interview with Xavier Cadorel
https://issuu.com/melbournemicrofinanceinitiative/docs/impact_review_2020
What if the COVID-19 pandemic was the opportunity to pause and reflect on our economic model, on our impact on Earth and what we value as humans? Or was this pause too brief? As we prepare for afterwards, economic forces are already regrouping to resume our madness in consuming the global equivalent of 1.75 times earth’s available resources each year. It is an overwhelming thought that many have decided to ignore the growing environmental crisis or to address it just enough to alleviate their conscience. As design professionals, creating, designing and constructing are our raison d’être, however resuming these activities has severe impacts on our ecosystem. Many professionals are conscious of these challenges and the buzz around Architects and Engineers Declare demonstrates it, yet how successful will these initiatives be in achieving true sustainability. How can we, as designers, be part of the solution in lowering global consumption to the equivalent of one Earth or less…because for now, this is the only one we have.
This article is a conversation between two designers and writers who are committed to environmental design. Architect Alvyn Williams (AW) from soft loud house architects responds to questions from academic Xavier Cadorel (XC) from the University of Melbourne.
Xavier began his career as a structural engineer, specializing in timber design before joining the University of Melbourne in 2011 and he currently lectures at the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning. Over the past 20 years he has worked internationally on a variety of projects ranging from research, to structural and prefabrication design, to site and project management.
Xavier’s research focuses on the challenges and opportunities for the built environment in facing sustainability imperatives. He has worked with numerous researchers, has published several reports and journal articles, and has presented at conferences within a variety of domains including the carbon footprint of buildings, materiality within the urban heat island effect, climate resilience and heritage buildings. Xavier is an active member of the Thrive research hub and is currently completing a Master of Philosophy, addressing the gap of research related to the environmental benefits associated with mass timber construction
XC: Alvyn, who are you and what was your path to becoming an architect?
AW: I work at the fringe of architecture. Sometimes it is probably not architecture, but more like helping people to work out who they are and what they care about, and how to modify their environment to make it coherent with who they are.
I never really fitted into the architectural industry. I struggled to find a university that put humanity or care or even learning how to listen properly, before ego and cleverness and making a statement. Everyone wanted to be cool, to be seen. The architectural industry seemed equally self-focused, giving awards and medals to each other with little critical discussion about whether any of those projects made the world a better place for people. It wasn’t that attractive to me. Through focusing on rural projects and living outside the city, I was able to reflect on how I could use the privilege I had enjoyed in receiving a university education to better support clients, community and most of all the environment.
Architects are generally removed from making things, which gives a person such a strong understanding of the qualities of a material, how it was produced, and where it came from. Thanks to my parents rural lifestyle, I always made things from an early age, tools, prototypes, models and buildings, benefitting from the incredible learning that comes through touching materials, learning as much or more from the failures as I have from success.
Through soft loud house architects [softloud is from piano-forte – can be played strong or gently] we have been working on and refining a process of values-based architecture for many years. What does values-based architecture involve? We ask what people care about and use that to create an environment for them to live in, one that supports their needs, goals and values while responding to the usual concerns; place, materials, climate, regulations and of course budget. We now follow a values-based process with most of our projects. One of the amazing things about working deeply with values is that most of our clients when given the choice, prioritise values they have that are bigger than their own self-interest, like environmental issues, endangered animals, social injustice, reducing fossil fuel energy, etc. Research confirms a growth in awareness and connectedness to other issues bigger than ourselves when people adjust their behaviour and choices to align with their most deeply held values.
XC: With such values driving your practice, could you further develop your approach to architecture?
AW: As a student, I was very fortunate to work for eight years with Gregory Burgess in Melbourne, who is still the greatest influence on how I work today. Environment was always important, but Greg’s architecture was as much about relationships. I can still see him move his hands in an expressive dance when he tried to explain this. Relationships between everything, clients, design team, builders, people, other living and non-living things, materials, and ideas and culture. Our work as architects exists in a rich web of relationships encompassing all of life. I have found that if I listen, if I ask questions instead of racing towards answers, and if I hold all of that research gently instead of one issue tightly, my design intuition can respond to these in a holistic way.
Sustainability is an over-used word but sometimes it’s the right word. I’m interested in why. Why we would want to be sustainable? It raises bigger issues, like cultural sustainability, who are we and what do we care about as a community? What do we want our legacy to be? That interest has developed into the practice of values-based architecture, and really looking deeply into what I care about, and how to make my actions as a human and practice as an architect coherent with that.
I believe we have consumed so much of the earth in the last fifty years that for generations to come we will need to have a different relationship with resources. For our profession, as makers and designers, we will have to move towards re-shaping and re-making the things others have previously used. David Holmgren describes this in Retrosuburbia; things our throwaway culture have made wastefully and discarded mindlessly will be re-formed into the things that will sustain us into the future.
XC: In your practise and discussions with colleagues and clients, what are the topics or facts that you wish people knew about the impact of architecture and the built environment?
AW: It amazes me that people, particularly architects and designers aren’t really aware that humans, like most living things, are formed by their interaction with their environment. Architects create places that are harsh, cold, sterile and fragmented with little or no awareness that those places as an aggregated experience are the whole environment for some people. Juhani Pallasmaa talks about the way architects now design electronically, the tools we use influencing form and design, all of which is taking us further from an embodied experience and understanding of what it is to be human in the places we design.
Probably the scariest thing for me is the way that in wealthy countries we use obnoxious amounts of materials and energy to create buildings which don’t last very long at all, treating unrestrained consumption as if it’s a human right. Architectural writer Elizabeth Farrelly, one of the few architectural critics in this country, has described the last decade of apartment building in Sydney as a development orgy, and her description could be extended to almost every city in every wealthy country. Despite a slow-down in some forms of consumption due to COVID-19 lockdown, consumption of materials and energy per person in 2020 is still hundreds of times that of our grandparents and still accelerating. Most buildings have a design life of 50-years, and far less for many components, but use more energy to produce and to maintain than the buildings they replaced. Described as the “Jevons paradox” from the 1860’s, as we increase technological efficiency, our consumption of materials and energy nevertheless increase, partly due to population growth, but also due to changing views of what our needs are. While COVID-19 has caused the first significant fall in consumption in modern history, nobody has an ongoing answer to reducing consumption at the scale required.
Some years ago I attended a month long design studio with Tony Fry in Tasmania, working on the theme of unsettlement. The studio at the edge of the world was an exploration of the grief and paralysis that comes from the awareness of how much humans have impacted the world, and how despite our attempts, we absolutely have failed to address the scale of the unsustainable. Years later, few architects question how enamoured we are with technology and the belief that it will solve overconsumption problems. The sad reality is that as Heidegger observed in the 1950’s, technology merely helps us obliterate nature faster, so we will need to develop a healthier relationship with it if we are to prevail. This is what softloud try to address with a default design response of low consumption architecture.
XC: This idea of low consumption architecture, isn’t it just one more fleeting trend after green architecture, tiny houses, passivehaus or zero-carbon housing?
AW: I don’t know if low-consumption architecture is a current thing, let alone a trend. Michael Moore’s recent film Planet Of The Humans has opened up a can of worms for the environmental movement, and for architects who have been working in a similar “green growth is good growth” paradigm. It’s seductive to have such an easy answer. Though some of the statistics are questionable, Moore has managed to communicate that our attempts at sustainability over the last fifty years have failed so completely that we are close to environmental and civilizational collapse. He’s not the only one who can see this; Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion have brought the issue in clear focus to the younger generation. Yet without strong policies biased towards reducing consumption instead of (barely) promoting efficiency, much of what we call environmental action is at best delusional. It would be neglectful not to mention that governments and businesses have been utterly complicit in in this failure.
The media are also complicit, in particular the green home magazines filled with articles about spacious and luxurious houses interspersed with cool stuff to buy to make us more sustainable. It is a lie that we can consume ourselves out of the dire situation created by overconsumption. Architectural associations are also complicit. Awards continue to be given each year to more extravagant projects, more glass, more steel, more, more, more. By relying on budgets alone to restrain client’s impulses, and not taking up the challenge, architects have not yet found the stomach to challenge consumption.
If you look at the original Shelter Book from the 1970’s, the “Woodstock houses”, the handmade house movement, maybe low-consumption architecture was a conversation then - in the shadow of an energy crisis. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, written about that time had a deep impression on me as a young architect. I continued to question the appropriateness of technology to its application, and what was driving our decisions, and the desire to use more or less technology. This has developed my curiosity towards where materials came from and where the money goes in the building industry which has developed elaborate pathways of manufacture and supply chains that completely obscure the environmental damage, excessive energy consumption and social injustice inherent in the things we use. Think about the evocative term “touch the earth lightly” in relation to steel-structured buildings; where does this steel come from, how much waste and greenhouse gases have been released to the environment and what are the ethics of steel mining companies. Or think about advising a client for choosing a simple item such a tap, where were the minerals mined, which fuel was used to power industrial processes, how many oceans were crossed, and whether the workers applying the chrome finish have a reduced life from the heavy-metals they ingested? Architects must take greater responsibility for the way they chaperone their clients through the complex layers of decision-making.
XC: All those questions could be quite paralysing when making decisions for your design, how do you promote low consumption architecture in your projects?
AW: At softloud, we have had the opportunity through our focus on values-based architecture to have a much deeper understanding of our clients and what they care about most. What comes with that is a closer working relationship, and what develops from that is the ability to challenge clients when they make a decision that is not coherent with their values.
As an example, during the Global Financial Crisis, a community school for disadvantaged students in Yarra Junction wanted to use stimulus funding to support people and businesses in their local community. We devised a simple modular system of local materials and labour, including innovative curved roof beams made from small section timber from the sawmill over the road from the school. It later became known as the dream beam. Hundreds of these beams have been made subsequently as the system became more widely known in the community. The majority of the project team, consultants, builders, contractors and suppliers came from a 20km radius of the site.
Another notable example is one that actually didn’t lead to the construction of a new building. After working through a values-based architectural process with the Borough of Queenscliff in the design of a Botanic Gardens and Eco Hub for the various environmental groups in the locality, it became clear that the spatial needs were already available within existing buildings in the Borough, they just needed to better manage their building stock. Instead of seeking millions of dollars funding and creating an award winning “sustainable” building, energies could be refocused on establishing the Botanic Gardens and supporting the community groups. The lowest consumption architectural response is surely not to build anything.
Houses are a different challenge to commercial and institutional projects in the way they mean so much more to people. We have been very fortunate to have some amazing clients and stunning sites to work with. The consistent themes we are confronted with include self-sufficiency, local community and clients who have a vision for their future, but don’t know how to find the path that leads there. We have discovered that when you understand, and can remind clients of their values, the decision-making process brings them back in a circle to themselves again and again. It makes projects fascinating as an architect, as I have no idea at the outset where the journey will lead. I have enjoyed the tiny projects particularly, like the 55sqm Cockatoo House, where at every stage, the house was kept as small as possible, yet the materials and finishes were timeless, solid, durable and involved a lot of handcrafting. It’s a little house that will shelter people for hundreds of years, meaning that the small amount of embodied energy consumed will be stretched out over three, five, perhaps ten times the typical life-span of an Australian home.
XC: What changes would you like to see in the near future?
AW: Xavier where do I start with such a big question? Of course, we could provide a handbook or recommend things for academics to research more, or for people stop what they are doing and to act differently. But much of the information we would provide has been published already, decades ago. As Tom Crompton describes in Common Cause: the case for working with our cultural values, it’s not enough to simply add to the pile of information available, people are resistant to information that is at odds with their values. A change in values and culture is urgently required, and architects are as well placed as anyone else to guide this; we can begin with ourselves.
To lead our clients with integrity, we need to value low-consumption in our work and home lives, and demonstrate how that choice leads to an increase in time, wellbeing, artistic richness and community life. I have a lot of respect for the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, which places a value on the relationships between things by focusing our attention on the natural character of materials, space and light. Following this philosophy, if your favourite cup breaks, you mend it, the care and reverence taken will become part of the story or essence of that cup, and you will be reminded of those qualities every time you use it.
One of the most important relationships to adjust is our relationship with time. Instead of consuming time efficiently, we need to think of time in a more qualitative way; Michael Leunig, a Melbourne cartoonist says it perfectly; to create time we must begin things that require a long time to complete. What he’s really saying is that time or presence comes from prioritising a different set of values, and that what we care about and invest in creates the conditions we want to exist in.
Rather than growing softloud into a bigger architectural practice, or employing more staff, or designing bigger buildings, I want to get better at what we do. That means taking risks, trying new things, backing what we care about and most of all learning from our mistakes. It means going back and asking clients hard questions, like how was the design or building process for them, did we lead them in a way coherent with our own values and the agreements made, etc? At the moment we have undertaken post occupancy evaluation for only a quarter of the projects we have completed, so there is so much more we can learn. As Tolstoy said “everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”
