Construction World November 2017

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Planet trumps 'PROJECT in PRECINCT' design Animals have a way of beating the odds by using what’s been given. If it’s not the one-inch cathedral termite that architects a 5-metre home on the Australian outback, it’s the beaver who rearranges the river’s flow with its bucked teeth. All around

By Martin Smith

But somewhere along the way our intellectual superpowers meant we didn’t have to work with only what mother nature had dished up for our disposal. We could actually change it. And the greater our ability to re-engineer our habitats to our advantage, the more detrimental it tended to be to our habitats. One project at a time, we have been rearranging our built spaces to satisfy our immediate demands, and the casualties in our wake have just been crammed under the carpet. Let’s face it: if you’ve got money, you can beat your own ecological odds. When it’s hot, turn up the air conditioning. If there’s drought, suck the water out of the ground or squeeze the salt out of seawater, and voila! – no rain dance needed! The paradox, of course, is that by doing these things we only make it hotter and drier for the rest of the world, with the most vulnerable populations bearing the heaviest blow. Make no mistake: there always is a price to pay; it’s just a question of who pays it. In a world of no constraints, can we be trusted not to swing the pendulum hard towards the easy solution? But can we actually be trusted to take the time to find the middle, where we uphold both the immediate and long-term picture? If we’re going to find this optimum balance, we’re going to have to think

precinct over project and planet over precinct. We’re going to have to step back and look at the overall ecosystem we are building. Our job is not merely to meet the brief, but to transform communities into a better picture than the one we inherited. Building our hives For centuries, we have been upgrading our own hives. We live, eat and sleep inside the security and comfort of our homes. We learn inside the four walls of school, college or university. Our careers are often crafted over time inside a custom-designed building. We gather food in built biospheres called malls. To get around, we carve out roads that criss-cross canyons or cut straight through mountains. When we want to exercise, we join air-conditioned gyms or visit sporting venues. Slowly over time, we are re-engineering the landscape to serve our habits and lifestyles. But each individual design has wide- scale impact that ripples through society. When a double lane road is thrown down to get traffic flowing, it also severs the natural flow of that community. When a shopping centre comes to town, suddenly the pleasant chats around the neighbourhood corner store dissipate, and the social glue that forms the community fabric begins to break down. Spaces slapped by mega malls and high-density roads are no longer intuitive and integrative, but disjointed ecosystems that cut through the sweet intangibles that make community what it is. Going beyond the brief Project by project, we are reinventing our world. We meet the brief (we may even wow the client and one-up it), but if we treat that project as an isolated design, then, to some degree, we’ve actually failed. With climate change and urban influx breathing down our backs, we can’t afford to think in boxes anymore. We have to align our work to a bigger story. We have to think of every project as part of the tapestry that interweaves the social fabric of the community in which it is placed. We need to put the “soul” back into project briefs, where human interaction can flourish and community is nurtured. When was the last time a project brief had a requirement to increase the amount of serendipitous moments of human interaction? Technology, public works, architecture and policy all have a part to play in the push

Once upon a time, humans were no exception to this rule. Arctic Eskimos were given the option of ice or more ice, and so igloos were born as dome-shaped structures that miraculously had you peeling off some layers when blizzard storms blew. Populations in the tropics adapted to the heat and humidity by building lightweight elevated timber structures with wide openings and breezeways to allow cool night air to permeate their houses and remove the heat build-up from the day. Generally, we were pretty good at staying in step with the environment for a very long time. us, nature is giving and taking, budding and dying, to keep the same centuries-old symbiotic song playing.

“In great cities, spaces, as well as places, are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organised around citizenship — around participation in public life.”

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CONSTRUCTION WORLD NOVEMBER 2017