Green architecture is no longer a mere fashionable fad

Green building. Energy efficiency. Sustainable design. Natural building materials. Environmental architecture. Just a few of the catchphrases and concepts increasingly being bandied about in dinner-table conversations, at conferences and in the media against a background of growing concern over climate change, harmful environmental practices, and stretched energy resources and capacity.

To find out exactly what the state of green architecture is in South Africa, we engaged some leading practitioners, consultants and researchers in conversation. After all, with buildings said to consume between 40% and 50% of the world’s energy through their construction and ongoing operation, the work of local architects and other design professionals is undoubtedly also taking on a distinct shade of green. The Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA) defines “green building” as a building that is “energy efficient, resource efficient and environmentally responsible”, and which “incorporates design, construction and operational practices that significantly reduce or eliminate its negative impact on the environment and its occupants”. The GBCSA was established in 2007 with participants from across the broad property industry including major corporate developers, owners and tenants, design professionals and other consultants, construction companies, different levels of government, and academia. Its goal is to address “the major issues of our time – excess energy consumption and the related CO2 emissions from burning carbon fuels, pollution of air, water and land, the depletion of natural resources, and the disposal of waste”. The council believes green buildings can reduce their consumption of energy to less than half of what a conventional building does, therefore having a significant impact on resource consumption and on combating global warming. For this purpose, the council has developed a set of green rating tools to measure, recognise and reward environmental leadership in the property industry. Some argue that by developed-economy standards, South Africa is still lagging behind many other countries in respect of green-building practices, and that most South African green building projects are award-chasing designs for private dwellings. Environmentally sustainable practices have been employed in relatively few commercial property developments in South Africa. But there are signs that this is changing. While the focus often is on designing and building new sustainable green buildings, retrofitting existing buildings to make them green-compliant is also a serious option. In this regard, the South African government decided some time ago to lead the way and retrofit thousands of buildings used by it, setting energy-reduction targets of between 10% and 15%. Be that as it may, architects such as Sarah Calburn of Johannesburg lament that the government missed a golden opportunity to implement alternative and environmentally-sustainable building techniques with its RDP housing programme. Calburn says the government does not invite experimentation and innovation, while attitudes and aspirations of recipients of the RDP houses are also not conducive. A prime corporate example of green building in South Africa, on the other hand, is the award-winning designs of petroleum company BP’s new southern Africa head office in the Cape Town Waterfront. The building makes the most of natural light and air flow, uses photovoltaic cells and thermal panels to provide part of its electricity, has an underground run-off water storage tank, and uses recycled materials among other things. Calburn is a multiple award-winning architect who graduated from Wits University in 1987, obtained her Master’s degree in Australia and has worked in Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong and Paris before returning home to South Africa. She views current green architecture in terms of the use of alternative energy resources in the powering of human life and inhabitation. “I think currently – unless you are making straw bale or adobe buildings – it is pretty limited to this, as concrete, bricks, steel, glass and aluminium will never qualify as ‘green’ in their manufacture,” she states. She says ironically, on the one hand, it is a “backwards step”, a return to using “simple, everlasting design factors” such as orientation or natural ventilation, while on the other hand it represents a technological leap into the future. Calburn does not like the term “green architect”, saying it is too limiting as it seems to imply “style”, a word she abhors since in her view it reduces architecture to decoration. “I consider architecture an art, a complex technical and cultural and philosophical spatial language. Architecture is one of humankind’s most potent material manifestations, and is, therefore, extremely revealing of the way we conceive ourselves,” she says. In Calburn’s view, the attitudes and demands of the public client base with its media-driven aspiration towards “style”, the failure to heighten awareness around township housing, the lack of education, the lack of debates across social divides, are some of the problems inhibiting green design and building in South Africa. “When I look around, it is immediately obvious to me that architecture is failing in what I conceive as one of its primary roles: that of the speculative, experimental and inspirational reframing of South African society post 1994,” says Calburn. A man who is hard at work trying to reframe the urban landscape in South Africa – both from a social and architectural perspective – is Cape Town architect, Mokena Makeka. A University of Cape Town graduate whose family originally hails from Lesotho, he was a top student, has won competitions, lectures widely on a part-time basis, and writes and speaks widely on various facets of architecture. Makeka shares Calburn’s dislike of the word “style” and the narrow confinement of labels such as “green architect”. A label, he says, takes away from the complexity of what it means to be an architect. “I don’t believe green architecture is about styles. Cherry-picking approaches are bad practice. Each design must command a specific approach. Each design must reflect its time and in so doing, must reflect the authenticity of the past and the conditions of the current age.” Makeka says just like the automobile industry that required the oil crisis of 1973 to change design and technology attitudes and approaches, the current resource crisis confronting the world makes the work of sensitive architects more prominent. Architects have always been green and are “pioneers of the movement for society to go green”, he says. When it comes to consumer and client values and demands, he concurs with Calburn and says mainstream practitioners “were unable to gain traction on green issues because of broader public consumer habits”. Many of Makeka’s major professional contributions have been in the public sphere – such as the Public Transport Shared Services Centre in Athlone, the Thusong Service Centre in Khayelitsha, various railway police stations, the plans to revamp Cape Town Station, the Conradie Hospital Site redevelopment project, the Leeuwenhof Curatorial Framework, the Western Cape Transport Precinct Initiative, and the SA National Parks Smitswinkel Camp. He singles out his work for the Oude Molen Eco Village design framework, the Athlone transport project and the Thusong Service Centre as examples of his own environmental architectural designs. Makeka was also selected to work on the Ordos 100 project in Inner Mongolia, China in which architects from all over the world participated. Each architect had to design one of a hundred 1 000m2 villas for Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd, with consideration to the harsh environment and climate of the region. Makeka thinks of architecture as being “the art of shaping the built environment to serve physical and metaphysical needs of human beings. Musicians work with a rigour of chords, keys and notes to create music. The architect employs space, light, form and texture for similar effect.” While aspirations of popular style may prevent many South African consumers from considering innovative green designs, cost is also a factor. Calburn sees high costs going hand in hand with government resistance and an uninformed public. Makeka says green building is expensive only in the short term and that a high initial investment in green interventions will save much money in the long term. Constraints for South African green architects “to create a world-class green building of significant public scale”, Makeka believes, revolve around the lack of “sophisticated enough clients”, budgets, resources and statutory approval constraints. Taking sustainable, energy-saving, natural and environmentally-friendly building design to homeless and poor people around the world is what Malcolm Worby is all about – when he is not being a consultant to architects, developers and others. Trained at the Bristol Polytechnic in the United Kingdom and now residing and working in the Winelands near Stellenbosch, Worby has designed buildings in the United States, UK, South Africa, Mexico, and the Netherlands among others. He has also worked on low-income natural building projects in South Africa, Malawi, and the US. Worby says he has designed various types of natural and energy-efficient buildings and homes for people from all walks of life, from the wealthy in Hollywood, California to the very poor in Malawi. After 30 years of doing architectural design, he switched to natural and sustainable building and energy consulting in 2003. He also founded the Homeless And Poor People’s Initiative (HAPPI) in 2006, a not-for-profit organisation that equips poor and homeless people and communities in underdeveloped countries with the necessary skills to build affordable, natural, environmentally-friendly, and energy-efficient homes and community buildings. For Worby, green architecture revolves around using as many natural, sustainable, energy-saving, and low CO2 products in a building as possible. He believes green architects are “only as good as their clients will allow them to be”. He says green architecture has become fashionable as many people try to jump on the bandwagon, but it is also a lasting phenomenon, having a serious impact on society and our environment, as is demonstrated, for example, by adobe building that has been around for thousands of years. Worby looks towards South Africa’s cultural heritage for fine examples of green building, saying many of the old winery buildings were built of ‘mud brick’ or stone, and date from the late 1600s until the turn of the 20th century. As for his own work, he describes it as being “contemporary indigenous”. He says he likes to design buildings that have a link with local culture and history – whether in style, materials, function or space. A man whose work as a green architect is admired by Worby, is Cape Town architect, Etienne Bruwer. Bruwer himself has a strong philosophical take on his profession and likes quoting one of the pioneers of modern architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Born in Bloemfontein, and another alumnus of UCT, Bruwer has travelled and worked in various parts of the world. In 1988 he established the first green practice in South Africa, undertaking community projects in Gugulethu and New Crossroads; restoration and urban conservancy commissions; and running social responsibility and poverty alleviation programmes, as well as training courses in green construction, among others. Bruwer found the substance of his profession when, as a postgraduate student in the mid-1980s, he read the work of environmentalists such as Rachel Carson and “loved ‘happening’ architecture” such as found in Shelter, the classic work on human habitat, and discovered Permaculture, the nature-by-design philosophy that seeks to duplicate the relationships found in natural ecologies. Bruwer says he sensed at the time that the likes of these issues and developments “had greater currency and relevance than plodding postmodernist polemics”. For the past 12 years Bruwer has been driving the Sustainable Built Environments project, a series of education co-conferences and workshops that, he says, has spearheaded the green movement in South Africa. Bruwer’s view of green architecture is that it represents merely “one bandwidth, or strain, of a bigger, more comprehensive paradigm – that of sustainability – which casts a much wider net of variables in its conception and making, seeking more organic and harmonious environmental wholes”. On the question of whether green architecture may simply be a fashionable pursuit of the moment, Bruwer says “timeless architecture” and “flavour-of-the-month architecture” represent two extremes of a spectrum. “The currency and durability of architecture appears in its own time frame. At times, meaningful buildings arrive ahead of their time. Some of these harbingers take several generations to become recognised, others enjoy high brow and soon become forgettable,” he says. Like Calburn and Makeka, Bruwer reels back from the notion of a specific style, calling it archaic, passé and premature. “We are in an in-between phase now, fermenting –we have neither one-size-fits-all nor consensus on what might be good. Because globalisation is the age of the individual, there will be for the next 10 to 15 years as much architectures as there will be designers. Designing in any region for climate change is a moving target,” he says. What or where is the fit between green architecture and South Africa’s developmental priorities? Is it an elitist project or can it indeed feed into developmental requirements? Bruwer says there are risks. “If in the service of the global consumer industry, the means to environmental morals merely become commoditised, and eco/green consumerism tragically risks becoming the biggest reinforcer of inequity in the world, defining the widening divide between the haves and the have-nots. We need believable, viable alternative models and aspirational (sic) projects.” Worby, too, is quite outspoken about the mis-fit between green design and South Africa’s mass housing programme. He says it has been quite easy to re-educate people in rural communities about the benefits of building natural, energy-efficient and affordable homes, but the urban challenge is far greater as government agencies try and provide as many houses as quickly and as cheaply as possible. While there are solutions to the dilemma, he says, those in power are not making the necessary changes. Makeka believes mass housing projects of the RDP type do fit the notion of green design, but that “traditional roots of sustainable living have been abandoned and substituted with the notion that sustainable interventions are about expensive materials such as solar panels”. To this adds Llewellyn van Wyk, a former practising architect and now a senior researcher at the Built Environment Unit of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), that the issue is a huge challenge, but that development can and should be transformative. “In our work at the CSIR, we have demonstrated that the ‘RDP’ box can in fact be designed in such a way that it yields significant environmental benefit at very little extra cost. I think a greater challenge for environmental designers is the concept that the use of scarce resources should be accounted for, a fundamental principle in the Habitat Agenda,” he says. Van Wyk’s research work focuses on the science of new construction materials and methods. He is a founding member and director of the GBCSA and member of the Technical Committee charged with overseeing the development of rating tools. Van Wyk says that at present, international architects who “best reflect this combination of art and science within the green building paradigm” include people such as Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Ken Yeang and William McDonough. In his view, no South African architect has yet emerged with the same credentials. Van Wyk says green architecture definitely is not merely a fashionable fad of the moment. A number of surveys done in the US indicate that from a consumer perspective, the market is demanding green homes and offices, he says. “Contractors and developers in the US see this demand as part of the emerging business paradigm, one that is emerging out of a reflection of the impacts of climate change and energy scarcity on the zeitgeist of society as a whole,” he says. Also, increasingly, organisations such as the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank, International Finance Corporation, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) are actively promoting the adoption of green building. As for the future of green building in South Africa, Van Wyk says a large number of interventions are required, the most important being regulation, enforcing green building. This is the route being followed in many other countries, he adds. Calburn, on the other hand, believes the necessity of professionals gaining continuing professional development would lead to research programmes that could direct energy towards green initiatives. Makeka sees the way forward being led through example, design and client leadership. “The public must mature from fad and fashion to a way of life. The incentives are that it would lead to a safer, more stable and equitable society,” he concludes. s Stef Terblanche