7/8 – 2018

Climate Change

The building sector plays a major role in emitting the greenhouse gases that cause warming. The branch has reacted to this by trimming building stock to minimise CO₂ emissions through new buildings and renovations. But in the course of these renovation works does the industry not produce so much CO₂ that the remainder of the emissions budget available in the framework of the climate goals will be used up in a few years’ time? As our author Sasha Cisar shows in this issue, a cultural change from replacing to retaining building fabric and from employing materials that use up CO₂ to those that bind it is urgently needed. To apply Schellnhuber’s warning to the building branch: if we don’t get a grip on climate change, then we don’t need to reflect any longer about building culture, floor plans and proportions. While there is a keen awareness of this theme among those who make architecture in this country, few answers that use the means of architecture are given. Perhaps this is because climate change is still seen as the problem of “the others”. But anyone designing a building today is doing this for a very different climate than the present one. H Arquitectes from Catalonia show how climate-conscious buildings can be made using the means of architecture itself — without elaborate technology and air-tight building envelopes. In this sense the search is for innovative as well as traditional answers to the question about how we can keep our planet and our buildings inhabitable. We asked architects about this and looked at cities that are undertaking adaptation work for the warmer times ahead.