commitment to introduce mandatory embodied carbon emission limits in 2028 presages 25 years of progressive regulation and incentive that will transformation the sector.
In making peace between Construction and Nature, we can vision a future for Architects whose life’s work is not vested in an Architecture of consumerism and the unsustainable production of stuff, but in an Architecture of health and social justice, of meeting our needs within planetary limits, vested in a new-found relationship between people and place, at individual, community and species scales. Now that’s something worth investing your working life in.
Daniel Bell, of Atelier Luma spoke of the shift to a bio-regional strategy for materials, with bioplastics grown from algae, and resources harvested from our already-built environment and the waste in its supply chain. ‘Buildings and materials are heavy and remain’ he said, ‘people and ideas are light and move’.
Young Architects will spend their professional careers healing the damage to the environment that my generation has curated and profited by. If they are to build a new kind of Construction sector and deliver Net Zero by 2050, they need to be trained for the job with a very different skill set to the one that currently sets them up to be stressed-out CAD fodder in our contemporary commercial sector.
This new skillset for Architects is pretty easy to define:
the ability to design out the need for new buildings by 50%
creatively adapting and re-using existing structures for new purposes
upgrading buildings to net zero emissions
creating healthy habitats for humans
a new material language of bio-composite construction, free from concrete, steel and plastic
design for diversity, reflecting all humanity’s physical, cognitive and cultural variety
re-designing people’s relationship to place, stepping back to give space for nature to thrive
increasing occupancy by sharing space and embracing continuity through impermanence
Oh, and listening to and co-creating with diverse people and non-human entities
Larens Bekemens, of BC Materials, spoke of a hybrid role for Architects beyond the boundaries of traditional practice, working at a city region scale with it’s human, material and organisational resources.
Rowland Keable, CEO of EBUKI, discussed working with industrial partners, cay and natural fibres to innovate, bringing the circular economy into contemporary construction site practice.
Hearing and empowering young architects, especially women, not yet vested in the status quo which impedes progress across our sector, is a route to manifesting the twin future realities of a healthy and happy workforce and a construction sector that doesn’t destroy the planet.
Feile Butler of Roots Architecture spoke about the importance of bringing people back into the heart of our design intent and of being in conversation with place. This sort of conversation requires skills of empathy, listening and a shared language.
‘Innovation’, said Becky Little of Rebearth ‘is inherent to human creativity, and has been with us since Palaeolithic times, in our material conversations with earth, water and plants.’
Finola O’Kane spoke of Architecture is a language. Places carrying forward conversations from people in the past.
Peter Cody spoke of the intimate conversation between people and land on the Aran islands, how people became entangled with place by laying down soil and by raising up stone. Lines of containment, lines of shelter, harvesting the sea into the land to sustain a community through time. You become the island and it becomes you, what happens to it happens to you.
But that is not the language of place and people in today’s Dublin.
Ten thousand years ago as the climate warmed, people from far away to the south followed animals, who followed plants, who followed the retreating ice, until they all made Ireland their home, building a relationship with landscape, as the bog was laid down a millimetre a year. Now, Ireland’s walls are raised with materials from far away, accents in Dublin come from everywhere, and there are tents huddled into corners providing refuge to those who have no homes.
Housing is the most important issue for 69% of Irish, climate change only 9%. The new Taoiseach says he will build 300,000 homes – whose materials is he using to do that? how much carbon will he throw into the air, what Nature will he dispossess? The construction machine rolls on down the merry path to hell. Meanwhile people seeking shelter from violence, broken economies and degraded environments see building set ablaze in their faces. Where in this civic space is the voice of Irish Architecture? What is Ireland’s relationship of landscape and people today? Can it find a new architectural language of belonging to articulate how we might share our place on this fragile earth in peace?
So I went searching a brave new language in the streets of Dublin, for it surely is a city of articulate words, if there ever was one.
And outside the Red Room, I saw those modern travellers, seeking refuge from dispossession and climate crisis, camped out amid the cathedrals of concrete, steel and glass, the baristas, cranes and bars, and the trees quietly fighting for their right to life against the all-consuming concrete pavements, as Sunday joggers pounded past.
Then! Would you believe it but Seamas Heaney himself waylaid me as I walked past Trinity College and drew me into the National Library’s archives to hear him speak about his life’s work digging into the meanings buried deep in the Irish landscape.
I was four but I turned four hundred maybe
Encountering the ancient dampish feel
Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.
Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats
In a rank puddle-place, splash-darkened mould
Around the terracotta water-cock.
Ground of being. Body’s deep obedience
To all its shifting tenses. A half-door
Opening directly into starlight.
Out of that earth house I inherited
A stack of singular, cold memory-weights
To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.
(Seamas Heaney, Squarings xl, Seeing Things)
And in the city’s galleries, Irelands contemporary artists and thinkers voiced the anxiety of our age.
At the Royal Hibernian Academy Celina Muldoon, Rhonda McGovern and Clare Kelly gave ‘a public call to action’ from ‘a collective understanding that behaviour change in response to these issues (climate change & neo-liberal capitalism) can and must happen’ articulated as a mesmerising reimagining of Fritz Lange’s Metropolis a hundred years on ‘birthing us into a new age - a mycelium utopia within which we coexist and thrive in a new world order’
Meanwhile at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Deirdre O’Mahony’s The Quickening ‘’represents a polyvocal response to the most urgent questions affecting land and its inhabitants, giving voice to the invisible protagonists that shape our earth’s future and an idea of being-in-common that encompasses all earthly inhabitants.”
Perhaps young Architects need to find inspiration in conversations with people and entities beyond the profession. And train outside inherited practices.
One advantage that UCD has in taking forward the agenda of renewing faith in Architecture in our era of climate crisis through progressive training practices, is the extraordinarily high staff to student ratio. With something like 260 staff to 800 students, the school has a huge inter-generational human learning resource to work with.
If we accept their assertion of having a co-learning environment, (where some learners pay and some are paid), then it opens up a wealth of possibilities. With most of the staff part time and in private practice, the school has a direct and strong relationship with current local Architectural life, meaning the it can be a crucible for critical reflection and renewal of practice, under the vitalising influence of young Architects unbound by group think. This cohort of practitioner staff have the opportunity to influence a new generation of Irish Architects, and thereby find fruitful paths for their own transition.
As Architects look to transform construction through the transformation of their profession, so the construction sector can look to transform civic society by contributing to the species-wide transition in human culture. It is because our environment now is an artificial one (students measured spend 98% of their time indoors), everyone interacts with the built environment all the time, therefore as we de-carbonise it, the effects and the narrative will reach everyone.
That narrative, how we tell the story of our built future, is vital to the success of the enterprise, and Architects can be the champion story-tellers, claiming the ground as leading voices that has for too long been given over to money-men. A new culture of story-telling. A re-telling of that old Irish story of a culture of common purpose and place among nature.
We tell ourselves stories about the future and the past to make sense of the present. They can hear that at the National Leprechaun Museum. For Architects our language is material, space, light & movement, and we use it to tell stories of people finding themselves through place. It’s time we found ourselves again as Architects.