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Let me just
explain, my 1st couple slides are just context.
I have a firm I started 8 years ago in Western Canada, Vancouver. We're just
architects.We're private practice, we do projects all over the world, I'll show you a map of
just the places we work. We work on all scales of buildings from tiny little
retail spaces and restuarants to towers, to international airports.
Some of the projects I've worked on include to the Petronas Towers, in Kuala Lumpur
in Malaysia, which I was a young architect working on the team floor.
Big projects my firm has done, like the Vnukovo Airport in Moscow.
For the Mayor of Moscow as our client, so we work on a huge range of things
and I sort of jumped forward and not really talk a lot about what we do, but a lot about
what we see our role as achitects, in the greater
context and how that some what has informed my practice but why I actually get out
and do this speaking. And that's that, I'm in a profession that
actually a fairly small profession with a huge level of influence, in a way
and certainly an influence in the issue of climate change. Buildings are responsible
for a huge component of the impact on the environment
and yet, we are not theoretically a very organised group. we're a bunch of
small practices around the world trying to our best to contribute, but we don't have a
structure for really stepping back and looking at how we can influence a
systemic change in the way we build world-wide. So
the only slide I will show you- that's my work is this, and this is the kind of thing we
do. But again, its not really the point of my talk. These are all the different
places we built. The blue dots are buildings that I've done in my own
pracitce before I started my practice 8 years ago, and the red one's are
where we are working today. That diversity of locations of buildings means
that we see a huge range of issues. We're interested in not only what happens
at our big cities in Canada but also what's happening in the developing world, so we are engaging
at both ends of the cert of economic's spectrum as architects.
Really what I'm here to talk about is this- I believe that there is
2 fundamental questions as an architect world-wide for us to tackle are -
a combination of these two issues, world housing and climate change. And how they
are entrancingly linked. And the reality that if we build and try to solve
world housing, and I'm going to go into it. With the way we build today
fundamentally we are going to make climate change worse. And in doing so
effectively solve one human need, will actually create an even greater
2nd human need. I noticed in Bjorn's talk, he doesn't have housing on that list of
fundamental priorities, but the way I actually think about it is that
there is certain 3 things we need in our lives every single day, and 1 is food,
1 is water and 1 is some sort of shelter. Especially as the climate gets
hotter or colder, or so forth. So lets just talk about world housing.
The reality is, this is a UN Habitat Statistic, is at 3 billion
people in the world will need a new home in the next 20 years. That's the
equivalent of 40% of the world needing a new affordable home. The reality of that
is that around the world 1 billion people live in slums, and 75 million people
a year are moving into urban slums. That reality for me is
as a Canadian, it's 2 Canada's every year are moving in effectively
into slums. That's a huge statistic and currently we actually don't have a way
globally to really think about how we are going to tackle the scale
of that problem to provide for that human need. In the architecture
profession the conversation tends to be about
how we are going to tackle green issues on a fairly micro
level. So we tend to start seeing in the mainstream press a lot of conversations about
buildings, that are built in rammed Earth, or straw built contruction or these great techniques
that are traditional techniques. And they are a wonderful conversation on modular buildings,
but they really lack the sort of perpective to realise that mainstream conversation
is focused on the scale of problems that are really suburban scaled problems,
1 house at a time. But the reality is that today 50% of the world live in urban
environments, and by 2050- 70% of the world are going to live in urban
environments, which means we really need to start thinking about how we
address building in new ways, for an urban
context- which means very large buildings. So if we go into climate
change, I think most of us are aware that roughly a 3rd of the issue is
related to the environment and to climate change, come from the building sector in 1 form or another.
As I sort of talk about this
what I'm going to do is sort of leave one of the huge components to the side- which is energy.
Which is not...you know it's sort of the way I look at it, as energy issues are quite different
in different parts of the world. The kinds of issues that I'm dealing with as a Canadian Architect are quite different
than the issue of the specific climates in other areas. And so I'm
going to part that issue, for now as part of my conversation-
talk about the reality that is, we think about the fact that 70% of the world are going to live
in urban environments. For the most part urban building structures
are completely universal. So the incumbent materials
are really steel and concrete. Every city skyline across the world
has buildings made of steel and concrete and we don't think twice about it.
Most architects / engineers when they work up, in the morning with a new fresh project
don't even think about that basic choice of the fact that they are going to build their building
out of concrete, 'cause it's a 30 story tall office building.
It's just a default, that that's what our cities are built of.
But there are some really fundamental things, choices that we should be making and thinking about,
when we think with that perspective. 1 is that we have
an enormous amount of concrete in the world- that we produce and the fact that it's the
2nd largest material by volume that we build with. But it's context
when we consider the carbon foot print of concrete is this,
is that roughly 1% of world carbons coming from the airline industry and roughly
3% from shipping. But concrete represents and it's fairly
well established a minium of 5% of world carbon is coming from the concrete
industry in the production of cement, upto upwards of 8%.
So it depends who's statistic your ultimately going to look to.
But when you start to think about that choice that architects and engineers
don't think about, just kind of get up and automatically assume we'll build
a building out of steel or concrete, you can obviously see what that impact might be.
So steel is also one of the most energy intensive materials that represents
about 4% of world energy is coming from steel. So it really kind of asks you that question
-well what choices do we really have? And the truth is since the last
100 years, we haven't really had any choices, we automatically defaulted these structures
because we know they can build big, we know that we've sort of proven the fire
and life safety issue arond these kinds of buildings. But what we
also know is that really if we are going to address global carbon we need to do these
2 things, and all of us are onboard with this idea that we have to find a way to reduce
emissions and find ways to remove carbon from the system. And as an architect
the only material that I get to build with, that ultimately can do that is wood.
Which is obviously why I am here with the sponsor. So the reality
is that -for every cubic meter of wood
roughly 1.6 -that's the soft wood- 1.6 tonnes of carbon
dioxide are stored within it. So that notion that if a tree falls to the forest floor
and rots or burns, it gives off that carbon
and gives back to the atmosphere. But if you cut it down, move it into a building
use it in a structure you're effectively getting this incredible storage capacity
in the building. It seems like a very simple mechanism for us to
re-think the way we build. So this is a Canadian statistic
most of our homes are made with stick wood frame
construction which doesn't use very much wood, but the amazing statistic that it
roughly 28 tonnes or driving a car for 7 years
is stored within the wood in our homes. So there is some real fundamentals
to that choice of making wood become part of this
conversation of what we can build with nuts, you know really this fundamental
issue that we also need to get much better and dealing with the sustainable management of our
forests. And the 2 ways that I think about that is advanced forestry systems
are really about the idea that we see in central Europe, which is single stem
forestry. Which really looks at preservation of eco systems it's
a reality that when you drive around in the country side of Austria or Germany you can't
even tell there is a forestry industry, because you don't see large tracks of
forest that have been clear cut, that those
...market places never the less produce some of the best wood that we can buy as
architects world-wide and it's some of the cheapest wood that we can buy. So ironically the formula
of where the economics and the quality of forestry management work together
I think is best proven in Central Europe. Or single stem
forestry works. The issue here and I guess I'm going to go a little bit
into it in a second, is that obviously a huge component of climate
change has come from the fact that we have seen so much de-forestation especially in the Southern Hemisphere.
And that's also a fundamental question that I'm often asked, "Well if we
start building with more wood, what does that actually mean? Will that cause more de-forestation?"
But not if we look at the proper management of our forests.
And that it's very possible. In Canada I live on the sort of door step of some of the
-effectively the largest, sustainably managed forest in the world.
So...but the issue really becomes, ok how
do we then take an alternative to concrete or steel?
And how do we take wood to allow us to start building bigger buildings.
To me I think that the answer to that is really quite simply the issue of ambition.
We haven't really had a sort of need or desire to want to
re-think the way our skylines are built, because until really
this discussion of climate change came about- we had a system that worked pretty well.
Steel and concrete buildings are effective.