I’d like to thank Keith Staite for that very very daunting introduction. I’m delighted to be here in Cornwall and to be in Truro. I know I’m in Truro although I wouldn’t know by looking at the invitation, which doesn’t say where the Hall for Cornwall is and I’ve still got it in my papers here and it says on it, to my secretary, where is it? So maybe there is a little point to be made somewhere there. We had a most delightful train ride down …it is one of the most marvellous train-rides you can do, I think.….
This lecture is going to take two parts, FIRST OF ALL, a lecture about global issues and global responsibility and hopefully quite wide-ranging issues. I’m then going to show a video about the Eden Project and perhaps add some issues I would like to raise about Cornwall and building in Cornwall. I think that that might quite a good lead-in to the third section of the evening which hopefully will be questions from the floor……
I would like to say that this is a very positive attitude to the next millennium. I am not talking about doom and gloom I am trying to talk about what man is doing and what he can do.
The lecture breaks down, after the introduction, into six pieces: the first is to do with the flexibility and re-use of buildings, which I think is quite relevant here. The second issue is communications. I then talk about living in the city and about the natural environment and the relationship between that and manufacturing and then I talk about the undeveloped world and the relationship we have with it.
Those are the topics I’m hoping to cover before we move on to the local issues here in Cornwall. … .lights out…. slides…
Before I go any further, the only issue I have to talk about that I’m not going to refer to is this left hand slide behind me. This slide shows my three kilometer walk to work every day through Regent’s Park. I calculated that if I did this journey by car, it would need 300 fully grown trees to counteract the pollution caused so I like to feel that that is just my own small contribution every day to some kind of global responsibility and it also – every time I say it – encourages me that I must keep it going. But car travel and the pollution it causes is one of the things which we have to take very seriously. If you assume that that walk is 1,500 miles per annum, it basically works out that every five miles you drive a year, you need one tree to counteract the pollution.
Well let’s turn to the lecture as a whole.
I’d like to start by saying that the first time after two millennium have passed, we seem to be starting to treat our globe with the respect it deserves. The Conference in Rio dealt with a large number of environmental issues on an international scale. I’d like to feel we are entering the third millennium with a much greater degree of global responsibility. Can we, as architects, play a role in this?
I believe we can, and in this lecture I’ll give my own thoughts on some of the aspects of global responsibility which will be part of my firm’s philosophy for the future. Just two slides: wc are talking about positive issues here throughout but of course good examples of positive issues are quite hard to find. We are normally bludgeoned with pictures like this – burning oil wells and the wholesale destruction of the landscape by mining and so on. I would like to leave those two slides and move on from now on to positive issues.
River pollution in Europe has been a very big issue and rivers are now being cleaned up. Fish are now being caught in higher and higher reaches of the Thames and there is great progress being made by international treaty in Europe to clean up the rivers.
Forests are being managed so it is no longer a crime for us architects to specify hardwood. We can get it from managed forests. Replanting is going on and checking on growth and clearing of trees. Aluminium is being recycled and if you recycle aluminium you only use 20% of the energy needed for its original smelting. I’ve read some figures that by the year 2020 there may be no further need to mine aluminium because there will be enough circulating in the world to be continuously recycled which is a very interesting thought.
Car tyres are being recycled in many many uses to provide heat and even rather interestingly on the right a form of primitive shelter. Many metals are being compressed and retained for recycling. Nylon clothing is being recycled to make into tennis balls.
Air pollution is being tackled and solar cells are being used for vehicle research. Even huge companies like Honda are doing a lot of research on vehicles powered by solar power. I couldn’t resist putting the slide on the left. (Camels taking solar cells to remote village.)
Paper is being recycled and now nearly 80% of our newspapers are made from recycled paper. An interesting issue here is the effect of information storage on compact disks and it is saving an enormous amount of paper. Here Bill Gates demonstrates the enormous amount of paper needed to reproduce the information on a single compact disk. If the paper made from these trees was used for printing, that same information would probably fit into the disks in one small briefcase. On the right you can see the kind of wholesale tree destruction that happens to produce the paper that we are now starting to not use.
But this kind of monitoring and analysis of what is going on is the important thing. I have only quoted a few small examples. The important thing is that global warming is increasing exponentially due to present day communications. So the sort of mapping that you can see on the right of one small area of America is taking place globally so we actually know what’s happening and we can take responsibility and we can change it.
Well, can architecture do anything about this? I think it can. We can build more thoughtfully. In the UK we have a system called BREAM which is the Building Research Establishment Assessment Method which gives an overall green rating to a building. We used this system for the first time on our RAC building and working from scratch with a resource consultant we managed to achieve 8 out of 10. I hope we can do better next time. But factors which were taken into account were the materials we used of construction, the energy consumption of the building, and the ability to recycle materials and for instance the very compact shape of the building which short of being totally circular is about as compact as you can get.
Very careful shading was applied to the outside of the building, to stop solar gain, and this created very good working conditions inside for the work people and also the ability of them to see out across the countryside which is so important if you are glued to a computer all day. The other thing we pioneered in this building – if you can call it pioneering – was the non-use of lifts.
Here we have 500 people working very happily in a building of three floors, entered at the middle floor, so you only have to down one flight or up one flight of stairs. All the movement in the building takes place in the atrium and people meet all the time and it creates a very good social atmosphere and lifts are only used for disabled people and the occasional shifting of stationery and so on up and down the building. People were shocked by this initially but it is absolutely a fact of life now that you move around the building by foot.
I’m going to get on to the first theme which I mentioned – the flexibility of buildings and trying to make them so that they can be changed and reused in the future. In my view the bones of a building should also be clear and well articulated. This is the building of the Berlin Stock Exchange which is almost like a kind of contoured hillside. We occupied the whole of the site and I think one of the reasons we won the competition in the first place was because we kept the building as low as you possibly can. Again pushing this idea of ease of communication around the building. One of the prime issues was being able to keep the ground clear for the Stock Exchange and the conference centre underneath, so it had no columns going through it. All the floors are hung from these prefabricated steel arches. I think that this is a skeleton which will last for a long time. I think a building with good bones will last a long time, and can be reclad.
I like the idea of a building kind of shedding its skin, rather like a lobster sheds its carapace and there’s the skin of the Berlin building done by the computer showing the alternate bands of cladding and glazing and it is really just like an animal skin in a way. If you look at the way a bird builds its nest, like this weaverbird, rebuilds it every year, and it is a recycling process and makes its nest complete. I couldn’t also resist putting in this slide of the linear accelerator on the right hand side to make the kind of rather nice conjunction between nature and technology.
When we did the Herman Miller building at Bath, we made the skin completely flexible. The glass, the panels, the doors and even the courtyards could be moved around on the outside of the building. The building is now 20 years old and it has gone through many changes. The planners, interestingly, have not been able to work out how to treat this building because it is continuously changing its skin. Everybody likes it, and indeed it won one of the first Civic Trust awards for a modern building and quite a few other architectural awards but people don’t quite know how to deal with a building that is continuously changing.
When doing the second building in Chippenham, we used aluminium panels which is a little bit more ecologically sound because they can be recycled but again the whole idea was that the panels could be moved, the doors could be moved, and further areas of glazing can be put in. When we started off this building was purely a warehouse building and it’s changed its use to quite a heavy amount of manufacturing in there.
Similarly, we did a plastics factory in Cologne in Germany and we developed these ideas of moveable panels even further. That these panels just held on with tabs and can be replaced with windows, even by the workforce inside the building. There is a picture of the happy client with l~is architect leaning through the building during construction, and they remain extremely happy with the building.
You can see on the right the kind of growth pattern that the building has gone through during the time. They started with quite a small little square courtyard building. So I’m introducing here an idea that flexibility is important in buildings but this does not mean that they can’t be beautiful buildings and they can’t be well designed and well coordinated buildings.
Up to now I somehow feel in this country we’re not very good at that. Someone has said many times that we are a nation of lean-to buildings. At the heart of every industrial plant you can nearly always find a Victorian brick building which has been added to with lean-tos over the years. It is very seldom that anyone starts off, even now, with a kind of master plan for growth and change and order within their building.
I don’t think it’s going to be very long before buildings really can change their skin their colour and even their texture. Just in the same way that a chameleon will do it, or this chevron butterfly fish changes its colour between day and night.
I think this would be a very fascinating thing to pursue. We tried this idea at the Victoria and Albert Museum competition which we didn’t win. The idea was for a building which oriented people and enabled them to find their way around the seven miles of corridors at the V & A. We wanted to have a building which could demonstrate what was happening inside by projections on the outer skin and different departments would take over the facade for a set period and display their own objects that they had through either direct lighting or using back projection on different kinds of glass and so we thought we would have a kind of living changing shop window to demonstrate what was going on in the building. A kind of dynamic facade but that was not to be and the competition was won by what I would call basically an old fashioned monument type building which has been quite controversial even so.
So the idea of a building shedding its skin and revealing a completely new surface underneath is quite an appealing one I think. Now another aspect of all this idea about flexibility is the re-use of buildings and changing the use of buildings. For instance this is a former printing works which has been changed into apartments. In London now we even have quite well known office buildings of the 60s, this is Castrol House in Euston Road, changing its use to form apartments which people never thought would happen. And I think that’s probably particularly relevant here in Cornwall where there are some very fine redundant buildings where – with a lot of thought and care – very good re-uses can be found for them.
A particular aspect of our Stock Exchange building in Berlin which I mentioned before was the flexibility at ground level. I feel all buildings in cities could benefit from this kind of approach. It is very often the ground that you want to change. It is the ground floor of a building which people flow in and out of and by hanging the floors from these arches we left the ground floor completely free so that you see the Stock Exchange which has changed in size four times since we started the project and will probably be changed soon after the building is opened and the conference centre have completely free space to be constructed in and just for amusement I speculated on what would happen if the Stock Exchange finally became electronic and moved out and showed on the right hand side that you can get an ice rink in it at ground level which would be a very nice thing to come into off the street. I’m not quite sure what my clients think about that but I don’t think they’ve seen the slide.
If I could move on to my next topic which is about communications. Communications are going to affect buildings in a major way. We hear a great deal about people working from home. When I tried to find slides of people working from home it was incredibly difficult. Either people can’t disclose the incredible mess from which they work at home or in some way they are sort of ashamed of it. It is a fascinating issue and well organised home work places don’t seem to have really materialised yet.
One of the fascinating things about telecommunications which is developing is that some countries which hadn’t installed telephone posts and wires throughout the country have actually opted to not have any wire network in their country at all and have gone straight into mobile telephones with aerials placed at strategic intervals throughout the country and of course this saves thousands of miles of telephone wires and poles and all the waste that goes with it.
If this working from home and people not being in cities really worked out, cities could simply become cultural exchanges and here in Berlin, there is the most marvellous event where Christo wrapped the Reichstag from top to bottom and it became one of the biggest events in the city for many many years. Places where people, like in Sienna for the Talio, or in Japan, for a great festival, where you come to exchange cultural experiences.
Now could some countries that have not been through catastrophic urbanisation like this, is it possible we could encourage them to stay decentralised? That I think is going to be a very interesting thing of debate between developed and undeveloped countries. Could they rely entirely on information technology to provide their interpersonal communications? Very interesting thing to brood on.
I don’t think people will turn their backs on cities, I think they will rather demand improvement in the quality of life in cities on a large scale and I want to talk a little about city life and how one can improve it. People probably see more and more cafes outside London, outside operating open air cafes. … In Paris there is a great deal of very interesting intermediary space between the outdoors and the indoors which I don’t believe we’ve really cottoned onto in our climate which could be very beneficial to street life generally. Right down to small scale, people are considering the quality of life on a much closer level.
Much better public transport is going to be a keynote we hope of governments and it is one of my hopes of this new government that when they do decide to spend any money on anything that public transport will get absolutely high priority. It’s something where in Europe trams are being introduced quite widely and even in Manchester tram systems are now being mixed in with people circulating in the streets. Higher quality public transport is the only way it is going to be resolved. Because to get people out of their cars, they have got to have transportation of similar quality. If we can do that, then we have a chance of getting some of the traffic off the roads and greatly improving air quality, which is one of the main issues which people complain about in cities.
The other thing that makes people in cities think of… because of all this, makes them think of the wider environment, and I think that people get more and more yearnings for what you might call the natural environment. And this is my fourth section where I’m talking about man coming closer to his natural environment. I think this is going to be a thing we’re going to see more and more in the next Millennium. People feel the need to get away. (slide of La Corunna, Northern Spain). People are going to look more and more for a new dimension in their lives.
Mountains, and for instance looking at the sea, something you can do looking over the edge of a cliff. These photographs were taken by Ansel Adams of a wave from the Pacific … very evocative.
Under the sea. People are seeing more and more under the sea and this sense of wonderment is gradually getting across to the world. You can see that I am gradually working my way towards talking about Eden but I’m not there yet.
Forests and jungles. But one of the main dilemmas of the next millennium is going to be how we can enjoy the wonders of the natural world without destroying it. I think if I may say so, I think it is going to be one of the main dilemmas for Cornwall in the next Millennium. How people can enjoy the county without destroying it has to be thought about extremely carefully. On the right is some of the detritus left behind from a mountain expedition which is kind of sad when you think of the marvellous landscape that people have been enjoying.
One solution is to simulate and here you have got two very interesting pictures one of a real beach and the other of a completely artificial beach in Japan. Somehow I think to us Europeans having a completely artificial beach seems not right but in Japan it is looked upon as a roaring success. This does bring me to one or two slides of Eden. As I said earlier, we are going to show a video which will bring this marvellous lost world – as Tim Smit says – alive. I would just say that you can see the scale of the operation on the right on that sand and the aim is that the whole of this valley, disused clay mine will be landscaped and with the enclosed buildings as part of the landscape so it will be in many ways a completely lost world.
I think this does raise the issue of how you can explain different kinds of plant life and different kinds of climate to people who won’t be able to go there. It is a way of creating the natural world in many ways without despoiling it. But there are good ways of doing this and there are not so good ways of doing this. One of the things we are not going to do is to turn Eden into some kind of leisure park/fun palace. It is a serious project of research and understanding of plants and that is the way that everyone involved in the project wants to steer it. We also hope people will enjoy some of the architectural detail and these are slides working out the geometry. There are other non invasive ways of viewing nature which may be successful. These are tree bridges and we hope maybe to work that kind of feeling into Eden. On the right is rather a fascinating experiment dropping a kind of inflatable spider onto the roof of the rain forest and working from there, taking samples and examining the flora and fauna. But it remains a high priority that we should not destroy the landscape we have learned to love.
Leaving the landscape for a minute I want to talk about this whole issue of industry which has been raised under the IPE programme and it is a very interesting topic to consider.
Enjoyment, and happiness, and places also to come to for great cultural events and things like opera and skating and so on and marvellous celebrations but not necessarily places where people have to pile in and work and soon so finally I want to turn to …I’ve concentrated so much on what we in the developed world might or might not be doing but what about the undeveloped world? Do we encourage them to hold on to their rural idiom and say it’s not all brilliant piling into cities why don’t you stay in your natural environment. Enjoy yourselves and go on building beautiful huts. And doing things which National Geographic can go and photograph especially.
The trouble is we are having a problem at the moment persuading people to even retain their forests as they strive to meet western levels of development and the most difficult thing is how we can get that message across when after all we cut down all our forests to make fields and have cattle and in simple terms when people say ‘well we want to cut down our forests and have fields and cattle’ we have to have a much more sophisticated argument than simply saying ‘don’t do it’.
But there are things we can do which in some ways make our intervention in the underdeveloped world useful. If you are talking about the wealth of a country not resting on manufacturing industry, as the wealth of this country doesn’t, one of the things where enormous income for the country is being gained is by consultants such as engineers building bridges or this irrigation project abroad or for instance these great solar projects or dam building. This produces marvellous benefits for the third world and it also produces income for the developed countries in exchange and this is probably one of the kind of processes that is going to happen.
I don’t know whether many people realise that one of the things about the Seville pavilion was that we were trying to get this idea across. The building itself was an exercise in energy conservation and won an award for the least use of energy of the 106 pavilions in Seville. One of the ideas which wasn’t taken up by the last government was that the solar cells on the roof could be shipped off to the third world and used to run a pump which we were using on the outside of the building to pump the water up which would then fill water tanks and so each one of the groups of motors and solar cells could provide enough supply for a small village in the undeveloped world. I thought this was a great possibility for the Foreign & Commonwealth office to pursue but instead of that they sold the pavilion after Expo to the highest bidder.
These are my last two slides on this whole issue of global responsibility and I hope I’ve touched a few nerves and got a bit of thinking going this evening. This is an aircraft park in North America where the planes are grounded and broken up and recycled and I thought it made a nice juxtaposition with the slide on the right where we have this very old building which is being reskinned with simple handmoulded clay put on it. You can see the fingermarks. The fact is it is a building being reused and reskinned and there is a great message of hope in both slides and that is what I have been trying to get across this evening, that if we do think about things we can plan and we can organise so that we don’t destroy the planet we live on.
If I could just make one or two closing remarks:
I think that one thing possibly which will and should help the Eden Project is the idea that new buildings and new structures can have a catalytic effect and can stimulate everyone to start thinking about what they can do. I don’t mean just new buildings but the reuse of buildings.
This building (Hall for Cornwall) is a very good example and Paul Newton and Roger Hocking have I think done a brilliant job on reusing and siting this building right in the centre of town and making it as fIexible and as technologically useful as it is. I think it’s a great example. On the other hand if you bear in mind a lot of the things I said on the siting of new buildings here in Cornwall.