The process of re-badging and re-launching goes on, relentlessly. A few years ago while I was working on buildings for mental healthcare, I studied the evolution of asylums for the insane. It’s a specialist field, with lots of expert knowledge which I barely touched on, but it has produced a fair number of under-appreciated buildings including MacMon’s beautifully-designed facility at Murray Royal in Perth, which was completed a few years ago.
One of the most striking things I discovered was the continual renaming of places for people who have psychiatric issues. Insanity became mental illness, asylums became hospitals. The names changed many times, from madhouses to lunatic asylums and idiot colonies, then institutions for mental defectives, hospitals for the mentally handicapped, then psychiatric units and now mental health facilities. Changing the names made little difference to patients – it was a matter of semantics for politicians and administrators – but improving the buildings in which they’re cared for did. I can see a parallel in today’s sustainability movement.
As Michael Pawlyn wrote in the RIBA Journal in 2019, signing up to Architects Declare signed you up to “Regenerative Architecture” – but what is it and how do you achieve it? He quickly admitted that, “For those of us who have been involved in sustainable design for 30 years or more, it is painful to accept how badly sustainability has failed to prevent the multiple environmental crises from worsening.” That gets close to the truth of why Sustainability (which used to be known as Eco-friendly Design, and before that as Green Architecture) has been re-badged as Regenerative Architecture.
Architects Declare and their allies believe Sustainability has failed – so they’ve decided to rebadge it. But that’s a misconception. Sustainability hasn’t failed; it’s a multi-decade project and still a work in progress. Buildings today are far more sustainable than they were thirty years ago. Sustainability has achieved a great deal – albeit not the total overthrow of capitalism, which Extinction Rebellion and their fellow travellers would like to see.
Meantime, “Regenerative” in this context reveals breathtaking arrogance and ignorance within our profession about what regeneration means. For example, one of the few specifics Michael Pawlyn provides is to suggest building with materials made from atmospheric carbon: he cites wood as an example. But chopping down trees is De-Generative, because it reduces the natural world’s ability to absorb stormwater and CO2. Only by planting more new trees than you fell can you regenerate the ecosystem’s ability to absorb. That's a crucial caveat.
Then you have solar panels, which are a red herring when it comes to Regenerative Architecture. They’re certainly helpful to generate some electrical power for buildings, which may mean using less coal- and gas-powered generation; but that’s a non-issue in Scotland where almost all our electricity is generated by hydro stations and wind turbines, and nuclear power. Regardless, solar panels can’t regenerate the natural ecosystem in the way that planting shrubs and herbs creates a habitat for insects and helps to absorb water and CO2.
Biophilia and biomimicry have also been offered up as examples of Regenerative Architecture. In the early 2020’s, they became fashionable among the mega-consultancies which offer workplace design to the multi-national corporations which fill up Grade A space in our big cities. For them, supposedly regenerative design followed a formula of including some raw timber, rather than painted finishes. Living walls, often using reindeer moss or something similar, or fake green walls which approximate a living wall. A view to the outside, if you’re lucky enough to have one from your deep plan floorplate; or artificial lighting which follows circadian rhythms, if you’re not that lucky. Plus a few pot plants.
But no-one from Architects Declare has explained how a newbuild central London office tower can help to regenerate the natural ecosystem, so Regenerative Architecture joins a series of straw men and pails of greenwash which practices parade on their websites. The RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge, B-Corp, Article 25 and so forth. The whole scene is rather like a ceremony in the Wacky Races cartoons: each time Dick Dastardly needs to motivate Muttley, he gives him a medal which is proudly displayed on the dog’s puffed-up chest. Re-badging is a distraction which misses the point of what the term Regenerative actually means.
For once, I can speak from direct experience. All the generations that preceded me worked the land, but while some were farmers, my direct ancestors on Dad’s side were mostly market gardeners. During the 18th and 19th centuries they relied on horsepower for ploughing, crop rotation to keep down diseases, and animal manure for fertiliser. My grandfather was the first to buy mechanical tractors, motor lorries and use chemical fertiliser.
Market gardening isn’t like farming. The latter is extensive agriculture, whereas market gardening is intensive horticulture – in other words, using a few hectares to grow higher yield crops like fruit and vegetables, rather than a few hundred hectares to grow cereals, or grass to support grazing sheep and cattle. My family grew vegetables like carrots, turnips, tomatoes and salads; fruit like strawberries and apples; and flowers like chrysanthemums and helichrysums.
My Grandad, and my Dad after him, saw the introduction of NPK fertilisers (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) and chemical insecticides like DDT and 2,4D, along with pre-emergence weedkillers make a big difference to crop yields. DDT was introduced when Dad was a teenager, and it was a tremendously effective insecticide. By the time he was in his 30’s, DDT had been banned, along with many others like Aldrin and Deldrin. We now understand that these toxic chemicals are biocides: they don’t just harm the species we’ve decided are “pests”, they also also kill helpful pollinators and destroy friendly bacteria in the soil.
These chemicals, which made post-War horticulture less back-breaking and more profitable, were counter-productive. The latest agri-chemicals to be banned (just the other week) are neo-nicotinoid pesticides, but none of this is news. For example, Strawberry Cultivation, written by Edward Hyams in the early 1950’s, was one of my Dad’s favourite books. Its opening lines read, “If man ever has to give an account of himself as chief tenant of the planet, he will be hard put to it not to show himself deserving of severe censure. He has destroyed forests, befouled rivers and seas, created deserts, hunted, tortured and even exterminated many of his fellow species, all with complacent self-satisfaction.”
My Dad and Grandad observed a cycle where most of the wonder chemicals introduced during the 1940’s and 50’s were banned during the 1960’s and 70’s: but meantime an alternative had opened up in the US. A movement called Conservation Farming emerged, which was a form of permaculture later called Regenerative Agriculture. By coincidence, one of the companies which contributed to it was Allis-Chalmers, an engineering firm in Milwaukee which was founded by a distant relative. He escaped from a life of tenant farming in Angus by emigrating to Chicago in 1841, and decades later his company had grown into one of the biggest of its kind in the world. I mentioned one of their earthmovers here.
A-C is credited with designing, manufacturing and selling the first commercially successful no-tillage planters, in 1966. The principle is really simple. Rather than driving a tractor through the field four times – once with ploughs, then with harrows, then with fertiliser, then a final time with seeders – No-Til barely disturbed the soil, and did everything in one pass. That saved time, money and fuel and most importantly it didn’t open up the soil which would have allowed nutrients to leach away. Thanks to No-Til, natural nutrients and moisture were retained and the topsoil was able to regenerate itself, naturally. By contrast, conventional ploughing degraded the soil, which meant more artificial fertilisers and chemicals were needed.
Trademarked as the Allis-Chalmers No-Til system, three toolbars were carried behind the tractor. The first had a series of coulters developed by A-C engineer Maynard Walberg, which sliced through crop residue or sod to prepare a narrow strip of soil, rather than churning up the whole field. The second toolbar carried fertiliser boxes which sprinkled a small amount of fertiliser only where it was needed, in the seedbed. Planter units were attached to the third toolbar. As an aside, the story of how Allis-Chalmers developed the No-Til planter and pioneered regenerative farming is a powerful argument for the good that enlightened capitalism can do, too.
Leaving the soil as undisturbed as possible is truly regenerative: and perhaps only foresters, ecologists, farmers and market gardeners, and conservationists can help to regenerate the natural environment in a true sense. By comparison, architects are kidding themselves: the glass and stone and steel and dead timber which we make buildings from can’t regenerate communities of plants, animals, birds and fungi. Misunderstanding what Regenerative means isn’t just semantics – it’s crucial to understanding the issue, in exactly the same way that the so-called “fireproof” insulations used at Grenfell Tower weren’t Class A1 rated, so people died. “Car-free” developments aren’t really car-free, if residents just park their cars on adjacent streets.
I hate to make predictions this early in the New Year, but I can see the current generation of dogma-driven architects repeating the mistakes of their predecessors, just in a different way. What was labelled as the worst of 1960’s architecture – such as Sam Bunton’s Red Road flats and Basil Spence’s Hutchie C tower blocks in Glasgow, T. Dan Smith’s masterplan for Newcastle, the Hulme Crescents in Manchester, and Ronan Point in London – was blamed for destroying inner city working class communities and creating brand new slums. Likewise, claiming that we can regenerate the earth by building on it is intellectually dishonest and plain wrong.
In the 1960’s, Modernism promised to remake the world, by adopting a new paradigm. We replanned cities to eliminate slums, then housed people at high density in tower blocks and deck-access slabs, prefabricated these buildings in precast concrete factories, and made it easier for cars to get around. But the streets in the sky turned into wind-blasted nowheres, precast large panel systems turned out to be difficult to assemble accurately on site, and electric underfloor heating turned out to be too expensive to use. Some buildings leaked, others were poorly insulated, some were structurally unsafe.
In the 21st century, Sustainable architecture promised to remake the world, by adopting a new paradigm. We replanned cities to eliminate private cars, then tried to raise inner city densities by prefabricating medium rise buildings in SIP factories. However, the combinations of membrane which make them airtight but vapour permeable rely on faultless workmanship on site. When mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) systems fail due to poor maintenance, when external wall insulation (EWI) systems fail due to being poorly applied, and when heat pumps are incorrectly installed in poorly-insulated, leaky old buildings – they don’t work.
I’ve got personal experience of MVHR problems and modern EWI systems which failed in the most dramatic way – I was a small part of a team brought in to rectify the problems. That underlined to me that Sustainability is a work in progress, rather than something to discard. If we don’t recognise the limits of our competence and show some humility by doing simpler things more effectively, the results will be just the same as during the 1960’s: cold houses where old people live miserably through winter, and damp houses where children develop breathing disorders.
Before we ditch sustainability in favour of a new badge, we need to get the fundamentals right. Aim for Fabric First, rather than bolting on complex heat recovery systems in order to scrape through the SBEM calculations. Demolish as little as possible, instead upgrade everything we can – and push Westminster to abolish VAT on refurbs in order to encourage that. Finally, specify Scottish products and materials every time – not imports from China for “value engineering”.
The concepts behind sustainability are often misunderstood – sometimes wildly so. It’s been tough enough to master sustainable materials while we improve U-values and airtightness, without starting again from scratch with Regenerative Architecture: a mixture of misconceptions, extravagant promises to save the world, and greenwash.
That notwithstanding, Happy New Year. :-)
