Welcome to the future!
You may have heard that Kevin McCloud is touring Australia at the moment, doing a live show called ‘The World According to Kevin’.
I have a love-hate opinion of Kevin McCloud (which I’m happy to admit may be largely fuelled by professional envy on my part!).
I love him because I think he’s done more than anyone alive to raise the profile of Architects and Architecture. I’m worried, though, that in many episodes of Grand Designs, the architect is the villain; pushing the client beyond their comfort zone and budget; hell-bent on exploring their own creativity; and pushing everyone - client, consultants, builders - to the limits of endurance.
But an Architect I was with last Thursday set me straight on that. “The audience knows the format, they understand that in reality TV there are villains and heroes,” she said. “If anything, it’s us - Architects - who don’t get that whole scene, because we consider reality TV too low-brow to watch.”
Hmm. That puts rather a different spin on Kevin, I thought, vowing to go into the show with more of an open mind. The evening was divided into three parts: his early life in Toddington and Luton, where Modernist homes exerted influence; his time at university and living in Europe, studying Art and Architecture History and experiencing the Grand Tour; and his current obsessions with the Vitruvian principles of firmness, commodity and delight, and the Golden Mean. In the middle, there was a quiz, where Architects failed dismally to answer questions about chairs and quotes, while wearing silly glasses and hard hats.
And then he arrived at the biggest issue of our time, which is when things became really interesting.
“With climate change, how do we define what is ‘just enough’ for all of us?,” Kevin asked. “And by all of us, I don’t mean us in the room; I mean the 7.5 billion people on the planet… or 15 billion by the end of the century.
“So, is it buildings like this?”
At which point he put up this image of Architect and builder Clinton Cole‘s own home in Darlington: #WelcomeToTheJungle.
#WelcomeToTheJungle by C+C Architectural Workshop
To me, this house embodies all the ambitions and aspirations of the Architects Declare movement, which states:
“For everyone working in the construction industry, meeting the needs of our society without breaching the earth’s ecological boundaries will demand a paradigm shift in our behaviour. Together with our clients, we will need to commission and design buildings, cities and infrastructures as indivisible components of a larger, constantly regenerating and self-sustaining system.”
And that brings me neatly back to last week‘s blog, ‘Have you calculated your carbon footprint at home yet?’ where I proposed measuring your current household emissions as a way of beginning to reduce impact against benchmarks. It outlined my own carbon calculations, and I signalled my intention to create a spreadsheet for householders to measure and reduce their carbon footprint (I’ve prepared a beta version - email me if you’d like a review copy).
This week, as promosed, I’ve collated suggestions about how to measure your practice carbon footprint, in line with the Architects Declare goal of achieving that outcome by June 30. Your options include:
Climate Active: the only carbon tool at present that has government backing, and which was developed in collaboration by the Department of Environment and Energy, GBCA and NABERS. According to Jamie Sorman, full certification is an expensive annual exercise that is better suited to medium and larger offices. Madlen Jannasck from Cundall, an architect and ESD consultant, said that Climate Active plans to introduce an online tool later this year which may bring costs down. You can find resources - including a list of certifiers here: www.environment.gov.au/climate-change/government/climate-active
Ian Smale from Pangolin Associates (with offices in five capital cities) is an accredited Climate Active and NABERS tool certifier, among other rating tools. See pangolinassociates.com/about/team/managing-director-iain-smale/
The Carbon Reduction Institute in North Sydney is also a Climate Active certifier, see www.noco2.com.au/contact-us
Jeremy McLeod and Breathe Architecture will provide more advice on this topic soon (and will host CPD-training, to be announced shortly).
ArchiTeam is working on providing some options for small practice/sole-practitioners… and will announce more details as soon as they become available.
For self-certification, I use the WA-based online tool at Carbon Neutral (carbonneutral.com.au/carbon-calculator/) and its sister organisation, the Carbon Neutral Charitable Fund (www.cncf.com.au) which sells offsets.
I got some useful advice from Tobias Busch - WA co-convenor of Architects Declare - from his discussions with Madlen Jannasck (she does carbon assessment for organisations, events, buildings, precincts and products).
“As mentioned, you can also do this without the certification and ‘self declare’ meaning you calculate your footprint with the calculator and then buy the respective amount of offset units. With_Studio’s footprint (approx. 20 staff) was around 75 tonnes of CO2e. Costs for offsets vary between $5 and $25 per tonne, depending which ones you choose. That means for a mid-size office like With_, you look at costs between $400 and $1,900 per year for your self declaration.
Pros for the certification would be:
• that it is harder to cheat – there are clear rules how to calculate your footprint (which are aligned with UN and IPCC requirements) and this is checked by someone independent. You also have to demonstrate that you actually did purchase offsets (and not just say so) as these are listed under your name on a public register – again, no cheating.• that you are forced to report this publicly which means you are forced to show that you actually attempt to reduce your emissions and justify when your footprint goes up (you can’t just buy yourself out of ‘real’ action)
• you have exposure to a wide network of other members – when you look at the website you will see organisations like Cbus or CBRE also being certified who are potential clients
• and of course the marketing, including being listed on their website
Like most climate change and carbon issues, one of the significant challenges is working out what you need to understand in order to begin (what you don’t know you don’t know, yet) and how and where to source reliable and evidence-based information.
That’s why I compiled this post from various comments inside the Architects Declare Facebook group, Tobias Busch and my own research. The AD Facebook group is open to all, so please join if you’d like to contribute to the discussion, and keep up-to-date with the AD meetings which are taking place regularly in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.
I’m also meeting later this week with a PhD creator of a carbon measurement and offset app for households (with a business version due later this year), so I’ll keep you updated about that.
And if you have any questions, please get in touch. The more voices in this conversation, the more chance we have of achieving the transformation we need.
That’s all this week. Drop me a line and let me know how your practice carbon audit is going if you’d like to.