Description

Reinventing the Built Environment

How are we going to change building practice from a sector that produces buildings as ‘carbon bombs,’ , buildings with an enormous CO2 impact, to a sector that operates carbon neutral and also stops depleting stocks of raw materials? This will eventually become an equally big problem, since the potential of the earth is limited; it is an island and no more raw materials are being added. It will only work if we use materials from which we can restore stocks within the time of use. That is only possible with ‘regrowable’ materials, also known as organic or biobased materials. In other words, we must create a sector that will become ‘vegetarian’, that creates vegetarian buildings and will go through the same transition as the food sector.
Even then we will have to deal effectively with those sources, in order to stay within the physical boundaries of resource cycles. This means that all our choices must relate to the physical constraints of system earth; in other words, the services to be delivered by the built environment have to follow physical rules. Architects and builders have had 150 years since the Industrial Revolution to experiment with new materials and techniques, it is about time to make new choices. The new Credo is Form Follows Physics.
In this book, articles and publications have been brought together that substantiate this theory and provide some insight on the consequences for the built environment.